The June 1st Washington Post did a profile on Ed Harrington, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Procurement, Department of Defense. I know, I never heard of him either, but he does get to spend about $132 billion of our military budget, overseeing how the U.S. Army pays its vendors and contractors. An interesting chart graces his office, one that tells you the ratio of government contractors per U.S. soldier since the Revolutionary War: “The government's contracting out for services is nothing new, as Harrington's office notes. Its ‘Contractors on the Battlefield’ chart outlines the number of contractors compared with the number of soldiers since the American Revolution. Back then, the ratio of contractors to soldiers was 1:6. World War I, 1:20. Vietnam, 1:6. Gulf War, 1:60. Iraq, 1:1. Afghanistan, 2:1.” Two soldiers for every contractor in Afghanistan?!!!! Wow!
I could drone on… ooops… about how we are slowly moving into a robotic and mechanized military force. But then, there are lots of military and civilian casualties that say otherwise. Some folks – like United Nations official Philip Alston – don’t like these impersonal killing systems, particularly when they are administered by clandestine spy agencies that bury their mistakes (quite literally) versus military operations which are openly accountable: “With the Defense Department you’ve got maybe not perfect but quite abundant accountability as demonstrated by what happens when a bombing goes wrong in Afghanistan,” he said in an interview [with the May 27th New York Times]. “The whole process that follows is very open. Whereas if the C.I.A. is doing it, by definition they are not going to answer questions, not provide any information, and not do any follow-up that we know about.”
And then we have the modern day Hessians – like the Blackwater (now Xe Services LLC) guards that generated so much notoriety with their Iraq War shoot-em-ups – contractors with guns that often replace military troops in specific functions. Xe today provides the “guards” to U.S. embassies all over the world; 90% of their income (2/3’s coming from no-bid contracts according to Wikipedia) comes from government contracts.
Okay, someone has to supply the table settings along with the surface-to-air missile systems that the Army needs, and someone has to supervise that procurement and all the generals and their supply officers pounding the table and asking, “More! More!” Fact is that military conflict is good business. Nothing like an arms race to stimulate the economy… of our military-industrial complex. We may be laying off teachers, cutting back our police forces and deferring the much needed maintenance on our dams, bridges and roads, but we will continue to hire lots of soldiers, enriching tons and tons of military suppliers to fight in theaters like Afghanistan and Iraq. So what if the Iraqi government is unraveling even as our troops are departing? Who cares if the Taliban are actually retaking towns almost as fast as our troops leave to take another strategically-important region?
Looking for wars to fight, reactions to strikes begging for retaliation in the minds of angry voters, and sending troops – without invoking a military draft that would require a public re-think of their initial desire for revenge – seems like such a non-starter these days, particularly fighting wars that we cannot win: Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan… combat that requires decades, millions of soldiers over time and – today – at least a trillion dollars in financial resolve. Frankly, we ain’t got it anymore. There are too many problems back home that need attending. Not that I am advocating isolationism in a modern era; that doesn’t work either. But this “go it alone” or “go it with the primary burden on the U.S. soldier and taxpayer” is no longer within our financial ability to bear. We need to stop subsidizing our military contractors and vendors just as much as we need to level the marketplace to weed out Wall Street favoritism; we need to get real!
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