 Good morning, and welcome to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I have one administrative note I'd ask you to do what I'm about to do, which is make sure that your phones are in the mute or off position so that we don't have an interruption. Thank you. I'm David Burto. I'm a senior advisor here at CSIS, and I'm the director of our Defense Industrial Initiatives Group, and we're very pleased to be hosting what today is a doubly unique event. CSIS regularly sponsors visiting fellows from our sister enterprise, the Council on Foreign Relations, but it's rare that such a visiting fellow has an area of study that actually overlaps with our Defense Industrial Initiatives exercises. So we were delighted when we were offered the opportunity to host and sponsor Colonel Rick Rona as our Council on Foreign Relations fellow this year. Colonel Rona comes to us from AFRICOM, and his area of study for this fellowship is private security contractors. So there's an obvious overlap with our core efforts here at CSIS. We looked at that, and we've found, of course, gaps in policy, gaps in execution, and a whole host of unanswered or underanswered questions when it comes to private security contractors. So we were really pleased to support Colonel Rona's research, and that's the first unique aspect to this event today. The second is that he will combine both his research and the event together in a way that's somewhat unprecedented for CSIS. So in a way, all of you are participating today in an experiment, and I'm grateful to you for that purpose. So we'll see at the end how we've come out here. I'll be back on the microphone when we get to the questions, but with that I would ask you to join me in welcoming our CSIS visiting fellow from the Council on Foreign Relations, Colonel Rick Rona. Thanks a lot, David. I appreciate it. And thanks, everyone, here, both President and on the webcast for participating. We very much appreciate your participation and your interest in the topic. The debate today is between two of the foremost experts when looking at strategic studies and particularly the issues of private security contractors and private security firms. First of all, Mr. Doug Brooks immediately to my left is the president and founder of the International Stability Operations Association, a non-governmental, non-profit, non-partisan association of service companies dedicated to providing ethical services to international peacekeeping, peace enforcement, humanitarian rescue, stabilization efforts and disaster relief. And that is directly from Doug's own characterization. Other people have characterized it as the trade association for the private security companies. So he brings a wealth of knowledge not only in that position and not only as a founder of the association, but as one who has looked from a policy perspective and an academic perspective at private security companies for over a decade. And to his left is Dr. T. X. Hamas, who is a retired Marine Colonel and presently a senior research fellow at the National Defense University, specifically the Institute for National Strategic Studies. He's also the author of The Sling and the Stone on Warfare in the 21st Century. What I'd like to talk about before turning it over to the two participants is a little bit about the format of the debate itself. First of all concerning the question, what we're looking at is the costs versus benefits detriments of armed contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I use some of that language deliberately. First of all costs versus detriments rather than simply cost benefits. What I hope that the debaters will bring out today is not simply the financial costs and benefits, but also looking at some of the value and policy implications of our reliance and it has become a reliance on armed contractors and the significant conflict zones for the United States. The other area of language that I think is important is the term armed contractors. And by armed contractors at least what I mean in putting together the debate are those who are armed for purposes other than immediate self-defense in the execution of their duties. And the reason I bring that up is because this language for people looking at this topic and especially those who only look at it tangentially has become very loaded. You have people who are not familiar with the industry who automatically default to the term mercenaries. You have private security companies which is used by the association and by the industry itself and their international code of conduct which was signed by a number of the companies in November. In academia you have private military slash security companies. So there are a whole lot of terms out there. I've used armed contractors to try and distill it to what we're trying to look at. Those who are armed for reasons other than immediate self-defense. The format that we're looking at using today is called Lincoln-Douglas debate format. And although it's named after what are probably some of the most prominent debates in American political history it doesn't follow exactly what Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas did in the 1840s. Basically we're following a format that many people who have done high school debate are very familiar with. It allows direct interaction slash confrontation between our two participants because they will be allowed to immediately cross-examine