Does anybody else found it disturbing that the Department that contains the US Public Diplomacy apparatus, is ostensibly in charge of “winning hearts and minds” (used here because they use this phrase), and works with foreign media could be so blind as to ignore the impact of their travel? While they were too busy looking after the forest, they didn’t realize they were poisoning the land on which the trees grow.

Their aggressive posture, fueled in part by IEDs, was more than condoned but encouraged. Blackwater did their job: they kept their principals of the X and nobody they were charged with protecting died.

A few brief comments:

• In a Los Angeles Times editorial, Max Boot hypes the utility of contractors while ignoring the political and economic trade-offs as he notes more warfighters are freed to do other things. There is a decision that must be made here: upsize the force or spend more money on “short-term” solutions that are used for the long-haul? There are political costs to using contractors that include public diplomacy, changing foreign policy options, and distance from the citizenry from conflict, all of which must be factored in. Economic costs are similar.
• Malcolm Nance’s suggestion of a Force Protection Command is useful and one of the best analyses of the subject I’ve seen.
• However, as P.W. Singer notes in his comment to Nance’s post at SWJ, Nance’s recommendations also skipped over the foundational reasons contractors are engaged.
• Ralph Peters plays the same emotional card that contractors are independent cowboys while feebly addressing the core issues.
• Tom Barnett, commenting on Ralph Peters’ emotional and fact-challenged diatribe, unfortunately, drinks the Peters Punch and Jeremy Scahill’s Kool-Aid that outsourcing itself is wrong and that the principal’s agents are uncontrollable. The world Peters describes is not accurate at heart but has become functionally accurate the more we learn about how State, not DOD, has used and supported contractors. The existence of contractors isn’t the issue, nor is their use by a democracy novel, but novel is the absence of employing the real mechanisms to hold them accountable, we need to implement and internalize these processes, understanding the core reasons why it’s necessary to do so.

It is this failure to understand the resource being engaged, and the necessary control, that makes the Machiavellian warning more accurate after years of use. It is State that, ironically, demonstrated it could not, for a change not for bureaucratic reasons, understand the need for appropriate RUF and ROE out of a lack of vision, awareness, and fortitude.

Both the conduct and rules of war has changed, and the range of services that private military companies provide and what the US requires of them is significant, prompting the Dean of the Army War College to say, “The US cannot go to war without contractors.” Unlike technology stewardship issues that prevent aircraft carriers from putting to sea without civilians (for the last four decades), security contractors are on the front lines, directly and independently engaging foreign publics. These “guns with legs” are point persons in American foreign policy and public diplomacy and are perceived as representatives of the United States. Their role isn’t a given nor is it required, but we seem to have accepted it. We cannot afford to make these assumptions.