Is outsourcing war a new development? What about Hessian soldiers during the American Revolution?
Mercenaries have been around for a long time, and the Hessians were mercenaries. But now you have private companies with publicly sold stocks. That’s something different than a government just going around and rousing up troops to aid the cause. Turning them into something commercial makes them legal and legitimate. We can get ourselves into bad places when we don’t think about what should be outsourced. How so? Exhibits A and B are the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We couldn’t be able to fight those wars without contractors. The military could not feed its own soldiers without the help of private companies. If we didn’t have those contractors, we would need to have a national draft. Isn’t the lack of a draft a good thing? Not necessarily. It makes it very easy to engage in overly ambitious military commitments. It becomes a matter of money, not putting the lives of our sons and daughters in danger overseas. Does contracting undermine existing government efforts as well as aid them? It