or question each other after each has made their arguments. You'll also notice that Doug, taking the affirmative on the question, is given the opportunity to begin the debate and end the debate. So even though their speaking time will be equal or they'll have the opportunity for equal speaking time, Doug starts and ends the debate itself. You'll also see that we have no AV format or aids that they'll be able to use. So Doug and TX will be relying on their logic, their persuasion, and their winning personalities throughout the debate. Some of the ground rules. David already talked about cell phones. Please remember if you haven't done it already to turn off your cell phones and your electrical devices. The debate is on the record. Obviously this is open forum and we are webcasting. I would ask you to keep in mind that I've asked them here because of their personal expertise, not necessarily as representatives of their individual organizations. So when you are looking at citing them, please cite them individually unless you have their explicit permission after the debate to cite them as their representatives of their organizations. And then after the debate we'll have an audience Q&A format or question and answer time that David will lead us through. Finally before we begin the debate, on each of your chairs you'll find two ballots. What I'd like you to do is take a look at those two ballots. One of them says pre-debate and post-debate. They have the question of the debate and then they ask whether you agree, disagree, or are undecided concerning whether the benefits of armed contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan truly outweigh the cost of detriments at this present time. So what I'd ask you to do is take the pre-debate ballot right now and fill that out. And then some of our research associates, some of my colleagues from the Defense Industrial Initiatives Group will go through quickly and collect those. And then after the debate I'm going to ask you to fill out the post-debate ballot and we'll do a little bit of a comparison to see if anyone's minds or positions have been swayed by the rhetoric of either of our two speakers. Okay, final bit of housekeeping is for the two participants, Ryan upfront will be providing time cards for you. Once we reach stop you get about a 15 to 20 minute grace time and then we'll have to cut you off. 15 to 20 minute? 15 to 20 second. Yeah, you wish. 15 to 20 minute. 15 to 20 second grace time and then I'll have to cut you off. All right, with that I'm going to turn it over to Doug. Thank you very much. It's a real pleasure to be here and thank you for putting this together and I've never actually formally debated anyone before. And let me just say that Colonel Hamas is brilliant. He's spoken at our events previously and I actually used many of his comments and thoughts in my own work. So I think this will be less of a debate, more of a prickly agreement on many issues. Contractors are not new. They're armed contractors and anybody who's studied American history is aware of the privateers that we had back in the beginning of the Republic. We've always had contractors, they've always supported the military. The numbers go up and down depending on the demand and that's normal. The security companies, the PSCs are about 15% of contractors and the US, the Americans are about 10% of that number. So there's a very small number of Americans doing the armed security but that's really what you see you focused on in the press. Security contractors are not hunting down insurgents invading countries, they're not there as a replacement for armies. They're guarding nouns, they're guarding people, place and things. While the military has rules of engagement, which are secret, which allow them to use lethal force to achieve a mission, security contractors have rules for use of force, RUF, which allows them to defend themselves, self-protection, allows them to protect whatever that noun is that they've been contracted to hire and it allows them to protect civilians under mortal threat. If you can use local police and military in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, fantastic if they're available. But there aren't that many that are trained up, there's huge attrition rates, there's lots of problems with them. All for it, all for training them, contractors do that as well. But we have a long way to go before they're going to be a replacement. Contractors are mostly locals and this includes security contractors. There's a large number of locals, so they're hiring people, they're giving them good jobs, they're training them up, they're giving them capacity. And essentially it's relatively good jobs in a recovering economy. Taxpayers don't like it when we contract to idiots. So quality matters when you're contracting. There's a big issue in our industry about best value versus lowest price and there's a lot of pressure to go cheaper, cheaper, cheaper on the contracts. But we really need to be thinking about this when we're contracting contractors, especially security contractors. You want some quality. We need to improve the procurement system. When it works, it works great. But a lot of times it's not working right. Accountability matters. When you have armed contractors abroad, it doesn't matter if they're local nationals or they're foreign nationals or third country nationals. You have to have some way of holding