New reports cast more doubt on the use of private contractors in a war zone.  CNN is reporting that the watchdog group Project On Government Oversight (POGO) briefed reporters and sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about widespread hazing incidents allegedly taking place at the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan.

POGO says two weeks ago it began receiving whistleblower-style e-mails, some with graphic images and videos, that are said to document problems taking place at a non-military camp for the guards near the U.S. diplomatic compound in Kabul.

“This is well beyond partying,” said Danielle Brian, POGO’s executive director, after showing a video of a man with a bare backside, and another man apparently drinking a liquid that had been poured down the man’s lower back.

These latest allegations are about ArmorGroup, a British company that was formed in 1981.  These types of companies have seen exploding rates of growth since the start of the Iraq war as more and more functions that have been traditionally assigned to the military have been outsourced to private security companies.  In 2004 it was reported that there were over 180 private companies providing services in Iraq.  This massive deployment has skewed traditional warfighting:

In the first Gulf War 15 years ago, the ratio of private contractors to troops was 1 to 60; in the current war, it’s 1 to 3.

In fact, the private sector has put more boots on the ground in Iraq than all of the United States’ coalition partners combined. One scholar, Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution, suggests that Bush’s “coalition of the willing” would be more aptly described as the “coalition of the billing.”

Those bills are in the billions and rising.

Blackwater alone has won $505 million in publicly identifiable federal contracts since 2000, according to an online government database. About two-thirds of that amount was in no-bid contracts.

Having just finished reading Jeremy Scahill’s shocking exposé of Blackwater, this topic is very much on my mind lately.  Scahill documents a culture of Christian zealotry within Blackwater that found ready and willing supporters within the ranks of the Bush Administration.  A number of highly placed former intelligence and military executives left government service and found employ as executives with Blackwater and other private security firms.

In 2007, Blackwater came under scrutiny as some of their mercenaries opened fire and killed 17 civilians in Baghdad. In the wake of that scandal, the House Oversight and Government Reform committee issued a scathing report that documented alleged abuses by Blackwater going back to 2003.  Politico reports that

The committee has also determined that Blackwater pays its contractors, many of whom are former U.S. soldiers, $1,222 per day, which comes to $445,000-a-year – “roughly six times more than the cost of an equivalent U.S. soldier,” according to the report. The firm has received more than $1 billion in federal contracts since 2001, including more than $832 million from two contracts with the State Department.

Blackwater has found themselves facing even more scrutiny as several highly unflattering stories have emerged lately.  First, the New York Times reported that Blackwater was recruited by the CIA as “part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials.”  This is the program that caused Leon  Panetta, director of the CIA, to call an emergency meeting with Congress in June to brief them on details of the program.

Additionally, the Times of London reported in August that there were a series of disturbing allegations regarding Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater (which has recently changed it’s name to “Xe”):

In one of the statements, John Doe 2, who worked for Blackwater for four years, alleged that Mr Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe” and that his companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life”.

They claimed that Mr Prince and other executives destroyed incriminating videos, e-mails and documents and hid their criminal behaviour from the US State Department.

John Doe 2 claimed in his affidavit that — based on information he said was provided to him by former colleagues — “it appears that Mr Prince and his employees murdered or had murdered one or more persons who have provided information, or who were planning to provide information, to the federal authorities about the ongoing criminal conduct”.

The bigger issue is one of accountability.  It becomes apparent that many of these companies are operating as though there is no oversight, and therefore no rules on their behavior.  However, the government seems to believe they have no choice.  And in fact, they may not have many alternatives, at least as long as they continue unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  CNN reported that military recruitment numbers had been trending downward for some time, until the financial crisis intervened.  Since then, “fresh recruits keep pouring into the U.S. military, as concerns about serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are eclipsed by the terrible civilian job market”.   However, to hire enough active duty military to replace current mercenary forces would entail a substantial increase in the recruitment targets.  If they continue behaving as though there are no laws or rules governing them, sooner or later demands will be made to sharply curtail these companies.  Blackwater has already been banned by the Iraqi government, although they still have some employees in Iraq operating a subsidiary company.

EDIT: I’m just finishing up with Chalmers Johnson’s fantastic book Nemesis, and I came upon a passage which is perfectly applicable here.  Johnson’s quoting Anatol Lieven in America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism:

“U.S. global power, as presently conceived by the overwhelming majority of the U.S. establishment, is unsustainable…The empire can no longer raise enough taxes or soldiers, it is increasingly indebted, and key vassal states are no longer reliable… The result is that the empire can no longer pay for enough of the professional troops it needs to fulfill its self assumed imperial tasks.”  (p. 270)