Hired guns.

Here is an op-ed piece on that whole Blackwater security scandal. I'm surprised that the story is consistently making the front pages, even a week later. My cynical side expected it to fade into thin air, like so many similar stories often do.

I don't agree with some of the stuff Paul Krugman says here. Like for instance his sweeping generalisation about these private military contractors being mercenaries. There are at least 4 very different types of PMCs operating in Iraq today...most of these companies are hired to build infrastructure, feed soldiers, transport materials and supply troops. Meaning that they are very rarely involved in actual combat situations so they could hardly be called mercenaries in the proper sense of the term. There is a small number of PMCs, like Blackwater, who are hired to help the army carry out specific missions, and these are the contractors who are causing all the problems.

I also do not agree with Krugman when he says that the US government has had plenty of time to figure out a way to replace these PMCs. I'm curious to know who he would have put in their place: the hundreds of thousands of US troops that don't exist because the army is spread too thin? the Iraqi army that was disbanded as soon as Bremer took over? or how about all those allies who have progressively pulled their troops out because the situation has become too chaotic?

The privatization of war is not an Iraq-specific phenomena. Former military powers are no longer able to afford maintaining massive armies and the nature of war has changed so much that such power in numbers is no longer necessary nor desirable. While Krugman is right in portraying the situation as a out of control, he isn't considering the fact that resorting to PMCs is inevitable in an endeavor as gigantic as the Iraq invasion.