Feral Jundi

    So I keep coming back to this debate, because this is very important to the policy makers out there.  Most importantly, it is a vital conversation to have with one another about who we are and what our place should be in the war and in this country.  

   The fear is that the state does not have control over  the civilian contractor community, and more specifically, armed security contractors.  Or that a state could not survive if they unleash the hounds of industry against their enemies, because then they would not have control over that industry, and especially after the war is over.  That the industry as a whole would somehow turn around and attack the client, in the name of some other enemy or cause.  

    Well, I have read the debates, and even participated in the debates, and my conclusions are that the state would be stupid ‘not’ to use industry to fight it’s wars.  Privateering during the revolutionary war is a prime example of how this country used industry to fight it’s enemies.

     Thousands of enterprising ship owners, hunting down British naval vessels, and taking the loot.  It was certainly a profitable endeavor back then, and arguably, that infusion of money into the local economies and the small successes of sea battle, helped to increase the morale of the revolutionaries back then.  Success breeds success, and the naval fight was vital to our fight back then.  Sure the land battles were important, but the sea battles are something that is always forgotten during discussions about that war, because it was an aspect of the war that was fueled by industry.  

     From providing jobs for building ships, to forming companies, to organizing business strategy, to competing with others–all of it was the basis of this country’s entrepreneurial spirit and certainly contributed to the growth of this country.  But we won’t talk of these humble and desperate beginnings, because somehow using industry to fight your enemy is a bad thing?  

     So then how did privateering go away?  We won the war, and we became a country with the time and resources to raise our own navy.  Funny how winning wars can be helpful like that.  

     And those privateers that continued to be privateers for someone else, or just went solo, became what’s called ‘pirates’.  They are no longer tools of the state if they dared to attack their former employer, and now then they were considered criminals.  But really, what ended privateering, was when it wasn’t sanctioned by our country anymore and the end of the revolutionary war.  And of course that same industry, just refitted their warships, as merchant ships and continued to serve the economy of a growing nation. 

   Let’s fast forward to today.  Do we use privateers anymore?  Not right now, because we have a strong navy.  Do we use mercenaries to attack our enemies on land?  Nope, because we have an all volunteer military, who are doing a great job of offensive operations.  The problem is, that we don’t have enough of these troops, and not enough people are volunteering for the war.  ‘You go to war with the troops we have, not with the troops we wish we had’, so they say. We still don’t have the necessary numbers of troops we need for this world wide war, and it is incredibly difficult to get young men and women to volunteer for such a thing.  

     So we revisit the same problem the colonists had.  Do you raise your own navy to fight the British, or do you use industry to fight the British?  Do you raise your own army to provide all the essential services and logistics for a war or do you use industry to provide those things so your war fighters can actually fight?   

     It is a great question.  Should civilian contractors be used to provide services and logistics for a state’s army?  And most importantly, should those civilian contractors be armed in order to provide those services and logistics to the client?  

   I say yes to all the above.  We are providing services and logistics to the military in this war, and we should have the right to defend ourselves and others in that war zone so we can provide those services and logistics.  We can do this, and we have been doing this, and it works.  But to make it really work well, then we must be properly managed and regulated-both by the company and by the client.  We are a service provider, and if our service sucks and is not up to the standard of the contract, then we should be punished by losing that contract or fined.  But in order for the client to know if that service sucks, that would mean they would have to actually watch over us and make sure we are providing a good service.  You would think this concept was a no-brainer, but at this time, the state has done a terrible job of managing this resource called civilian contractors.  

   So there you have it.  Here I am, a security contractor who has operated as an armed guard in Iraq, screaming for the government to provide some quality control and actually manage the thousands of us civilians that are over there!  No one in this industry wants to create some evil armed empire and take over the US–to think of such a thing is ridiculous.  If anything, we only want to please the client so we can get more contracts, and make more money.

   Yet this lack of control is the argument that Max Weber makes.  So “is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” have any application at all to the scenario that we are currently involved with?  

