Outsourcing War and Peace—Six Questions for Laura Dickinson by Scott Horton

[Jefferson23]

June 6, 8:54 AM, 2011

Waging war and engaging in diplomacy would generally be reckoned among the most important powers of any sovereign. Yet as Laura Dickinson argues in her new book, Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs, America has been delegating these responsibilities to private companies over the past decade, and offering them lucrative contracts in exchange. Dickinson argues that this practice poses a threat to core public values of human rights, democratic accountability, and transparency. I put six questions to her about her book:


1. As you note, neoconservatives have objected strongly to the use of international law to constrain military activities. What role, if any, has their ideological perspective played in the accountability crisis you identify surrounding private security contractors?

Laura DickinsonI think there is some support for the argument, implicit in your question, that neoconservatives increased the role of contractors in order to circumvent the strictures they believed international law imposed on efforts to combat terrorism. The immunity established by Coalition Provisional Authority Order 17 (which is no longer in effect) may reflect that view.

Yet, I argue in the book that probably a bigger reason for the extraordinary increase in our use of military and security contractors overseas is simply a pervasive ideology of privatization: the belief that the private sector can necessarily perform services more cheaply and efficiently than the public sector. That ideology dominated our political debate about domestic government services in the 1980s and 1990s, and set the stage for the huge increase in foreign affairs contracting we saw over the past decade. It is much easier politically for agencies to add contract positions than to hire additional governmental employees. But nobody actually checked to see whether the premise was correct. So while in some cases privatization may cut costs, in other contexts it does not. Indeed, the Commission on Wartime Contracting recently concluded that lack of contract oversight in Iraq cost taxpayers billions of dollars. The accountability gap, I suggest, stems in part from too much blind faith in the private sector. Moreover, we radically increased the amount of contracting activity without a commensurate increase in resources for contract monitoring. That is a recipe for disaster.

remainder in full: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/06/hbc-90008105