Last week, ClearanceJobs.com’s “Contracting-Out Intelligence” covered Daily Beast contributor Kate Brannan’s “Spies-for-Hire Now at War in Syria.” This morning, Defense One published Sean McFate’s “The Hidden Costs of America’s Addiction to Mercenaries.”
Sean McFate is an Army Veteran of the 82d Airborne, a former mercenary (“contractor”, by today’s lexicon), now a professor of national security and foreign policy at both the National Defense University and Georgetown, and he frequents think-tanks like The Atlantic Council and RAND. That’s just a beginning . . .
In “The Hidden Costs,” McFate explains in plain language our nation’s expansive reliance on mercenaries (contractors) and the ill-effects. McFate writes, “Since 2009, the ratio of contractors to troops in war zones has increased from 1 to 1 to about 3 to 1. . . . During World War II, about 10 percent of America’s armed forces were contracted. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that proportion leapt to 50 percent. . . . Today, 75 percent of U.S. forces in Afghanistan are contracted.” Seventy-fiver percent. The United States is hardly at war in Afghanistan. The private sector is at war.
CONTRACTOR (MERCENARY) CREEP
“Private military contractors perform tasks,” McFate writes, “once thought to be inherently governmental, such as raising foreign armies, conducting intelligence analysis and trigger-pulling. . . . Only about 10 percent of these contractors are armed, but this matters not.” As I noted, contractors are performing traditionally soldier tasks like cooking, repairing equipment, securing bases, and more. What’s left?
And while news from Afghanistan from a security perspective is more and more dire, from a business perspective things are going swimmingly. “In the 2014 fiscal year, the Pentagon obligated $285 billion to federal contracts—more money than all other government agencies received, combined.” McFate points out. “That’s equal to 8 percent of federal spending, and three and a half times Britain’s entire defense budget. About 45 percent of those contracts were for services, including private military contractors.”
McFate argues, “Today, America can no longer go to war without the private sector. . . . The greater point is that America is waging a war largely via contractors, and U.S. combat forces would be impotent without them.” Indeed, in my view, that we can go to war by way of the private sector is one troubling reason we can go to wars so often, so freely, without the appropriate constitutional drag on what should be somber decisions made by the Congress and the President.
In “Contracting-Out Intelligence,” I concluded, “When war is not waged with a profit margin in mind, but, rather, with a candid and sober acknowledgment of the enormous, undeniable, and inexcusable short-term and long-term human costs—both figurative and fiscal—it makes a difference.” The difference being a wariness with warfare that helps ensure we avoid it at nearly every cost.
No doubt, the industrial base the nation grew in fighting World War II was critical to pulling the country out of The Great Depression. Indeed, the defense industry today is an important part of our economy and national security. However, when economic interests and bottom lines have even the potential to inform national security decisions, we’re on a dangerous path.