   In my view, the state does have a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force.  How is defending self or the state in a war zone, not a legitimate use of physical force? Priority one is always self preservation, and I see nothing more legitimate than that.  If contractors were used to commit war crimes by the state, then that would be illegitimate and extremely wrong.  But in the context of this war, the state has been able to dictate easily what we can or cannot do.  And when you have incidents like Abu Ghraib, where the state tried to get away with using contractors for torture, and the people got a hold of that information, what happened?  It was shut down, and the outcry of the people and the rule of law put this in check.  If contractors were not controlled by the state, they would still be torturing people, and for their own means. I think another contractor named Jack Idema tried to do this as well, and guess what, he was thrown in Afghani prison and completely ostracized  by the US.  He claimed that he was working with the US as well, and in this case, the US was able to deny everything.  In both cases though, the US still had domination in that territory and still laid down the law with contractors.  Abu Ghraib was shut down, and Jack is doing time.

   So what about the Blackwater Nisour Square incident?  Is this a case of a rogue company, just doing their own thing, and not abiding by the contract?  Nope, this was an example of defending self and the client in a war zone.  If anything, the only charges that stick would be excessive force or manslaughter.  But let’s get real here.  These guys were in an active war zone, where the enemy does not wear a uniform.  The enemy also could be a woman or child, and the weapon could be a car or some suicide vest.  So in the end, no matter how far this case goes, or whatever ruling, in the end, Blackwater was defending themselves and their client in a really crappy war zone.  How is that losing the monopoly on the legitimate application of the use of force?  If Blackwater was alone, and had no government client under it’s care, and they went hunting, then yeah I could see calling that illegitimate.  But in this case, the client used a tool(Blackwater) for preservation of life in a war zone and that is completely legitimate.  If the client had military protection, they could have used that, but they chose Blackwater because there is not enough military. And Blackwater has been providing years of outstanding service to the client in the war, but now all of a sudden we have ‘lost control’ of Blackwater?  If the client had a problem with how Blackwater was protecting them all of these years, then that is where quality control and actually managing the contract would come into play.    

     And if we were to expand on Weber’s statement, then the obvious solution is to kick out the 12,000 plus security contractors in this war, and recruit that many for the military.  Matter of fact, if we are to be fair and consistent in this purging of contractors, then get rid of all the contractors overseas. There are 230,000 plus or minus civilian contractors in this war, and if President-Elect Obama wanted to replace them with military, then he better get busy. In my honest opinion, to raise that kind of army, and in a reasonable time frame to support the current war, would require the draft. And even then, it would take several years and billions of dollars to get on track with an all military force. It would be great if we went back to that, but it absolutely not realistic at this time.  You fight a war with troops you have, not the troops you wish you had.  

     During the Revolutionary War we used privateers, because we did not have a substantial navy to fight the enemy with.  And from that war, there were positive outcomes and negative outcomes that came from that use of privateers.  But the best outcome, was accomplishing the goal of defeating the enemy and winning the war.  That should be priority number one of any ‘human community’ and self preservation is the first order of business. 

     In today’s war, we are once again in short supply of manpower and services, and industry has answered the call in prime entrepreneurial fashion.  That is not just a good thing, it is a necessary thing.  The only issue that I see is that the state is too ignorant or lazy to exercise any leadership or quality control over this force of industry. And compared to the privateers of the Revolutionary War, today’s civilian contractors are far more tame and far more within the control of the state.

     So let’s wrap this up, and this is my final thought on the matter.  Not only does our human community(the US) have a monopoly on the application of physical force within a given territory, but we have increased the efficiency and lethality of that physical force through the use of industry.  And that is a good thing.  Because if you lose a war, then you can kiss your human community goodbye.  The state has three choices, either 1. raise an army and create a contractor free military, 2. manage and apply quality control standards to the private industry, while still maintaining a strong military, 3. do neither, give up on the whole thing and lose the war…… I like number 2.-Head Jundi

 

Oh, and be sure to read the comments section of this article I posted below.  Lots of good input from the readership on this one….. 

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Mercenary Impulse

Is there an ethics that justifies Blackwater?

Michael Walzer,  The New Republic  Published: Wednesday, March 12, 2008

 

The state, Max Weber wrote in his classic essay “Politics as a Vocation,” “is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Our government is struggling to create such a state in Iraq, one strong enough to monopolize the use of force within its territory. To achieve this, we are using the physical force of the U.S. military against (some of) the private militias that have sprung up since the fall of Saddam Hussein. There can’t be an effective Iraqi state until these militias are disarmed or incorporated into the Iraqi army and subjected to its chain of command. It is exceedingly strange, then, that we have brought private militias of our own into Iraq.

In September, one of these private entities–a North Carolina-based company called Blackwater USA–became the subject of scrutiny when its guards fired into a crowd and killed 17 Iraqi civilians. Blackwater, which has a $1.2 billion State Department contract, is the largest of the dozens of private security firms currently operating in Iraq–firms that provide protection for top American officials, reconstruction projects, residents of the Green Zone, convoys of different sorts, and even the U.S. military itself (the Pentagon employs 7,300 private security guards inside the country). Blackwater’s employees, of course, are not fighting a private war–Iraq is an American war–but they do get into firefights on their own, for their own reasons; and these firefights are not always approved by the U.S. military. Blackwater and similar firms are private in another sense, too: The U.S. government keeps no record of the security guards who have died or been wounded–nor, needless to say, of the Iraqi civilians the guards have killed.

Mercenaries like Blackwater have a bad reputation. But is that reputation really deserved? Two books published in the last several years have examined the role of private security firms in Iraq–one from the left, one from the right. Jeremy Scahill’s Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army is informative but written as if readers already know the argument and so it is necessary only to present Blackwater’s history in appropriately indignant tones. Then there is Gerald Schumacher’s A Bloody Business: America’s War Zone Contractors and the Occupation of Iraq, which defends the contractors but also considers in detail the criticism directed against them. (This happens shamefully often these days: political correctness on the left, intellectual engagement on the right.) I believe Scahill is right; but I also believe that it is important actually to make the argument against mercenaries–and not merely to assume it.

Consider first an example of possible mercenary usefulness. During the wars of the former Yugoslavia, the Clinton administration wanted to help the Croatian army, which was in headlong retreat, badly battered by Serb attacks. But Clinton also thought he had good political reasons to avoid sending U.S. troops into battle. So, instead, his administration permitted a private U.S. firm to conduct training exercises with Croat soldiers–some of which, Schumacher writes, “turned into hostile encounters with the enemy.” Thanks partly to this assistance, the Serbs were defeated and driven out of Croatian territory.

A big success, right? Not necessarily. Might it not have been better in the long run–better at deterring future Serb attacks, better at preparing the American people for just interventions (and making unjust interventions harder)–if President Clinton had gone to Congress and laid out the argument for helping the Croats? Using private soldiers makes policy invisible and so reduces (or eliminates entirely) its political costs. But it is a crucial feature of democratic decision-making that politicians should pay the costs of the decisions they make. They should also get credit for the benefits. And then voters can study the balance sheet.

Indeed, the question of accountability–for the highest-ranking politicians, the lowest-ranking fighters, and everyone in between–undergirds most of the arguments against the use of mercenaries. Take the standard claim that mercenaries are cheap, which they often are. Since many security companies compete for these contracts, and since government agencies and aid organizations are looking for inexpensive help, there are strong incentives to skimp on training, equipment, and battlefield support. And, at any given moment, in any given place, despite the number of companies, the demand for private soldiers may exceed the supply, and so the people hiring them won’t be able to insist on high standards of competence and provision. The result, writes Schumacher, “has been a … flood of relatively unskilled and inexperienced contractors on the battlefield.” Without sufficient training and without sufficient equipment or support–Schumacher lists what is often missing: Kevlar helmets, body armor, armored cars, trained medics, medical evacuation helicopters, hovering attack planes–“they compensate by asserting a level of aggressiveness that they hope will ward off would-be attackers.” There is no question, he says, “that civilian security firms have gotten out of hand at times.” Soldiers, of course, get out of hand at times, too; and, in Iraq, training, equipment, and support have often been inadequate, with terrible consequences for both U.S. personnel and Iraqi civilians. But that is the result of political decisions, not market processes. And, for such decisions, we know whom to hold accountable.

It is not just accountability for politicians that matters; equally important is the question of accountability for individual fighters. And soldiers who get out of hand are accountable in ways that mercenaries are not. At least in the best cases, soldiers are trained to fight in accordance with a code of conduct enforced by military courts, which in turn are overseen by civilian courts. By contrast, though a voluntary code of conduct has been accepted by many of the security companies operating in Iraq, the code doesn’t provide any enforcement mechanism. Under Order 17 of the Transitional Administrative Law, approved by Paul Bremer in 2004, private security guards are immune from prosecution in Iraqi courts. American soldiers are also immune, but they can be prosecuted in military courts. By contrast, it remains unclear whether contractors can be tried by the military. There has been some talk about applying military law to contractors working for the Pentagon and the State Department–or, at least, to the American citizens among them; many private soldiers are not American–but the Supreme Court may not allow this.

