The economics of mercenaries: the cost of war is rising

Dispatches From Fallujah - Why would anyone volunteer to be an infantryman? By Owen West

Paying civilians to play soldier makes no sense. Today the United States employs between 7,000 and 17,000 civilians in infantry roles. The pay is extraordinary, hovering between $500 per day and $1,000 per day for everything from site security (for government compounds throughout Iraq) to convoy/company security to personal security (for dignitaries). This money comes tax-free in a combat zone. There are four problems here: morale deflation, gross monetary waste, tactical confusion, and direct competition for a tiny talent pool.

Soldiers look at security contractors and think: Why the hell is he making eight times my salary for performing the same job? Is the military that pock-marked with overage and inefficiency? Using bottom-up cost-accounting, the military is essentially buying out its most experienced soldiers and luring them out of the active ranks (if Stop-Loss is ever lifted, that is) with rich contracts, even as it desperately seeks new recruits. Worse, it's paying introduction fees to private security companies like Dynacorps and Blackwater for the people it recruited in the first place. How in the world did this happen?

The answer may lie in the marginal recruit. Congress just passed legislation to increase the number of soldiers by 30,000. But the Army is just barely meeting its current recruiting goals. To attract these new hires, the Army will have to come up with a pay structure that lures the 30,000th recruit. The problem is, the military pay structure is so antiquated that if you pay one soldier more money, you pay all soldiers more money. So it's not a question of paying 30,000 recruits. It's a question of paying those 30,000, then upping the pay of the other 1.4 million active members and the other 1.1 million reservists. It's an expensive prospect, this reverse Dutch auction. Perhaps it's cheaper to shift 10,000 infantry jobs over to the privateers, jack up the pay of private contractors, and pay the brokerage fee to the company.

This conclusion still omits the inherent problems created when armed civilians operate in a battlefield controlled by the military. The Blackwater security crew that was ambushed in Fallujah was operating in the Marine Corps zone without their knowledge and specific consent. As a result, Marine plans to systematically build up goodwill in the Sunni Triangle were scrapped. In Abu Ghraib, contractors held sway over soldiers, yet took no responsibility in the aftermath. In sum, contractors operating outside the chain of command clashes with common sense.

This is not to denigrate contractors themselves—they are experienced soldiers who have been there and done that. Which is precisely why we need to keep them in the Army. Less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the U.S. population chooses to become an infantryman. It is a profession—a public expression of commitment—rather than a job. This is a tiny talent pool. We need everyone who heeds the call to carry a rifle working toward a common goal, and the best way to do that is to keep these folks in the government.

How, then, should these elite infantrymen be compensated so that we can attract and retain the best? By revamping the military pay structure. Today the 9-to-5 corporal disbursing pay on some base in Florida earns the same salary as the corporal working 20 hours a day who is on his third deployment in three months. As for elite infantrymen, who we need for special security in war zones, offer them the same pay structure we give today's contractors and then take a look at re-enlistment rates. They'll skyrocket. What's more, the military will pay no brokerage fees and will retain the flexibility to reassign these men as the battlefield shifts. The military needs an escalating, bonus-based pay system that coincides with performance and hardship, not rank and time-in-grade."

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I'd been impressed by the arguments for the fairness of the draft, but Kaplan convinced me a draft would be extraorinarily ineffective. He and Owens agree -- the answer is a LOT more money for active fighters.

How to destroy a nation: assasinate the intelligentsia

Dispatches From Fallujah - Why would anyone volunteer to be an infantryman? By Owen West: "The Viet Cong assassination program destroyed South Vietnam's intelligentsia and put a country on its knees."

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Hundreds of physicians and scholars have been assasinated in Iraq. Someone's been reading the Viet Cong manual.

Dispatches From Fallujah - mercenaries and soldiers

Dispatches From Fallujah - Why would anyone volunteer to be an infantryman? By Owen West: "There's an incubating firestorm of stress that will gut the military if left unchecked, and this—private soldiers earning five to 10 times what the comparable serviceman earns—is one of its fuels."

