It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
One morning, Uncle Sam woke up and his military had been privatized. There had been no national debate. No congressional action. No sweeping White House order. It just happened.
Today, the Pentagon employs more than 217,000 contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, doing the kind of work that enlisted military personnel would have performed in the past, according to a Congressional Research Service report.
Now, there's a move in Congress to change that. On Tuesday, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) introduced the Stop Outsourcing Security Act, which would make it the military's responsibility to use its own personnel to train troops and police, guard convoys, repair weapons, run military prisons and do military intelligence activity.
There are strategic reasons to move away from a reliance on contractors, says Schakowsky, a senior member of the intelligence committee. They damage the U.S. reputation with reckless behavior, are overly costly and hurt the morale of troops, who see private guards earning much more money than they do.
It's dangerous, Schakowsky says, when a nation has no apparent choice but to hire a paramilitary corporation to do its war-making.
If such a bill had been introduced just a few years ago, it would likely have easily passed.
As Schakowsky, seated in her office, lays out her plan for phasing out military reliance on contractors, her assistant gets a news alert on her BlackBerry reporting that Blackwater is close to getting a major contract to train soldiers in Afghanistan.
Schakowsky is appalled and momentarily speechless. "That is just so unthinkable," she says. "I really believe that were they an individual -- and nowadays you can call corporations individuals; they have the same rights, right? -- they'd get a dishonorable discharge for what they've done. How many people do they have to kill? How many missions do they have to screw up before we say, 'No, we're not going to do that'?"