I'm not going to pretend that these hired guns are going to have anything like the negative domestic effects Niccolo Machiavelli reported they had on the Italy of the Renaissance:
"Mercenaries...are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy. The fact is, they have no other attraction or reason for keeping the field than a trifle of stipend, which is not sufficient to make them willing to die for you. They are ready enough to be your soldiers whilst you do not make war, but if war comes they take themselves off or run from the foe; which I should have little trouble to prove, for the ruin of Italy has been caused by nothing else than by resting all her hopes for many years on mercenaries, and although they formerly made some display and appeared valiant amongst themselves, yet when the foreigners came they showed what they were."The United States is not the Florence of the 1500s; we will neither be conquered nor ruined by these mercenaries.
But a putative republic should be concerned with the interests of its citizens. When it increasingly becomes, through using hired troops to further divorce its actions abroad from its people at home, more of an imperium it furthers the conditions that make all the more likely that - although the standards may still read "The Senate and People" - that the orders that move those standards do not reflect any actual intent to do good for, or further the interests of, We the People.
I wish I could, as I so often do, make this into a partisan problem. It's not; the desire to make the nation's military adventures less fraught with political consequences has been sought by the "leadership" of all factions outside the tiny genuinely Red Left (such as it is) and the equally tiny isolationist Right.
No, it's not a Democratic or Republican problem.
It's an "American" problem, and one generated by the massive indifference We the People have shown towards holding our "leaders" accountable to us for their indifference towards...I won't even say "our interests"; it's an indifference towards even trying to honestly and openly assess what those interests are.
Any truly rational evaluation of the value of spending blood and treasure to send soldiers - any soldiers - to chase the ragged aspirants of a theocratic fantasy around a disputatious and chaotic foreign region would quickly conclude that value is utterly nil. All the bullets ever cast cannot kill the notion of Islamic hegemony any more than they could kill Christian dominionism when it was the animating force of the West. It took an Enlightenment to do that, and by our part in discrediting and destroying the secular authorities in the Islamic lands we've done a hell of a fucking good job ensuring that the Islamic Enlightenment is further away than ever.
I have not desire to see my fellow soldiers thrown into this pointless abyss.
But I have even less desire to see my country continue to sow the dragon's teeth simply because I and my fellow citizens are too lazy and disengaged to bother with that sowing when it's done not by our "own" hands but by hired ploughmen tilling foreign fields with the seed my taxes have bought.
Those underneath the harrow are not too stupid to know whose money is behind the rifle, regardless of who is actually carrying it. If we do not understand that, if we do not understand the idiocy of trying to use those hired rifles to divorce ourselves from our cluelessness and geopolitical stupidity, we will never understand that we can never hire enough of those rifles to ever prevent being continually nipped by the dragons.
The problem is that mercenaries have been around since at least Xerxes that we know about. And probably a lot earlier. They typically turn devious, or completely lose discipline, or turn on their masters, or .... We think we are smarter now. But short term benefits always seem to overrule sanity.
ReplyDeleteLuckily for us, we're not in the sort of position that Xerxes, or the Medici, or Louis XIV were; Eric Prince isn't going to show up at the East Wing with a bodyguard of mercs to walk Trump out to behead him in the Rose Garden.
DeleteBut we're definitely not doing ourselves any political favors by using these mooks to kick our geopolitical can down the road.
We were supposed to have learned the lesson (remember Obama's "don't do stupid shit" after the Bushies' Most Excellent Iraqi Adventure collapsed like a punctured Trojan? Yeah, well...).
Now we have Donald the Dove, who's supposed to be all about #endendlesswars, if you believe the idiot mass media. But who, like his predecessors, is using these sellswords to simply keep the idiotic clusterfuckery on the downlow.
And then, when a bunch more pissed-off Saudis, or Palestinians, or Iraqis, or Mexicans, proceed to blow up the Trump Tower we're going to be all outraged and pissy and want to bomb them back into the Stone Age because they...wait for it...waaaaait for it...HATE OUR FREEDOMS!!!!
Fuck, we're so goddamn stupid it hurts to look at.
Mercs would have less qualms about helping a coup against the legislative branch than the army would have, though.
