A week’s worth of talk about civility is very nice. We should be more civil toward each other. There’s little more depressing in life than the incivility of much public discourse. But if you take five seconds to think about it, what happened in Tucson had nothing whatever to do with unmannerly misbehavior. Quite the opposite: the morning’s events gave ample evidence of humankind’s ability to hear the immediate call to greatness, as in Daniel Hernandez’s heroic salvation of Gabrielle Giffords’s life and how Dorwan Stoddard gave his life to shield his wife, Mavanelle, from Jared Loughner’s spray of bullet fire.
Thus, as we continue to gather more evidence of Loughner’s schizophrenia, the continuing rhetorical calls for the need for “civility” are now turning into nothing less than cover. They’re a dodge, a means by which those responsible for the slanderous accusation that somehow the Tea Party and Sarah Palin and the right were responsible for the massacre have been excused for hurling their grievously unjust charge. For, you see, they were only calling for a “new tone,” for “civility,” and who could be against those?
That is an investment we should make, but it will take a lot of time and money to train and equip and field more soldiers.
Max,Didn’t it require a lot of money to use contractors like Blackwater and others for years?, if that money had been used all along for training & equipment,wouldn’t our armed forces be stronger/better equipped right now?
You need a force authorization request to get approved by our friends in the congress. Bush asked for more soldiers, no luck. So what do you do? Outside contract. If we have more unemployment why not increase military enlistments?
*2 “Bush asked for more soldiers, no luck.”
When did Bush ask for more soldiers? The Republicans ran congress from 2000-2006.
Hope someone can answer this question for me: Do countries that contribute troops to the African Union in places like Darfur and Somalia get compensated? If so, is this any different than Blackwater getting compensated to clean up Darfur? I suspect Blackwater would do a hell of a better job than the AU too.
Actually, we will continue to rely on private security firms regardless of how large our military becomes, because there is a wide range of tasks and services that are better filled by private contractors than by the military. Some examples of these include personal security details, site and facility security, foreign military training, convoy escort, and–as we already have seen–shipping protection.
Why do private companies do this better than the military? Mainly because these missions are antithetical to military proficiency and readiness. They require different skill sets from those developed by most soldiers, and when soldiers are put on those duties, their value as soldiers deteriorates.
Of course, there are some types of soldiers who can do these missions very well while remaining proficient at their military jobs. These are the special operators, who already work in a semi-clandestine, quasi-civilian environment. But there are only about 15,000 of them, and the ability of the military to generate more is limited by the demanding physical and mental requirements for such troops (think of someone with a couple of masters degrees, the physical fitness of an olympic athlete, and the combat instincts of a Spartan warrior). To use them as bodyguards, or night watchmen, or truck escorts is a major waste of a scarce resource.
And that brings us to another matter. All of these PSC missions are highly manpower intensive, and the demand for them is growing. Trying to fill them all with military personnel, in addition to undermining the readiness of the troops, will also lead to “strategic consumption”, as forces get nickeled and dimed into nothing. For example, to guard one government bigwig usually requires a minimum security detail of nine or ten men, so that at least three are available at any time, day or night. A typical Provincial Reconstruction Team might have a dozen people requiring protection, which means that the personal security details will number about 120 men. That’s a small rifle company, right there. Imagine the situation multiplied thousands of times, all around the world, and soon there are no troops left at all.
By the way, we have plenty of men in uniform, we just don’t have the right mix for the kinds of wars we fight. I don’t see much need to increase the Army’s personnel top line by more than 25-30,000 men. Through reorganization and retraining, we can generate a lot more combat power with the men that we have right now.
>>>When did Bush ask for more soldiers? The Republicans ran congress from 2000-2006.<<<
in 2007, as a matter of fact. It was in his FY 2007-2008 Budget Request: an increase of some 75,000 men in the Army and 15,000 in the Marines. Congress sets the personnel top line.
*6
Stuart, you’re tap dancing/Bush was using contractors from 2003-2006/Why didn’t he ask for more troops during that period?
>>>Stuart, you’re tap dancing/Bush was using contractors from 2003-2006/Why didn’t he ask for more troops during that period?<<<
Would it have made a difference? The problem wasn’t a lack of troops, the problem was an Army designed to fight World War III in the Fulda Gap a full quarter century after the fall of the USSR. I’ve done the math for many people many times, but here is the salient fact: we have ten active divisions, six of which are “heavy” (i.e., tank or mechanized). Each heavy division has about 18,000 men in it. How many are “dismountable” infantry–the kind who can walk a beat, chase an insurgent down an alley, man a checkpoint, and so forth? About 2500. All the rest are tank and Bradley crewmen, vehicle maintainers, artillerymen, cooks, bottle-washers and so forth. All that, for about 2000 tons of supplies per day. And therein lies the problem–when you send heavy forces to fight an insurgency, you don’t get much combat power. Moreover, the light units you do have tend to get sent back again and again, because only they can do the job. It isn’t that we had a “ten division army to implement a twelve division strategy”, but that we really only had four or five divisions that we could actually use.
Throwing more men at the problem, before the Army got its act together both with regard to organization, doctrine and tactics, would only have created a more target rich environment. Note that once the Army did this, the number of troops in Iraq was not nearly as important as it seemed. When we surged, we went from 130,000 to 160,000 men–not the several hundred thousand that Shinseki said we needed (but what do you want from a man whose idea of transformation was making the Army wear Monica Lewinski’s hat?). If we had the right types of forces, we could have generated the same amount of combat power with the 130,000 men we had there–probably quite a bit more, in fact.
All this ignores the gist of my previous post, which is the duties performed by private security companies are best performed by private security companies and not by the military, regardless of how many men are in the ranks. What PSCs do is not compatible with the types of missions we ask our soldiers to do, and when we allow soldiers to take the place of PSCs, we get inferior PSCs and inferior soldiers.
Thanks, I appreciate your opinion,I do think we spent a lot more $s on the PSCs than the market value,by a lot.
Um, I don’t think it’s fair to Blackwater or to the English language to term the contractors as mercenaries. The dictionary definition of a merk is one who enlists to fight for another country. Blackwater provides armed guards for the United States (in the situation discussed here). They aren’t merks any more than the California Highway Patrol.
>>>Um, I don’t think it’s fair to Blackwater or to the English language to term the contractors as mercenaries.<<<
Well, by the UN Convention on Mercenaries, they are, but it’s a political rather than functional definition, by the terms of which the American Volunteer Group (the Flying Tigers) were mercenaries (they had no dog in the fight, and got paid a lot more than a Chinese pilot). But the true definition of a mercenary is a soldier who has no allegiance except to money, so there is one quick and easy test–will the people in question switch sides if offered higher pay? Sir John Hawkwood might, but somehow, I don’t think the Flying Tigers or the Blackwater boys would.
It is more precise to say that men like that tend to be idealistic soldiers of fortune, adventurers who are rather particular about to whom they contract their services.
>>>I do think we spent a lot more $s on the PSCs than the market value,by a lot.<<<
Depends. I know some of these guys, their backgrounds, and the jobs that they do. For the top of the line, there isn’t enough money around to pay them what they are worth (the same applies to most of our special operators, too). On the other hand, when you move down the food chain, you can meet some real bottom-feeders.