Blackwater, like any group of armed professionals in a chaotic environment, will find that some of its operators make mistakes. Under stress, they might be too quick on the trigger, misidentify the target, or otherwise create problems for themselves and the mission in Iraq. This is inevitable and likely occurred in the recent incident in Baghdad where 17 civilians were gunned down. The fact none of their protectees have died in Iraq is admirable, but this does not necessarily show that Blackwater’s personnel are furthering the mission goals from a strategic perspective. If the goal is to secure Iraq for the Iraqis so that they rally to the government so we can then leave, all of the people that are killed or aggrieved in the course of security operations create more work for the US government and the uniformed military.
But Blackwater’s very existence, even if its men performed their work with exquisite sensitivity, is not good news. Private contractors providing services that were once the responsibility of the uniformed military–most dramatically providing security for proconsul Paul Bremer and various US Army Generals–is a sign that our military is too small and inflexible to deal with the mission in Iraq and the war on terror more broadly. The shift from the uniformed military to contractors is part of a broader shift of power away from the nation-state to transnational entities–things like the WTO and multinational corporations–and a parallel devolution of power to subnational groupings like the tribe, the family, and the private individual.
Blackwater’s ususal mission in Iraq is a prosaic one: guarding VIPs in a nation that is in the midst of a very violent insurgency. But their presence shows two very bad things. One, it shows that the environment in Iraq, even in its capital city, remains too dangerous for movement by Iraqi and American officials in all but the most well-armed caravans, replete with armored cars, automatic weapons, and platoon-size teams of guards. Second, it shows that this capability is not available to the government in house.
The skill-sets of Blackwater’s operators originate in the government, as most of their members are ex-military special forces. But because the military is so small and also an all-volunteer force, the governments finds itself competing with itself and the private sector to retain this talent. It was once the “monopsony” buyer of such services. But now ex-SF can go to DSS, FBI, or the private sector contractors, whose customers include the State Department and the CIA.
I agree with observers who say that some kind of legal oversight is needed for contractors in Iraq. It is not good for the mission, America’s reputation, or ultimately the morale of the contractors themselves to be “beyond the law.” A lack of accountability always breeds corruption and vice. This issue, however, is less interesting to me than the strategic implications of Blackwater’s size and growth. The law will be changed and Blackwater will be under someone’s legal jurisdiction. But Blackwater’s massive growth after 9/11 is more important as a testament to the failure of the federal government to move away from the “peace dividend” military. Blackwater’s rapid acquisition of gear and infrastructure in Iraq is an indictment of the sclerotic procurement system used by the Pentagon. Donald Rumsfeld in particular maintained a stilted view of transformation that decreed that the uniformed military should remain the same size after 9/11 as it was in the early nineties because of the supposed transformational impact of technology, data systems, and precision weapons.
The real transformation is needed in how the government hires, compensates, and employs its people. The government has a flat pay structure. Folks that could barely make it in the private sector, can earn a stable middle class income as a GS-8 or 13 in the government. At the same time, highly skilled individuals that could earn millions in the private sector–such as Supreme Court Justices–are compensated only two or three times more than their staff. This is why government in general and now the military are seeing a brain drain into the private sector. That the government is paying again for what it failed to retain only underscores the problem.
There is no doubt Blackwater’s people and skills are useful to the government and its goals. If they are to work for the government, they should be paid accordingly. Other bright people, pursuing careers as investment analysts, journalists, professors, managers, and other renumerative careers likely could also be put to good use in the CIA, FBI, and military. But all three agencies are hidebound by onerous application requirements, low wages, bloated incumbents, and the misuse of talent. This lack of flexibility is perhaps endemic to government, but that is what is supposed to change during a war. What ordinarily takes a lot of time is supposed to be accomplished more quickly, even if this leads to marginal increases in graft. The graft-speed tradeoff should change dramatically when the stakes of moving slow (and paying less) are so much higher. US industry designed, tested, built, and fielded entirely new tanks, planes, ships, and firearms in WWII. It expanded the military from about 140,000 to several million. Today, it takes years to slap some armor on existing Humvees, and, at the same time, the military remains well below the level of the Cold War.
We are not on a war footing. The government does not compensate and hire people in a way designed to identify, reward, and retain talent (and also to punish failure). And the government’s people are leaving to do government jobs indirectly among the private sector’s government contractors. This may be a necessary stop-gap, and I don’t begrudge the operators’ decision to make a few extra bucks. This is not, however, an acceptable long-term solution to the government’s old-fashioned system of human resource management. Such contractors are less controllable than government forces, more likely to undermine the mission, and require the government to lose money by compensating an unnecessary middleman. The government can learn from the flexibility that allows a private sector organization to move quickly in adding manpower and equipment. Nonetheless, this situation is a sign that government agencies are inflexible and that leaders have tolerated numerous institutions that are miles away from a “war footing” . . . this, some six years after the 9/11 attacks.
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I think this also has something to do with the growing “comfort gap” between civilian and military employment. In the past, without an education you were likely to work in a civilian job which required long hours and hard physical labor. Over the last century, this dynamic has been changing, so that now those without college degrees can usually find a civilian job involving 40 hours a week in a cushy chair.