Dispatches From Fallujah - a series to read

Dispatches From Fallujah - Why would anyone volunteer to be an infantryman? By Owen West

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He's writing a series. Essential reading.

Dept of Homeland Security protects Gates "gifts" to government

Homeland Security works door at Gates' party | CNET News.com

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced a 'temporary security zone' earlier this month around Gates' Lake Washington home, saying in a notice published in the Federal Register that the move was necessary to prevent 'terrorism, sabotage or other subversive acts.'

Security zones prevent any person or watercraft from entering the area without explicit government permission. They're normally used to tighten security around military bases and naval facilities, and it's exceedingly rare for them to be erected around a private residence.

The reason for the 'Gates Residence Security Zone,' which locked down all of Lake Washington south of the Highway 520 bridge and stayed in effect for two days, was a private party the Microsoft billionaire threw on July 18.

Gates had invited over members of the National Governors Association, who were in Seattle for their annual conference. Microsoft also wrote a check for $150,000 to be an 'emerald' sponsor of the NGA meeting, which about 30 governors attended.

Among the NGA meeting attendees: Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, both former governors, as well as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and ex-White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta. Gates' homestead is approximately 48,000 square feet with a garage that reportedly accommodates 30 cars.

The NGA is an influential lobby group that often takes positions on topics important to Microsoft, like antitrust, Internet taxes and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) regulations.

For instance, the NGA opposes extending a now-lapsed moratorium on Internet access taxes, which had prevented states from taxing services like MSN Broadband. The NGA also insists that states should have the power to tax and regulate VoIP services, an idea that Microsoft opposes.

The Coast Guard, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, takes 'temporary security zones' seriously. Last year, an appeals court upheld the convictions of two men for ignoring warnings from Coast Guard officials in an inflatable boat to stay out of a secure area near a Navy firing range.

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Nice party I'm sure.

Points to the New Republic - they called the July surprise

Faughnan's Notes: The New Republic Prediction

This source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: 'The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington.'... according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that 'it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July'--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

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Pakistan delivered, arresting a HVT 10 days before Kerry's speech then announcing the arrest hours before the speech. I'd thought the New Republic was going too far when they made those claims.

Stalemate in Anbar -- waiting for the order to withdraw ... or to partition

In the face of stubborn insurgency, troops scale back Anbar patrols

RAMADI, Iraq - After more than a year of fighting, U.S. troops have stopped patrolling large swaths of Iraq's restive Anbar province, according to the top American military intelligence officer in the area.

Most U.S. Army officers interviewed this week said the patrols in and around the province's capital, Ramadi - home to many Iraqi military and intelligence officers under Saddam Hussein - have stopped largely because the soldiers and commanders there were tired of being shot at by insurgents who've refused to back down under heavy American military pressure.

Asked for comment, officials from the Marine battalion in Ramadi - which makes up about one-fifth of the forces there - provided a 21-year-old corporal, who confirmed that the Marines have discontinued patrols, but said it was because of the hand-over of sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government.

While American officials in Ramadi wouldn't provide exact figures for the change in numbers of patrols, there's obviously been a significant drop.

After losing dozens of men to a "voiceless, faceless mass of people" with no clear leadership or political aim other than killing American soldiers, the U.S. military has had to re-evaluate the situation, said Maj. Thomas Neemeyer, the head American intelligence officer for the 1st Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division, the main military force in the Ramadi area and from there to Fallujah.

"They cannot militarily overwhelm us, but we cannot deliver a knockout blow, either," he said. "It creates a form of stalemate."

In the wreckage of the security situation, U.S. officials have all but given up on plans to install a democratic government in the city, and are hoping instead that Islamic extremists and other insurgent groups don't overrun the province in the same way that they've seized the region's most infamous town, Fallujah.

"Since Ramadi is the seat of the governate, we worry that if they could unsettle the government center here they could destabilize the al Anbar province," said Capt. Joe Jasper, a spokesman for the 1st Brigade.

