What commitment does the average American have to a war that is fought mostly by volunteer services members (meaning most families are spared the risk of losing their sons and daughters in an unnecessary war) and with more and more of the actual work of the military farmed out in lucrative contracts to private corporations? And not just for food services, transportation, and supplies, but increasingly for actual military duties themselves.
The latest way in which this is proven not to be a good idea is the news that the training of Afghan police to fight the Taliban is being held up in a contract dispute with the private contractor that was hired to do the training. It's part of the shift of oversight of the training of Afghan police from our State Department to our Defense Department. DynCorp International is protesting that shift.
What if we contract out everything, pay to have our war fought by private contractors, and they decide to go on strike?
Ralph
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I know it' grandiose, but sometimes it almost seems like someone in Washington is reading my blog. One day after I posted this about privatization, there's this on HuffingtonPost:
ReplyDelete"House Dems Want to Phase Out Armed Contractors." The article says we have 217,000 contractors in Iraq doing the kind of work that enlisted military personnel would have done in the past.
There's a growing sentiment in Congress for changing that.