By Joseph Paul Vasquez, III, PhD

While our scholarly understanding of security-related issues is evolving, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate that American leaders stand alongside other historical counterparts who benefitted from mechanisms that kept their publics from fully recognizing the human cost of military action. Just as the French used their Foreign Legion in Indochina and the British used Gurkhas, Indians and other colonial peoples to bolster their military efforts abroad, the real costs of U.S.-led military action in recent years have been obscured from much of the public by the prominent role played by private military contractor (PMCs). In Summer 2005, for example, the 100,000 PMCs outnumbered all non-American troops combined in Iraq.[1]

Although use of some private contractors might be acceptable, the fact that they operate in a context of diminished military accountability is problematic. Last December, this point was highlighted by outrage in Iraq after a U.S. federal judge announced that he had dismissed manslaughter charges against employees of Blackwater — now rebranded as Xe Service –stemming from a 2007 Baghdad shooting in which seventeen Iraqis were killed and twenty-four wounded.

But there are even further complications to using civilian contractors instead of military personnel. Reliance on this so-called “coalition of the billing” hides the actual human toll of wars from the American public. Killed and wounded contractors frequently do not appear in the news and are not included in the number of Department of Defense personnel hurt or killed overseas. However, ProPublica, a non-profit journalistic organization, cites Labor Department records indicating that 1,757 civilian contractors had died and 39,794 had reported injuries in both Iraq and Afghanistan as of the end of 2009.[2] Not surprisingly the lack of adequate care for seriously injured contractors has come to light recently owing to their ineligibility to receive DoD healthcare.

In the years since military conscription ended in 1973, the United States has relied on an entirely volunteer force. In 2003, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld offered either a Freudian slip or a conspicuous pun when he referred to the All-Volunteer Force as “a booming success” before going on to declare that it had created “probably the finest military the world has ever seen.”[3] But the parallel expansion of PMCs during this timeframe was hardly coincidental.

While PMCs really blossomed in the early 1990s under a George H. W. Bush White House and Dick Cheney-run Defense Department, Richard Nixon actually prepared the ground for them to flourish when he ended the draft. Nixon and his advisors listened to economists like Milton Friedman who derided conscription as unfair taxation and reassured him that a smaller, stronger force could be maintained, if only the troops were rewarded with competitive wages and benefits. The problem was that in doing so, the U.S. military had to invest greater resources than before to retain young troops who wanted to raise and support a family on their military pay and benefits. It was precisely because of the increasing long-term costs of supporting an all-volunteer military and the political desire to keep taxes low that private military contracting became seductive. In this context, bankrolling generous salaries for PMCs became cheaper financially than having to pay salaries and benefits to soldiers over a lengthy military career. In 2004, the risk of having British troops permanently abandon the armed services for PMCs led London to allow service members to take a leave of absence to temporarily work for a year as contractors in order to reap some of the rewards.

It would be convenient to lay the blame for rogue contractors on Richard Nixon — the man who perfected rogue government, but that would be unfair. Nixon left office in 1974. It is those following in his footsteps and the American public who are most responsible for where the security and defense establishment is today.

One under-examined policy option that would save money and remove much of the impetus for using PMCs would be to return to the military draft. Activating the selective service would make it possible to have a larger force without exploding the defense budget. Such a move could have noteworthy benefits: decreasing reliance on PMCs; reducing the need for troops to serve multiple overseas deployments; and making enlistments less subject to economic forces. Moreover, a larger force would help with counterinsurgency operations since the ratio for success in such efforts is 10 counterinsurgents for every insurgent.

But little – if any – support exists for resurrecting the draft as typically done historically in the U.S. to maintain our common defense today. For a society accustomed to the ease of microwaveable meals and DVR-enhanced television, such a change would be hard to imagine.  One option that might be politically tolerable would be to use a draft to fill positions in areas where combat operations are not occurring. While this situation would increase stress on military volunteers by leaving them with fewer non-combat assignments and create a class of troops unavailable for worldwide deployment, it would increase broad public engagement in American foreign policy, just as fundamental economic troubles in recent years have refocused the public on the need for economic oversight and regulation.

About the Author

Joseph Paul Vasquez, III holds a M.A. from Ohio State University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame. As a veteran of the U.S. Army, he is a Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of Political Science at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, where he teaches courses on international and national security issues.

Endnotes

1. Marcela Gaviria and Martin Smith (producers) and Martin Smith (writer). 2005. “Private Warriors” (Frontline).  WGBH and PBS. June. <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/warriors/etc/synopsis.html > (accessed on March 9, 2010).

2. T. Christian Miller. 2009. “Disposable Army:  Civilian Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.” ProPublica. December 18.  <http://www.propublica.org/series/disposable-army> (accessed on March 11, 2010).

3. Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs) U.S. Department of Defense. 2003. Secretary Rumsfeld Remarks at the All-Volunteer Force Conference (News Transcript). September 17 <http://www.defense.gov/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=3166> (accessed on March 9, 2010).