DeleteNo question. But the mercs will be kept safely at a distance; that's the big difference between us and Machaivelli's prince. His mercs were a disease. Ours, as Pluto points out, are just a symptom...
DeleteThe feudal societies had decayed to a point where the 'nobles' were no more the expert warrior class, but simply privileged rich men. This and the rise of firearms that devalued knights' armour anyway led to common people led by aristocrats becoming the mainstay of the army, rather than the knights.
DeleteThe societies with three castes (nobles, clerics, commoners) were not yet able to organise this properly (as in the 18th century with professional armies) and lacked the foundation for real conscription, so they had to use the primitive mercenary setup.
The Italian cities did not need to use mercenaries if only they used their different society foundation to enforce conscription. Mercenaries were thus a much worse option in Northern Italy than in Germany (both part of the same empire then).
The call for a reliance on citizens armies was thus well-motivated, but it was very contextual.
Now what should bug today's Americans is that mercenaries really are a symptom of a country not getting its act together on military effort.
I'd argue that it's more than a purely military problem; it's that the U.S. is a political mess, with half (or more..?) the citizens who are supposed to be sovereign completely useless for self-government.
DeleteOn the Right you have...well, pretty much the Right; I'm not sure what's left of the non-wingnut non-bleach-drinking non-FOX-addled community, but it's effectively powerless. That's about 30-40% of the total citizenry (tho the TRUE whackos, the Cheney-loving subset from 2008, is about 27%)
On the Left you have a remnant of the actual self-governing community, but you also have an increasingly delusional "democratic socialist" wing that posits that electing Bernie Sanders president will usher in the Peaceable Kingdom and despises any attempt to suggest differently.
The wingnuts have no military policy other than "Hulk SMASH!", and the Bernistas consider any American foreign policy pernicious and really haven't thought much about it. The DNC/Clinton wing is caught up in the remnants of RPT and "liberal intervention". And the mushy middle couldn't find Ukraine on the fucking map.
So it's more than just a failure of military policy; We the People are failing massively, period. And the vultures of the Trump Administration are simply the carrion eaters that have recognized before we have that the beast is already dead and just still twitching as the nerve endings slowly cool...
Yeah, I have something along those lines (just a hint) on my long pre-planned next blog post.
DeleteI have beaten a lot on the U.S. on the last couple Saturdays with the cult and Fascism posts, so I'm holding back a bit this time.
Long story short: More Americans cannot find Iran on a map than were in favour of bombing it. It's but the latest instalment in a decades-long series of alike poll results.
That's strong evidence that the problem is indeed not limited to the politicians.
I'm reading Taibbi's "Hate Inc." book these days, and it seems to make a lot of sense. It also paints a picture of the population / mass media audiences that's not flattering.
I'll see your "strong evidence" and raise you "dead fucking certainty".
DeleteHard to say what and who gets more credit for the Idiocracy of the American Mind, but I think it's a combination of 1) "average intelligence" implies that half of any human population is below "average", 2) the corporatization of the news media, the 24/7 cable news cycle, and the sloth and political ignorance of most political reporters and editors, who can't be bothered to try and report the actual complexity of any political problem (or to pick sides when one side is clearly the problem) but, instead, report it as a horserace, or sensation, or, worse, as "both sides" without context, 3) the very nature of televised "journalism" itself, that makes the narrative forced to conform to the pictures rather than the other way around and, hence, makes the narrative as crude and simplistic as the pictures, and 4) the zero-sum politics of the madhouse Right. The notion that the only legitimate governance is "conservative" governance has made any sort of self-government damn near impossible. It's what makes places like Honduras and Iraq such disasters; all politics is reduced to a death-struggle between "my politics" and "treason, death, and horror". No republic can function without a legitimate transfer of power, and when one side's political goals are simply to "own the (insert other faction here)" that's not possible.
Actually, average intelligence does not imply such a thing - median average would do so. Most intelligence distribution curves that I saw resembled symmetric normal distributions, though.
DeleteMaybe Eric P wouldn't submit Commander Bonespurs to defenestration, but Bernie could be another matter? Or Granny Nancy? Or Adam Schiff, Bonespurs has already tweeted an implied threat against him. Plenty of other threats, real or implied, out there - so some nutjob might take them seriously.