The apparent failure of a long line of Army and Marine units to bring peace to the province, which makes up about 40 percent of Iraq's landmass, will be a major challenge for Iraq's new government and could prove to be a tipping point for the nation as a whole. Increasingly, Iraq is a place in which cities or part of cities have been taken over by insurgents and radicals.

U.S. officers in Ramadi openly acknowledge that the Iraqi security force trained to take over the hunt for insurgents, the national guard, has become a site-protection service that so far is incapable and unwilling to conduct offensive operations.

When the governor of Anbar left town last month, the head of the national guard, who since has been replaced, took part in an attempt to overthrow him. National guardsmen in town have refused to go on patrols either alone or with the Americans. The 2,886 national guardsmen in Ramadi so far have detained just one person.

To show how operations in Anbar have changed, Jasper sketched a map on a piece of paper.

Pointing to a neighborhood outside the town of Habbaniyah, between Fallujah and Ramadi, he said, "We've lost a lot of Marines there and we don't ever go in anymore. If they want it that bad, they can have it."

And then to a spot on the western edge of Fallujah: "We find that if we don't go there, they won't shoot us."

Marine Cpl. Charles Laversdorf, who works in his battalion's intelligence unit, said the Marines averaged just five raids a month and no longer were running any patrols other than those to observation posts.

The sharp reduction in patrols flies in the face of comments made recently by a top military official in Baghdad, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"Any insurgent that ... somehow thinks that after June 28 we'll be pulling back into base camps will be disappointed," he said. "This is a long-term program of handing over responsibility. ... It's not going to take days nor weeks, it's going to be months and years."

More than 124 U.S. troops have died in Anbar since President Bush declared major combat operations over in Iraq on May 1, 2003.

Between the 1st Brigade's 4,000 soldiers, who arrived in Ramadi last September, and a battalion of 1,000 Marines, who came in February, more than 80 have been killed and more than 450 injured.

Since the hand-over of sovereignty June 28, 25 U.S. soldiers have been killed. Fifteen of them were in Anbar.

The numbers grow more striking at smaller unit levels.

Capt. Mike Taylor, for example, commands a company of men in nearby Khaldiya. Out of his 76 troops, 18 now have purple hearts, awarded for combat wounds.

The Marines' Echo company, with 185 soldiers, has had 22 killed.

"There's a possibility that we'll say we'll protect the government and keep travel routes open, and for the rest of them, to hell with 'em," said Neemeyer, the intelligence officer. "To a certain degree we've already done it; we've reduced our presence."

Neemeyer continued: "I'm sure they are beating their chests and saying they drove us out, but what have they driven us out of? Rural farmland that's not tactically important. ... If they want to call that victory, that's fine."

Looking up at a map on the wall, Neemeyer flicked his laser pointer across a large piece of land between Ramadi and Fallujah. "We don't go into that area anymore," he said. "Why go there when all that happens is we get hit?"

The U.S. military has poured about $18 million into reconstruction projects in Ramadi, but Neemeyer said the projects hadn't done much in the way of winning people over.

"The only way to stomp out the insurgency of the mind," he said, "would be to kill the entire population."

The commander of one of the local national guard battalions, Col. Adnan Allawi, said he thought the security situation in Ramadi and Anbar in general would only get worse.

"If the Americans stay here, the same thing that happened in Fallujah will happen in Ramadi," he said. "If the situation stays the way it is now, the Americans will begin losing one city after the next."

Residents in Ramadi had long said the U.S. military underestimated the resolve of fighters in the area. Also, residents said, soldiers made community support for the resistance stronger with each cultural misstep, such as brusque house raids and cultural slights toward important tribal sheiks.

Many of those interviewed in Ramadi recently said they'd welcome a Fallujah-like rule by insurgents.

Bashar Hamid, a stationery store owner, said "only the mujahedeen (holy warriors) can provide stability."

Muhanad Muhammed, a pharmacist, agreed: "The Americans misbehave ... that's why I do not blame the mujahedeen when they attack them."

Capt. John Mountford, who oversees a central command office in Ramadi for local police, national guard and U.S. military officials, said that in retrospect the military should've paid more attention to what the Iraqis were saying.

