Counter-argument to this Film

Here are my rebuttals to your responses (not all of them, some were OK):

"They've proven to be more efficient than the US military in many areas. That's in fact why they're hired."

- Thats just plain wrong. They are hired because the current US Governments agenda is to strip the government of as much responsibility as possible. They outsource it to private companies who are run by their cronies.

"Money isn't wasted because the company has an incentive to figure out what the best allocation of their resources is"

- There are numerous facts shown througout this movie that prove this wrong, in quite a few cases their incentive is to spend as much money as possible!

"Private corporations actually have a better incentive to have better services. If the government was accidentally poisoning its own water, they have no one to hold them accountable. KBR has to fear losing their contract"

- This would be true in a world where the quality of the service would actually count, not whose cronie you are or who you donated campaign money to. We couldn't be any further from that world.

"Like the unarmored vehicles? How is the US military any different?"

- That is not a valid point. Mistakes others may have made do not devalue the mistakes you made yourself in any way.

"Why? When people die, that makes it harder for them to recruit"
"It creates extra work to do that could be avoided. "

- Yeah, harder as in "Before, I had 1000 guys applying for this job, now they are only 900." This hardly poses an inconvenience to those companies, they clearly won't have any trouble finding qualified personell as long as they pay well. The same goes for your latter point, the amount of the extra work is negligible.

"They're given a command and they find the most efficient way of carrying it out."

- Efficient as in cost-efficient, yeah. Just listen to what the Abu Ghureib guards had to say.


I think your grosely naive if you really believe that in this entire case economic principles are at work, that those who are better at doing a job get it because they deserve it. What really makes the world go round are corruption nepotism.

I'm actually covering this subject in my Politics of the Iraq War Class at college. I am reading a scholarly article right now about outsourcing the war. I remember seeing this film a few years ago and I realized that the article and the film are building on many basic facts. The article, by P.W. Singer mentions 5 problems surrounding the PMF's (private military firms).

1. "The incentives of private companies do not always align with its client's interests- or the public good."

There is no chain of command or justice system to report to. If you are an employee and you do something wrong the only people who can hold you responsible are the leaders of the multibillion dollar companies who are only interested in making a profit.

Sure, a large country like America could always retract its business offers but they wouldn't cancel an entire contract (worth billions of dollars) for small incidents. Lots of small incidents go unrecorded so there is very little large evidence of the many incidents of companies not doing what is morally and socially correct. The military has spent a long time getting its checks and balances in place, and they are responsible for and representative of America as a whole. PMFs don't have this check and balance system.


2. "There are insufficient controls over who can work for these firms and for whom these firms can work for. The recruiting, screening, and hiring of individuals for public military roles is left in private hands."

The recruiting of these companies is left in private hands, employees are not screened.

Sure, many of these companies work for the US but there are lots who work for dictators. When war becomes a business it doesn't matter what your client is doing, you will work for them. They can choose whatever clientele they want (whoever pays the most, not whoever is the most socially responsible).

3. "They allow governments to carry out actions that would not otherwise be possible, such as those that would not gain legislative or public approval."

This takes away all public oversight. It is an undemocratic system where the people of the US don't have a say, putting the power of their tax dollars behind an institution that they cannot monitor.

Contractor casualties and kidnappings aren't monitored and are rarely talked about in the media.

PMF contracts are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act requests because they are private companies.

4. "On both the personal and corporate level, there is a striking absence of regulation, oversight, and enforcement."

Private contractors cannot be tried by a military court. People working for the companies cannot be tried in foreign countries, and often cannot be tried in America if they do illegal things while abroad. Imagine if the American public wasn't held to any legal law, many many more people would steal or do terrible things for profit since their is no threat of punishment.

When private contractors are captured by the enemy the enemy gets to determine if they are military or civilian. The private contractors have the equivalent legal standing of the unlawful combatants at Guantanamo Bay, where they aren't defined as anything that has codes and standards.

5. "The military's professional identity and monopoly on certain activities is being encroached on by regular civilian marketplace."

This may not seem terrible at first but private military companies can offer army trained personnel extravagant wages to leave the military and work privately. Some make up to $1,000 a day. Then they charge the military even larger prices for their private services, so men who were trained with tax dollars can leave the military after a short amount of time and get paid even higher wages with more tax dollars. They are exploiting skills learned at public expense for private profit.

This will make it harder for the military to retain talented soldiers. Also, soldiers that were trained in the US can be hired by military companies working for dictatorships and end up fighting against US interests.

The PMF's have "distorted the free market and caused a major shift in the military industrial complex."


Just thought I would share that all with you. Now I am going to go discuss it with the rest of my class.

Are you starting a blog on this message board? Here's a tip: your entries can't be the same thing over and over:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0815181/board/nest/73089659