What is driving the heightened use of military contractors?
First, I should day there has been a significant shift if you compare the use of contractors today to the use of contractors thirty, forty, or fifty years ago, but if you go back even further in our history we did use contractors in many ways. What is causing this modern shift? One of the main factors is what I call the ideology of privatization, the idea that the private sector can do the government’s work better, more cheaply, and more efficiently. The privatization of our foreign affairs function is an outgrowth of the privatization of our domestic governance functions. In the 80s and 90s we saw a huge shift in how we provide a whole range of services from education, to healthcare, to prison management. We saw a shift on the part of governmental entities including state and local governments from public employment to the use of private contractors, and we had a big debate about that. The ideology that was driving that debate drove the outsourcing of foreign policy actions in the lat
