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In late March, I was taken aback by a news story about a drone attack on American troops at a joint base with Kurdish forces in Syria. Though five U.S. soldiers were wounded, there was only one death and, as Eric Schmitt reported in the New York Times, that "soldier" was actually a private military contractor. (Weeks after his death, we still have no idea what company he worked for.) Another contractor was also wounded. Consider that a grim reminder of a reality of American war in this century that it's been all too easy to ignore, one that TomDispatch regular, co-founder of the Costs of War Project, and military spouse Andrea Mazzarino highlights in today's piece. As large and staggeringly well-funded as the U.S. military is, this country also has a humongous shadow military of private contractors who are a crucial component of its ongoing, if ever less noticed, war on terror.
Let me put this in context. If you remember, President Trump actually tried to withdraw American troops from Syria but failed to do so. Since he left office, it's regularly been estimated that about 900 of them remain there. But that figure only counts the official military force in place in that devastated land, not the private contractors who provide them with support, some of it armed. Here's a reality of this American moment: we have no way of knowing how many "troops" are actually in Syria, only that in addition to the official figure, there are at least uncounted hundreds more. At certain moments in this country's little-noticed war there, there could have been four times as many.
Similarly, two decades after George W. Bush so disastrously invaded Iraq, about 2,500 U.S. troops are still officially stationed there -- but again that count doesn't include who knows how many private contractors. (Back in 2006, when the conflict was at its height, there were an estimated 100,000 of them!) In other words, in this century, a Pentagon funded to the teeth by American taxpayers has developed a new form of privatized war that leaves Americans knowing all too little about what's actually being done in their name.
With that in mind, let Mazzarino take you into the nightmarish private world that our post-9/11 conflicts have bred. Tom
The Army We Don't See
The Private Soldiers Who Fight in America's Name
The way mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin and his private army have been waging a significant part of Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine has been well covered in the American media, not least of all because his firm, the Wagner Group, draws most of its men from Russia's prison system. Wagner offers "freedom" from Putin's labor camps only to send those released convicts to the front lines of the conflict, often on brutal suicide missions.
At least the Russian president and his state-run media make no secret of his regime's alliance with Wagner. The American government, on the other hand, seldom acknowledges its own version of the privatization of war -- the tens of thousands of private security contractors it's used in its misguided war on terror, involving military and intelligence operations in a staggering 85 countries.
At least as far back as the Civil War through World Wars I and II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and the first Gulf War, "contractors," as we like to call them, have long been with us. Only recently, however, have they begun playing such a large role in our wars, with an estimated 10% to 20% of them directly involved in combat and intelligence operations.
Contractors have both committed horrific abuses and acted bravely under fire (because they have all too often been under fire). From torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to interrogations at the Guanta'namo Bay detention camp, from employees of the private security firm Blackwater indiscriminately firing on unarmed Iraqi civilians to contractors defending a U.S. base under attack in Afghanistan, they have been an essential part of the war on terror. And yes, they both killed Afghans and helped some who had worked as support contractors escape from Taliban rule.
The involvement of private companies has allowed Washington to continue to conduct its operations around the globe, even if many Americans think that our war on terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere has ended. I tried looking for any kind of a survey of how many of us realize that it continues in Iraq and elsewhere, but all I could find was pollster Nate Silver's analysis of "lessons learned" from that global conflict, as if it were part of our history. And unless respondents were caring for a combat-wounded veteran, they tended not to look unfavorably on sending our troops into battle in distant lands -- so scratch that as a lesson learned from our forever wars.
None of this surprises me. American troops are no longer getting killed in significant numbers, nor are as many crowding the waitlists at backlogged Veterans Affairs hospitals as would be the case if those troops had been the only ones doing the fighting.
At points during this century's war on terror, in fact, the U.S. used more civilian contractors in its ongoing wars than uniformed military personnel. In fact, as of 2019, according to Brown University's Costs of War Project, which I co-founded, there were 50% more contractors than troops in the U.S. Central Command region that includes Afghanistan, Iraq, and 18 other countries in the Middle East, as well as Central and South Asia. As recently as December 2022, the Pentagon had about 22,000 contractors deployed throughout that region, with nearly 8,000 concentrated in Iraq and Syria. To be sure, most of those workers were unarmed and providing food service, communications aid, and the like. Even more tellingly, roughly two thirds of them were citizens of other countries, particularly lower-income ones.
In 2020, retired Army Officer Danny Sjursen offered an interesting explanation for how the war on terror was then becoming ever more privatized: the Covid-19 pandemic had changed the Pentagon's war-making strategy as the public began to question how much money and how many lives were being expended on war abroad rather than healthcare at home. As a result, Sjursen argued, the U.S. had begun deploying ever more contractors, remote drones, CIA paramilitaries, and (often abusive) local forces in that war on terror while U.S. troops were redeployed to Europe and the Pacific to contain a resurgent Russia and China. In other words, during the pandemic, Washington placed ever more dirty work in corporate and foreign hands.
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