America's Addiction to Mercenaries
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
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.
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.
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.
[1] http://www.nationalww2museum.org/learn/education/for-student...
[2] http://www.dfas.mil/militarymembers/payentitlements/military...
I'd rather see military pay go up to closer to market rates. If we ask people to take these risks they should be paid a lot more. You might even see more volunteers.
I understand the concern that mercenaries may revolt against the real military, but is anyone really suggesting this is a danger to the US? I don't see anyone making that case.
The article also brings up real issues that soldiers-for-hire are inadequately supervised. This is a valid concern, but again the response to that should be a measured cost/benefit analysis as to whether adequate supervision + contractors or employees is better. Teachers-for-hire are, in many cases, also not adequately supervised. That doesn't mean we should resort to forced labor to provide teaching, it just means we need a better supervisory apparatus.
The is a spectrum for military participation: conscription -> volunteer professional -> mercenery. With conscription people will be more vested because it can affect their families more personally even if they don't support a war. With a mercenary army not only is the death of strangers easier to ignore, but deaths are not always made public. Look how often we had stats about army deaths/injuries reported daily vs how often you heard about Blackwater deaths during the Iraq war/occupation.
If your goal is simply to bind an unpopular position to a policy you oppose as a political maneuver, that's fine. But lets clearly distinguish political strategy (sneaking your favored choices through democracy by removing preferred choices from the voters) from a normative argument (we should do X because...).
War results in death, but, as the OP points out, people who support war don't necessarily share in that burden of lost life.
Construction results in (accidental) death, but, as I point out, people who support construction don't necessarily share in that burden of lost life.
Scenario 1: a city votes to do road construction. This results in all residents of that city paying more in taxes. All residents get to decide and all residents pay for the results of their decision.
Scenario 2: the U.S. invades Iraq. There are some casualties amongst U.S. Forces as well as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties, many of them civilians. What's different about this scenario is that none of the dead Iraqi civilians or their families had a say in the U.S. decision to go to war. But they pay the overwhelming cost in life. Whereas no Americans at all are required to risk their lives.
That is the asymmetry in costs that the OP was talking about.
I'm just saying that attaching a poison pill such as forced labor to a war-like policy is:
a) anti-democratic (since democracy involves allowing the mob to make decisions, including decisions you disagree with)
b) not a valid argument against war since all sorts of policies would be horrific if forced labor were involved.
If the draft isn't justified, how is the war justified? I'm having trouble imagining an ethical system where forced labor is obviously unethical but war for profit isn't.
[1] I'm assuming he was making an argument against war. It's possible I was misinterpreting him and he was merely suggesting an anti-democratic hack to get around the populist support for war.
War is a social cost that should be born by all members of the society. A draft isn’t an anti-democratic hack anymore than preventing a company from dumping toxic waste in a river is anti-democratic. We inhibit some freedoms to protect other freedoms. Certain actions have externalities beyond the person engaged in them. We have obligations beyond just serving ourselves.
Teachers unions don’t overthrow governments, but militaries, private or public, do. I lean libertarian in certain things, but no longer regarding the military. Allowing private companies to wield lethal force with military style units scares me. The military and law enforcement underpin the very laws that the country is built upon. Congress can pass a law, the courts can judge upon it, but without someone willing to pick up a gun and enforce it, laws are nothing more than words on paper.
Awhile back I saw an article about a private psyops contractor targeting american journalists who were critical of it, trying to tarnish their reputations. I scoured Google for 20 minutes but couldn’t find it. I believe there really is a threat that these private companies will engage in activities for their own self-interest at the expense of the country. I believe most of these companies do have a lot of patriotic people who are trying to make good money for their families and I don’t think the threat is extreme at the moment but that it grows over time as this becomes the pattern and the gulf widens between the military and the civilian population it’s supposed to protect.
I always felt that a key component contributing to the end of the Roman Republican period was the fact the elite echelons of society no longer felt obligated to serve and the soldiers no longer felt an allegiance to them or the institutions they ruled. From wikipedia: “The extensive campaigning abroad by Roman generals, and the rewarding of soldiers with plunder on these campaigns, led to a general trend of soldiers becoming increasingly loyal to their generals rather than to the state.”[1] I don’t want our soldier’s loyalty focused on a paycheck. I’m afraid more of where we are going then where we currently are.