them accountable legally. We have different laws that we use, the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, the UCMJ, the Uniform Code of Military Justice. All these things can be used and have been used to hold contractors accountable legally. Rick mentioned the Montreux document and its follow on the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Providers. That was a Swiss initiative. We very much supported that as an industry association. It's also supported by the U.S. and U.K. governments, and that's also going to be a game changer in terms of improving quality. Contracts work. Many of the contractor issues have just been a result of bad contracts or bad contract enforcement. That needs to change as well. What taxpayers get from security contractors is a real bargain. A high end U.S. private security individual doing protection for, say, an ambassador, still about half the cost of what it costs for a soldier to be in Afghanistan right now, according to Time Magazine, it's about a million dollars a year. Third country nationals, if you're not using Americans, they're even cheaper. And then if using the local nationals, if you're hiring a Afghan to do security work, they're about $500 a month, or 166 times cheaper than using a soldier or a Marine. We're projecting U.S. influence around the world and that costs money. And whether we're overthrowing dictators or whether we have these sort of bold policies for enlightening the world or providing security, you need to have a contractor contingent supporting that if you're going to be cost effective, if you're going to support a rational international policy. Finally, part of the question is, what do we want the U.S. military to actually do? Well, we've an old volunteer military that's more professional probably and more capable than it's ever been in its history. We give our military the power of life and death over our enemies, but they're not cheap. As I said, a million dollars a year per Marine or soldier in Afghanistan. We don't want our soldiers and Marines cleaning toilets or flipping eggs. We use contractors for that as well. Do we want them protecting power plants in Kabul? Well, maybe there's a strategic role. Maybe that power plant is so central to the mission you really do want to have these early expensive people doing that kind of security. But what about protecting a privately owned extractive company? Say BP and oil well somewhere. Or Exxon, or what about save the children protecting an NGO? Do you want Marines and soldiers doing that? To save the children, what Marines and soldiers doing that kind of work? Do we want them guarding new sewage plants, which is a big part of the reconstruction in these sorts of things? And I just kind of envision this letter to some mother in the United States, Mrs. Smith. We regret to inform you that your son or daughter died from defending a cesspool from looters. But it was in our national interest. That's crazy. Do we want our Marines and soldiers guarding the forward operating bases where they're based? It's not an offensive operation to guard a forwarding operating base. If you're hiring locals to do the security, well, you know what? They speak the language. They understand the culture. You're going to have far fewer misunderstandings. And yeah, there's 166 times cheaper than having the soldier guard it. Oh, and one other issue. When you put a soldier, an American soldier, in front of an American base, you have a target guarding a target. What's the point of that? We all want our volunteer professional military focused on the key national policies. We want them chasing after our enemies. We want them focused on the strategic mission. We want to use our US military resources to change the world for the better. We all know that there are problems with contractors and PSCs, but they're not insurmountable. And both my colleague and I have addressed these problems in various ways. ISOA has a lot of programs in terms of improving contracting, improving the use of security contractors. But clearly, they have a role, and we're not going to get rid of them. The international community has picked up this issue, as I mentioned. So that's also working to improve this. Contractors support the US military. They support US policies. And this includes the security contractors. They're enormously beneficial to reconstruction operations. They're enormously cost-effective. It's crazy to sort of say, we can't do without these, or we shouldn't do without these. Thank you. I address, I actually will address most of these points in my presentation. So you want to go with questions first? Yeah, let's go ahead and go with questions first, and then you can go and readdress it in your presentation. OK, we'll start at the beginning. Contractors. We'll start at the beginning. Contractors are not new, and that's true. In fact, historically, you look at the 30 Years War, is fought by contractors. Wallenstein, a contractor, essentially becomes the equivalent of a nation state. And the power of a nation state, he has the power of a prince. What happened to those contractors through history? Why are privateers gone? Why are the contractors gone? For instance, all artillerymen used to be contractors. Why did they go away? Wonderful historical question. I think part of it was, well, it goes back to the French and the idea of the mass army in that you can script your citizens