Hired Gun

Of interest to the excessively aspiring privatizer:

As a former Navy SEAL, Erik Prince should know the difference between the U.S. military and the U.S. postal system. But apparently he doesn't.

"We're trying to do for the national security apparatus what Fed Ex did for the postal service," explained Prince, founder and CEO of the private military contractor Blackwater USA, in a congressional hearing Tuesday. "They did many of the same services that the postal service did--better, cheaper, smarter, and faster."

Prince was trying to justify his company's involvement in Iraq, which according to the International Herald Tribune now consists of about 850 security workers (also known as mercenaries) on the ground and over $1 billion in State Department contracts. Prince and his company have been under a steady stream of media fire since the September 16th incident in which eleven Iraqis were killed, and their record of aggressive incidents in Iraq dates back to 2004.

Such were the accusations (including the drunken murder of an Iraqi security guard Christmas Eve) against which Erik Prince defended himself for three hours on Tuesday. His consistent theme was Blackwater's status as a private company, and its excellent record of achieving objectives with maximum speed and minimum price.


But it's not Blackwater's efficiency that's on trial, it's their collateral damage. Prince's defense betrays his deepest misunderstanding: a complex military campaign can't run on privatized contracts, because its objectives do not exist in isolation. In the postal service, when the package is delivered the job is done, and no one worries what other effects have been set in motion in the course of delivery. But in the military--especially in a volatile and complex occupation like Iraq--immediate objectives are means to ultimate mission objectives. When short-term objectives are met at the expense of long-term ones, the military is failing.

That's why privatization has worked for the postal system but not for the military. In Prince's self-acclaimed "corporate mantra," you hire a contractor to do a specific job, and when the job is done he gets paid. It's not his business or his problem how that job fits into your ultimate goals. Thus Erik Prince can boast that no official under Blackwater protection has ever been killed, without considering the damage his mercenaries have done to the ultimate mission in Iraq--a mission stated very clearly in COBRA II (the original U.S. war plan) as "regime change."

It is true, as Prince asserts, that his company has met all the obligations of a private contractor--but Machiavelli didn't call mercenaries "useless and dangerous" because they're fast or cheap; he called them "disunited" and "without discipline." The money the State Department saves in short-term objectives by employing Blackwater is paid back in American lives when our failure to achieve long-term objectives--like a functioning, Western-friendly regime in Iraq--comes home to roost.

2500 years ago the great Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu instructed generals to "induce the people to have the same aim as the leadership, so that they will share death and share life." Do Blackwater mercenaries share life and death with the US. army? Probably not unless it's specified in their contract.