"We should have worked with the tribal leaders earlier," he said. "I just wonder what would have happened if we had worked a little more with the locals."

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Wreckage is a good description. It sounds like the marines there are in a holding pattern, expecting a call to withdraw or a decision to partition Iraq. I have always thought that Rumsfeld and Cheney planned to partition Iraq; they need only hang on until no other approach is possible. The Sunni will get Anbar, but Anbar lacks oil.

Don Walters: the unknown hero of the Private Lynch story

The New York Times > Opinion > Kristof: Unbearable Emptiness

SALEM, Ore. — Ever since a group of Iraqis told me last year about seeing a redheaded American soldier who was captured, held naked and then executed, I've been haunted by the question of his identity.

The first clues were in Nasiriya, Iraq, where in the aftermath of the war I interviewed the doctors and hospital staff who had cared for Pfc. Jessica Lynch. They said that the Pentagon had exaggerated the drama of her rescue, but what I could never put out of my mind was their tale of another American, whose name they never knew.

Abdul Hadi, an ambulance driver, tried to pick up a male American P.O.W. being held by Saddam Fedayeen. The American, he said, had been stripped naked and handcuffed, but he was allowed to smoke a cigarette while under guard....

The hospital staff said the guards refused to give up the American and threatened the ambulance crew with guns and grenades. So the ambulance retreated - and several hours later, the same P.O.W. was brought to the hospital as a corpse, shot dead.

.... I heard about Sgt. Donald Walters. He was a cook who vanished in the same firefight in which Jessica Lynch was captured, and his body was later recovered in Nasiriya....

It also seems that the heroism originally attributed to Private Lynch may actually have been Sergeant Walters's. Iraqi radio intercepts had described a blond U.S. soldier fighting tenaciously, and the Army this year awarded him a posthumous Silver Star in implicit acknowledgment that he was probably that soldier.

The citation reads: "His actions and selfless courage under fire resulted in saving lives of several other members of the convoy" - perhaps including Private Lynch. His cover fire allowed fellow soldiers to escape, while he remained alone in a hostile city; when he ran out of ammunition, he ran but was captured....

Sergeant Walters left three children, then 9 months, 6 years and 8 years old. A veteran of the first gulf war, he had re-enlisted out of patriotism after 9/11...

...When hawks say that the Iraq war was worth the price, they should remember that that price is measured in the lives of people like Don Walters, forever young, forever heroes, forever gone.

Why the French are skinnier ...

BBC NEWS | Health | How the French manage to stay slim

American researchers from Pennsylvania University recently spent some time researching why the French remain so much slimmer than Americans. After intensive study, they came to a remarkable conclusion.

It was because the French ate less.

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The lazy reaction would be to mock a study that produced a seemingly obvious conclusion, yet the rest of this pop article makes clear that the conclusion was not necessarily obvious. The French diet is not noteably low fat, nor is it an Atkins diet -- if anything it's carbohydrate heavy. Meals seem large enough at first sight. It turns out that the individual meal components may be high calorie, but portion sizes are often quite small. Snack intake is also relatively limited. The net effect is limited caloric intake.

I suspect a study of New Yorkers, who are quite a bit slimmer than we midwesterners, would produce a similar result.

This does not explain French lifespans, which are relatively long considering their tobacco use. That's still an interesting research topic. Is it genetic drift, or consumption of anti-aging ingredients in red wine? Noone knows.

The primary lessons is that obesity is NOT an inevitable consequence of prosperity. It is possible that we will develop cultural adaptations to abundance, as the French have, that will lessen obesity. It would also help if cities and suburbs were to facilitate physical activity through light rail, walking and bicycling paths, parks, sidewalks, etc.

Electoral fraud in America -- it works just like buying elections

The New York Times > Opinion > Krugman: Fear of Fraud

This year, Florida again hired a private company - Accenture, which recently got a homeland security contract worth up to $10 billion - to prepare a felon list. Remembering 2000, journalists sought copies. State officials stonewalled, but a judge eventually ordered the list released.

