Military Mercenaries

Military mercenaries are nothing new. Hired guards have probably been used to protect business interests as far back as the spice caravans from the Orient. But I wonder if they have ever been used to the extent they are now, and I wonder what implications might that have in the future of America and the world.

If I remember rightly there are currently about as many, or more, mercenaries in Iraq as conventional enlisted troops – something like 150, 000 people. Mercenaries are very more expensive than conventional troops. I have heard it reported that paying for mercenaries is at least 40% more expensive than using regular troops. I think it is a lot more than that. I have read reports of vast sums of unaccounted funds allotted to mercenary contractors. These wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are draining the resources we need desperately at home.

With so many young people not choosing the Army, Navy or Marines as a career I suppose we may have to resort to using mersenaries. Or is the type of war that deters recruits.

Sometimes mercenaries perform the same duties, or even fight beside, our regular troops who are paid much less for the same assignments. That must be very demoralizing for our soldiers and marines. Maybe the rationale, in addition to being readily available in the world, is that the mercenaries are older military veterans themselves and have more experience. But that is not necessarily so, and they are not necessarily American veterans, either. Also foreign veterans may not have the same ethical restraints on their behavior, nor view their duties the same as regular trained American troops. In any case they are doing jobs that used to be done by trained military personal, are paid much more money, and they don’t have to follow the same rules and regulations as our troops.

In fact it is doubtful that some of them follow any rules at all. There have been instances of incompetence, bad behavior and even deaths committed by mercenaries - abuses both accidental and pre-meditated. Seventeen (17!) American troops were killed in Iraq by electric shock from faulty wiring. A hearing exonerated the contractor. In fact I heard on the news that their contract has been renewed. That is outrageous! There have been other incidents where Iraqi civilians, including women and children, have been shot by mercenaries under highly questionable circumstances. No one brought to justice for that either. Add to that the recent photographs that show wild and indecent drunken behavior of mercenaries partying. The whistle-blower I saw interviewed said such behavior was common in a certain group of mercenaries, but not all. He said that when the wild parties first occurred they included only the mercenaries, but later there were Iraqis involved too. Can you imagine the outrage of other Muslim Iraqis whose religion forbids them to imbibe alcoholic drinks, not even considering what other infractions of their religious code that were committed? To our Muslim enemies, this is a religious war, and such despicable behavior by Americans and other Western mercenaries whom they consider infidels, is a reason to double their efforts to destroy us all wherever they can. Mercenaries represent our country that contracts for them just as much as our regular troops do, and America's character is judged on how they conduct themselves. Regular troops have been trained for this. We must find a way to enforce the same conduct on mercenaries and insist on punishment and dismissal of those who don't live up to the code.

Using mercenaries, in my opinion, is a questionable practice for another important reason. Training enlisted recruits in skills that they can use in their later civilian lives used to be a great incentive for them to sign up for at least one tour of duty. In addition to learning discipline and having time to grow up to decide what they would like to do to earn a living after they were discharged, the skills that young recruits learned were valuable all their lives. (I still remember from when I spent two years in the Navy WAVES during WWII, the delicious baked goods made by Navy cooks who went through the Navy’s Cooks and Bakers School.) In addition to learning how to kill an enemy and keep themselves alive at the same time, recruits became corpsmen, tower control operators, pilots, mechanics, office workers and more – all valuable skills later in civilian life. In the Navy Construction Battalion, the Seabees recruits learned skills like driving bulldozers and other road-building and airfield building machines,  plumbing, carpentry, and many other construction trades.  They also got combat training with the marines at Camp Pendleton south of Los Angeles. The West Coast CB base at Port Hueneme, 40 miles north of Los Angeles, is now closed. I don’t know if all such training in the country has been suspended in favor of using corporate contract mercenaries or not, but if it has, it seems like a sad state of affairs to me.