to actually fight for you, or you can find ways to make them fight for you. So I mean, there's a number of different issues on that. But I also think there's an aspect of professionalism that we have now in terms of a standing military that perhaps we didn't have in the past. I would encourage anybody to read the history of this. Contractors go away in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia. The French Revolution is 1792. I'm not sure what happened in the 150 years in between, but it certainly had nothing to do with the Levy and mass. The reason they went away is because privateers became pirates. Contractors couldn't be relied upon to fight, or they could be outbid. And of course, the whole problem. Sarah Piercy has a wonderful book on this. She's an Oxford scholar who did a book on this. Second question, on cost, you say a real bargain. For instance, the cost of an American contractor in Afghanistan. How do you amortize that cost for the training that was provided by someone for the security, for the air base, the air bridge, of the structure that they operate under? Whereas the cost of the US soldier is amortized, all functions are amortized, the contractor tends to only amortize the actual contractor cost. How do you handle those costs? You're saying in terms of the training they received as military people in the past. The support facilities is also there to support them, but they're not charged against the cost code. Well, in terms of support facilities and so on, yes. I mean, sometimes that's part of the larger contract. Sometimes the contractors have to provide their own support facilities. It really depends on the contract, but that's something that the policymakers have to decide. In terms of the previous training, and I assume you mean the small number of security contractors who are Americans, who received training in the military as you did, it's the same as airline pilots. How many of them were actually in the military flying, learning to fly, and so on? That's a big boost to the airlines, of course, but it also means that somebody put, how many years, five, 10, 20 years in the military before doing their service, before they go into the private sector, and I think that's fine. I mean, essentially when somebody joins a military, they join up and they commit to a certain amount of time, and after that they are free. I mean, they are citizens and they get to make their own decisions. I didn't really answer the question about how do you amortize those costs. They're cheap because they don't have pay for them. Well, it's just like the NFL gets cheap recruits because they don't run farm clubs. But the, well, colleges aren't, but are not paid for by the NFL. They're paid for by other sources, whereas baseball runs its own farm clubs. So there's some of that. We're gonna switch over from question and answer to the first negative constructive, TX. Okay, we're discussing Iran and Afghanistan, but the real point about this debate should be where does the policy go in the future? Let's face it, Afghanistan and Iraq are set. We're not gonna change those in any significant way. And we're discussing, I will expand armed contractors one bit to say unarmed direct support of military operations in addition to, but not the humanitarian, not the reconstruction people. And we got here logically, and this paper with their copies in the back, explains how we got from one time contractor for 55 military in Vietnam to 1.43 contractors to one military in Afghanistan. And I'm gonna discuss the good, that's Doug's job. There are three immediate tactical disadvantages. Doug says we can develop and control quality because quality has been a regular part of the discussion. And the way we control that is to tighten up our contract rules. The problem with that is it's a contractor sitting somewhere. When I was in Iraq, the contractor was in Tennessee. So his ability to control who was hired in Iraq was pretty low. The other thing is you hire somebody but you don't have any idea of his capabilities or his skills. When the military certifies a unit to go overseas, we spend literally millions of dollars on training them up as a unit, certifying them, and they're certified by other professionals who've usually been in the conflict zone and study what they do. They're evaluated and if they're not ready, they don't go. A contractor's evaluated by, oh, there's my quality and you go, yep, you're on plane, get going. We even found people who showed up with no idea how to get weapons, not qualified to handle weapons. If you've been around some of these clowns, you really understand that there is no quality control at all, absolute unawareness of muzzle direction or anything. We can't control our operations. We've set up big operation centers and they're supposed to report in and I'm sure that they religiously report every time they shoot a local or run a local off the road. I can't imagine any incentive that would encourage them not to report. I mean, the absurdity of saying we can control through radio is just that absurd. Anybody who's in a tactical situation knows that if you know what's happening on patrol, only if you've got someone on that patrol. So that kind of defeats the purpose. We have to send someone along and in fact, state has actually decided that. They have to send a security officer along every time they go on a security contract because otherwise they