Posting #10: The story about who fights our wars
The story: One of the most common stories told across American popular culture—in recruiting advertisements, television shows, movies, music, fashion, and video games—is that the U.S. military “warriors” are the best of us. The force members are said to model selfless, righteous, and dutiful patriotism, to nobly fight for our freedoms in conflicts across the world, and, with honor, to discharge their unique responsibilities. Though the tale says they will be held accountable for any bad behavior while representing the United States, it also says they are not personally liable for the wars in which they fight. Whether the wars are popularly condoned or condemned, the servicemembers only are to be lauded for voluntarily serving.
To repay our debt to them and to appreciate their exceptional patriotism, the story goes, at minimum we civilians should: herald American servicepeople as “heroes”; thank them for their service whenever and wherever we encounter them; erect countless memorials to make visible their heroic service to the nation and our obligation to remember them; mourn and honor them for their “ultimate sacrifice” with decorated gravesites on a dedicated federal holiday; and, especially and unquestioningly, apportion more taxpayer money to the military establishment than to the other top ten federal cabinet agencies combined. In this story of honor and sacrifice and gratitude, these monies are committed to supporting our noble troops and providing them with the best equipment and weapons to assure their glorious victories on the battlefield.
My take on the story: How does this story align, then, with another story, one less commonly told and in contradiction to the story of a national armed forces nobly and selflessly fighting our wars? This other story is about Private Military Contractors (PMCs), part of the for-profit “military-industrial complex” that in his 1961 farewell address President Eisenhower foretold would have a pernicious influence on the United States, and instead of shrinking, has only grown exponentially more powerful since the turn of the millennium. Eisenhower warned about the undue power of defense contractors, the industry that produces the machinery of war. Now, this club only includes five “primes” members: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. PMCs, though, go even further than the machinery builders, as they “are corporate bodies that specialize in the provision of military skills, including combat operations, strategic planning, intelligence, risk assessment, operational support, training, and technical skills” (Singer 8). In short, they provide the people for warring, not the machinery. This PMC club includes numerous members worldwide, most notoriously Blackwater, Halliburton, Custer Battles, and DynCorp (Singer 261). It also includes the infamous Wagner Group, a private military arm of the Russian government, known for its hiring of convicts, its brutal tactics, its centrality to Russia’s current war on Ukraine and, in June 2023, its short-lived mutiny.
Since the end of the Cold War and especially after 9/11/01, the United States has outsourced to private industry what used to be the exclusive purview of the State: sanctioned violence. “By removing absolute control from government…and privatizing it to the market, the state’s hold over violence is broken” says P.W. Singer in Corporate Warriors (18). In The Modern Mercenary, Sean McFate, who himself served in the U.S. Army and then as a Private Military Contractor, declares that although the United States has a long history of employing what would otherwise be called “mercenaries,” “never before has the country relied so heavily on their services to wage war. Consequently, war has become big business again” (19).
What are the consequences of the United States now relying less on the storied noble and patriotic military recruits and more on profit-driven PMCs to fight our wars? What do taxpaying citizens need to know about PMCs? In what follows, I examine the extraordinary costs of using military contractors in the last twenty years and also who is employed by Private, For-Profit, Military Companies.
1. The defense portion of the discretionary funds budget has grown exponentially in the last twenty years. Discretionary funds are the part of the federal budget that have to be decided on every year by Congress, whereas non-discretionary, or mandatory, funds, have been determined by law and so cannot be altered except by new law. Mandatory expenditures include Social Security, Medicare, and interest owed on the national debt. The defense portion of discretionary funds that have to be decided upon yearly now accounts for half of those funds, from which things like diplomacy, education, environmental programs, transportation, and healthcare also must be paid. War as “big business” following the Cold War’s end began after 9/11/01 and the US invasions in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) (AKA “Forever Wars”). It is reflected in the ballooning U.S. Defense budget, from $384B (2000) to $502B (2014) to $734B (2019). Despite an expected “peace dividend” with the conclusion to these two wars and a subsequent reduction in the defense budget, the most recently approved budget increased to $886B (2024) and will escalate further to $895.2B in 2025. In her most recent study, macro-economist Heidi Peltier writes: “An economy like this will suffer from two related phenomena: First, the military industrial sector will continue to grow at the expense of other, more generative economic sectors; and second, a strong military sector that gets the lion’s share of the budget will only gain political power, ensuring that it will continue to be allocated an overabundance of resources, further exacerbating the problem of diminished resources in other sectors” (2-3). When one only has a hammer, all challenges look like nails.
