The Problem with Mercenaries

By Scott Horton

Ask a typical American today how many soldiers are deployed in Iraq, and he’s likely to answer 130,000, which was the number officially acknowledged by the Pentagon before the troop escalation process began. The number of U.S. soldiers in uniform is now around 170,000 and I believe the number will reach around 200,000 by the end of the summer, with stop-loss and other measures in place. But this still understates the fighting force deployed by the United States. Understates it considerably. Because it fails to take into account the contract soldiers the United States uses. We have only a vague notion of the numbers, but it’s certainly north of 30,000 and perhaps closer to 100,000. For the most part they’re called “security contractors.”

The Washington Post’s Steve Fainaru gives us a sense of the morale and discipline issues surrounding some of these units in a front-page story on Sunday. Here’s a snippet:

On the afternoon of July 8, 2006, four private security guards rolled out of Baghdad's Green Zone in an armored SUV. The team leader, Jacob C. Washbourne, rode in the front passenger seat. He seemed in a good mood. His vacation started the next day.

"I want to kill somebody today," Washbourne said, according to the three other men in the vehicle, who later recalled it as an offhand remark. Before the day was over, however, the guards had been involved in three shooting incidents. In one, Washbourne allegedly fired into the windshield of a taxi for amusement, according to interviews and statements from the three other guards.

Let us recall the words of Niccolò Machiavelli in The Prince:

I say, therefore, that the arms with which a prince defends his state are either his own, or they are mercenaries, auxiliaries, or mixed. Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy. The fact is, they have no other attraction or reason for keeping the field than a trifle of stipend, which is not sufficient to make them willing to die for you.

I wish to demonstrate further the infelicity of these arms. The mercenary captains are either capable men or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them, because they always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their master, or others contrary to your intentions; but if the captain is not skilful, you are ruined in the usual way.

Machiavelli’s point as to the “infelicity of these arms” is part of the reason why the United States has for the two hundred and thirty years before the arrival of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld avoided the employment of mercenaries. This may well be a point to revisit that issue. And we should start with this question: how did the United States come to deploy a mercenary army in Iraq without any public discussion of the issue, without a single voice raising questions about it in Congress? It points to something rotten in the structure of government and a lack of candor.