The year is 2010 and civil war has erupted in Oxford between the local population and a radical extracurricular club. On a typical grey Oxford morning, you and your roommate are just marching out of your cramped residence hall or overpriced off-campus shanty, destined for the library. The two of you are commiserating over how difficult your gerontology exam is going to be, but mid-sentence, shots ring out and your roommate gets filled with searing-hot lead-spraying his insides like a Jackson Pollock painting all over the sidewalk. The bullets came from the bodyguard of a student dignitary, who killed your roommate in crossfire with one of the many townie assassins that lurk the streets. Since the bodyguard was privately hired, he faces no charges from Miami University, Oxford or even the United States. To add insult to injury you discover that the myth of getting straight A's upon a roommate's death is false. Though an extremely rare occurrence, the bodyguard is demonized in The Miami Student and The Oxford Press alike, and outrage erupts among the entire public.
This kind of media attention and public outcry is often what our private contractors in Iraq get. Even though the tragedies they cause are rare, the media often over-scrutinizes them while who they work for are wreaking havoc on a much larger scale.
Private military companies (PMCs) are just part of the gamut of reasons the war has been "longer and harder and more costly," as President George Bush admitted last Wednesday. PMCs like DynCorp, KBR and Blackwater USA provide our military with a wide range of integral services such as supplying food, logistics, housing, intelligence, armed sentry and even pest control. The media often makes contractors out to be money-hungry, cowboy mercenaries-which can often be true-but the real harm is done on the unarmed level. Those who pressure immediate troop withdrawal are only ironically supporting military-specific jobs being replaced by these contractors since they don't count towards troop numbers or casualties. These mercenary companies often hamper progress by having undue influence in military operations and charging exorbitant prices.
We can see why analysts predict that the war bill could reach over a trillion dollars when we look at our privatized military operations. An audit by the U.S. General Accountability Office has said that private military company KBR alone has charged $88 million dollars in meals unserved, $108 million in fuel that's price was artificially inflated and more than $1.8 billion in other questionable costs. KBR chalked it up to a "spotty paperwork" issue. Companies have been discovered to charge as much as $45 for a can of soda, which I assume could only be some kind of caviar-based soda from Russia that we've never heard of. Though dangers are obviously high, PMCs often hire specialized security contractors on the government's bill for anywhere around $600-$1000 per day, and those who die in combat can bring in $64,000 from the government for next of kin. The military has understandably created incentives in the past few years to keep special operations personnel they have trained to perfection from going to the very private sector that they employ. In light of so much money, however, retention can be difficult.
Much of the media's scrutiny of contractors is instead focused on controversies in combat. A decree by the Coalition Provisional Authority (our defunct occupational government in Iraq), a provision known as Order 17 that allows contractors to operate outside Iraqi law, is one of the main sources of attention. Contractors are also not held to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and federal law is foggy on if and for what they can be prosecuted. The few cases in which prosecution is needed-such as the two alleged gangbangs by KBR employees and the killing of an Iraqi guard during an argument by a drunken Blackwater contractor-don't warrant the blanket statement that the media throws over everyone else. When the accidental shootings of Iraqi civilians at the hands of contractors (or troops, for that matter) occurs, the media touts the situation as massacre-they make us forget that in a war in a failed state like Iraq, our forces are confronted with unclear and extremely volatile situations. The truth is, most security contractors are highly trained, ex-military professionals who have nothing to gain by shooting innocent civilians or walking all over U.S. officials.
Maj. Sean Murray (United States Marine Corps), a Miami University professor who has completed two tours in Iraq, had nothing but positive experiences with contractors on the ground level. One-hundred-fourteen Marines and 35 contractors were under his command, and he easily fired what few contractors broke rules, despite them being outside the chain of command. Murray saw little problems between contractors and his men-security or otherwise-and even had some professional training on improvised explosive devices (IEDs) by security contractors. The real issue lies not with the wild, Yosemite Sam-like security contractors, but the monstrous corporate entities that control them.
The use of mercenary forces isn't anything new in history. Machiavelli decried their use in The Prince, and President Dwight Eisenhower sternly warned against privatized military, or the "military industrial complex," in his farewell speech, saying "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." The reason why we've used them successfully in the past and not today is found in the numbers: current official troop count is around 155,000 while the number of contractors is over 180,000. Such large number of mercenary forces creates loss of accountability and coordination and causes corruption on the large, strategic scale. We need to stop focusing on what few liability problems occur on the combat level with security contractors and start focusing on reducing our dependency on increasingly powerful private military corporations.
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