Soldiers can’t quit. They can’t unionize. They can’t demand higher wages. But they can use lethal force to achieve their objectives. We need to make sure that those objectives are always in line with democracy. If we don’t, then you can vote all you want and one day it won’t matter, because democracy depends upon the rule of law and that depends upon the will of the military. I prefer a civilian military more than a private military and more than an all volunteer military. I think that is the greatest defense of democracy and the freedom you talk about.
So I suppose that since all regulations are enforced with potentially lethal force, all regulatory apparatus should be provided by forced labor?
A draft isn’t an anti-democratic hack anymore than preventing a company from dumping toxic waste in a river is anti-democratic.
Of course it is. The demos wants a war staffed by volunteers. You want to remove that option from the set of choices available to them so that their only choices are either options unacceptable to them or the choice you want them to make. At least in terms of whether people have free choice, it's no different than "give me your wallet or I'll take your head".
Note that I'm not strongly opposed to this; I'm not a proponent of democracy at all. I'm only pointing out that neither are you. The 3 wolves would - given the choice - vote to eat those non-voting brown sheep across the world without forcing their baby wolflings to be put at risk. Democracy is allowing those 3 wolves and a sheep to vote on dinner.
Awhile back I saw an article about a private psyops contractor targeting american journalists who were critical of it,...
"Psyops" is a fancy word for using speech to influence the actions of others. There are a wide variety of actors who engage in it. I happen to know that a variety of educational institutions do; I know this because my ex-girlfriend sold them (along with various state-level democratic parties, interestingly) software to do exactly that.
This is of course ignoring the psyops operations that teachers themselves directly run. If this is our worry, we are already there and the military/mercenaries probably do far less of it than, e.g, our educational or journalistic institutions.
Again, let me emphasize that I'm not disagreeing with your goals. I'm very strongly opposed to using force. I'm also opposed to unchecked democracy that often results in voters harming non-voters (whether it be wars against foreigners, SF nimbys fighting against domestic immigration, or Shiv Sena trying to prevent Biharis from driving autos). I'm just disagreeing with the internals of your argument; it is blatantly anti-democratic (which I support!) and it also implies more than you want it to (meaning it's probably too broad).
It always struck me as a conflict of interest to have government employees teach young voters what to think.
Perhaps the best historical analogy to the present USG is transitioning from "the Roman Republic" to "the Roman Empire". Even with foreign troops and "contractors" (people who were promised retirement land in exchange for military service) the Roman empire lasted a long time. I wish it were otherwise, but it seems that the US and its empire is set for a long-term decline in public virtue.
Few people are pro-conscription, they are choosing between the incentives present when conscription is the only path to war and when mercenaries or professional soldiers recruited from those of lower status are used. If the war is considered just by a democracy then many will want to fight, because it will be obviously necessary, defensive, and those chosen must be chosen fairly.
Perhaps you think this is an argument for the continuation of American global continuous war combined with conscription? Because it's very much not. It's a statement that the only just wars would inevitably result in conscription also being just, even without the incredible moral hazard present when democracies can vote for wars to be fought by labor.
I said so two comments up, and reiterated this in the very comment you replied to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12286281
The tone of your post suggests you disagree with me about something. Am I misinterpreting? If not, what do we disagree on?
You keep referring to it as forced labor, and missing the central point while labeling the elimination of the moral hazards inherent with mercenaries as a "poison pill". And referring to subverting democracy.
If a fighter in a war is ever remotely close to being labor then they should not fight, in fact they should probably be fighting those trying to send them. I'm not arguing for a poison pill of forced labor, that isn't on the table. Ever.
Do you disagree that there is any form of conscription that isn't "forced labor"?
