Power & Market

US Taxpayers Are Paying to Train Mercenaries Who Then Work for Mideast Dictators

Power & Market Ryan McMaken

Aram Roston reports on how Mideast dictatorships now hire former US military personnel to form what are essentially death squads designed to eliminate the regimes' enemies:

The revelations that a Middle East monarchy [UAE] hired Americans to carry out assassinations comes at a moment when the world is focused on the alleged murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia, an autocratic regime that has close ties to both the US and the UAE. (The Saudi Embassy in the US did not respond to a request for comment. Riyadh has denied it killed Khashoggi, though news reports suggest it is considering blaming his death on a botched interrogation.)

Golan said that during his company’s months-long engagement in Yemen, his team was responsible for a number of the war’s high-profile assassinations, though he declined to specify which ones.

Where do these kill teams come from and where do they get their training and experience? They get it from the US military and the US taxpayer.

Last month, I wrote on how the US military is becoming increasingly reliant on mercenaries to staff military operations. This makes it easier for the Pentagon to ratchet up military conflicts while still claiming that it is reducing boots on the ground. It can do this because the Pentagon doesn't report details on how many mercenaries it's using or where they are. Essentially, mercenary forces are a sort of human slush fund which allows the Defense Department more leeway in doing whatever it wants, while sharing precious little information about it with Congress or the taxpayers.

Thus, the US treasury subsidizes the creation of these mercenary forces that then become adjuncts of foreign governments. Roston concludes:

The long US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have relied heavily on elite special forces, producing tens of thousands of highly trained American commandos who can demand high private-sector salaries for defense contracting or outright mercenary work.

He's right about that, but then makes a rookie mistake: he refers to the movement toward mercenaries as a "privatization" of war, saying, "War has become increasingly privatized, with many nations outsourcing most military support services to private contractors, leaving frontline combat as virtually the only function that the US and many other militaries have not contracted out to for-profit ventures."

I see this mistake made over and over, and everyone needs to stop calling this sort of thing "privatization." When the government hires a construction firm to build a government highway, is that "privatization" of the highway system? No one thinks that, and for good reason. Similarly, it is not privatization when a state — whether its the US government or the UAE — hires a private firm to execute some aspects of the government's wars. These wars are state-on-state wars. There may be some truly private organization at play, but they're on the receiving end of the mercenaries' violence.

Historically, we call private military forces "irregulars" or "guerrilla" forces. There's gray area there, but, broadly speaking, truly private military forces don't have a legally enforceable contract with an officially-recognized regime. They're often not loyal to any extant state, and they often don't even get paid by any organization recognized as a state.  Clearly, this doesn't describe these American mercenaries who likely have a signed contract with the UAE dictators, and money is paid in return for certain killings.

This is government money, spend on a private firm to carry out a government agenda. This is not privatization.

As the number of experienced American mercenaries continues to grow — thanks to 18 years of non-stop American wars, it will be interesting to see how many Americans military contractors have their hands in various assassinations, bombings, and other killings carried out on enemies of far off regimes.

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