Private corporations and the future of war

Over the last few weeks, we have witnessed the intense debate raging over the Obama administration’s decision on whether to send more troops to Afghanistan. General Stanley McChrystal, commander of the U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, recently implored Obama to send a staggering 40,000 troops, and this request has not been taken lightly. Afghans and Americans alike have voiced their concerns about this ever-increasing military presence when, according to a New York Times article, Afghans have come to be “increasingly skeptical that the Taliban can be defeated.” Americans, particularly Vice President Joseph Biden, are also bristling at the move. But even as a new story broke last week about the infamous private security corporation Xe (formerly Blackwater), there’s been surprisingly little debate about how many private contractors will be sent in addition to our 40,000 uniformed soldiers.

In August, the Wall Street Journal published an article that provided some estimates for the private military presence in Afghanistan, and its comparison to the U.S. troop population showed the U.S. military to be vastly outnumbered: 74,000 private military companies, or PMCs, versus 58,000 soldiers on the ground. That’s a difference of about a third. A third. If Obama decides to send another 40,000 troops overseas, how many more contractors from Blackwater, KBR, and similar organizations will be tagging along?

It’s important to be critical of this for a number of reasons. Obama has been “downsizing” in Iraq, true, but he’s been downsizing in U.S. military personnel. The problem is that even in the absence of the U.S. military, our presence is still felt because the government then supplements the military with private companies that do everything the military would normally do. Yet these companies are not held accountable to the same chain of command that U.S. troops are, and thus are rarely prosecuted when something goes wrong.

Last week, The New York Times reported that Blackwater authorized secret payments of $1 million to Iraqi officials to silence them after the shooting of 17 civilians in Nisour Square in 2007. This, in essence, is bribery. It’s not the first article detailing yet another point on Blackwater’s laundry list of offenses—weapons smuggling, prostitution of minors, and more. Since the Nisour Square shootings, five guards have been charged with manslaughter, and another pleaded guilty last year. But regulation on corporations is few and far between save for these very public incidents. It’s hard to believe that such vast numbers of unregulated forces overseas, performing the same work as the American military, are all behaving properly. It’s simply impossible. And Blackwater as an entity has yet to be formally charged.

I make note of this because PMCs are consistently left out of the debates about American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, it might even be fair to say that Americans cannot even conceptualize modern warfare because they’re still being fed a simplistic idea of war from the 1960s and 1970s: that the success of a military operation is wholly contingent upon the initiative the citizenry takes to protect its country. In reality, citizens’ support is not as important as it once was, as there is an unaccountable force overseas over twice the size of our military. Now it almost seems that whether or not we ask for a troop reduction is meaningless—we’ll welcome the U.S. Army home, but there will still be a military force in place. Private corporations work in America’s name—just without the military’s rules.

This is already a problem, and it’s not going away. In Obama’s first year in office, the administration has increased its use of PMCs in Afghanistan by 29 percent, and these firms have been used in more than just these recent wars. For our own benefit, it’s important that we are up to speed with how war is changing. We must know where our tax dollars are going, understand what it means when we ask our governments to “bring the troops home,” act on the accelerating privatization of warfare and security.

Melissa Sions is a third-year women and gender studies major at the School of General Studies.