Alan Axelrod - Mercenaries: A Guide to Private Armies and Private Military Companies

A Guide to Private Armies and Private Military Companies

Printed in the United States of America

On January 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan took the oath of office as the fortieth president of the United States and delivered an inaugural address far more memorable than most, not for all that it conveyed but for a single sentenceor, more precisely, for that sentence minus its introductory clause. The context for this consequential utterance was what the incoming president himself called an economic affliction of great proportions the longest and one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history. Promising that, severe as the problems were, they would be solved because we as Americans have the capacity to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom, President Reagan declared, In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.

The applause was tumultuous, and over the next eight years, the sentence echoed as the defiant theme of the Reagan Revolution, the leading doctrine of which was the sovereign supremacy of the free market. This, in turn, spawned a frenzy of privatization, the notion that enterprises of the private sector could do most of the public sectors business better than the traditional agencies of the government could. During and since the Reagan presidency the notion has hardened into a seemingly immutable principle. Little noted that January afternoon, and now quite forgotten, was the context of Reagans inaugural utterance, the clause that had introduced his radical sentence: In this present crisis, Instead, government was durably redefined, and shifted perhaps permanentlyfrom the solution to the problem. Henceforth, in federal, state, and local governments, privatization was exercised almost as a kind of reflex.

From the 1980s on, one traditional government function after another was outsourced to the private sector. For the most part, this movement was quite popular with the American people. At least one area, however, gave the public pause. The increasing outsourcing to the private sector of many of the functions of the national military created much controversy. For its part, the U.S. military leadership gave assurances that only support functions, not combat duties, were being privatized. Officials explained that logistics, food services, supply transport, air charter transportation of some personnel, maintenance, and certain aspects of facilities security could be more efficiently and inexpensively handled by private contractors than by service members. For the most part, officials demurred when it came to presenting an even more pressing case for privatization: the fact that the end of the military draft, suspended by Secretary of Defense Melvin P. Laird on January 27, 1973, with the creation of an all-volunteer force (AVF), meant that the national military had been reduced to numbers insufficient to fully staff many noncombatant functions. There was no longer any choice; civilian contractors were now necessary to address the shortfall.

The government was even less willing to let the public in on yet another possible motive for privatization. In any major and prolonged deployment of forces, the tail (support, logistics, and other noncombat contingents) of the force deployed substantially outnumbers its tooth (combat) component. In the absence of private sector outsourcing, a commander in chief who wanted to deploy, say, 40,000 combat troops to some global hotspot had to request 100,000, since the tooth-to-tail ratio required for such a deployment was about 4 to 64 combat troops supported by 6 logistical troops. With privatization, that commander in chief had only to request 40,000 troops, since the 60,000 support personnel, as civilian contractors, were not publicly reported in the deployment number.