Jerry Scahill, author of the book Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army testified on May 10 before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense on the impact of private military contractors on the conduct of the Iraq War.

[W]e are now in the midst of the most privatized war in the history of our country. This is hardly a new phenomenon, but it is one that has greatly accelerated since the launch of the "global war on terror" and the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Many Americans are under the impression that the US currently has about 145,000 active duty troops on the ground in Iraq. What is seldom mentioned is the fact that there are at least 126,000 private personnel deployed alongside the official armed forces. These private forces effectively double the size of the occupation force, largely without the knowledge of the US taxpayers that foot the bill.

Using his numbers, the US taxpayer has 271,000 people deployed in Iraq for this war. Over a quarter of a million personnel. I’m not in the habit of thinking about the war in this way. Are you?

I know why we went in with the army we had, and why it might seem to be both efficient and effective to use outside contractors for certain jobs. And those in charge thought this would be a quick war. But here we are today, four years later, and I can’t help but think that we’ve not only wasted incredible amounts of money but also done ourselves great harm by choosing this alternative.

War requires a lot of hardware. The equipment bought by the contractors with our tax dollars remains with the contractors and is not shared within the rest of the force as needed to support the overall strategy, nor will it be returned to us for later service after this conflict is over.

The dollar cost of the contracts are not well understood, but it is reported that some individual contractors make as much in a month as many soldiers make in a year. Doing some rough back-of-the-napkin calculations, I could guesstimate that for each soldier-contractor we have hired, we could have equipped and fielded maybe 7 soldiers. How might this war have gone differently, if we could have put that many more boots on the ground? Boots that could be deployed as our generals saw fit, as part of a cohesive and coordinated military. With up-to-date equipment and training. By doing so, we would have also restored more overall capacity to our military, capacity that the hawks say will be sorely needed to meet other threats.

The psychological impact is not minor either. He gives his assessment of how is this policy affects our soldiers:

The testimony about private contractors that I hear most often from active duty soldiers falls into two categories: resentment and envy. They ask what message their country is sending them. While many soldiers lack basic protective equipment--facts well-known to this committee--they are in a war zone where they see the private soldiers whiz by in better vehicles, with better armor, better weapons, wearing the corporate logo instead of the American flag and pulling in much more money.

A corporate logo instead of the American flag. A corporate logo instead of the American flag.

He closes his testimony with this happy thought. Let’s not delude ourselves. We understand capitalism. Why indeed would any company, grown fat and happy with profits, willingly and meekly go out of business? That would be absurd. It would reduce shareholder value ;}

In the current discussion in the Congress on this issue, what is seldom discussed is how this system, the privatization of war, has both encouraged and enabled the growth and creation of companies who have benefited and stand to gain even more from an escalation of the war. . . . This war contracting system has intimately linked corporate profits to an escalation of war and conflict. These companies have no incentive to decrease their footprint in the war zone and every incentive to increase it.

Outsourcing parts of the theater operations might have seemed like a good idea at the time, given the expectation of a short, easy war. But elementary strategy dictates that one thinks about developments and contingencies. At some point, should we not have realized the diminishing returns of this policy and changed course, and is it now too late to change?

Was it wise for the taxpayers to fund the development of a viable, independent mercenary army at the expense of our own? I don't think so. I'd rather have bases and more full time American soldiers. And what are they going to do when this conflict is over?