don't know what the hell's going on out there. So those are two bad things. We have no control over the quality of who we hire. We have no control over what they do. We are held responsible for everything they do or fail to do by the local population. And this is very important because legitimacy is at the heart of counterinsurgency. If you put out illegitimate forces and you're responsible for them but you're not punishing them or controlling them, then you're held responsible for that. There's been a lot of low level abuse. Anything from, I would drive around with an Iraqi and an Iraqi pickup truck because we didn't have security. We would get pushed off the road, weapons aimed at us. If a military unit had done that to me, as a full colonel, I certainly could have stopped it. I could have complained and fixed it. When I tried to complain about a contractor, what's his description? It was a big guy in a T-shirt wearing sunglasses. Well, thank you very much. That narrows it down. That's the problem. The locals feel there is no punishment and while we have in fact passed laws, the problem is they're virtually unenforceable. If you're a prosecutor in the United States, do you really want to try to prosecute someone who did something in Iraq? You could spend your entire annual budget on a very low probability of a conviction. We have repeated cases of pedophilia, sex rings, even slavery. And the punishment was pretty severe. They got to take it home. We did not touch them because we couldn't. If it had been the military, there are pedophiles in the military unfortunately, there are people who abuse sex in the military and we can take action. They're very difficult to fire. One of the most important things when Stanley McChrystal took over and General Petraeus has echoed this, the most important thing we're doing in Afghanistan is raising the police and getting them right. Dine Corpus had that contract since I think 2003 or 2004. Every single outside report, by outside mean anybody, other than Dine Corp reporting, has been how massive failure the police system. Now some of this is outside Dine Corp's control. There's no rule of law, et cetera. But the fact is for seven years we've had failure. McChrystal takes over, says this is the most important job. I've got to push it. We do a review, Dine Corp fails, the contract comes open, Dine Corp loses the bid. Dine Corp goes to court, wins the appeal, everything's back in the bidding process. So now you've got the people, the most important aspect of your counter-insurgency strategy is being run by people you have fired for incompetence. And they ran it for the eight months. I think we're into the bid now and they finally let the new bid. They finally let the new bid guess who won, Dine Corp. So the most important factor is now being run by a corporation who we've fired once, beat us in the courts and is back again. I'm not sure how that works. You compete with host nation governments for scarce personnel. There's an enormous number of problems there and you see this constantly out of Afghanistan. Yeah, they hire, but the people they're hiring are the people we train. We train Afghan police. As soon as they're done, they go work for the contractor. Why? Because the contractors pay more than Afghan police. We've got attrition rates on the best trained police that run as high as 75% a year. We've got to look for where those guys are. They're across the street with the contractor. So we're competing for a very limited number of people. We pay double. It's a huge cost saving, except that we now hire contractors to do things that soldiers should be doing and we have soldiers to do. For instance, we're leaving Iraq. We're gonna keep 8,000 contractors to guard the Department of State. Now as a taxpayer with 1.2 million people on active duty, we should be able to squeeze out 8,000 of those to do the job, but it's easier to hire contractors. It gives us a default position that gives us essentially a low quality force we can't control or maybe high quality, but you don't know. And it's, we're paying double. We're paying for the military guy and that. So there's no real cost savings there. In fact, Mushy Sports is from the CRSC here. I thought it was gonna be here. We're probably watching one more. Has done a great job on cost and essentially the conclusion he came to was there's no way to adjudicate the cost. Because although, for instance, medical, the insurance covers the medical, but if the guy expends his insurance, where does he go? He goes to the emergency room. Who pays for that? You and I do, through local costs. We have no way to adjudicate costs of contractors over time. I think that's a pretty bogus thing. I will, there's some very specific information on a strategic and I'll address that in the second seven minute period. Because while all I talked about there was tactical. Essentially, tactical is transient and not particularly important. And you can overcome tactical mistakes. But in the next section I will talk about the strategic issues that are the real damage. It's not just the cost and the inefficiency. It's the damage to your strategic position that you've gotta be worried about. And I'll leave it there. Okay, in a world where what comes around goes around? Doug, it's your turn to question. A lot of the comments, I think we're more general on contractors and specifically on security contractors. One point I