The way mercenary leaderYevgeny Prigozhinand his private army have been waging a significant part of Vladimir Putins war in Ukraine has been well covered in the American media, not least of all because his firm, the Wagner Group, drawsmostof its men from Russias prison system. Wagner offers freedom from Putins labor camps only to send those released convicts to the front lines of the conflict, often on brutalsuicide missions.

At least the Russian president and his state-run media make nosecretof his regimesalliance with Wagner. The American government, on the other hand, seldom acknowledges its own version of the privatisation of war the tens of thousandsof private security contractors its used in its misguidedwar on terror, involving military and intelligence operations in a staggering85 countries.

At least as far back as theCivil Warthrough World WarsIandII, theKoreanandVietnam Wars, and the firstGulf War, contractors, as we like to call them, have long been with us. Only recently, however, have they begun playing such a large role in our wars, with an estimated10% to 20%of them directly involved in combat and intelligence operations.

Contractors have both committed horrific abuses and acted bravely under fire (because they have all too often been under fire). From torture atAbu Ghraibprison in Iraq to interrogations at theGuantnamo Baydetention camp, from employees of the private security firm Blackwaterindiscriminately firingon unarmed Iraqi civilians to contractorsdefendinga U.S. base under attack in Afghanistan, they have been an essential part of the war on terror. And yes, they both killed Afghans andhelpedsome who had worked assupport contractorsescape from Taliban rule.

The involvement of private companies has allowed Washington to continue to conduct its operations around the globe, even if many Americans think that our war on terror inAfghanistan,Iraq, and elsewhere has ended. I tried looking for any kind of a survey of how many of us realise that it continues in Iraqand elsewhere, but all I could find was pollster Nate Silversanalysisof lessons learned from that global conflict, as if it were part of our history. And unless respondents were caring for a combat-wounded veteran, they tendednot to look unfavourably on sending our troops into battle in distant lands so scratch that as a lesson learned from our forever wars.

None of this surprises me. American troops areno longer getting killedin significant numbers, nor areas manycrowding the waitlists at backlogged Veterans Affairs hospitals as would be the case if those troops had been the only ones doing the fighting.

At points during this centurys war on terror, in fact, the U.S. used more civilian contractors in its ongoing wars than uniformed military personnel. In fact, as of 2019, according to Brown Universitys Costs of War Project, which I co-founded, there were50% more contractorsthan troops in the U.S. Central Command region that includes Afghanistan, Iraq, and 18 other countries in the Middle East, as well as Central and South Asia. As recently as December 2022, the Pentagon had about22,000 contractorsdeployed throughout that region, withnearly 8,000concentrated in Iraq and Syria. To be sure, most of those workers were unarmed and providing food service, communications aid, and the like. Even more tellingly,roughly two thirdsof them were citizens of other countries, particularlylower-incomeones.

In 2020, retired Army Officer Danny Sjursenoffered an interesting explanation for how the war on terror was then becoming ever more privatised: the Covid-19 pandemic had changed the Pentagons war-making strategy as the public began to question how much money and how many lives were being expended on war abroad rather than healthcare at home. As a result, Sjursen argued, the U.S. had begun deploying ever more contractors, remote drones, CIA paramilitaries, and (often abusive) local forces in that war on terror while U.S. troops were redeployed to Europe and the Pacific to contain a resurgent Russia and China. In other words, during the pandemic, Washington placed ever more dirty work in corporate and foreign hands.

(Not) counting contractors

Its been a challenge to write about private security contractors because our government does anything but a good job of counting them. Though the Defence Department keeps quarterly recordsof how many civilian contractors it employs and where, they exclude employees contracted with the Central Intelligence Agency or the State Department.

When Costs of War first tried to count contractor deaths by searching official government sources, we came up short. The spouse of a gravely wounded armed contractor directed me to her blog, where she had started to compile a list of just such deaths based on daily Google searches, even as she worked hard caring for her spouse and managing his disability paperwork. She and I eventually lost touch and it appears that she stopped compiling such numbers long ago. Still, we at the project took a page from her book, while adding reported war deaths among foreign nationals working for the Pentagon to our formula. Costs of War researchers then estimated that8,000 contractorshad been killed in our wars in the Middle East as of 2019, or about1,000more than the U.S. troops who died during the same period.

Social scientistsOri Swed and Thomas Crosbiehave tried to extrapolate from reported contractor deaths in order to paint a picture of who they were while still alive. They believe that most of them were white veterans in their forties; many were former Special Forces operatives and a number of former officers with college degrees).

