In Washington today, all eyes are on the Blackwater hearings. But the relentless focus on potential atrocities committed by unaccountable, grotesquely overpaid private security firms in Iraq and Afghanistan obscures the larger issue for the United States. That is, mercenary forces simply should have no place in the national security structure of an American democracy.
No doubt, mounting allegations of inappropriate use of force by Blackwater in Iraq justify the inquiry by Chairman Henry Waxman's House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. In the wake of the controversial firefight on September 16 which resulted in the killings of 11 Iraqi civilians and calls for the termination of Blackwater by the Iraqi government, a devastating report detailed numerous other incidents and a concerted effort to cover them up. Since 2005, Blackwater personnel have been involved in 168 shooting incidents; in 143 of them, they initiated fire. In one case last year, a drunken Blackwater employee shot and killed a bodyguard for one of the two vice presidents of Iraq. (The report by the majority Democratic staff is available here.)
It is of course also vitally important to examine the carte blanche given to Blackwater along with the $1 billion in payments the company has received since September 2001. Unaccountable to the Iraqi government and unbound by the American code of military conduct, Blackwater has operated without oversight or limits in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2004, an edict from outgoing Coalition Provisional Authority viceroy Paul Bremer gave Blackwater immunity from the Iraqi legal process. In the ensuing months, as the House report shows, the State Department acted as Blackwater's enabler, providing funds to payoff Iraqi victims of Blackwater shootings. State Departments officials helped Blackwater extricate from Iraq its employee responsible for killing the vice presidential bodyguard. The public relations backlash in Iraq and across the Muslim world only makes the American project more difficult.
Unquestionably, the massive contracts provided to Blackwater, Dyncorp, Triple Canopy and other private security firms make no sense for American taxpayers. Waxman's committee calculated that Blackwater charges the U.S. government $1,222 a day or $455,000 a year for a single security contractor, six times the annual cost to pay and maintain an average American solider. Worse still, those numbers create a perverse incentive, luring the most highly trained U.S. soldiers from active duty to private security work where their pay can increase by an order of magnitude. Regardless of the math (disputed of course by Blackwater founder Erik Prince), there is little doubt that the American taxpayer is getting a bad deal. As Waxman put it:

"Privatizing is working exceptionally well for Blackwater. The question for this hearing is whether outsourcing to Blackwater is a good deal to the American taxpayer."

Even some among the Republicans were willing to acknowledge the obvious. Rep. John Duncan Jr. (R-TN) criticized the "lavish" and "excessive" contracts given to firms like Blackwater:

"Fiscal conservatives should feel no obligation to defend this kind of contracting. In fact, fiscal conservatives should be the ones most horrified by this."

But the real significance of Blackwater lies not with its gold-plated contracts, its accountability to no one, its rumored atrocities and the concomitant blowback. Instead, Blackwater is a symbol of a failure of American democracy. Simply put, the American people should never rely on private mercenaries, period.
For most of its history, the United States relied on its citizenry to provide the armed forces - and shared sacrifice - to fight the nation's wars. As Ken Burns' film The War reminded us this week, during World War II over 16 million Americans served in the U.S. military, over 12 percent of the entire population. But in the aftermath of Vietnam, the move to the all-volunteer military and the search for the "peace dividend" in the wake of the Cold War, the Army was downsized to 10 divisions in the 1990's. Designed to fight two "regional wars," the streamlined U.S. military would have to outsource basic services.
The result was that the American military was too small in the run-up to the Iraq war and is stretched to the breaking point now. As I wrote two years ago, the national security threats facing the United States call for a dramatic expansion of the military over the next decade. The experience in Iraq and the need to deter - or fight - future adversaries means the U.S. needs two to five more Army and Marine divisions. The fight against Al Qaeda requires a doubling of U.S. Special Forces. Tens of thousands of military policemen and other constabulary forces for current and future peacekeeping missions also need to be provided.
None of those of functions should be outsourced to overpaid, unaccountable mercenary firms. Simply put, that is un-American. Private security firms like Blackwater and bloated service providers like Halliburton and Bechtel are a blight, a stain on our democracy. Our reliance on them is failure of the American people and the politicians of both parties. Ultimately, the people of the United States must pay - with their taxes and with their sons and daughters - for the military we need.