WP op-ed: Guns for hire are not worth it: Breaking the Blackwater Addiction

Sure, He's Got Guns for Hire. But They're Just Not Worth It.
Sunday, October 7, 2007; B01

To: Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense
cc: Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State
Subject: Breaking Our Blackwater Addiction

The more we hear about the deadly Sept. 16 shootout in Baghdad involving contractors from the private military firm Blackwater USA, the worse it sounds. Despite investigations by the Iraqi government, the FBI and your department and last week's House hearings, we may never fully know what happened in the chaos that hospital records show left at least 14 Iraqis dead and 18 wounded. (The contractors claim that they were fired on first, while Iraqi witnesses and officials say that the Blackwater guards opened fire on a small car, carrying a couple and their child, that wouldn't get out of the way in a busy traffic circle.) But by now, we do know a great deal about the business of relying on hired guns -- more than enough to convince you that the Pentagon and State Department urgently need to change their ways.

By your own department's count, more than 160,000 for-hire personnel are working in Iraq today, which, amazingly, is greater than the number of uniformed military personnel there. These private forces perform all sorts of key functions, such as moving fuel, ammunition and food, as well as protecting top U.S. officials and guarding bases and convoys. Handing those tasks over to U.S. troops would further overstretch a military that you've warned is already dangerously overstretched. Hence the allure of outsourcing the jobs to private firms. But while we can't go to war without 'em, we also can't win with 'em. Our military outsourcing has become an addiction, and we're headed straight for a crash.

We've done poorly at a cold cost-benefit analysis here. It's far from clear that contractors save us money; when pressed on this score by the House last week, Blackwater Chairman Erik Prince went from claiming cost savings to pleading ignorance of his own firm's profits. (He did, however, let slip that he makes at least $800,000 per year more than you do, for overseeing a force that's a tiny fraction of the size.) Oversight has been miserably lacking, as has the will to use civilian or military law to hold contractors accountable for bloody messes such as the Baghdad shootings. On balance, for all the important jobs that contractors are doing, Blackwater and its kin have harmed, rather than helped, our troops' counterinsurgency efforts....

***

Those vested in the system will try to persuade you to ignore this cycle, to pass off an obvious pattern as mere anomalies. At the hearings, the owner of a private firm, outside the chain of command, oddly described his company as somehow being "part of our nation's total force." Then State Department officials claimed that they had no choice but to outsource security tasks to Blackwater, rather than admit that they had preferred not to make choices that carried political costs. These are the denials of enablers, pushers and addicts.

The blunt truth is that while contractors are carrying out valuable roles, their overall effect has been to undermine the Iraq mission and the wider fight against terrorism. Worst of all, we have outsourced the most important core function of our government: to fight and win the nation's wars....

(P.W. Singer is director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution and the author of "Corporate Warriors.")

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/05/AR2007100501677_pf.html

According to the Bush gang, corporations striving to maximize profits are supposed to be so much better than governments, hampered by bureaucracy and red tape, at getting the job done efficiently at minimized cost and on time.

Actually I believe the aim was to make Blackwater far more than just a protector of diplomatic convoys. It is quite possible they are bing developed as a private shock troop army to assist in the fascist takeover of the US government.