Gail Collins is one of my favorite columnists out there. To be honest, she's the reason I keep subscribing to the New York Times. She can skewer faulty logic and overblown prose more deftly than most; she's often timely and always very, very funny.
All of this makes today's unusually somber piece all the more powerful. She writes about the outsourcing, and privatization, of American military efforts through contracting to companies like Xe (formerly the infamous Blackwater) and ArmorGroup. And she points out that this very chilling trend continues with very little outcry from the American public.
Let’s pretend for a minute that it is not stupendously irresponsible to let private contractors stand in for our military in wildly sensitive and dangerous situations abroad. Even if it was a terrific idea, we would still have to ask whether huge government agencies, which frequently have a difficult time finding cost-effective ways to order a hammer, know how to purchase services that actually work.
Contracted military services represent a longstanding, if not proud, tradition in American history. For example, the British hired conscripted Hessian mercenaries to fight the patriots during the American Revolutionary war. And there are always privatization advocates who claim that government just can't provide services that work, that private companies are more motivated (by competition, etc) to provide better services. (Presumably such folks never heard of a no-bid contract).
The trend toward contracting out soldiers in the last decade is a very chilling development. As we saw with Blackwater in Iraq, it creates a situation where Americans are in the battlefield fighting for American military objectives, but are not subject to American military or civil law. Not the kind of soldier I'd like to have patrolling in my neighborhood.
As Collins points out,
These days, there’s virtually nothing the government doesn’t contract out. At the height of the war in Iraq, there were 190,000 contracted personnel taking part in the effort — 23 times the number of allied troops who were lending a hand. “What we created was not a coalition of the willing. We’re relying on coalitions of the billing,” said P.W. Singer, a contracting expert with the Brookings Institution.
This is the real surge, with a dwindling number of overseers riding herd. In 1997, Singer said, each defense auditor was responsible for overseeing about $642 million in contracts on average. “The last figures I saw, it was one auditor to $2.02 billion.”
There’s no reason to believe the government has the capacity to determine how well all these private contractors are doing their jobs. And it’s doubtful that if the government did know, it could do much about it.
If the argument for privatization is that government can't run the military, in other words, how on earth can it be expected to run private contractors who are not subject to discipline or law?
I've been away from DK for a few weeks so have been out of the loop, and know this is a very short diary, but the subject is so important, I thought it worth highlighting this very fine column.