February 24, 2010 02:56 AM UTC

House Dems Want To Phase Out Armed Contractors

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• by: Danny the Red (hair)

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.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

This we all know from our good friend Baron X, but wait maybe we are going to do something about it

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.  

To me it gets to the fundamental role and use of legitimate coercion

“There’s a larger philosophical question as well,” Schakowsky adds. “Our definition of ‘nation-state’ has been a hegemony on the use of force. Now we seem so reliant on these companies that we need them to conduct war, that even when Blackwater was thrown out of Iraq, we had to extend their contract last fall because they were the only ones capable of this helicopter contract. And so we had to continue to use them.”

It’s dangerous, Schakowsky says, when a nation has no apparent choice but to hire a paramilitary corporation to do its war-making

With the growing power of multinational corporations and their “personhood” acquiring additional rights, it is critical that coercive force not be a right they are afforded or relied upon for.

Why you ask, whilst corporations have often enlisted government to help overthrow governments (see Dole), in the modern era corporations have not used military force to intervene militarily on their own…until 1992.  In 1992 Branch Oil & Gas hired a brigade sized unit of ex South African special forces who now worked for executive outcomes to fight in a civil war inside of Angola.

If we do not get control of the PMCs this is the future: Corporations hiring private mercenaries to fight in resource wars.  I am not ok with this.