Two recent attacks reveal the U.S.’s troubling reliance on military contractors.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/01/military-contractors-iraq-kenya-syria.html
JAN 24, 2020
President Donald Trump speaks frequently about his desire to bring U.S. troops home from places like Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan and bring a close to the “endless wars” he inherited. Just last Wednesday he boasted that “
we left Syria.” This
isn’t even true in an official sense, but troop numbers also only tell part of the story. Some boots on the ground are not being counted at all.
In a
stunning report on Wednesday, the New York Times revealed details of a Jan. 3 attack by the Somali jihadi group Al-Shabab on a base in neighboring Kenya that left three Americans dead. The Pentagon was so alarmed by the incident that it quickly deployed 100 troops to restore security at the base at Manda Bay. But it got almost no attention in the United States, perhaps because it occurred in the aftermath of the killing
of another contractor, in Iraq, which set off the tit-for-tat cycle that nearly brought the U.S. and Iran to war. Two of the three Americans were civilian contractors. The U.S. increasingly relies on private contractors in a vast number of overseas military operations, creating a status quo that both obscures the extent of the U.S. military’s reach and creates a host of new dangers. If Trump moves ahead with troop withdrawals—the Pentagon is reportedly
considering a major drawdown in Africa even as conflicts with jihadi groups in Somalia and
West Africa intensify—these contractors could take on an even greater role.
Trump may be perfectly happy with this new status quo. His administration’s reliance on contract workers
goes far beyond military roles.
Erik Prince, founder of the contractor Blackwater (now known as Academi) and brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, is an influential if unofficial figure in the administration and has publicly advocated replacing U.S. troops in Syria and Afghanistan with contractors. Trump, who
recently boasted inaccurately that Saudi Arabia paid $1 billion for the deployment of U.S. troops, doesn’t always appear to grasp the distinction between troops and mercenaries. The use of private soldiers generally fits with his transactional approach to foreign policy.
But this drift toward privatization began before Trump took office. Under the George W. Bush administration, Blackwater employees killed 17 Iraqi civilians in the
2007 Nisour Square massacre, inspiring anger and debate over the use of military contractors in Iraq. As a senator,
Barack Obama sponsored legislation to rein in the use of these contractors and hold them accountable for abuses. But as president, he relied heavily on them, even as he worked to withdraw troops. As the analyst Micah Zenko
pointed out in 2016, “Under Obama, more private military contractors have died in Iraq and Afghanistan than all the U.S. troops deployed to those countries.” While all the Democratic presidential candidates, to varying degrees, have pledged to withdraw U.S. troops and bring an end to “
forever wars,” it’s worth questioning to what degree they will follow in Obama’s footsteps and simply privatize those wars. “Contractors are like crack cocaine for presidents, because it allows them to extend American muscle but not under congressional oversight. It’s a way to circumvent democratic accountability for military force,” says Sean McFate, a former Army officer who worked as a private military contractor in several countries in Africa and now teaches at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service.
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