This week, the DoD and State Department announced that State Dept convoys, previously guarded by contractors and not formally supervised, will be coordinated by the US military.

This announcement is purely symbolic; its core motivation is what is commonly referred to as CYA: “Cover Your Ass”. The new organization doesn’t address the real problem: that our government hires mercenaries to do things soldiers should do.

I can see it now: some new cell at Multi National Forces Iraq (MNF-I) will be created to liaise with the State Department and “keep track” of the contractors and their movements. This cell will be a small office headed by a major or lieutenant colonel and staffed by a few junior officers, staff non-commissioned officers, and some drivers and clerks. They’ll meet all the contractors, make friends with some of them, hate the rest of them, do ride-alongs to make sure rules of engagement (ROEs) are being followed, and keep tabs on all State Department traffic on a big whiteboard. They will spend most of their time beating their heads against the wall, talking about how the State Department doesn’t understand warfighting or how bizarre the contractor sub-culture is and how everyone just does what they want anyway. Some of them will secure jobs as contractors. And everything will continue as it is: status quo.

Why? Because contractors are mercenaries (hired guns), and are controlled by market forces- not an oath of service to our country. The US government has stated that the reason contractors are used is because it is cheaper to hire them than it is to recruit, train, and deploy all the soldiers needed to do all the things that our wars require. Mostly, they say, it’s a logistical issue; that behind every rifleman are X number of logistical support personnel, and the cost to provide that support is prohibitive.

The takeaway from this argument is that we fight wars on the cheap, not the way they should be fought.

From what I can tell, most contractors are well trained, and many are combat veterans. But real wars have ideological foundations. In the case of Iraq, the US created an ideology (that fighting terrorists abroad is better than fighting them in The States- at least that’s how it was explained to me). But for Iraqi militants, the ideology is real: “foreign armies are occupying our country”.

When you deploy a warfighting strategy, and the people that protect your diplomats and sometimes your supply lines are mercenaries beholden not to ideology but market value, you’re doing more harm than good. On the balance sheet, the contractor math might look good. But take a look at the ideological or social bottom line. Having mercenaries as one of the faces of America abroad is not worth a cost savings.

If we’re going to claim an ideological high ground, then we have to live up to that ideology. When you put a gun in someone’s hand and send them into another country, there’s only one thing that stays black and white: intention. The battlefield is amorphous, asymmetrical, and full of more opportunities to fail than to succeed. Without the right intentions, failure is guaranteed. Market forces to not create the right intentions for fighting wars, particularly wars of liberation or on behalf of democracy. If that’s what these wars actually are.


Further Reading: NY Times AP C-SPAN