would just question. My understanding is there are 80,000 contractors in Vietnam and I talked to PAE, they had 40,000 contractors of their own. So the ratio of one to 55 is probably a bit off. That would be a peak. But I don't know if you're aware of that. But they were not doing the security so much except for the ones working for the agency at the time. I think in terms of, I would ask, you look at a certain set of contractors doing security in Afghanistan or Iraq. Are you familiar with the state contractors and the level of training and vetting that they get to do the WPS contract, the diplomatic security contract? That's, again, that's a very high value target slash defense. And so we spend a lot of money on it. And that's probably appropriate. The question is, you still have people that are covering a very specific target, very high value target. And the company knows they have to use their best people because you don't win a contract again if the ambassador gets shot in your watch. This is probably a bad thing. Conversely, you will do things to protect the ambassador that you wouldn't do if you were a US cop. Even the president of the United States, a secret service convoy, has never run people off the road. I was run off the road on two occasions in Iraq by a contractor protecting a principal. Now I'd say actually that's one of your best arguments is the externalities of using contractors. Unfortunately, a lot of that is a policy, as you pointed out too. State makes a policy that essentially causes harm and harms a larger issue. That is problematic. But is it, I would get, say, okay, we're not going to use the security contractors. Is it because of the illegitimacy issue? Is it legitimate to use foreign soldiers in a reconstruction effort to, or would the locals prefer local security to provide the security? I think there's a sort of a larger issue. Yes, you're bringing in foreign soldiers to change the regime or whatever, but does it make sense to have them continue on there to be seen everywhere doing all the security everywhere else? I would say there's a real conceptual issue there. Absolutely, and I think the solution though is not to have contractors hire them, it's to have the government hire them. For instance, if I couldn't go work for a contracting company, I'd probably stay with the government police. There is very little training for hard point security. Almost none. The police could do that if we hadn't already contracted out and created a perverse incentive program that sets up the police for failure. And on the incentive program and on the problems of the training, I think there's a million of those that we can go into. And as you pointed out, not all of those are contractor related but are policy related. You also brought up, and again, you're straying a bit from the main topic, the issue of sex ring, slavery. That doesn't happen in the military. Well, maybe it doesn't happen in the US military. It certainly happens in militaries in all the peacekeeping operations. So if we're looking beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, my own experience in Sierra Leone where you had 17,000 UN troops, you had the most amazing sex trafficking ring and sex trade going on. Also, of course, in Bosnia, where you mentioned there were contractors involved with it, that was a much smaller part of a much larger UN sex trafficking ring. And yes, they were military. Did they go to jail? I don't know. The contractors at least got fired. Yes. That's gonna cut off the second question and answer. So we'll start your first rebuttal. How long do I have? Four minutes. Okay. Yeah, I mean, there are absolutely strategic issues when you bring in contractors, but one of the role that the contractors do that is so important is really draw on the local population, start providing them jobs, start putting them to work. And I think the colonel points out that, well, are they taking really quality people away from the reconstruction? Well, certainly not the security guys. The security guys are essentially people that are possibly former combatants that you're bringing in, training up, professionalizing and putting to a good use. I think we do see problems, sometimes NGOs come in and they overpay their local nationals. And instead of having a desk clerk who can read and write, you have a desk clerk as a doctor because it's better, more lucrative to work as a desk clerk for an NGO than it does to be a doctor in a hospital. That's an issue you have to watch out for. But with contractors, in fact, there's a ton of price pressure. So you're hiring people as low as you can pay them, quite frankly. But you're also trying to make sure that they operate professionally and they don't undermine your contract by violating the rules, by violating the federal acquisition regulations and everything else that the US puts on top of its contractors. I think these are sort of key issues. There is a reconstruction going on. The more you're working with the local population, the fewer foreign soldiers that you see around, the better it is in terms of a long-term perspective. I think some of the, a lot of the issues that were brought up were, in fact, policy issues. And yes, there are lots and lots of bad policies. Contractors aren't there to make policy. You're not hiring companies to decide what the US is going to do in DR Congo or in Haiti. You're hiring them to carry out a policy