Meanwhile, the military continues to be a hard life in many respects, especially in the combat arms of the Army and Marines. When deployments are frequent, as they are now, life for those in the military is especially tough.
This means that in a volunteer army the only compelling reasons to make a career out of service in the combat arms, as opposed to an easier life in the civilian world, are patriotism and love of the military life.
Patriotism is often enough to get you through several years of service, but not 20 years. And there is a limited number of people who love the military life enough to continue putting up with physical hardships and family separation.
Blackwater and other contractors are the result of this undersupply of military labor created by the disconnect between compensation and hardship. They pay what the labor market expects when asked to endure hardship, which happens to be several times what the military is willing to pay. I remember meeting retired E-8′s in Iraq, who in the military would be company First Sergeants (a very big responsibility), getting paid 6 figures to work in laundry plants.
Until the military pay scales start to balance out, we’ll be stuck with this problem. But I guess that’s what you’ve already pointed out.
I think the government had to go to the private sector because nowhere in our federal apparatus did the Blackwater skill set exist in sufficient quantity to meet the Iraq/A’stan needs of VIP protection.
Sure, DSS or USSS are mission capable, but not nearly in the size that was needed. I doubt that regular SF operators, SEALs, Force Recon, etc. types would be capable of running VIP protection without training. Special ops are good at many things–direct action, intel gathering, guerrila warfare–but I’d be surprised if PSD training was the core skill set.
Blackwater (and others) understood this, and took highly trainable special ops soldiers, and turned them into close protection specialists by teaching them the DSS/USSS doctrine on advance work, motorcade/driving skills, immediate action drills, vehicle counterambush, etc.
It comes as no surprise to me that VIP protection is not a widely held skillset in the military.
Advance work, convoy protection, immediate action drills, and counterambush are all skills that the military teaches and utilizes. There may be some specifics to guarding civilian VIPs, but I would think if there wasn’t a force shortage to deal with it would make more sense to train military personnel to perform the task. It wouldn’t be anything radically different than what they are already trained to do.
I can’t say for certain, but I’d bet that the immediate action drills taught in the military resemble nothing like VIP IADs. I think a lot of the military IADs are going to be left/right/center peels, break contact drills, etc., whereas in the PSD context, you’re going to have more emphasis on getting the principal off the X, etc. Certainly, military operators arent going to routinely learn counterterrorism driving skills on civilian vehicles. I’m aware that the Army has a protective services unit, but I think it’s the CID guys who go through this, not so much the SF guys. Air Force also has a school they send their AFOSI guys through. Mostly, I was under the impression that its the military 1811s who go thru, and not the operators.
What about USMC FAST Company and Embassy Guards, they deal with this stuff all the time. It’s not too hard to take a guy who knows how to run and gun and train him also to do so in a way that protects an individual from insurgents with AKs, IEDs, etc., since this is what the military is dealing with all the time with respect to themselves, supply convoys, Civilian Affairs teams, etc.
I understand your point that the military may currently lack some of these skills, but my point is that it wouldn’t be difficult to start teaching service members these skills. In particular, SF, infantry, armor, and cavalry soldiers would find that much of the knowledge and training they already possess would make the transition easy.
Why couldn’t we set up special service units to handle VIP protection? Didn’t the SS do this quite effectively in WWII? (obviously we’d need some radically different Rules of Engagement, but you get the point)
The reason we aren’t providing the forces to carry out these tasks aren’t because we are incapable of teaching the skills to military personnel, but because without the personnel to spare, we find it easier to rely on contractors.
Oh no doubt there are tons of guys in the services who could be trained to do this; I was just saying that State had to go to contractors, because the off-the-shelf capacity wasn’t there in the needed quantity. Blackwater, on the other hand, had a pre-existing capability, both in training and protective services. You can’t just take knuckledraggers/door-kickers and turn them into a PSD overnight. If you try to do this, you end up with Custer Battles.
Actually, we did use military personnel to pull PSD, I know this from personal experience.
But you are still probably right that the training isn’t there yet. But I would guess that Blackwater, while having a pre-existing expertise, did not have a pre-existing capacity to perform these tasks. It no doubt has had to resort to massive recruiting efforts to staff up to this task.
The reason they were able to successfully do this was because they pay well enough to attract new personnel.
What I’m saying is kind of radical: the military shouldn’t necessarily pay everyone the same. The “Danger Pay” and “SF pay” and pay for signing longer contracts, getting special skills, etc. should vary radically. It’s simply not rewarding the much-harder-to-find folks going off to the quasi-private sector of government contractors.
Oh, and they should get rid of that bullet magnet ACU uniform while they’re at it. : )
That’s something I’ve felt for a long time, and it needs to go beyond the SF / regular service divide.
There’s a huge difference in the amount of hardship and danger experienced by a soldier in an infantry company compared to a soldier in a finance detachment, for example. But deploy them to Iraq, and they get the same hardship and combat zone pay. There’s also hazardous duty pay, but that is highly specific. Believe it or not, you can be in the infantry in Iraq and not qualify for hazardous duty pay.
They actually have people who have gamed the system well enough that they fly into combat zones on the last day of the month, spend the night on the base, and head out within the next couple days, getting tax free status and combat and hardship pay for both months. Meanwhile, you have combat arms soldiers living in muck and squalor, constantly in danger, who get the same benefits.