ReplyDeleteI agree about the threats. But I don't think it'll be mercs proper. It'll be a rabble of gun nuts and three-percent whackjobs like the ones that converged on Richmond the other week, to fire the shots when the current civil cold war turns hot...
DeleteSorry FDC, I can't agree with you on this one.
ReplyDeleteIf Trump wins the election he's going to find (or create) enemies everywhere and he's going to do something stupid. Since his faith in the US military is dropping (with justification, the Generals are getting restless), he's going to have to purchase security from somewhere and Blackwater IS the logical source.
To make matters even worse, I can easily see Eric Prince putting a bullet in Trump's brain (followed by a bullet in Pence's brain) after listening to the nonsense that continually spouts from Trump's demented (I mean that literally) brain for a few months.
What happens after that is anybody's guess.
No matter what we think (or, more accurately, wish), it CAN happen here if we, the voting public, are determined to avoid taking responsibility for ruling ourselves.
Trump isn't the cause, he's a symptom, and no matter what we wish, things can ALWAYS get worse until we take responsibility for our own actions.
You'll note that I explicitly pointed out that, yes; this is a "We the People" problem. We've helped the "leadership" of both our political factions make this happen. The GOP tends to be worse with it, because the subset of "war works" dopes inside the GOP is larger and more influential (hence your point about Orange Foolius using mercs to prosecute his overseas folly, take the oil, etc...) but the "RTP" faction inside the Dems - the outfit that produces Bidens and Clintons - would do something very similar.
DeleteBut...no. The "coup" won't be a Grand Duke Eric taking the throne over a roomful of bodies. It'll be a President Cotton with the powers of a king, with a pliant Congress and a vituperative ignorant public backing his every play to own the libs as his patrons foul the air and water and break the social contract made in the Great Depression to ensure that you can die broke and sick when you no longer have anything to offer to the God Mammon...
I frankly despair at this point. If 35-40% of the public can see what Trump is - not the GOP, because the Party has been fairly clever covering their plutocratic agenda with a screen of God, guns, gays, and tax cuts - but Trump! and have no problems with that...then the Republic as it was given to us is doomed. Because somewhere there's a Tiberius watching Trump's ridiculous Nuremburg rallies realizing that there's a huge portion of the nation that will he his willing freikorps and that the rest will not fight them until too late. Things WILL get worse, and worse, until finally, when the rest of the country realizes that we're in the New Gilded Age, it'll be too late, and the old coalition of muckrakers, socialists, radicals, noblesse-oblige-aristos is long gone and won't save us.
Damn, I'm depressed. I never thought to see this in my lifetime.
Take heart, Chief. At least for the moment, the sheer incompetence of the Trump administration will probably prevent a lot of logical bad things from happening.
DeleteThis isn’t a new issue. Corporations like Vinnell, MPRI/Engility and KBR have been allowing Big Army to save on support costs (training, pensions, housing etc) for decades. From an accounting perspective, that’s actually a somewhat prudent use of tax dollars. But the argument that they make it easier to slide into (and stay in) armed conflicts is also valid. They also present legal challenges when they don’t fall under conventional rules of engagement or military legal structures.
ReplyDeleteI have no idea what to make of a guy like Prince (are there others like him in the US?). Is he trying to make foreign policy? Is he truly mercenary and simply looking for profit (in which case is he any different from Halliburton or Chevron?)? Is he a threat to the US government? On this last question, I agree with FDChief on gun nuts and three percenters being the greater threat.
I'd argue that the "savings" are purely short-term. My Army has the worst sort of CRS (what Dave Hackworth used to bitch about the Army - "Can't-Remember-Shit" syndrome) about this. We've gone down this "civilian sutler" road before, and it works provided you don't need the sutlers to run supplies up Route 19 or the MSR from Kuwait. Then it takes GIs in the gun trucks to get the MREs and porta-potties into theater. Hopefully we'll never find out if that's a problem. But in a high-intensity conflict? It might well be...
DeleteAs we've discussed above, though, the real issue is that privatizing these cabinet wars make them politically easier to fight. a big part of the whole American Experiment was that The People (well, at least initially the wealthy white guys the Framers assumed would be "the people" for political purposes...) would take serious interest in, and actively manage, foreign policy. The problem turned out that most "people" (including wealthy white guys) have very poor understanding of the issues, and the result is that trying to get them to learn the complexities of that policy - let alone try and make intelligent decisions - turned out to be damn near impossible.