that somebody makes somewhere else. And yes, there's a lot of problems with those policies and we can get into the training issues and the problems that we've created, I'd say, with really, really bad policies, but that's not really a contractor issue so much. The contractors are going to do the best they can. I would say one sort of really structural, conceptual problem that we have, those of contractors will never be critical of their clients, which would be the US government. And essentially, the last thing they're going to do is turn around and say, yeah, you know what? The US government made us do this really dumb policy. They can't do that because they won't get hired again. I mean, it's a blunt reality. I want to also touch on the vetting issue and making sure you have quality people in the field, and that's really tough to do in a conflict or a post-conflict environment. The way Dincourt did it in Liberia when they were training up the Liberian military was pretty interesting. There were no records for 20 years. How do you make sure somebody you're bringing in is not a war criminal, is not a rapist or something? Well, here's how they did it. And actually, he was done by one of the Texas colleagues at National Defense University when he was working for Dincourt. They took pictures of everybody who sort of passed the initial test. They published those pictures around Liberia and they said, is this person a war criminal? And they were actually able to screen people out. It's not easy to do this. It's not perfect, and it's never going to be perfect, but you're taking risks when you operate in these sorts of things. You're trying to change the world. You're trying to change your government. You're trying to change a regime. And if you're going to do that, you're going to have to take some of these risks. Iraq is another wonderful example. If somebody had a really good record under Saddam, does that mean he's a good person? If he has a really bad record under Saddam Hussein, does that mean he's a good person or a bad person? It's hard to do this. And ultimately, for the better companies, you figure out how to do the vetting. You make sure that the people you have are pretty good and then you're going to beat your competitors and win these contracts. I'm going to violently agree with you. There is a policy issue, and that's the important point. The policy of using armed contractors in conflict zones is inherently bad. He's right. Doug made the point that we put him in a policy box that forces him to do things that don't make sense from a strategic point of view. I think you just argued from my side. I think you made the point precisely that the policy cannot be adjusted so armed contractors make sense. And when I asked where did the other armed contractors go, that's essentially historically the record. You try them, you find out this wasn't as good an idea as you thought, and eventually they're either put out of business or reabsorbed into the government forces. The strategic issues, the very presence of armed contractors strikes at the legitimacy of the government. Legitimacy, the prime function of legitimacy and counterinsurgency provides security. When you can't provide security, you can't protect people you're illegitimate. That's fine if you then hire locals, and you should hire locals to do it, but why don't you hire them to work for the government instead of an outside contractor? It doesn't make any sense. It reduces, another huge problem here, is it reduces the political will necessary to go to a counterinsurgency. If I know I can hire, as in Afghanistan, one and a half contractors virtually for every US or ISAF troop, then I don't have as much political will. Do you think we would still be in Afghanistan if instead of 100,000 troops there, we had a quarter million troops there? We would evaluate it and say, you know, probably doesn't make sense. We have not had to have that discussion because contractors make it easier to go to war. I am pretty sure that was not the intent of the Constitution. This is from a practical point of view, contractors can make you invisible. Absolutely right, UN troops are much worse than any of the contractors have ever been, but we weren't paying for them. The people there, we were paying for them, but people there did not associate them with the United States. We pay about 40% of those costs, but they don't associate that directly with the United States. They do, if we hire them, for instance, Blackwater has signed on to do something in Somalia. Everybody's convinced America's back in Somalia. Whether we are or not is a question, but the world is convinced we are, and particularly the Somalis are convinced we are. And from a practical question, should it be easier to go to war? Because the danger is, if it's easy to get in, it's very difficult to get out. We spent over a trillion dollars in Iraq. We're well on our way to a trillion dollars in Afghanistan. From a strategic point of view, was that a good idea? Would there have been more debate if we'd had to raise the force levels and actually engage the American population? It's a good way to avoid the will of the American people. You just ignore that whole voter thing. It's so much easier. There's a moral question too. Should we hire people we don't know, we don't train, and give them authority to kill people in the name of the United States? While people will sometimes