The Miami Herald quickly discovered that 2,100 citizens who had been granted clemency, restoring their voting rights, were nonetheless on the banned-voter list. Then The Sarasota Herald-Tribune discovered that only 61 of more than 47,000 supposed felons were Hispanic. So the list would have wrongly disenfranchised many legitimate African-American voters, while wrongly enfranchising many Hispanic felons. It escaped nobody's attention that in Florida, Hispanic voters tend to support Republicans.

After first denying any systematic problem, state officials declared it an innocent mistake. They told Accenture to match a list of registered voters to a list of felons, flagging anyone whose name, date of birth and race was the same on both lists. They didn't realize, they said, that this would automatically miss felons who identified themselves as Hispanic because that category exists on voter rolls but not in state criminal records.

But employees of a company that prepared earlier felon lists say that they repeatedly warned state election officials about that very problem.

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In my industry (health care IT) we work with matching problems all the time. Accenture's matching rule was incompetent; they probably spent about 30 minutes designing and testing it. I suspect the work was a bit of a "freebie", done in gratitude for that 10 billion dollar contract. They wouldn't even have had to deliberately bias their work, all they would have to do is not pay attention and then bias the testing towards their employer's primary concerns. Mistakes that favored Democrats would get caught, mistakes that favored their Republican employers would be missed.

It's the same way political donations corrupt the political process. Direct quid-pro-quo bribes happen quite often, but the big effect is ensuring the "right" person gets the money to buy voters. The "right" person will, by virtue of the beliefs for which they were selected, vote the "right" way.

Now I'm worried. I can see why Kerry is assembling an outstanding legal team to supervise our elections. Too bad the Supremes have already demonstrated the power of assembling the "right" people.

Thank you, Miami Herald and Sarasota Herald-Tribune!

The FBI running amok ...

Boing Boing: Stargate fan-site operator busted under anti-terrorism law

The creator of an SG-1 fansite has been charged by the FBI with criminal copyright infringment, the result of an investigation that involved a USA PATRIOT Act warrant against the site's ISP to gather intelligence. The Feebs confiscated and then destroyed his personal computers, returning their remains months later.

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It's not impossible that this guy broke one of our new and monstrous copyright laws. It's even possible that he knew he was crossing the line. Possible, but not interesting.

What's interesting is that the FBI used a sledgehammer on a fly, then, in an astounding display of incompetence or malevolence, trashed his property.

This is the agency we're depending on?

The prison nation -- one nation under bars.

MSNBC - U.S. prison, parole population sets record

... about 3.2 percent of the adult U.S. population, or 1 in 32 adults, were incarcerated or on probation or parole at the end of last year.

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This number doesn't include those who've been previously convicted for a felony. The article also didn't provide percentages by ethnicity; based on past reports it's likely that the percentage of incarcerated black men is substantially higher than 3.2%.

I'd wager that one of the best measures of the psychic health of an industrialized nation is the incarceration rate multiplied by the murder rate. It would be interesting to plot that number for a range of industrialized nations. I'm pretty sure the US would rank dead last. It would also be interesting to plot that number for American states; the result would be a good guide on the best places to live.

Is there any number that will spark outrage? 5%? 10%? 40%!?

When do we say enough?

Who will be the Dickens for 21st century America?

Playing the hand you've been dealt - the story of a cancer experimentalist

The New York Times > National > Heeding a Call to Test Breast Cancer Treatments

My father used to say, 'You play the hand you've been dealt,' ' Sister Mary Andrew said. 'I would like to have lived longer, worked longer. I'd like to still be president of the university. But it's not the hand I've been dealt'

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This is an excellent NYT article about experimental therapies. It's not the usual tabloid "miracle cure" story -- it's the story of a brave, curious, and wise woman (an academic and a catholic nun) who chose to join clinical trials primarily as a way to make her death meaningful. Some of them may have helped her, some probably hurt. She may no longer be a candidate for further experiments; she seems a bit wistful about that.