2. Most of the defense budget in the “Forever Wars” went to Private, For-Profit Military Companies and defense contractors. During the same 2001-2021 period, at least half of the defense budget went to paying military contractors, who not only engage in combat but also produce equipment, build infrastructure, and provide facilities support.
3. Most of the U.S. military presence in the “Forever Wars” were Private, For-Profit, civilian Military Companies. At least 50% of the US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan were comprised by contractors. At the very most, thirty-four percent of the contractors were Americans, though the number was fewer in Afghanistan. Locals made up twenty-seven percent, while third country nationals—from countries such as India, Fiji, Ghana, Ecuador, Australia, Mexico, and South Africa—constituted the majority at thirty-eight percent.
4. More Private, For-Profit, Civilian Military Company members died in the “Forever Wars” than did U.S. servicemembers. More civilian PMC employees met their deaths in direct war violence than did U.S. military servicemembers during the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unlike U.S. military members, as employees of a private company, PMC members could not count on receiving benefits as part of their compensation, especially including a death benefit to their family members.
5. The Private, For-Profit, Military Companies benefited financially from the wars. PMCs gained huge amounts of cash that went into corporate coffers. A DoD report issued in April 2023 says as much. Not only do “Defense companies have higher total returns to shareholders compared to their commercial analogs, or when compared to broad equity market indices such as the S&P 500,” but also “the share of contractor spending on Independent Research and Development (IR&D) and capital expenditures declined while cash paid to shareholders in dividends and share repurchases increased by 73%.”
6. The Private, For-Profit, Military Companies are known to overcharge the Defense Department. At the same time, PMCs notoriously overcharge the U.S. Government, first because there is so little competition among the companies, second, because there are too few DoD employees whose job it is to negotiate and oversee the contracts with the PMCs, and third, because PMCs hire scads of lobbyists to work in their favor on Capitol Hill (Singer 252).
7. For the first time in US history, taxes were not raised in this war period nor were war bonds sold to finance the wars. This means all of the money to fund these “Forever Wars” was borrowed, increasing the U.S. debt and making the United States beholden to its debt-holders. As of January 2023, the top five foreign holders of US debt are Japan, China, United Kingdom, Belgium, and Luxembourg.
8. Americans will be paying for these two wars for decades. These two wars cost $5.8 trillion and, with the cost of interest on the borrowed funding of the wars and the cost of providing healthcare to veterans now and in the future, is conservatively estimated to amount to $8 trillion.
9. Contrary to popular belief, Private, For-Profit, Military Companies are more expensive. Though it has been alleged since after the Cold War’s end that PMCs are more cost-effective, evidence suggests that PMCs are more expensive than if the military did this work.
10. Private, For-Profit, Military Companies are not transparent about their expenditures or behaviors. Though they are doing US government work and being paid by taxpayer dollars, as private entities PMCs are not obligated to be as transparent as government agencies. Thus, we taxpayers are permitted to know very little about them and they cannot be held accountable. (McFate 59). In Corporate Warriors, P.W. Singer cautions that “this particular form of privatization removes military expertise from the realm of public accountability…It blurs the line between a military that directly works for the state and one that works for profit, not dependent on the local populace’s membership and support” (215). Though, as of 2007, the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) governs American PMCs operating on behalf of the United States government, it has been applied inconsistently.
11. DoD cannot track the monies they spend with contractors. DoD and other agencies cannot accurately account for how their monies were spent on contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq. Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, attributes this inability to a lack of oversight: “It is in large part because of the lack of intense scrutiny by the media and Congress that their [PMCs’] future appears both secure and bright” (484).
