There are significant implications to what you suggest beyond just the mere possibility of the potential benefit you claim.
I think it is a very disconcerting notion that we would allow a private entity to possess the equipment and infrastructure to wage war.
How do we ensure they don't go rogue?
Why? Do you feel you have any real say in what our public entity does with its equipment and infrastructure to wage war? Those capabilities are already in the hands of the highest bidder.
>How do we ensure they don't go rogue?
The public entity is already rogue.
We have 30x the number of bases than the rest of the nations of the world combined!
Our military budget is larger than the next 19 countries, many of whom are allies. Is this also a result of the US population's wishes and hitting the target goals? Perhaps if your paycheck had a list of where your taxes are going, like they do in France, you'd see just how much discretionary spending goes towards the military, and the taxpayers would send a message to Congress that enough is enough.
And the public army faces no market competition, so the Pentagon can't account for $8.7 trillion with a T dollars - yet our politicians always say that our army is always running out of funds and we need to increase our funding to support the national defense.
Politicians always say "we just didn't have enough money, give us more". However the definition of (institutional) insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a better result.
I am not talking about replacing the military with the free market. I am talking about shrinking it. Yes using democratic means. But good luck with that!
More people should read Smedley Butler.
In the Israel-Palestine situation he criticizes Democratic Israel far more than, say the Kingdom of Jordan. He criticizes Likud more than the PLO, and writes about the USA's imperialism in supporting a democratic state in the Middle East, while ignoring that during the 50s and 60s the KGB trained the PLO as part of explicit support to undermine Western-backed countries.
I correspond with Chomsky from time to time, and I think he is set in his ways. But I hardly think he would say our democracy has a good track record. You're thinking of Michio Kaku :)
But that doesn't address what we're discussing, it distracts from it.
Historically the concept of private fighting forces is not in any way radical.
I repeat, then, that of all kinds of troops, auxiliaries are the most dangerous; for the prince or republic that calls them to their assistance has no control or authority whatever over them, as that remains entirely with him who sends them. ... A prince or republic, then, should adopt any other course rather than bring auxiliaries into their state for its defence, especially when their reliance is wholly upon them; for any treaty or convention with the enemy, however hard the conditions, will be less hard to bear than the danger from auxiliaries. ... And in truth no more favourable opportunity could be presented to an ambitious prince or republic for seizing a city or province, than to be asked to send troops there to assist in its defence. And therefore any one whose ambition so far misleads him as to call in strangers to aid in his defence, or in an attack upon others, seeks to acquire that which he will not be able to hold, and which after acquiring will be easily taken from him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DynCorp#Controversies
Edit: A good documentary to check out about military contractors in Iraq is Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers
I don't think the private, for-profit operation of a unit or facility of a military is inherently flawed in any distinct way. The onus is on the government to draft and enforce the contracts appropriately, and make sure they retain control over the force.
Ultimately, war is in the hands of the armed; not governments, not corporations. The governments and corporations which organize armed men are responsible for setting up the correct incentive structures to achieve the goals, with as few mistakes as possible.
Truly depraved criminal actions by personnel in the employ of his merc company.
Historically, that's hardly unusual.
> How do we ensure they don't go rogue?
How do we ensure anyone and anything doesn't go rogue? What does "going rogue" even mean in this context? Are you imagining that they might behave worse than officially state backed forces? How is that even possible, given how horrible state backed forces routinely behave?
I'm not trying to be flippant, but I just don't get the distinction you're trying to make. This doesn't seem especially new, or different, or dangerous.
And the US-backed groups variously called paramilitaries, anti-communist insurgents, moderate rebels, etc. are essentially foreign-run PMCs by another name.
what if we take this to extreme, and have everyone be capable of waging war? That is, take the right to bear arms to the extreme where you cannot go to war with anyone, because it would be Mutually Assured Destruction.
At least with nation states there's some feeble international law.
Conversely, how well is international law working for the residents of eastern Ukraine?
Although I wish it were otherwise, when I look around the world, I see a system governed by force, not laws. Private military forces fit tidily into this system.
Now obviously force in the moment is what decides everything but the decisions that may lead to that moment or away from it are at least possible with the international framework of relations.
My argument is that there's no real difference between the two: The exact same force prevent both from occurring. (And, should it occur, it would be just as terrible, of course.)
The comment I replied to was discussing how to hold people responsible, and suggesting (in my view, incorrectly) that international law is of more use against state actors than non-state actors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nisour_Square_massacre
And here are some quotes:
> On September 24, 2007, the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior announced it would file criminal charges against the Blackwater staff involved in the shooting, although it is unclear how some of them will be brought to trial.
and
> US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates testified before Congress that the Pentagon has sufficient legal authority to control its contractors, but that commanders lack sufficient "means and resources" to exercise adequate oversight.
but hey, at least:
> In 2013, the charges against Ball were dropped. The other four went to trial in 2014.[5] The jury found Slatten guilty of first-degree murder, and the other three guards (Slough, Liberty and Heard) guilty of at least three counts of voluntary manslaughter and using a machine gun to commit a violent crime. Jurors sided with prosecutors' contention that the shooting was a criminal act, not a battlefield encounter gone wrong. Slatten faced a potential sentence of life in prison. The other three guards faced decades in prison; the weapons charges carried a minimum 30-year sentence under a law enacted during the 1990s cocaine epidemic.
