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Private Sector, Public Wars: Contractors in Combat - Afghanistan, Iraq, and Future Conflicts
Contractors are big business and a big part of war, with businesses taking upon themselves many tasks previously designated to the armed forces. By 2007, there were over 100,000 individuals working on U.S. contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan-versus about 160,000 U.S. combat troops. By some estimates, contractors account for some 40 percent of the costs of running operations.
This important work examines how that came to be, as well as answering a number of critical How have Congress, public interest groups, and other parties dealt with the issue? How is the marketplace affecting the American way of war? What impact will this have on force structure? How will the growing involvement of the private sector influence such matters as the all-volunteer force and the procurement and maintenance of advanced warfighting systems?
The emergent role of contractors on the battlefield reflects a deeply significant transition in the nature of armed conflict, a significant rebalancing between the roles of the private and public sectors. This change is the most significant upheaval in the nature of warfare since the rise of the nation-state in the 17th century. It represents a transformation started long before the invasion of Iraq and, absent a dramatic change in the evolution of the global marketplace, it will continue to increase, regardless of the course of American domestic politics. Government will have to change to keep up.
Understanding why the private sector has come to play such a prominent role in public wars requires tracing a story as torturous and, at times, mysterious as the search for the Holy Grail, a tale filled with deceit, greed, courage, selflessness, stupidity, misdirection, and myth. It includes following a winding path from Medieval Tuscan hills, to England, to colonial America, to the sands of Iwo Jima and of Iraq, the mountains of Afghanistan, the corridors of Wall Street, and the halls of the Pentagon. It demands walking through the cross sections of military, political, social, cultural, economic, intellectual, and business history. At the end of the journey lies the unvarnished truth about contractors in combat. That is the story Private Sector, Public Wars means to tell.
This important work examines how that came to be, as well as answering a number of critical How have Congress, public interest groups, and other parties dealt with the issue? How is the marketplace affecting the American way of war? What impact will this have on force structure? How will the growing involvement of the private sector influence such matters as the all-volunteer force and the procurement and maintenance of advanced warfighting systems?
The emergent role of contractors on the battlefield reflects a deeply significant transition in the nature of armed conflict, a significant rebalancing between the roles of the private and public sectors. This change is the most significant upheaval in the nature of warfare since the rise of the nation-state in the 17th century. It represents a transformation started long before the invasion of Iraq and, absent a dramatic change in the evolution of the global marketplace, it will continue to increase, regardless of the course of American domestic politics. Government will have to change to keep up.
Understanding why the private sector has come to play such a prominent role in public wars requires tracing a story as torturous and, at times, mysterious as the search for the Holy Grail, a tale filled with deceit, greed, courage, selflessness, stupidity, misdirection, and myth. It includes following a winding path from Medieval Tuscan hills, to England, to colonial America, to the sands of Iwo Jima and of Iraq, the mountains of Afghanistan, the corridors of Wall Street, and the halls of the Pentagon. It demands walking through the cross sections of military, political, social, cultural, economic, intellectual, and business history. At the end of the journey lies the unvarnished truth about contractors in combat. That is the story Private Sector, Public Wars means to tell.
- GenresMilitary Fiction
242 pages, Hardcover
First published July 30, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 30, 2008
By far the best work on the subject of contracting in contingency environments and on companies whom provide military-type services traditionally associated with governments. Mr. Carafano offers a fairly strident defense of contracting for military services. His larger conclusions are spot on: outsourcing of military services is here to stay, it is economical, and importantly that the U.S. Government has failed to adequately manage contractors in contingency operations.
