Mercinaries And The Volunteer Army

The volunteer military works great as long as you don't have a big war to fight, especially if it's an unpopular war. The Pentagon has attempted to get around this by hiring mercinary military forces like Blackwater. As I suggested below Blackwater and other private contractors are responsible for many of the problems that the US is experiencing with the Iraqi people. Peter W. Singer of The Brookings Institution agrees:
Can't Win with 'Em, Can't Go To War without 'Em:
Private Military Contractors and Counterinsurgency

The use of private military contractors appears to have harmed, rather than helped the counterinsurgency efforts of the U.S. mission in Iraq. Even worse, it has created a dependency syndrome on the private marketplace that not merely creates critical vulnerabilities, but shows all the signs of the last downward spirals of an addiction. If we judge by what has happened in Iraq, when it comes to private military contractors and counterinsurgency, the U.S. has locked itself into a vicious cycle. It can't win with them, but can't go to war without them.

The study explores how the current use of private military contractors:

• Allows policymakers to dodge key decisions that carry political costs, thus leading to operational choices that might not reflect public interest. The Abrams Doctrine, which has stood since the start of the all-volunteer force in the wake of Vietnam, has been outsourced.
• Enables a "bigger is better" approach to operations that runs contrary to the best lessons of U.S. military strategy. Turning logistics and operations into a for-profit endeavor helped feed the "Green Zone" mentality problem of sprawling bases, which runs counter everything General Petraeus pointed to as necessary to winning a counterinsurgency in the new Army/USMC manual he helped write.
• Inflames popular opinion against, rather than for, the American mission through operational practices that ignore the fundamental lessons of counterinsurgency. As one set of contractors described. "Our mission is to protect the principal at all costs. If that means pissing off the Iraqis, too bad."
• Participated in a series of abuses that have undermined efforts at winning "hearts and minds" of the Iraqi people. The pattern of contractor misconduct extends back to 2003 and has involved everything from prisoner abuse and "joyride" shootings of civilians to a reported incident in which a drunken Blackwater contractor shot dead the security guard of the Iraqi Vice President, after the two got into an argument on Christmas Eve, 2006.
• Weakened American efforts in the "war of ideas" both inside Iraq and beyond. As one Iraqi government official explained even before the recent shootings. "They are part of the reason for all the hatred that is directed at Americans, because people don't know them as Blackwater, they know them only as Americans. They are planting hatred, because of these irresponsible acts."
• Reveals a double standard towards Iraqi civilian institutions that undermines efforts to build up these very same institutions, another key lesson of counterinsurgency. As one Iraqi soldier said of Blackwater. "They are more powerful than the government. No one can try them. Where is the government in this?"
• Forced policymakers to jettison strategies designed to win the counterinsurgency on multiple occasions, before they even had a chance to succeed. The U.S. Marine plan for counterinsurgency in the Sunni Triangle was never implemented, because of uncoordinated contractor decisions in 2004 that helped turn Fallujah into a rallying point of the insurgency. More recently, while U.S. government leaders had planned to press the Iraqi government on needed action on post-"surge" political benchmarks, instead they are now having to request Iraqi help in cleaning up the aftermath of the Blackwater incident.

The U.S. government needs to go back to the drawing board and re-evaluate its use of private military contractors, especially armed roles within counterinsurgency and contingency operations. It needs to determine what roles are appropriate or not for private firms, and what roles must be kept in the control of those in public service. As part of this determination, it is becoming clear that many roles now outsourced, including the armed escort of U.S. government officials, assets, and convoys in a warzone, not only are inherently government functions, but that the outsourcing has created both huge vulnerabilities and negative consequences for the overall mission. A process must immediately begin to roll such public functions back into public responsibility.

There can be very little doubt that actions have Blackwater have not only undermined the "mission" in Iraq but have resulted in the deaths of US soldiers. Much of the hate that the majority of the Iraqi people feel towards the United States and it's soldiers is a result of irresponsible actions by military contractors who have no accountability for their actions.