12. Foreign Nationals constitute the majority of PMC employees. From what can be gleaned, the preponderance of PMC employees are foreign nationals. Because of the lack of PMC transparency, we do not know who PMCs employ or who are their other clients.
13. White men in their 40s constitute the vast majority of Americans in the Private, For-Profit, Military Companies. Because PMCs are private and not subject to the kind of transparency required of government institutions, little data is available. Scholars have deduced that the majority of American PMC employees are white men, in their 40s, not married but have dependents, did not graduate from high school, are from rural areas with high rates of unemployment and veteran populations, and have significant previous experience in the military (especially in the infantry) and law enforcement agencies. One might wonder whether the men who were trained at taxpayer expense in the military and now are employees of PMCs at taxpayer expense are also collecting military pensions…at taxpayer expense.
So what?
The extraordinary financial cost to the nation and the abrogation of its responsibility for national security in favor of private forces motivated first and foremost by profit raises the question: to what extent is “Private Military Company” a semantic cover for what are, in fact, mercenaries? Tellingly, the United States did not sign the 2001 UN Law prohibiting the use and financing of mercenaries but did sign on to the 2008 Montreux Document which provides only recommendations for the treatment and regulation of PMCs. This refusal to sign the first document but sign the second suggests there is a very fine line between mercenary and PMC, certainly a line still up for debate.
The fact is, though, that it is unlikely that the United States could have sustained both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without the use of private, for-profit military forces. Just as we borrowed money to pay for the wars, we also borrowed the manpower to fight the wars. In this context, we can understand better the December 2004 comment Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld made in response to an American soldier in Iraq complaining about inadequately armored vehicles: “You go to war with the Army you have, not the army you want or wish to have at a later time.” Clearly, going to war is the important thing, at whatever cost and with whomever is available.
In The Modern Mercenary, Sean McFate declares “The US penchant to lean on the private sector in war has produced the modern mercenary. Half of the country’s military force structure was contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, short of conscription, it is unlikely that the superpower could have sustained two multiyear wars simultaneously without them. This was a convenient political solution for the country’s leadership at the time, since premature withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan would look like Vietnam-era defeat, and a national draft was unthinkable” (25).
Still, critics fear that using private, for-profit, military companies encourages war-making. Such use relieves American leaders from having to make hard choices about instituting a draft, raising taxes, and gaining Congressional approval to go to war. The 2003-2011 Iraq war is a case in point, when the American populace was misled by its leaders about “weapons of mass destruction” and a message that imputed a link between Iraq and the 9/11 terrorists (though 15 of the nineteen were Saudi and trained by Saudi Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.) In retrospect, it seems more important to have gone to war in Iraq, period, than to have fought for legitimate threats to American security.
Nevertheless, in 2017, Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private, for-profit, military company, Blackwater, argued in the New York Times for replacing the twelve thousand American troops in Afghanistan with 2000 American Special Operations personnel and 6000 private, for-profit, military company employees. A year later, then-President Trump was feared by his advisors to be seriously considering Prince’s proposal, especially because he had promised during his campaign to end the war in Afghanistan, Prince pledged his plan would be less expensive than the Pentagon’s, and the US leader of Prince’s group would report directly to the President. In the end, Trump did not decide to replace US forces with a PMC but instead agreed with the Taliban to withdraw US forces by May 2021. In August 2021, President Biden withdrew American forces.
This is why it is crucial for American citizens to know who fights our wars and how we pay for them. The story we tell of our fighters being noble and selfless Americans who have volunteered to serve their country in the armed forces is a happy one. The story we tell is that our thanks and our celebrations and our memorials compensate for the very few of us going to war. Unfortunately, both parts of the story are untrue. I’m not arguing the old “freedom isn’t free” pablum by pointing out the falsity of our story, nor am I arguing for peace at any cost. Instead, I am suggesting that our American war stories can cover a multitude of sins, and to be responsible citizens, we should know what those sins are.
Sources
McFate, Sean. The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order. Oxford UP, 2014.
Scahill, Jeremy. Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. 2d Trade Paperback edition. New York: Bold Type Books, 2019.
Singer, P.W. Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry. Updated edition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2008.