7 ms·

America's Addiction to Mercenaries

76 points by dthal 10y ago

sschueller 10y ago
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. It is a very sad world where we favor profit over lives and suffering.
- Noseshine 10y ago
  > probably already the case What has always been happening is that politicians fight to keep defense industry in their district by keeping weapons projects running, or running more inefficiently than possible, which exists almost exclusively based on government funds allocation. 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-congress-to-stop-buying-equipment-it-doesnt-need.html 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.
  - Aelinsaar 10y ago
    Yeah, yet incredibly easy to predict. "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."
    - autokad 10y ago
      what are you guys talking about, arms economy? apple has enough cash on hand to buy almost the entire 'industrial complex'. boeing (83 b), general dynamics (46 b), Northrop Grumman (40 b), Lockheed Martin (80 b) - assumes these companies do solely defense work other than selling commercial jet airliners, etc. if anything, we are living in a phone economy.
      - Aelinsaar 10y ago
        Four companies are not "Almost the entire 'industrial complex" sorry. There is also a difference I think, between cash on hand, and total contribution to GDP, local economies, politics, etc. That's not to downplay phones, or electronic portable devices in general, but they are one of the most ubiquitous non-foodstuff around now.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  Is it sadder than a world where people are subject to the draft? Should the US be "the world police"? If not us, then who?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - dsabanin 10y ago
    An international entity, with representation from all countries, under the guide of international law that is just. US as a world police is heavily biased to it's own interests, and not to the interests of peace and coexistence.
    - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
      Let's define the IWP as "The International World Police" - the IWP. For any given single-human actor within an IWP, they then have to carry two sets of methods of accountability. One, to the nation-state they call home. Two, to the IWP. 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.
    - angersock 10y ago
      How would such a force handle the mere existence of North Korea? How would such a force handle nations with Sharia law? 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.
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    So is it that we've lost the lessons learned from Vietnam about the draft? Holy cow.
- adventured 10y ago
  > for profit prisons strongly encourages incarcerating more people 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.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Back in the real world, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (read: california prison guard union) alone made more campaign contributions than the two largest private prison corporations put together ($22 million vs $10 million). The Fraternal Order of Police spent another $5M. https://reason.com/blog/2015/06/02/are-for-profit-prisons-or-public-unions 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?
  - adventured 10y ago
    That's a really great example. 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.
    - yusee 10y ago
      Private prisons are incentive disasters. Everyone can see that. 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.
benmarks 10y ago
Obligatory link to Eisenhower's farewell speech, warning about the rise of the military-industrial complex, eerily prescient about current state of affairs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knBEQnuJNiI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knBEQnuJNiI
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
  Most critical section, originally by Douglas MacArthur: "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."
  - yolesaber 10y ago
    Damning words from the man who wanted to nuke Korea
- arca_vorago 10y ago
  I think one of the keys to remebering that speech is to remember the original draft called it the MICC or the military industrial congressional complex.
  - praptak 10y ago
    That's almost a tautology. With the system rigged to depend on unlimited campaign donations, every "complex" has the "congressional" part.
opaque 10y ago
Interesting article. Pretty terrible writing/editing though. "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.
nxzero 10y ago
Article lacks any real valid argument for why outsourcing to contractors is an issue. 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.
Aelinsaar 10y ago
You've correctly identified that he wasn't a perfect person, congratulations! Is this your first fallacy, or just the latest in a long and ugly line of them?
- tsunamifury 10y ago
  Sarcasm that is meant to cut another isn't really appreciated here. Your long history of comments seems to often show a rebuke to the first person who responds. We are happy to have you, but please consider that his comment is not an insult to you.
  - PavlovsCat 10y ago
    > please consider that his comment is not an insult to you. And what is it, what is the point of it? Can you offer a reading of it that isn't "sarcasm that is meant to cut another"?
  - Aelinsaar 10y ago
    I didn't take it as a personal insult, just the pointless, flippant, content-free diversion it was. A personal insult is something I'd ignore.
- sctb 10y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12285576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12285576 and marked it off-topic.
1024core 10y ago
> The U.S. government does not track contractor numbers in war zones. Because they don't want to.
poof131 10y ago
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] 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-students/ww2-history/ww2-by-the-numbers/us-military.html http://www.nationalww2museum.org/learn/education/for-student... [2] http://www.dfas.mil/militarymembers/payentitlements/military-pay-charts.html http://www.dfas.mil/militarymembers/payentitlements/military...
- skybrian 10y ago
  It makes sense that people who can say "no" to risks they don't like have to be paid more. That's the market price and people in the actual military who can't refuse (once they signed up) are grossly underpaid. How would taking away more people's freedom help? 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.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Similarly, I feel that this educational contracting is a threat to democracy. Either employ forced labor to provide education or don't have public schools at all. 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.
DominikR 10y ago
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. 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.
maverick_iceman 10y ago
Why not Congress simply grants them Letters of Marque as allowed by the Constitution instead of contracting them?
gumby 10y ago
The English parliament's use of Hessian contractors for security and skirmishes in their American colonies was one of the colonists' specific complaints. Ironic that this has come full circle!