American mercenaries can, theoretically, be brought home and tried in federal courts. But then witnesses would also have to be brought over–and the evidence, too, with guarantees that it had not been tampered with en route. In practice, it would be very difficult to secure crime scenes in a war zone and produce evidence that would stand up in a U.S. court. Nor, until the September killings by Blackwater guards, have American officials shown any interest in doing this. Mercenaries suspected of crimes are sometimes sent home (but not for trial) or dismissed from one security company and hired by another. As Columbia professor Scott Horton told The New York Times in October, there are some 100,000 American contractors in Iraq, yet not one has been prosecuted for an act of violence. He then invited us to “[i]magine a town of 100,000, and there hasn’t been a prosecution in three years.” But that comparison doesn’t tell the whole story, for the town’s population would include children and old people, while the combatant contractor population is almost entirely young men (and a few women), for whom rates of violence, even in zones of peace, are much higher than the U.S. average. Not a single prosecution. That means mercenaries in Iraq are radically unaccountable; their fire is free.

The new regulations for such contractors adopted by the Pentagon and State Department in early December do little to fix the problem. True, they specify minimal standards for training and set limits on the use of force; but, if one tries to imagine how these standards and limits could be enforced, and how many monitors and military police would be necessary, it gets harder and harder to envision a realistic scenario in which mercenaries are actually held accountable.

If we want to maintain accountability in war, then, we had best take a statist view of military activity. I don’t want to argue that private armies run by commercial companies, political parties, religious organizations, or governmentson-the-sly are everywhere and always a bad idea; but they are mostly a bad idea. The state is the only reliable agent of public responsibility that we have. Of course, it often isn’t reliable, and it often doesn’t represent a democratic public. One might plausibly argue that the army of a tyrannical state is a private army. Still, there isn’t any agency other than the state in the contemporary world that can authorize and then control the use of force–and whose officials are (sometimes) accountable to the rest of us.

Weber’s definition suggests that the state is constituted by its monopoly on the use of force. It is also, and perhaps more importantly, justified by its monopoly. This is what states are for; this is what they have to do before they do anything else–shut down the private wars, disarm the private armies, lock up the warlords. It is a very dangerous business to loosen the state’s grip on the use of violence, to allow war to become anything other than a public responsibility.

There are, of course, exceptions to every rule. Speaking at a conference of arms merchants and war contractors in Amman, Jordan, in March 2006, Blackwater vice chairman J. Cofer Black offered to stop the killing in Darfur. “We’ve war-gamed this with professionals,” he said. “We can do this.” Back in the United States, another Blackwater official, Chris Taylor, reiterated the offer.

Since neither the United Nations nor nato has any intention of deploying a military force that would actually be capable of stopping the Darfur genocide, should we send in mercenaries? Scahill quotes Max Boot, the leading neoconservative writer on military affairs, arguing forcefully that there is nothing else to do. Allowing private contractors to secure Darfur “is deemed unacceptable by the moral giants who run the United Nations,” Boot writes. “They claim that it is objectionable to employ–sniff–mercenaries. More objectionable, it seems, than passing empty resolutions, sending ineffectual peace-keeping forces and letting genocide continue.”

Some of us might prefer something like the International Brigade that fought in Spain over a force of Blackwater mercenaries. But the International Brigade was also a private militia, organized by the Comintern and never under the control of the Spanish republic. Does it matter that most of its members fought for ideological rather than commercial reasons? Scahill tells us that Blackwater is run by far-right Christian nationalists–for me, as for him, that doesn’t make things better.

Whatever Blackwater’s motives, I won’t join the “moral giants” who would rather do nothing at all than send mercenaries to Darfur. If the Comintern could field an army and stop the killing, that would be all right with me, too. But we should acknowledge that making this exception would also be a radical indictment of the states that could do what has to be done and, instead, do nothing at all. There should always be public accountability for military action–and sometimes for military inaction as well.

Michael Walzer is a contributing editor at The New Republic.

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