For example: defending your own home or community or democratic nation from an invading army is not labor, it's a non-economic activity. Say a contract of mutual defense with your fellow citizens in the case of an invading army? I'll go fight if they invade the east coast even though I live on the west coast because of a legally binding reciprocal agreement that is in all our best interests? In that case we are all called in to serve and organized to fight effectively. Our neighbors who can't fight take care of our kids while we're away. Is that forced labor?
I think that by definition, taking people and forcing them to do work they don't want to do is forced labor. I don't subscribe to your Orwellian redefinition of soldiering as not being labor, simply because you label it "non-economic".
I'm also not sure of the relevance of this redefinition. Whether or not your poison pill is redefined to be forced labor or not, it's subverting democracy because the public wants a war staffed by volunteers and mercenaries. You want to remove that choice from them.
In that case we are all called in to serve and organized to fight effectively. Our neighbors who can't fight take care of our kids while we're away. Is that forced labor?
If we've all contractually agreed to it, no. If we are forcing people who didn't agree to the contract to join us, yes.
<evil person> drank water, so we shouldn't drink water.
In a sense they are dupes. Plenty of people would be willing to pay money to be "employed" as "SF soldiers". How many military members carefully consider the foreign policies for which they are pledging their lives? If the soldiers think they are being improperly compensated then they should demand more pay or quit when their term is up. That's the whole concept behind the AVF right?
If the US Government did not have a ready reserve of people willing to sacrifice themselves for its latest harebrained foreign policy perhaps it would more carefully consider its foreign adventures?
Or perhaps in the near future USG will field its first all-contractor brigade?
"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."
Without knowing what percentage of "services" are PMCs this doesn't tell us anything and the comparison to Britain's spending is therefore meaningless.
The entire phrase "were linked to murder, kidnapping, bribery, and anti-Coalition activities" is repeated twice in different paragraphs...
I expect better of the Atlantic.
Ironic that this has come full circle!
It is a very sad world where we favor profit over lives and suffering.
Should the US be "the world police"? If not us, then who?
US as a world police is heavily biased to it's own interests, and not to the interests of peace and coexistence.
The (military historical) literature is full of examples of this not working well. Making it Canada instead of the US, and using the UN as an IWP, the rules of engagement in Bosnia led to ... extremely widespread dissatisfaction.
I don't think an IWP is consistent with the mores and reality of the nation-state.
It sounds pretty, but until we are ready to say what is and isn't just, and acknowledge that that makes some other sun just and needing of adjustment, it won't matter.
> probably already the case
This also leads to this problem: "Pentagon Tells Congress to Stop Buying Equipment it Doesn't Need" (http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/28/pentagon-tells...)
One may argue whether or not that leads to wars but the mechanism, if demonstrated, surely would not be a simple one.
"It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear. While such an economy may produce a sense of seeming prosperity for the moment, it rests on an illusionary foundation of complete unreliability and renders among our political leaders almost a greater fear of peace than is their fear of war."
if anything, we are living in a phone economy.
That's not to downplay phones, or electronic portable devices in general, but they are one of the most ubiquitous non-foodstuff around now.
Apparently government profit prisons do an even better job. Now that private prisons are increasing, the prison population level is beginning to decline after 40 years. Look out for the narrative violation.
And yes I'm aware that the rise of private prisons isn't actually the reason prison populations are finally no longer increasing. However, I find it hilarious to poke a hole in the false narrative of government prisons somehow being better, when at least 95% of all the prison population of the last 40 years went into government prisons.
Nearly the entire prison population boom - mostly 1980 to 2010 - occurred at a time when private prisons represented a tiny fraction of the prison base. If you go back to Clinton's Presidency - a time in which we saw the prison population continue to explode upwards rapidly - private prisons represented a meaningless single digit portion of the system.
The radical majority of the profit earned from the prison boom went into government specified pockets, not to the shareholders of private prisons. Handed out as special favors to create jobs in a political district, benefit construction companies, benefit police unions, and so on. Most of the employees that have benefited from those jobs have been government employees, millions of them over the years, which have derived hundreds of billions of dollars in pay from the government prison complex.
