Military Contractors: ‘Can’t Win With ‘Em, Can’t Go to War Without ‘Em’

[L. Coyote]

‘Can’t Win With ‘Em, Can’t Go to War Without ‘Em’: Six Questions for P.W. Singer
BY Scott Horton - Sep 30, 2007
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/09/hbc-90001311

Peter Warren Singer is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, widely viewed as Washington’s premier think tank. He has been writing about military contractors and particularly the transformational role of security contractors in U.S. military strategy long before this topic became vogue. Indeed, among the small library of books this subject has engendered, his ‘Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry’ has emerged as the go-to work. Singer’s writing has been nuanced and detached—respecting the innovations, the flexibility and the accomplishments of this new industry while at the same time carefully cataloguing its problems. But a couple of days ago, Singer released a new Brookings report entitled “Can’t Win With ‘Em, Can’t Go to War Without ‘Em: Private Military Contractors and Counterinsurgency.”(PDF http://www3.brookings.edu/fp/research/singer200709.pdf). It adopts a far more critical posture towards security contractors, concluding that they are actually undermining the American military’s achievement of its declared objectives in a counterinsurgency operation in Iraq. I put six questions to Singer based on his new paper.

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[Selatius]

1. This is old hat. Machiavelli wrote somewhat disparagingly of mercenaries back in his day.

They are only accountable to the money given to them, not to any policy objectives that the rulers may have in mind.

[verse18]

2. Nice cartoon I saw in our left wing local paper this week

[L. Coyote]

3. And, give them large piles of taxpayer money too! Then we understand.