And a big part of the result is that here we are, where a grifter and sellsword like Eric Prince can schmooze his way into the corridors of power...
And speaking of strategic cluelessness; it's worth noting about the recent D.C. pandemonium regarding John "The Mustache of Stupidity" Bolton's slapsticking Trump is that Bolton isn't a Republican "loyalist". Bolton is loyal to two things: Bolton, and the principle that there isn't a piece of real estate outside the United States three-mile-limit that is better unbombed.
ReplyDeleteThe fucker is a war-lover. He's very shrewd, in the one-dimensional sort of intelligence that pursues an object to the oblivion of everything else, and in Bolton's case it's sheer, brutal, U.S. military hegemony.
So if he's really taking stick to Trump, it's likely because he hopes that a President Pence will fulfill his long dreams of war with Iran and, possibly, North Korea. There's no real reason to trust him, or accept his say-so without voluminous corroborating evidence such as tape recordings. He's not a foolish liar, like Trump...but he WILL do and say anything to get his way, regardless of whether his "way" makes geopolitical sense or not. He's like the stormtroopers in Star Wars; there is no tactical, operational, or strategic objective that he doesn't think can be taken by brutal frontal assault, regardless of the cost or the value of the objective.
I s'pose I conflated Prince's mercs with whacko militias. But I recalled seeing pics years ago of right wing whackjobs on Prince's Wyoming ranch shooting silenced pistolas and/or ARs & AKs with what appeared to be 60 (or 60plus?) capacity mags. Or maybe they were mercs in training?
ReplyDeleteDefinitely not sure what Prince's claim to fame is. A former associate said of him: "He operates with a 12-year-old’s mindset of war." He had to drop out, or was forced out, of the Naval Academy. Later got into a SEAL Team via OCS but had no combat experience that anyone can reliably point to. A BS artist who would have made a good used car salesman. A cheat who double deals and skims profits. Was under investigation for violations of the US regs on international arms trafficking, but that was dropped when Bozo Bonespurs was sworn in, probably due to Steve Bannon influence. I understand that several congressional committees are investigating him.
It seems now though that most US operators have been priced out of the international merc market. The UAE's MbZ hired Colombians (via Prince) to fight in Yemen. And MbZ has hired vets of the Viet-Nam People's Army to be his imperial guard within the UAE. The Saudi's MbS hired Sudanese to fight for him in Yemen. Prince hired a ragtag bunch of Somalis led by a South African to go after Somali pirate nests. Not sure where that funding came from?
Reminds me of a conversation I had years ago with a South African contractor in a miserable corner of Afghanistan. He was going on about the contractor circuit in general, and mentioned that Americans make the worst contractors in the world, because they all think they're still fighting for the USA, and are dependent on American-standard luxuries.
DeleteSo to your point about Americans being priced out of the market - I don't think it's price. I think they actually have a poor reputation, and those in the market have greater faith in Russians, South Africans, Colombians or (for the lower end, higher casualty ops), Sudanese and Pakistanis, because they talk less bluster and are simply tougher.
The thing is, we don't actually have mercenaries fighting our wars. What we have is a US military that has outsourced some logistical and support functions. As a guy with a high-level clearance who deployed to most of the major theaters (including East Africa), I never saw any military contractor "shooters" tasked with any operational mission. Most of those types of guys were employed by foreign governments, corporations, or other agencies of the US government (like State) as security forces.
ReplyDeleteIn East Africa our primary base is Djibouti and Manda Bay is a Kenya base where we have a presence. As part of the agreements that allow us to operate there, the US government is required to hire locals to help their economies. So many of those "contractors" are dirt poor Djiboutians who are making money by doing all the menial tasks for a large facility. And the support services also hire locals and TCN's (third country nationals.). When I was in Djibouti in 2014 the Pakistani who cut my hair and the NEX barber shop (the base is run by the Navy), had been there for six years supporting his family back home. The chow hall was staffed largey by Pakistani and Phillipinos employed by KBR, but still had Navy leadership.