76 points by dthal 10y ago

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. It is a very sad world where we favor profit over lives and suffering.

Noseshine 10y ago
> probably already the case What has always been happening is that politicians fight to keep defense industry in their district by keeping weapons projects running, or running more inefficiently than possible, which exists almost exclusively based on government funds allocation. 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-congress-to-stop-buying-equipment-it-doesnt-need.html 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.
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
  Yeah, yet incredibly easy to predict. "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."
  - autokad 10y ago
    what are you guys talking about, arms economy? apple has enough cash on hand to buy almost the entire 'industrial complex'. boeing (83 b), general dynamics (46 b), Northrop Grumman (40 b), Lockheed Martin (80 b) - assumes these companies do solely defense work other than selling commercial jet airliners, etc. if anything, we are living in a phone economy.
    - Aelinsaar 10y ago
      Four companies are not "Almost the entire 'industrial complex" sorry. There is also a difference I think, between cash on hand, and total contribution to GDP, local economies, politics, etc. That's not to downplay phones, or electronic portable devices in general, but they are one of the most ubiquitous non-foodstuff around now.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
Is it sadder than a world where people are subject to the draft? Should the US be "the world police"? If not us, then who?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- dsabanin 10y ago
  An international entity, with representation from all countries, under the guide of international law that is just. US as a world police is heavily biased to it's own interests, and not to the interests of peace and coexistence.
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    Let's define the IWP as "The International World Police" - the IWP. For any given single-human actor within an IWP, they then have to carry two sets of methods of accountability. One, to the nation-state they call home. Two, to the IWP. 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.
  - angersock 10y ago
    How would such a force handle the mere existence of North Korea? How would such a force handle nations with Sharia law? 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.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  So is it that we've lost the lessons learned from Vietnam about the draft? Holy cow.
adventured 10y ago
> for profit prisons strongly encourages incarcerating more people 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.
yummyfajitas 10y ago
Back in the real world, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (read: california prison guard union) alone made more campaign contributions than the two largest private prison corporations put together ($22 million vs $10 million). The Fraternal Order of Police spent another $5M. https://reason.com/blog/2015/06/02/are-for-profit-prisons-or-public-unions 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?
- adventured 10y ago
  That's a really great example. 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.
  - yusee 10y ago
    Private prisons are incentive disasters. Everyone can see that. 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.

benmarks 10y ago

Obligatory link to Eisenhower's farewell speech, warning about the rise of the military-industrial complex, eerily prescient about current state of affairs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knBEQnuJNiI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knBEQnuJNiI

Aelinsaar 10y ago
Most critical section, originally by Douglas MacArthur: "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."
- yolesaber 10y ago
  Damning words from the man who wanted to nuke Korea
arca_vorago 10y ago
I think one of the keys to remebering that speech is to remember the original draft called it the MICC or the military industrial congressional complex.
- praptak 10y ago
  That's almost a tautology. With the system rigged to depend on unlimited campaign donations, every "complex" has the "congressional" part.

opaque 10y ago

Interesting article. Pretty terrible writing/editing though. "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.

nxzero 10y ago

Article lacks any real valid argument for why outsourcing to contractors is an issue. 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.

Aelinsaar 10y ago

You've correctly identified that he wasn't a perfect person, congratulations! Is this your first fallacy, or just the latest in a long and ugly line of them?

tsunamifury 10y ago
Sarcasm that is meant to cut another isn't really appreciated here. Your long history of comments seems to often show a rebuke to the first person who responds. We are happy to have you, but please consider that his comment is not an insult to you.
- PavlovsCat 10y ago
  > please consider that his comment is not an insult to you. And what is it, what is the point of it? Can you offer a reading of it that isn't "sarcasm that is meant to cut another"?
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
  I didn't take it as a personal insult, just the pointless, flippant, content-free diversion it was. A personal insult is something I'd ignore.
sctb 10y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12285576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12285576 and marked it off-topic.

1024core 10y ago

> The U.S. government does not track contractor numbers in war zones. Because they don't want to.

poof131 10y ago

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] 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-students/ww2-history/ww2-by-the-numbers/us-military.html http://www.nationalww2museum.org/learn/education/for-student... [2] http://www.dfas.mil/militarymembers/payentitlements/military-pay-charts.html http://www.dfas.mil/militarymembers/payentitlements/military...

skybrian 10y ago
It makes sense that people who can say "no" to risks they don't like have to be paid more. That's the market price and people in the actual military who can't refuse (once they signed up) are grossly underpaid. How would taking away more people's freedom help? 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.
yummyfajitas 10y ago
Similarly, I feel that this educational contracting is a threat to democracy. Either employ forced labor to provide education or don't have public schools at all. 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.

DominikR 10y ago

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. 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.

maverick_iceman 10y ago

Why not Congress simply grants them Letters of Marque as allowed by the Constitution instead of contracting them?

gumby 10y ago

The English parliament's use of Hessian contractors for security and skirmishes in their American colonies was one of the colonists' specific complaints. Ironic that this has come full circle!