One weakness is that the author allows his conservative ideology (he is a member of the Heritage Foundation) color his analysis on occasions. Sometimes it is merely word choice that betrays his bias, but he also explains away criticisms with assumptions about how companies act in a free market, ignoring the fact that defense is a very distorted sector dominated be a relatively small number of companies who exist almost entirely off government revenues. That said, where other books on the subject tend to be overly sensationalist and focus solely on the activities of companies, as if they existed in a vacuum, "Private Sector, Public Wars" shifts the focus to how the U.S. Government manages contracts. So much criticism of contractors is off-base, because it fails to take into account what services the client is paying a company to perform, to what degree the client changed or failed to define its requirements, or to what degree the client managed the contract and performed quality control. As any number of government audits and inspections will reveal, the U.S. Government in Iraq and Afghanistan was grossly deficient in defining work requirements and managing contracts. This created an environment conducive to fraud, but also waste as contractors were operating with little information about their customer's needs. Even in the Blackwater Nisoor Square incident, seemingly one of the most clear cut instances of security contractors gone bad, accounts of the incident more often than not fail to acknowledge that Blackwater was paid by the Department of State to act in an overtly aggressive manner and take a zero risk approach to protecting principals (much in the same manner as the State Department's own Diplomatic Security Service operates in Iraq and, coincidentally, they manage the Blackwater contract). The mere fact that this book mentions the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), the guidelines by which federal agencies let and manage contracts, puts it leagues above any other work.
It can be dry and is really aimed at practitioners in the national security realm. It could also do without the first 40 or so pages, which amount to a diatribe on why our national aversion to the mixing of violence and profit (traced to Machiavelli and later President Eisenhower) is overblown. However, I think the central message of the book is critical from a public policy perspective. The fuming about mercenaries, shadow armies, undue influence, etc. found in other books is fairly useless as defense service companies are here to stay because they provide cost savings to the government, provide U.S. forces with a technological advantage, and because Americans have an aversion to increasing the size of the federal government and military. Mr. Carafano's call for better government oversight and improvement in the federal acquisition workforce is a real public policy prescription.
One weakness is that the author allows his conservative ideology (he is a member of the Heritage Foundation) color his analysis on occasions. Sometimes it is merely word choice that betrays his bias, but he also explains away criticisms with assumptions about how companies act in a free market, ignoring the fact that defense is a very distorted sector dominated be a relatively small number of companies who exist almost entirely off government revenues. That said, where other books on the subject tend to be overly sensationalist and focus solely on the activities of companies, as if they existed in a vacuum, "Private Sector, Public Wars" shifts the focus to how the U.S. Government manages contracts. So much criticism of contractors is off-base, because it fails to take into account what services the client is paying a company to perform, to what degree the client changed or failed to define its requirements, or to what degree the client managed the contract and performed quality control. As any number of government audits and inspections will reveal, the U.S. Government in Iraq and Afghanistan was grossly deficient in defining work requirements and managing contracts. This created an environment conducive to fraud, but also waste as contractors were operating with little information about their customer's needs. Even in the Blackwater Nisoor Square incident, seemingly one of the most clear cut instances of security contractors gone bad, accounts of the incident more often than not fail to acknowledge that Blackwater was paid by the Department of State to act in an overtly aggressive manner and take a zero risk approach to protecting principals (much in the same manner as the State Department's own Diplomatic Security Service operates in Iraq and, coincidentally, they manage the Blackwater contract). The mere fact that this book mentions the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), the guidelines by which federal agencies let and manage contracts, puts it leagues above any other work.
It can be dry and is really aimed at practitioners in the national security realm. It could also do without the first 40 or so pages, which amount to a diatribe on why our national aversion to the mixing of violence and profit (traced to Machiavelli and later President Eisenhower) is overblown. However, I think the central message of the book is critical from a public policy perspective. The fuming about mercenaries, shadow armies, undue influence, etc. found in other books is fairly useless as defense service companies are here to stay because they provide cost savings to the government, provide U.S. forces with a technological advantage, and because Americans have an aversion to increasing the size of the federal government and military. Mr. Carafano's call for better government oversight and improvement in the federal acquisition workforce is a real public policy prescription.
September 1, 2008
I think this book does a lot to clarify the debate on the supposed over-reliance on "mercenaries" in Iraq and Afghanistan. Well researched and comprehensive in his argument, if a little dry at some points. I advise you skip his weird turn into obscure political history for a justification of contractors on the battlefield. Yes, yes we know they've always been around. Unless some of Machiavelli's more esoteric pieces do it for you. Also, he spends a little too much time shopping the argument that the market is the best cure for human ailments. He is after all a fellow at the Cato Institute. Suspend what you think you know of "mercenaries", separate the informational wheat from the proselytizing chaff and you've got a pretty decent book.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews