In the Gap they’re “mercenaries,” but in the Core it’s called “private security”
Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 25 April
Reference: “’Outsourced’ or ‘Mercenary,’ He’s No Soldier,” by James Dao, New York Times, 25 April, p. WK3.
Story about role of private security firms in Iraq: is this new phenom? No, say experts. We can show you long history of such entities in international affairs.
Reality is: whenever you’re talking about stable security rule sets, like we have inside the Core today, these entities are basically rent-a-cops. But move inside the Gap, where the security rule-sets are weak or absent, and these entities add bulk to the point of becoming private armies. So long as we have the Gap, we’ll have these mercs, but they’re not a way to shrink the Gap. You will find these guys where things are really bad, and they are nothing but stop-gap measures for private companies trying hard to do business in security-less situations. In short, the firms are the equivalent of sending a boy to do a man’s job.
My vision of the Sys Admin force that the U.S. military fields, along with other states, would keep these guys largely at the margins in the Gap, filling up the corners instead of tackling central jobs like Iraq. Trying to shrink the Gap on the cheap involves a lot of mercenaries, but it’s not a recipe for success. The Core’s corporations will come and go in the Gap, entering and leaving according to business decisions regarding profit and loss. We won’t be integrating Iraq into the wider world on the basis of business decisions alone. War isn’t out-sourced in such an easy fashion.
So yes, wage war within the context of everything else, but don’t pretend you can just push it off on somebody else. There are simply some jobs that belong with governments, and waging war in one of them.
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