What “All-Volunteer” Really Means

Our move in Liberia starts with seven U.S. military personnel, and now we’re all worried that yet another front is going to open up that requires hundreds, or more likely, thousands of U.S. troops to go into harm’s way.

Not to panic. The all-volunteer army has a solution that won’t require that your sons and daughters don the gear and venture into bad neighborhoods. The draft is not going to happen again. After all, those are voters and their offspring you are getting killed out there! That is political suicide.

The solution to those pesky flare-ups we don't really want to deal with? Hiring mercenaries. That is, letting the invisible hand (or fist) of Mr. Market sort things out. And no reason to think the mercenary approach (aka outsourcing) will be limited to logistics. We've backed fighting mercs in the past.

So don't be surprised if and when you see the idea come directly from those dutiful employees of the new neo-trusts (see Richard N. Perle , the well known chicken-hawk) . You remember the approach: Where your ancestors had the right to build railroads and work in coal mines for less than they wound up owing the company store. And if they squawked, hired Pinkerton's agents shot them.

What am I taking about? Why what Bush, Sr., first referred to and now is seeing fronted for by his chicken hawk son. Right, The New Global Order—and more importantly military privatization.

Military privatization sounds like laissez-faire, but actual smells like using mercenaries. It’s already happening in Iraq, thanks to the impending use of DynCorp Rent-a-Cops.

Thing is, mercenaries are a truly disastrous idea. Troops answerable to those that pay them (the administration/government) will turn on citizens, or anyone else they’re pointed at. A troublesome thought for any democracy. Worse, they’ve a historic tendency to turn on those who hire them, too, by way of renegotiating their fees. They’re prone to sacking, pillaging and taking over countries by force. It’s in their nature, doncha know?

That’s why our founding fathers were against them. As they point out in the Declaration of Independence. “[King George] is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.” More to the point, the mercs did lose the American colonies for their masters, didn’t they?

The trend for the U.S. to use mercs is neither smalltime adventure nor new next thing, either. According to a Brookings report by Peter W. Singer, :

“privatized military industry is a surprisingly big business. It has several hundred companies, operating in over 100 countries on six continents, and over $100 billion in annual global revenue. In fact, with the recent purchase of MPRI (a Virginia-based military advisory company) by the Fortune 500 firm L-3, many Americans already own slices of the industry in their 401(k) s. In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the industry was one of the few to rise in stock valuation rather than plummet. The reason is that the attacks essentially lodged a "security tax" on the economy, from which the private military industry stands to benefit.
The industry began its boom roughly a decade ago. The opening of a market for private military services was the result of a synergy between three powerful forces. The immediate catalyst was a massive disruption in the supply and demand of capable military forces since the end of the Cold War. Not only did global military downsizing create a new labor pool of over 6 million recently retired soldiers, but at the same time there was an increase in violent, but less strategically significant, conflicts around the world. With the great powers less willing to intervene or prop up local allies, the outcome was a gap in the market…”

And into that gap has now sprung…the free market. Investors like you and me. It’s important to note that should the Administration decide to send only mercs to Liberia, it will be a watershed event in some ways. It appears to be the first time that mercs without even a token moral umbrella of actual U.S. troops will be used (except for the pathetically unsuccessful drug war).

The test is needed because the military doesn’t like to buy anything that isn’t battle tested, so smallish wars are a good way to shake down strategies and hardware—and even force structures. So if mercs work in Liberia, look for it to become the new M.O. (modus operandi) of our military and foreign policy.

That’s an important line to cross. It heralds the beginning of true imperialism and the final capitulation to a might-over-right diplomatic strategy. It also is a profound betrayal of the core of democracy—that citizens wage only wars they are willing to fight themselves. It’s an important trigger point. Every good “Yankee trader” wants to make a buck off the rest of the world. That’s capitalism and that’s a good thing—or certainly less bad than any of the more unsavory alternatives to the natural give and take of nations (tribute, conquest, etc.).

But having to fight the wars yourself, so to speak, makes voters and free citizens just that extra bit more thoughtful in their jingoism. And that’s good; it tempers greed and arrogance, stopping it just short of those dreams of Empire that transmute national ambitions through the use of impersonal force. And Empire turns quickly into brutality abroad and the source of anti-imperial violence, such as we now face. ¶ 11:27 AM