But still, what was prevented? Blackwater changed the name, fantastic. But really, there is so much more, again just one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academi#Incidents
> On February 16, 2005, four Blackwater guards escorting a U.S. State Department convoy in Iraq fired 70 rounds into a car. The guards stated that they felt threatened when the driver ignored orders to stop as he approached the convoy. The fate of the car's driver was unknown because the convoy did not stop after the shooting. An investigation by the State Department's Diplomatic Security Service concluded that the shooting was not justified and that the Blackwater employees provided false statements to investigators. The statements claimed that one of the Blackwater vehicles had been hit by insurgent gunfire, but the investigation concluded that one of the Blackwater guards had actually fired into his own vehicle by accident. John Frese, the U.S. embassy in Iraq's top security official, declined to punish Blackwater or the security guards because he believed any disciplinary actions would lower the morale of the Blackwater contractors.
Dear God. I'm kind of speechless, actually. I expected to find some shit, but still wow. Compassion with the aggressors, not even a THOUGHT for the victims. And make sure to not be abrasive and actually expect people to imagine the consequences of what they accept on them. Yes, there is already a lot of crap in the world, but that doesn't excuse more of it.
If it makes sense to contract it out to lowest bid, it makes sense for the companies to cut corners. Capitalism is as capitalism does. Why does this need spelling out? If someone accepts this being done to third parties in the third world, they wouldn't stop it being done to me, even if they're not even able to admit that to themselves, it's useless to attempt to insult my intelligence. I don't know or care about the posters personally, but I know what these words mean in the sense of what consequences they ultimately have. Laws and institutions don't just spring out of nowhere, and what Einstein said about freedom of speech with "Laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty, there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population." applies to other things, as well. And for this spirit of, let's call it not being subservient to sociopaths, I resist them. That is what I can do. That I don't give a single fuck about being "flagged" for being "abrasive", if a friend of mine shrugged this off they'd be a former friend. If a community forbids this sort of accountability, it's a vampire's den.
Prevention, at least an attempt at it, would be people with a spine not stopping to be loud about this stuff until every last company shut down. Then you prevented these incidents. Similar to citizens and decent cops and military flushing out the bad apples and washing the barrels, but no, let's just accept it as the order of things, instead of the results of our daily choices, that would be too real. As long as we're not doing it, nobody can blame us for not being very bothered about putting an end to it -- right?
I agree that international law would not stop a nation bent on conquest, it certainly doesn't stop the US. But that's quite besides the point, when someone shrugs away developments like this, question one to them is "how would you react if they did this to you?", and question two is "why did none of you ask that?" to everyone else. https://warprayer.org/ comes to mind. This is not off-topic, this is how tall you have to be to even ride.
Come, you know perfectly well how it works. I live (you probably do too) in a country with a functioning state, which uses its monopoly on violence and alliances with other functioning states to ensure that no foreign military forces, PMCs, militias, or even organised gangs run around killing people.
Or in blunt terms, I pay my taxes, and in exchange, there's an army/police that 1) doesn't shoot me and 2) shoots people who try. It's pretty nice, or at least, a lot better than the alternative. But Iraq does not have that, and ONE of the ways that's shown is sure, that Blackwater can run around doing terrible things with almost complete impunity, and that is, yes terrible.
But you know why that happened? Because an actually nation state military came in and shot a bunch of people with, basically, complete impunity, and continued until everyone left alive agreed that this was fine, and yes, companies like Blackwater can get away with murder. It got a ton of press coverage at the time, you probably heard of it? [0]
If you look at the situation in Iraq, and you think "man, this is great, everything is amazing, except for these PMCs, that's the only issue here!" then I think you're blind.
If Iraq was allowed to, they'd have arrested and prosecuted every accused Blackwater opperative, confiscated all in-country assets and funds, and kicked the rest out. But they're not. And it's not Blackwater that stopped them.
I find it deeply disenguous to look at the things which were done, and shrug, and then blame Blackwater, and not the people pulling the strings, paying the bills, issuing the orders, and protecting the guilty. All of whom worked for the US government, not a private company.
> Prevention, at least an attempt at it, would be people with a spine not stopping to be loud about this stuff until every last company shut down. Then you prevented these incidents.
You think any of those incidents would have been prevented if the US had to use actual soldiers instead of contractors to do their dirty work?
> I agree that international law would not stop a nation bent on conquest, it certainly doesn't stop the US. But that's quite besides the point
On the contrary, I think that is precisely the point. Stop being so naive.