But Djibouti is not a war-zone base. The US is a guest and has to conform to the agreement between the US and Djiboutian government. Manda Bay is a little more complicated since it's a Kenyan base that was expanded primarily to help deal with the instability just over the border. And the US presence there is also as a guest of the Kenyan government, though the threat there is much larger.
But support is what almost all contractors do. They stay on large, established bases and provide various services so that US forces can do the actual fighting. Uniformed personnel could do most of these tasks but the reasons they don't aren't terrible and do involve trade-offs. And it's definitely true that contracting has allowed the US military to "do more with less" especially in an age with high Optempo. And a lot of that has been driven by bean-counting. We've arguable gotten too reliant on contractors, but I don't think it is something that is ever going to go away. Even on bases here in the US we contract out a lot of stuff that it simply doesn't make much sense to have uniformed personnel doing.
And we could get into the civil service as well since there are a lot of GS personnel deployed overseas.
Good points, Andy.
ReplyDeleteLet me digress on them for a bit, though.
First, yes: the vast bulk of the USG-employed condottiere are doing CS/CSS missions. The number of actual shooters is miniscule (although apparently there is a non-zero number of people in this administration that like the idea of privatizing the actual bullet-launching parts of cabinet wars, as well) compared to the people vacuuming the porta-johns and heating rations.
Second, that's relatively untroubling for a OOTW/LIC/rebellion suppression-type war. Those sutlers are unlikely to be a weak link in the support chain. The question becomes, however, is the active duty becoming inseparably dependent on organizations that cannot be coaxed and unlikely to be compelled to serve in a high-intensity conventional war? I hope we don't ever have to find out. But your experience suggests that we have put ourselves in a position to have difficulty supporting our expeditionary forces without them, if that ever becomes a reality.
The bean-counting has always been a thing ever since Sumer; the sovereign doesn't like paying for GIs to do things like drive trucks that civilian truck drivers can do and not get expensive retirement pensions for.
But experience with modern warfare - where truck drivers tend to get killed - made the "militarization" of CS/CSS practical beginning in the late 18th Century (starting with artillery team drivers, because not surprisingly it kinda pissed off the redlegs when they needed to limber up and their civilian contractor had grabbed a hat during counterbattery duels...). We've moved away from that as our wars return closer to the standards of 1710 than 1910, and, like you, I'm not sure that weren't not "too reliant" on these hirelings.
Still...the big question remains; why should We the People want to subcontract and cost-cut and offshore our wars? If they're important enough to fight them, why aren't they important enough to risk our one lives and those of our sons and daughters, instead of hiring the lowest bidders? Why should we encourage the idea that our foreign policy be fought as far away and as little known to us as possible?
At some point you're going to have civilians in your supply chain. There's no way around it - for any country.
ReplyDeleteThe argument that having contractors involved in war fractures the US public link to foreign policy strikes me as a weak variation on the argument of a conscript force vs the all-volunteer force. The US went all-volunteer, so only a tiny segment of the population feels the effects of war (except for when war comes to America and Ivy Leaguers get killed in the World Trade Center). Adding contractors doesn't really change that equation.
Adding contractors does, however, change some equations for in-theater commanders. Most simply make war fractionally cheaper to fight. But some contractors run the roads, just like uniformed supply units run the roads. Sometimes they get into firefights, just like uniformed supply units. But they aren't subject to military discipline, so when contractors kill 17 civilians in Nisour Square (2007), they create strategic problems for military commanders. And when contractors get dragged out of their vehicles and strung up from a bridge (2004), they create pressure for disproportionate responses.
But the presence or absence of contractors isn't going to make the US (or any other western) public more or less engaged in foreign policy. The public will only care if it is personally invested. And right now I doubt the US public differentiates between a serving military member and a contractor. They have, in effect, both been hired to be an invisible class (only to be recognized at sporting events) to keep the discomfort of war (and the discomfort of talking about war) as far from US soil as possible.
On the topic of Soldiers of Fortune, "Mad" Mike Hoare has just died at the ripe old age of 100.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7960655/Mercenary-Mad-Mike-Hoare-dies-100.html
Worth noting in the whole "who works for your government" is the "right-to-repair" issues that are, apparently, becoming an increasing pain in the DoD's ass:
ReplyDeletehttps://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/even-the-american-military-is-struggling-with-right-to-1841531517