Personally, I feel this military contracting is a disgrace and a threat to the democracy. Bring back the draft or don’t fight the war. Even in World War 2, America’s paragon of a “justified” war, 61% of troops were drafted. [1]<p>Not only does it create private military forces with significantly less allegiance to the country, it destroys the morale of active duty troops. When I was in Iraq, it seemed like there were more contractors than troops. Kenyan’s managed by dutch contractors provided internal security. Indian’s worked in the chow halls. Filipinos manned the commissaries. And on and on.<p>The Special Forces soldiers I worked with had former SF soldiers helping with the training of Iraqi forces. They considered them lazy and unhelpful in general, taking none of the risk but getting paid $1k a day. Compare that to the actual soldiers making a few grand a month, and you get the sense your country doesn’t really give a shit about you and your just a dupe.[2] Get out as quick as you can and get paid 5-10x more for less risk.<p>Throughout history, private military forces are the tool of tyrants. I don’t want this for America. War is a last resort. Either we go together or don’t go at all. Hopefully the latter, but contracting out the fight is stupid and lazy and destroys the fabric of our country by slowly eliminating our citizen military. Opposing the draft isn’t opposing war, it’s supporting war by contractor and making wars easier to wage by politicians who’ve never served, whose kids don’t serve, and who have no real skin in the game. Truly a sad state of affairs.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.nationalww2museum.org/learn/education/for-students/ww2-history/ww2-by-the-numbers/us-military.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nationalww2museum.org/learn/education/for-student...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.dfas.mil/militarymembers/payentitlements/military-pay-charts.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.dfas.mil/militarymembers/payentitlements/military...</a>
Obligatory link to Eisenhower's farewell speech, warning about the rise of the military-industrial complex, eerily prescient about current state of affairs: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knBEQnuJNiI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knBEQnuJNiI</a>
Interesting article. Pretty terrible writing/editing though.<p>"Contracting is big business, too. In the 2014 fiscal year, the Pentagon obligated $285 billion to federal contracts—more money than all other government agencies received, combined. 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."<p>Without knowing what percentage of "services" are PMCs this doesn't tell us anything and the comparison to Britain's spending is therefore meaningless.<p>The entire phrase "were linked to murder, kidnapping, bribery, and anti-Coalition activities" is repeated twice in different paragraphs...<p>I expect better of the Atlantic.
The English parliament's use of Hessian contractors for security and skirmishes in their American colonies was one of the colonists' specific complaints.<p>Ironic that this has come full circle!
In the end we will be fighting wars to keep people employed (probably already the case) just like for profit prisons strongly encourages incarcerating more people.<p>It is a very sad world where we favor profit over lives and suffering.
I like that the writer asks why there is a need for (often foreign) mercenaries and correctly states that there are not enough volunteers willing to join the army.<p>But instead of following this thought and asking why there are not enough volunteers he proceeds to teach us why using mercenaries is bad for a country. (as if we didn't know)<p>It would be important to widely discuss this and get to the bottom of this problem because I believe it is caused by very bad government policies of the last decades that ultimately could lead to the downfall of Western civilisation itself.<p>My personal opinion on that is that we have basically removed all incentives for men to do what traditionally was their role in society - building and maintaining civilisation itself and protecting the society from threats.<p>Call me sexist but the fact is that roads, houses, airports, planes and all kinds of infrastructure is built and maintained almost 100% by hard working men. So is internal (police) and external (army) security.<p>So why do men have no incentive anymore to do this important work for society and instead choose to withdraw to some escapism like excessively playing video games, using drugs or watching porn?<p>Traditional families as a goal in life was or is in the process of being destroyed and bad economic policies have on top of that created an environment where most men, even if they wanted to, can't acquire the necessary resources to support a family anymore.<p>Even if you get a great education you'll start your life with massive debt that barely enables you to pay rent if you get a good job. So men withdraw from society, almost nothing is manufactured anymore in the West (wealth creation) and the economy enters a fatal downward spiral.<p>And for people that are still successful the outlook isn't much better. I myself came from a former Communist country to the West and made it to the top 1% in the EU country I am in even though I started out with nothing. But I am not willing to marry my girlfriend (and I have told her this) because we have here laws that would basically give her the power to dominate and destroy me at will if she ever felt like it.<p>Don't get me wrong, I highly value marriage but I'm not willing to enter a deal where I'm having to give up everything to her and can not expect to get anything in return for it. For example if we married and divorced (without children) she would be entitled to 40% of my net income as long as I am alive.<p>If I then decided that it's not worth it anymore to work so hard just to have all profit taken away from me (or god forbid, my business could fail for other reasons) the government could punish me (literally put me in prison) because I intentionally do not make the kind of money I made before that she is for some reason entitled to.<p>And that only covers what could happen to me if she played fair. Divorce lawyers would likely suggest to her that she accuses me of abusing her physically to extract more money out of me.<p>So sadly for me starting a family is currently out of question in the West. Maybe Trump wins in the US and turns the ship around (by ending Socialism and promoting Patriotism and Capitalism again) and I'll cash out here and go through the legal process of moving there, or I move at some point to Russia because they are right wing Capitalists there too.<p>But the EU is pretty much beyond saving in my view, there's no perspective to have a normal life here anymore. If there was no perspective for me to cash out and move to a better place in the future I would have stopped working so hard already. I could easily survive by working only 10 or 15 hours a week because I personally don't need much and slaving away to have more resources only makes sense if you plan on starting a family. I definitely don't, at least not here.
Article lacks any real valid argument for why outsourcing to contractors is an issue.<p>Simple fact is that most wars do not need to be fought, so the idea that how they're fought matters is irrelevant; which is to say that I'm not aware of any war the US has fought since WW2 that was vital to future operations of the US.