The Perils of Privatizing

On 26 March 2011, Al Jazeera/English broadcast an interview between Sir David Frost and the venerable British documentary maker Ken Loach about his latest film, “Route Irish”. It’s about two Liverpudlians ex-soldiers who return to Iraq as mercenaries.

”Route Irish” is the “safe” highway in Bagdad between the Airport and the International Zone. The increasing incidents involving such mercenaries in mostly unprosecuted crimes made me curious about another “presumably” Dick Cheney trick of expanding uncontrolled presidential power.

Sure enough Googling immediately revealed that after the Gulf War the Pentagon,then headed by Cheney, awarded a Halliburton subsidiary almost $9 million to study how Private Military Contractors (PMC’s) could support soldiers in combat zones. That company has now won at least $2.5 billion to construct and run military bases, some in secret locations, as part of what the Pentagon calls the Army’s Logistic Civil Augmentation Program.It used to be that mercenaries were a dirty military secret, but Financial recently dubbed the new mercenaries as the “creeping privatization of war.”

During the first Gulf War about two percent of U.S. Military personnel were private workers. By 2003 it had reached 10 percent. Now the Pentagon employs more than 700,000 private contractors, and at least $33 billion of the $416 billion of military spending in 2004 was unaminously approved by the Senate. In Iraq such companies supply more trainers and security forces than all remaining menbers of “the coalition of the willing” except the United States. About 15,000 civilian security guards were then stationed in Iraq, some 6,000 of them armed.

One “advantage” of such deployments is that it keeps the casualty count down. Peter Singer reports in “Corporate Warriors” that in 2004 at least 30 PC’s were killed and about 180 wounded, even though “non-military” casualties are not reported by the Pentagon. Even so the practice poses risks: Caci International and the Titan Corporation have been implicated in charges of torture, humiliation and rape charged to the U.S. Military in Iraq.

How did we get in this bind? In 1969 the U.S.Army had 1.5 million active soldiers. By 1992, this number had been cut in half. But as we intervened in several conflicts a “corporate foreign legion” was formed. They are paid shamefully higher than G.I.’s thereby demoralizing our “real troops” and inducing not a few to not reenlist but return as highly paid mercenaries.

And high technology accelerates this process. Private companies have gear the military doesn’t have but needs. So PC’s maintain the B2 stealth bombers and F-117 stealth fighters as well as operate some of the new weapons systems, viz. the Global Hawk and Predator “unmanne4d” drones! And systems like the Army’s Guardrail surveillance aircraft are designed to be operated and maintained by PC’s.

DynCorp, the largest PMC in Iraq, has contracts worth more than $2 billions to provide “post-conflict police training” all over the world. In recent decades it has dispatched trainers to Haiti, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Liberia,East Timor, Afghanistan, and now Iraq. Ike could never have imagined how many secret tentacles our military-industrial complex would devise when he gave his prescient departure warning. As Greg Guma reported in his UPI report (7/7/04).”

PMC#s have become an adjunct foreign policy apparatus that is largely invisible, rarely mentioned by the press, and not currently subject to congressional oversight. The Freedom of Information Act doesn’t apply, and any background on how they operate is private, proprietary information.”

No wonder we need Wiki-leaks. And Army brass and presidents who redefine torture to slip away from Geneva Conventions have no scruples about abusing Private Manning. Such are the examples of democracy we provide the MSM these cruel days. And I find more coverage in Al Jazeera than even the best of our MSM’s.