The rising of private wars

The world woke up back on a late April Tuesday morning to the horrific images of a cargo airliner crashing in Afghanistan. The huge fireball left by the plane when crashing was a clear picture of the tragedy.

The aircraft was a Boeing 747-400 carrying only cargo on board. This load was mostly military equipment, vehicles and other supplies. It seems there wasn’t any attack and for now, the most plausible theory is that it was an accident.

The load probably wasn’t well secured and went loose during takeoff towards the tail. This in turn would have altered the center of gravity of the aircraft, making it stall and fall. It is certainly the most likely cause.

However, this accident brings to the front a problem that is currently missing in the headlines: wars are increasingly private and states are increasingly dependent on mercenaries.

We are only a few months from NATO leaving Afghanistan and with Iraq already abandoned. Today there are more non-military than American military personnel in these two countries, as it has been during the past half decade. The United States has gotten used to fight its wars with remote-drones-and outsourcing them to others.

Most of these contractors are non-combatant personnel. They are engineers, doctors, foremen and all kinds of project managers, belonging to Western companies that have won bids for reconstruction projects. There are also many who are local labor.

But then there is the category of mercenaries. These are responsible for the security of the bases or, as in the case of the crashed plane, of transporting personnel and equipment to operational theaters.

This is nothing new. Spain lived in their own flesh what it means to engage third parties with the crash of a plane carrying its soldiers back from Afghanistan. It was the biggest loss of personnel -60 soldiers died- in a single day for the Spanish army since the Civil War, in 1939. But the influence of contractors has increased as increased the conflicts in which the United States was involved.

Today we can find mercenaries in Iraq or Afghanistan, but also fighting piracy in Somalia aboard private freighters, helping the French in Mali, dealing with the war on drugs, assisting the Syrian rebels or handling the biggest air base in Kyrgyzstan.

This has made modern armies, starting with the American, depend largely on mercenaries. Without them, NATO operations in Afghanistan would stall because there is no country in the coalition -not even the US- capable of, for example, maintaining the cargo capacity that handle the various subcontractors.

The troops would be out of fuel and ammunition, but also they would have to stop patrolling to start doing tasks like peeling potatoes or guard bases. Jobs that once were assigned to the soldiers and today are made by mercenaries.

This work is reflected on the bills. Between 2008 and 2011, companies like Blackwater or DynCorp pocketed a total of 132 billion dollars, a budget larger than that of any other American agency in the same period. And we must bear in mind that this is only the invoice for the Americans and it does not include all contractors. Personal like embassy security guards is not included in that number.

The economic issue of employing mercenaries is joined with the moral problems that cause the mercenaries. Several times they have been involved in scandals in Iraq and Afghanistan, some high-profile. But even after Blackwater’s shooting in central Baghdad, the mercenary army has done nothing else but to increase. It is certainly a good deal for some. But at what cost to the states?