So the theory is that private prisons have a greater vested interest in boosting the prison populations than the government does? Then explain the massive boom in government prisons (and the government prison population) from 1980 to 2010. Explain how the government doesn't have in its own interest, growing its own size by putting more people in prison to be managed via ever greater tax sums / demands; passing more laws to hire more police to put more people in prison; hiring more government workers to manage more government prisons, to benefit voting districts, to ensure re-election; and on and on it goes.
https://reason.com/blog/2015/06/02/are-for-profit-prisons-or...
Most likely the reason for this is that private prisons enjoy no monopoly position; why lobby when others will capture the benefits?
Generally you're going to find very, very, very few people that are willing to have a facts based conversation on the topic. The popular narrative is to pretend that private prisons have driven the population boom - having a single digit share of the total prison population 15 years ago - despite the fact that it was overwhelmingly the government prison system and government employees that pocketed all that money the last 40 years.
Anyone here want to run rough numbers on how much combined income the millions of government prison and related workers derived in the last 40 years? Or tally how many millions of government jobs were created over the decades by politicians by putting millions of people into government prisons (and keeping them there)? It's trillions of dollars that the government has paid to its own workers, between the government employees putting prisoners there, and the government employees that keep them there. Accordingly, nobody could possibly have a larger vested interest in the prison boom than the government.
You are correct to note that public prisons are just as bad. Prison guards, companies that supply public prisons, police, firms that contract prison laborers, etc., are just as greedily pro-incarceration as private prison shareholders.
From this position of wisdom, what is the optimal communication with people who are against mass incarceration and excessively anti-privatization?
Is it to attack them for being ideologically blinded? Or try to convince and coalesce with our natural allies?
If someone is ignorant of a truth that is plain to you, you get to decide if they are a friend or an enemy.
Because they don't want to.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course that’s not sexist, it’s just a list of facts. This however:
>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.
is. It shows that in your world view, men make all the money and women don’t work. After all, if you were a stay-at-home dad and your wife had a career, would the roles not be reversed?
I have no problem with that because someone needs to raise children and still it's mostly women doing it. (which is one of the most important jobs someone could possibly do)
> After all, if you were a stay-at-home dad and your wife had a career, would the roles not be reversed?
That's all fine, someone has to do it after all if we want our civilisation to still exist in 100 years. I'm just pointing out the fact that men still at this moment mostly do the work that provides their families with necessary resources.
Every couple should be able to find a private arrangement that suits them best without being attacked for it.
Its not that all men work and women don't. Its that in his case, under current law, he would lose a lot in a divorce. Please read more carefully on such a sensitive topic.
There are many comparisons that you can draw between the US and fallen empires that had to rely on mercenaries before they finally collapsed internally.
The last time Western civilisation collapsed at a large scale (Roman Empire) it took the West almost a thousand years to recover from it.
Because these particular wars are pointless and immoral? Your segue from briefly discussing mercenaries on to gender roles, marriage, Trump, the EU, etc. just doesn't follow. It's obvious that your steering the conversation toward a certain set of talking points. The last 3/4 of your comment probably would've been arrived at no matter the topic at hand.
I'm obviously biased as everybody else is. So I interpret the direction our society is moving towards (and articles like these) according to this bias. You can enter a discussion or ignore my comment, it's up to you.
But what I'm definitely sure of is that we don't really need to discuss why needing mercenary armies is bad for a society. Most people will agree that mercenary armies are a bad thing.
It's better to discuss why we do we need them in the first place and what can we do about it. The article suggests legislation to ban this, but you can't simply legislate societal trends away that created the problem in the first place.
Someone will eventually have to do this job, it's just that there aren't enough persons willing to do it. So if you ban use of mercenaries some other entity will likely take power where we left a power vacuum. (like ISIS did in Iraq)
And if at some point we can't even find enough volunteers to provide internal security (which could happen) then we are probably all finished.
Edit: Btw I agree that most of these wars have been immoral and wrong.
In the US though the reason I think that this explanation is wrong is that the recruiters are verrrry aggressive in High School, and so I question if any of the big-picture men's role issues come into play.