One could do much worse than a family motto of "You play the hand you've been dealt." It covers a lot of ground. One may argue that changing the game or cheating are alternative options, but I think that reflects a misunderstanding of the game. As was once said of thermodynamics, "you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't quit the game". In life one doesn't change the game, but one may realize that the rules are less restrictive than commonly thought.

BBC Tour de France tactics guide

BBC Sport Academy | Other Sport | Cycling | Read our Tour de France tactics guide

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Hey! I only just found this! Would have bene nice a few weeks ago. I hope it's still there for next year.

Richard Clarke: what we should do to stop the next set of attacks

The New York Times > Opinion > Richard Clarke: Honorable Commission, Toothless Report

Americans owe the 9/11 commission a deep debt for its extensive exposition of the facts surrounding the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. Yet, because the commission had a goal of creating a unanimous report from a bipartisan group, it softened the edges and left it to the public to draw many conclusions.

Among the obvious truths that were documented but unarticulated were the facts that the Bush administration did little on terrorism before 9/11 ...

So what now? News coverage of the commission's recommendations has focused on the organizational improvements: a new cabinet-level national intelligence director and a new National Counterterrorism Center to ensure that our 15 or so intelligence agencies play well together. Both are good ideas, but they are purely incremental. Had these changes been made six years ago, they would not have significantly altered the way we dealt with Al Qaeda; they certainly would not have prevented 9/11...

First, we need not only a more powerful person at the top of the intelligence community, but also more capable people throughout the agencies - especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. In other branches of the government, employees can and do join on as mid- and senior-level managers after beginning their careers and gaining experience elsewhere. But at the F.B.I. and C.I.A., the key posts are held almost exclusively by those who joined young and worked their way up. This has created uniformity, insularity, risk-aversion, torpidity and often mediocrity...

Second, in addition to separating the job of C.I.A. director from the overall head of American intelligence, we must also place the C.I.A.'s analysts in an agency that is independent from the one that collects the intelligence. This is the only way to avoid the "groupthink" that hampered the agency's ability to report accurately on Iraq. It is no accident that the only intelligence agency that got it right on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department - a small, elite group of analysts encouraged to be independent thinkers rather than spies or policy makers.

... Either the C.I.A. or the military must create a larger and more capable commando force for covert antiterrorism work, along with a network of agents and front companies working under "nonofficial cover'' - that is, without diplomatic protection - to support the commandos.

Even more important than any bureaucratic suggestions is the report's cogent discussion of who the enemy is and what strategies we need in the fight. The commission properly identified the threat not as terrorism (which is a tactic, not an enemy), but as Islamic jihadism, which must be defeated in a battle of ideas as well as in armed conflict.

We need to expose the Islamic world to values that are more attractive than those of the jihadists. This means aiding economic development and political openness in Muslim countries, and efforts to stabilize places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Restarting the Israel-Palestinian peace process is also vital.

Also, we can't do this alone. In addition to "hearts and minds" television and radio programming by the American government, we would be greatly helped by a pan-Islamic council of respected spiritual and secular leaders to coordinate (without United States involvement) the Islamic world's own ideological effort against the new Al Qaeda.

Unfortunately, because of America's low standing in the Islamic world [jf: One of GWB's gifts to America], we are now at a great disadvantage in the battle of ideas...

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The CIA and FBI would never hire me. If they did hire me, I'd last about 2 days.

Problem is, the fight against evil needs a few (maybe not a huge number!) of people like me. They need nerds intellectuals and geeks who question authority and established thinking; people who don't fit military and paramilitary structures. The Manhattan project and the WW II crypto projects had "my people" (ok, 10 times smarter than me); but we've been shut out of this effort. It doesn't help that most us think GWB is incompetent!

The FBI had people who spotted parts of the 9/11 story, but they were shut out and shutdown. They didn't fit the established culture.

Changing hiring practices is a necessary but not sufficient component of reforming our security apparatus. We need to change cultures as well as adding new capabilities to the best of the old.

Clarke's treatise reads very much like Kerry's foreign policy plans.