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Originally posted by Bad_Rich_Chic
Mercenary hires aren't supported by the military. In the US military, more than most, support is the tail that wags the dog - it is huge, gargantuan, and horrifically inefficient. It seems not only possible but likely that it is cheaper to pay a soldier you have trained 5-10x more as a mercenary, instead of supplying him in the field yourself.
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Well, they have to be supported in some way, and someone is getting paid for that support, and the security firms are in it for profit, so the US gov't is ultimately paying for the support, right? It has been my understanding that a great deal of the support for the actual real military is now provided by private firms (e.g. Halliburton) on the assumption that it is more efficient than having soldiers doing it and cheaper b/c of competition. I dunno. If my tax dollars are going to be spent (hah, to some extent I just wanted to use that phrase) training these people under a system that assumes that a trade-off for the extensive training is a period of service at a low salary, and then the people go off and get paid a ton at firms that are also paying CEOs, managers, etc., and my tax dollars are paying for that too, it seems like it might be wasteful.
It seems like if we (the US) just used our soldiers and didn't hire the security firms, there wouldn't be as much of a market for them. With less of a market, it would be less lucrative, and fewer people would go into it. But the more the gov't hires them, the more they are going to cherry-pick trained soldiers, and the more the gov't will need to hire them.
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Originally posted by Bad_Rich_Chic The most lucid response to that question [how do the non-military armed "security" people get punished if they do something wrong] I've so far seen is "that's a good question." I note for the record that, right now, there aren't really any Iraqi courts. There aren't really any Iraqi laws they could be accused of breaching. That seems common in a lot of areas where a lot of mercenaries get deployed.
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So, there are a bunch of soldiers over there who, if they go and rape women or what have you, can at least be subject to court-martial (which shows we, the Americans, do not tolerate such behavior). Then there are these security forces who, if they go and rape women or what have you, are subject to no obvious consequences (other than probably (I hope) getting sent home and maybe losing their job).