It is an attractive argument in my mind but I also have to say that in many wars governments had to somehow convince its men to take part in an immoral war. How could they pull that off? Is it just propaganda and have we somehow lost the ability to successfully propagandise or did we consciously choose not to use this tool anymore?
For example here in Austria we convinced many men to take part in WWII and the conduct was in many cases horrifying. When talking to older people here many acknowledge that yes, there was rampant Anti-Semitism but many also knew some Jews personally from their community that they felt were decent people.
People here generally knew what was being done to their Jewish neighbours and most of them didn't approve of it but they still went along. Why? The Nazis restored the economy in a way that allowed them to work and put some food on the table of their families after the Germans experienced crippling hyper-inflation.
People had a future again and something to work for, at least they thought so at the time, so they rationalised their evil actions away.
The US empire certainly is not even close to the viciousness of the Soviets or the Nazis, whatever disagreements we all might have with the current foreign policy of Western countries. (and there is a _lot_ that I would criticise about our foreign policy)
So why can't we find volunteers? The Germans knew what was really going on, so did the Soviet people, yet they mostly went along even though what they did was far worse than what the US did.
That's why I believe that this can't be a sufficient explanation. A far better explanation is that there is a trend that vast amounts of people don't see any future for them in this society and the decline in formation of traditional and lasting families is to me an obvious reason.
We can see for example that in almost all Western countries the birth rate is far below the rate necessary to keep population size stable. We also see that single parents are soon to be the norm in Western societies. (which hurts first and foremost the children)
It can't be a good sign if our society can't even produce enough children on its own to sustain itself. And this I believe must have some kind of effect on men and women in our society. (likely negative)
I literally haven't come across a single young person in my life here in the West that believed that they will be able to have a life long stable marriage. I also have never spoken to a young person that believed that they'll be able to retire when they're old. So why participate in anything? Let's just all be hedonists and have a party as long as we can because we can't do anything about it anyways. (that's the kind of mentality I mostly see today)
Edit: Just ask yourself: What would you be willing to do for your country and how hard would you be willing to work if you knew that there is a very high chance that immediately after high school education or college you'll be able to A) afford to buy a home while being able to pay off the debt in 5-10 years and B) if you're able to attract a women you can enter a marriage that will very likely last for the rest of your life? (and not end in divorce and bankruptcy) This is actually the kind of situation our grand parents found themselves in.
Another reason is the proliferation of high-quality at-home entertainment (compared to what was available say in the fifties) which allows you to get through life without much human connection (and not feel totally empty and lonely).
It's a myth. See this for example: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-manufacturing-dead-outpu...
Living standards have not improved for decades and there's lots of research showing that it actually has slightly declined.
Somewhere this profit must end up, it can't just vanish? What I believe is they count stuff like manufacturing of iPhones in China where the profits never arrive in the US.
Also a comment below the article points something out that I'm going to quote:
"The gross value of production in 1986 (T50030) is $2,214,450,700,000. Today, it's $3,641,055,400,000. So it hasn't doubled or tripled at all. In fact, that's only 75% of what we were producing in 1986, because when you adjust the 1986 figure for inflation, we would have to be at $4,870,130,000,000 JUST TO BE EVEN! It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out. In 1986 we imported $986,522,790,000 (adjusted for inflation) in goods. This year, we are on track to have $2,892,000,000,000 in imports. That extra $2T in imported goods are goods we used to make here in the US. So in an economy with a total output of $16.8 trillion, we've handed $2T of our industrial production off to other countries. That's $2T in manufacturing output, or 38 million jobs with a starting pay of $33k. "
His numbers are correct: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GVIPT50030S
And then the article states something that I find very concerning:
"The crude oil may come from Canada, Saudi Arabia or North Dakota, but it’s refined right here in America.
Refined petroleum products — such as gasoline, fuel oil, jet fuel and liquefied refinery gases — are America’s top manufactured product, with a value of shipments going out the factory door of nearly $700 billion in 2014, more than four times as much as the No. 2 product: light trucks."
If that is true, then the US is in even greater troubles than I had thought, because it doesn't seem to be an industry that is so hard to copy that Saudi Arabia couldn't do it themselves if needed.
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.