Suppose they gave a war and only contractors remained: Time for the military to get serious about this issue

By Richard Fontaine

Best Defense department of 21st
century warfare

The New York Times reports a series of eye-opening figures about the risk to
U.S. contractors in Afghanistan. For the first time, more private
contractors died working for the U.S. government in Afghanistan last year than
did American soldiers -- and the total killed and wounded is almost certainly
understated. With 113,000 employees of defense contractors working in
Afghanistan, there are more private contractors in theater than American
military personnel.

America is
still struggling to get a handle on how the nation should employ private actors
in its battles and foreign reconstruction efforts. CNAS' John Nagl and I
wrestled with these issues in a 2010 report that advocated a path of reform. Since
then, the Pentagon and the rest of the U.S. government have made important
strides toward improving the process by which contractors are employed. But the work is far from over.

The challenges
posed by contractors on the battlefield are unlikely to go away even as the
United States draws down in Afghanistan. While we are unlikely to see
another large-scale reconstruction effort akin to Afghanistan and Iraq anytime
soon, given Pentagon, State Department and USAID operating procedures, America
will for the foreseeable future be unable to engage in conflicts or
reconstruction and stabilization operations of any significant size without
private contractors. The ratio of contractors to government personnel in
certain operations may actually increase as the Army and Marine Corps cut their
numbers. And in Iraq, of course, while all American troops have departed,
thousands of U.S.-employed contractors remain - sometimes in harms' way.

All of this
raises key practical concerns. Last fall's report by the
U.S. Commission on Wartime Contracting, which examined contracting abuses in
Iraq and Afghanistan offered a series of sensible recommendations for reform,
mostly focused on preventing waste and fraud (which, the Commission estimated,
produced a loss of up to an astonishing $60 billion).

In addition to
those reforms, others are needed. Training courses for U.S. soldiers
preparing to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan, for example, have rarely addressed
the role of contractors. They should. Operational plans frequently
lack a detailed annex that articulates specific contractor requirements for a
given mission. They need one. The legal status of contractors under
overlapping layers of U.S., foreign domestic, and international law remains
murky in places. The Congress and the executive branch should together
work to clarify this status.

Beyond the practical need to further reform the system,
however, are no less important questions about the proper role of the private
sector in American conflicts. While contractors have been a part of U.S.
operations since the Revolutionary War, the scale and scope of their activities
is unprecedented in American history. In 2010, for example, some 260,000
contractors served in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than the entire troop presence
in those countries. As the scholar Alison Stanger has chronicled, the increased use of contractors is not
limited to the military but is taking place across the "three Ds" of defense,
diplomacy and development.

This use of private contractors reduces the political
costs associated with U.S. deployments and global commitments. American
politicians and policymakers routinely make reference to the number of troops
that have deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan but almost never to the hundreds of
thousands contractors that served alongside them. American troops,
diplomats and other government workers killed in combat zones are listed in
casualty totals and featured in "faces of the fallen" tributes; American
contractors killed in the same zones barely register - to say nothing of locals
or third-party nationals working for the United States.

Contracting out key jobs enables American commanders
and diplomats to field a far larger effective force than they could by relying
on government employees alone. Given this state of affairs, the United
States has a keen interest in properly marshalling the activities of
contractors in America's military and reconstruction operations.

But that is not its only interest. America should
also begin to consider the broader implications of relying on contractors for
future wars, both its own and those of other countries. It should
determine with greater precision when to contract out a given activity and when
to require that only the government perform it. And it should debate what
all of this means for the all-volunteer force, for American democracy, and for
those tens of thousands of contractors who -- as the New York Times
illustrated poignantly -- remain in danger on a daily basis.

Richard Fontaine is a senior advisor at the Center for a
New American Security. He is the author, with John Nagl, of Contracting in Conflicts:
The Path to Reform.