Mercenaries by any other name

You should read Gail Collins today:

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.

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.”

It’s in response to this story and others.

If we have a president who is going to say war is justified in pursuit of peace, then I would like to think he — or somebody sane — was in control of the forces he deploys. That they will be answerable to some one.

It makes me wonder how our “army” differs from all those dangerous and de-centralized clan militias we hear authority. Is our holy war in service of the god Mammon?

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