Mercenaries no substitute for real U.S. troops
U.S. President Donald Trump has expressed a clear aversion to war. As he said in his recent State of the Union address: “As a candidate for president, I pledged a new approach. Great nations do not fight endless wars.”
Trump has already ordered a full U.S. troop withdrawal from Syria and a major withdrawal from Afghanistan, noting that a full withdrawal from Afghanistan is still on the table. Some members of the Washington, D.C., establishment might suggest that there’s a better way to occupy a country forever while being able to claim a troop withdrawal: through the use of private contractors.
No thanks to Hollywood, there seems to be a lot of confusion about what private military contractors actually do.
There are already contractors active in war zones right now. In Afghanistan, they outnumber uniformed troops, performing support roles. Because contracted entities are, by definition, privatized, their primary objective is to maximize profits for shareholders. In some cases, this means hiring non-Americans with American funding, in much the same way that other private companies exploit labor from the developing world.
There is, however, another type of private contractor — paid mercenaries sponsored by the CIA to perform in an active combat role. For example, Brigade 2506 was a group of Cuban exiles trained by the CIA for the Bay of Pigs invasion. More recently, the CIA trained rebels in Syria to operate on behalf of U.S. interests.
The advantage of using these types of operators is that they provide plausible deniability — the ability to confidently declare that America has no troops in a particular region. The downside is that, as we’ve seen, they’re completely uncontrollable and there’s nothing stopping them from taking a better-paying offer, or from just cutting and running.
The U.S.-backed Syrian mercenaries are a prime example. It was a program that cost American taxpayers millions of dollars for each trained fighter. Most ended up vanishing.
The only real Tier 1 Special Forces operators capable of winning a war are the Special Forces operating for the U.S. military. They’re scalpels that are used judiciously, and with good reason. If a mission isn’t important enough for them to be deployed, that mission probably isn’t going to succeed if it’s carried out by a lesser and lesser-known entity.
The other issue that arises is that mercenaries aren’t actually members of the military. This isn’t just a small semantic detail — it’s everything.
How is a privately contracted non-state mercenary any different from Osama bin Laden, Che Guevara, or a member of Hezbollah — or any other fighter that we in the West would categorize as “terrorist”? While it might be tempting to deploy such individuals for combat on behalf of American interests in a foreign country, how could that country view them as anything more than rogue actors who should be shot on sight? The Geneva Conventions are clear: “A mercenary shall not have the right to be a combatant or a prisoner of war.”
If a war is worth fighting, it’s worth fighting with a mission, and with pros who operate under an accountable command. When there’s talk of mercenaries — which distances America from control of mission and clarity of objective — the conflict isn’t worth fighting and it’s time to leave. Rachel Marsden is a political strategist and former Fox News host based in Paris.