| | I do not know, either, Ed. For one thing military operators under a government action are soldiers, regardless of how they get paid. So, they should be under the same rules as anyone else serving in that capacity. However, these are not the only contractor troops, just the ones in combat areas.
This private firm has a contract to guard air force bases:
http://www.akalsecurity.com/airforce
(Would that normally not be the duty of the air police? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Force_Security_Forces)
Last year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office raised concerns about base security. It warned about the Army's use of many contract security guards on bases because of post-9/11 manpower shortages caused by active duty and reserve personnel deployed overseas. For example, GAO found "a general lack of oversight of the guard's training, as well as poor record keeping on the part of contractors and inconsistent training techniques." While Earle uses contract guards in addition to sailors and civilian personnel to protect the installation, a spokesman there said he could not assess whether GAO's findings had any bearing on the naval base's security operations
http://www.coltsneckschools.org/cgi-bin/pages?PAGE=/board
Last Modified: Nov 30 , 2007
Chenega Security, a contracting firm presently supporting access control on Fort Myer has also augmented the Marine military police on Henderson Hall gates for the past year. By mid-October the Marines on the gates will be replaced entirely by the Chenega contract guards.
Thursday, October 12, 2006 -- "Myer assumes Henderson Hall police duties"
http://www.dcmilitary.com/stories/101206/pentagram_28178.shtml
This is not new. Here is a report a GAO RFQ from 1997:
http://www.gao.gov/archive/1997/ns97200b.pdf
Way... way... way.... back.... way back when... the pharaoh swept up the big guys when they were not needed for farming and sent them to whack the Nubians. Sumer, Babylon, Persia, the "army" (so-called) consisted of the king's closest male relatives down and across the moiety and clan and (as in Egypt) augmented with farmers not needed for the fields. That is the kind of army that the Greeks faced at Thermopylae. For about 300-400 years (figure it: ten generations) the Greeks had evolved hoplite fighting. Free men, citizens, in armor they paid for who hired themselves out to neighboring cities engaged in conflicts. Kolophon was famous for its cavalry. The men who voted for war were the men who fought it. That is the minority case.
In Rome, the senate relied on the fertile loins of Italy to provide tens of thousands of boys. They were paid in hard money -- bronze, silver and gold -- hence the "solidier" paid with a "solidus."
Fast forward and in the last century, with the rise of the democratic state -- even a "constitutional monarchy" -- we have the citizen soldier and of necessity total war because there is no distinction among the army, the state, and the people.
Now, that has changed, again. "Mercenaries" have a bad name -- as does most else related to capitalism. However, historically, wars fought by mercenaries against armies of their own kind tend to be gentlemanly affairs, to the extent that is possible.
The Geneva Convention was meant to address the problems of the citizen soldiery of hte 19th and 20th centuries.
We do not know what happens in Iraq because the news is mashed and mangled. I doubt that the Blackwater soldiers had nothing better to do than to drive into an intersection and shoot it up for kicks. Most likely, at worst, they misperceived something as a threat. At best, they correctly perceived a threat and acted first.
(Of course, the best of all solutions would be for no one to be engaged there at all and for America to "fight" with ideas: books, teachers, music, art, culture, movies, etc.. The problem is that even among nominal "Objectivists" we have this muscle-mystic mentality that distrusts the mind and feels a need for brute force "to get things done.")
One of hte Objectivist arguments against the draft -- aside from the Ninth Amendment in general and the Thirteenth in particular -- is that if a government cannot get enough people to volunteer to defend the state, then the government must have lost its popular mandate. To my knowledge, no Objectivist scholar has addressed the problem of differentiating "regular troops" on two- or three-year enlistments from contractors hired for some shorter period of time, and what that would mean. It is something of an oversight that no Objectivist scholar has previously thought out how to privatize or commercialize the military. All seem to have accepted the status quo as a the natural order, i.e,, fallen into the naturalistic fallacy. So, here you and I are, and no, I have no clear idea either.
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