Limited choices for veterans

How do people of relative racial, economic, and gendered privilege end up in positions that, while well-paid, are even more precarious than being in the armed forces? As a therapist serving military families and as a military spouse, I would say that the path to security contracting reflects a deepcultural dividein our society between military and civilian life. Although veteran unemployment rates aremarginally lowerthan those in the civilian population, many of them tend to seek out what they know best and that means military training, staffing, weapons production and, for some, combat.

I recently spoke with one Marine infantry veteran who had completed four combat tours. He told me that, after leaving the service, he lacked a community that understood what he had been through. He sought to avoid social isolation by getting a government job. However, after applying for several in law enforcement agencies, he failed lie detector tests (owing to the common stress reactions of war-traumatised veterans). Having accidentally stumbled on a veteran-support nonprofit group, he ultimately found connections that led him to decide to return to school and retrain in a new profession. But, as he pointed out, many of my other friends from the Marines numbed their pain with drugs or by going back to war as security contractors.

Not everyone views contracting as a strategy of last resort. Still, I find it revealing of the limited sense of possibility such veterans experience that thetop five companies employing them are large corporations servicing the Department of Defence through activities like information technology support, weapons production, or offers of personnel, both armed and not.

The corporate wounded

And keep in mind that such jobs are anything but easy. Many veterans find themselves facing yet more of the same quick, successive combat deployments as contractors.

Anyone in this era of insurance mega-corporations who has ever had to battle for coverage is aware that doing so isnt easy. Private insurers can maximise their profits by holding onto premium payments as long as possible while denying covered services.

A federal law called theDefence Base Act (1941) (DBA) requires that corporations fund workers compensation claims for their employees labouring under U.S. contracts, regardless of their nationalities, with the taxpayer footing the bill. The program grew exponentially after the start of the war on terror, but insurance companies have not consistently met their obligations under the law. In 2008, ajoint investigationby the_Los Angeles Times_and_ProPublica_found that insurers like Chicago-based CAN Financial Corps were earning up to 50% profits on some of their war-zone policies, while many employees of contractors lacked adequate care and compensation for their injuries.

Even afterCongress called on the Pentagon and the Department of Labor to better enforce the DBA in 2011, some companies continued to operate with impunity_vis__vis_ their own workers, sometimes even failing to purchase insurance for them or refusing to help them file claims as required by law. While insurance companies made tens of millions of dollars in profits during the second decade of the war on terror, between 2009 and 2021, the Department of Laborfinedinsurers of those contracting corporations a total of only $3,250 for failing to report DBA claims.

Privatising foreign policy

At its core, the war on terror sought to create an image of the U.S. abroad as a beacon ofdemocracyand therule of law. Yet there is probably no better evidence of how poorly this worked in practice at home and abroad than the little noted (mis)use of security contractors. Without their ever truly being seen, they prolonged that global set of conflicts, inflicting damage on other societies and being damaged themselves in Americas name. Last month, the Costs of War Project reported that the U.S. is nowusingsubcontractors Bancroft Global Development and Pacific Architects and Engineers to train the Somali National Army in its counterterrorism efforts. Meanwhile, the U.S. intervention there has only helped precipitate a furtherrisein terrorist attacks in the region.

The global presence created by such contractors also manifests itself in how we respond to threats to their lives. In March 2023, a self-destructing droneexploded at a U.S. maintenance facility on a coalition base in northeastern Syria, killing a contractor employed by the Pentagon and injuring another, while wounding five American soldiers. After that drone was found to be of Iranian origin, President Biden ordered an air strike on facilities in Syria used by Iranian-allied forces. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin stated, No group will strike our troops with impunity. While he later expressed condolences to the family of the contractor who was the only one killed in that attack, hisstatementcould have more explicitly acknowledged that contractors are even more numerous than troops among the dead from our forever wars.

In late December 2019, a contractor working as an interpreter on a U.S. military base in Iraq waskilledby rockets fired by an Iranian-backed militia. Shortly afterward, then-President Trump ordered anair strikethat killed the commander of an elite Iranian military unit, sparking concern about a dangerous escalation with that country. Trump latertweeted, Iran killed an American contractor, wounding many. We strongly responded, and always will.

I cant believe Im saying this, but Trumps tweet was more honest than Austins official statement: such contractors are now an essential part of Americas increasingly privatised wars and will continue to be so, in seemingly ever greater numbers. Even though retaliating for attacks on their lives has little to do with effective counterterrorism (as the Costs of War Project has longmade clear), bearing witness to warcasualtiesin all their grim diversity is the least the rest of us can do as American citizens. Because how can we know whether andfor whom our shadowy, shape-shifting wars work if we continue to let our leaders wage an increasingly privatised version of them in ways meant to obscure our view of the carnage theyve caused?

Republished from TomDispatch May 9, 2023.