The New York Times today continues a long tradition of moral preening in its editorials without spelling out the practical consequences of the actions it advocates. I refer to the editorial calling on President Obama “to get rid of the thousands of private gunmen still deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.” It concludes: “There are many reasons to oppose the privatization of war. Reliance on contractors allows the government to work under the radar of public scrutiny. And freewheeling contractors can be at cross purposes with the armed forces.”
I join with the Times editors in bemoaning contractor abuses and calling for more accountability — a point I laid out at greater length in this American Interest article. But I do not believe we can simply dispense with all contractors, or even all armed contractors, unless we are willing to radically increase the size of the U.S. armed forces or radically decrease the number of missions they are told to carry out.
Today the U.S. armed forces have 1.4 million active-duty personnel. In 1991, at the end of the Cold War, the figure was more than 1.9 million. The rise in the use of contractors is a direct result of the post–Cold War downsizing that was undertaken by Bush the Senior and Clinton and that has not been truly undone by either Bush the Junior or Obama. If we want to use fewer contractors, then we need more soldiers — a lot more soldiers. But that costs a lot of money, and at a time when Obama is holding the line on defense spending (seemingly the only department of government being fiscally constrained), it seems highly unlikely that he will cough up the extra billions necessary to enlarge our armed forces.
Failing that, we have to rely on contractors to carry out missions, especially for the State Department, the CIA, AID, and other civilian agencies that have few in-house security personnel. In Afghanistan and Iraq, there are roughly as many contractors as there are soldiers. Since we will soon have 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, if we were to dispense with contractors, we would need an additional 100,000 troops — a figure that cannot possibly be raised from our current force strength. Even if we kept all the contractors who cook food, clean bases, service aircraft, and undertake myriad other functions while only getting rid of armed security guards, we would still have to see a major increase in force strength — otherwise those tasks will suck up troops that are badly needed to perform combat functions.
In other words carrying out the current mission in Afghanistan is impossible without substantial reliance on contractors. So perhaps we shouldn’t be there at all? Some might say so, but not the Times editorial board, which has endorsed the strategy laid out in President Obama’s West Point address. Perhaps in a future editorial, the editorial writers can explain how we can reverse President Bush’s mistaken “strategy of fighting on the cheap” without employing a lot of contractors.
