Addicted to Blackwater-New Study From Brookings Institution

[kpete]

Addicted to Blackwater
By Noah Shachtman September 27, 2007 | 12:32:00 PMCategories: Mercs
The U.S. may rely on private military contractors for its operations in Iraq. But the guns (and logisticians, and truck drivers, and cooks) for hire are actually undermining the American counterinsurgency in Iraq -- "creat 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," says DANGER ROOM contributor P.W. Singer in a new study for the Brookings Institution.
http://www3.brookings.edu/fp/research/singer200709.pdf


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 U.S. war effort has been designed to count on contractors for so much -- hauling gear, training soldiers, washing laundry, protecting VIPs. But that reliance is directly at odds with the American mission in Iraq: counterinsurgency. The main goal in such an operation is to convince the population to turn against the guerrillas. Which gets a whole lot tougher when contractors are riding roughshod over the locals.

The point here is not that all contractors are “cowboys,” “unprofessional,” or “killers,” as Blackwater and other contractors are often described. Rather, most are highly talented, ex-soldiers. However, their private mission is different from the overall public operation. Those, for example, doing escort duty are going to be judged by their bosses solely on whether they get their client from point A to B, not whether they win Iraqi hearts and minds along the way. Ann Exline Starr, a former Coalition Provisional Authority adviser, de- scribed the difference between when she traveled with a military escort and with guards from Blackwater and another State Department-contracted security firm, DynCorp. While the soldiers kept her safe, they also did such things as playing cards and drinking tea with local Iraqis. The contractors, by contrast, focused only on the contract. “What they told me was, ‘Our mission is to protect the principal at all costs. If that means pissing off the Iraqis, too bad.”

This protection first and last mentality has led to many common operating practices that clearly en- rage locals. In an effort to keep potential threats away, contractors drive convoys up the wrong side of the road, ram civilian vehicles, toss smoke bombs, and fire weaponry as warnings, all as standard practices. Journalist Robert Young Pelton described his month spent embedded with Blackwater contractors in Baghdad. “They’re famous for being very aggressive. They use their machine guns like car horns.”

more at:
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/09/addicted-to-bla.html