make fun of the moral position of the United States, it has a tremendously powerful value in the world when we are a force for good. When we wander off and torture people, it really causes problems for us, and it continues to cause problems for us. Contracting is another way we're causing problems. We're hiring unqualified people, we're letting them kill people in our name. Another question, should we hire poor, third world nationals to absorb casualties for us? You made the point in your first session about, do you call the mom and say your son died for sewer plant? Well, it's okay, apparently if it's just a contractor, they're not like real people or anything, but the fact is, as morally reprehensible as that is, if you sign on as a contractor, you're suddenly not an American citizen, nor are you treated as one. We should make a point that those casualties be included in our casualty totals. Those are Americans dying out there. We should include third world casualties too, and third world wounded. What's the moral position of wounding a guy badly and shipping him back to the Philippines or Peru with no support? Again, it strikes to what we see ourselves as a country. If we see ourselves as an empire, and these are just auxiliaries to be used as the Romans use auxiliaries, then it's okay. But I don't think that's okay for the United States. So I'm gonna end with recommendations. Oh, there's just a debate. I would say there are things contractors do extremely well and use them extensively in non-conflict zones based on a genuine analysis. The guys doing the repair work in Kuwait do superb work, they do it cheaper, they do it better. Things that are repetitive functions that can be evaluated and kept track of are good things. There are places where you're gonna send them where some jobs can only be done by contractors. The United States is not sending people to Africa. Just we're not gonna do it. Do you then send a black water to stop a massacre in Sudan? It's a possibility. That's a legitimate area for debate. I'm not sure where I come down on that, but it's certainly an area we need to debate. The default position I would have is ban them in conflict zones. If they're in a conflict zone with U.S. troops, it mixes things up too much. You get a confusion as to what U.S. is doing and what we're held responsible for because we are responsible for what they do. We don't go outside the wire. If it's inside the wire, I prefer minimum contact with the local population, but would much prefer you hire locals. There's a good point here, but you hire locals through their government. It makes no sense to me to hire a bunch of companies to pay them a premium to compete with their own government in a period the government's under stress. We also can look, if you have to go outside, hire local government security forces. Local military forces, U.S. contractors would be second choice and third country nationals would be an absolute last choice. U.S. local military forces, you do it by assigning military forces to them. The Gendarmerie in Haiti and Nicaragua, the Marines have long experience with this. We're starting to do it in Afghanistan. We've avoided that because we could hire contractors to do the job and we've gone off on a bad path there. The failure to establish a policy on the use of contractors for the future is very dangerous. It'll leave us unbalanced because the natural tendency is to say, we'll let contractors do that so we won't provide forces for that. We'll let contractors do that. We're gonna find ourselves in a position where we have to use contractors even if it doesn't make sense. And finally, we need to push hard for international laws, not an international code, but an international law with teeth and standards and processes for contractors who are going to operate in areas that governments aren't because the fact of the matter is there's large parts of the world governments aren't going and contractors will be the only alternative. But they then become an extra force, an extra governmental force. The last time we introduced that force into the world, we got the 30 Years War. Didn't turn out all that well for Europe. Unless you think wiping out 40% of the German population is a good idea. Okay, thanks, Doug. You get the last words. I wasn't alive during the 30 Years War. I'm a lot younger than the colonel, but. I would, one point thing I would point out just historically, of course, was in the Marine Hymn, of course, triplies in there somewhere. And if you'll recall there, how many Marines involved in that operation? Like six. And then hundreds of people that they'd hired to help take triply. Armed contractors do not challenge the legitimacy of a government. They do not challenge the legitimacy of force. They get their legitimacy from governments to carry these weapons. I think if you say, okay, if you want illegitimacy, we have tens of thousands of armed contractors working for the US government right now in the United States, it's normal. To say we can't use them in places where it may be dangerous, that's a little bit crazy. If we say we can't use armed contractors in an area of conflict, does that include Mexico? Does that include Columbia? Does that include Haiti? I don't know. I mean, what's the definition of an area of conflict? Does it include Louisiana? I mean, we really, it's strange. There has to be rules and guidelines. They have to be clear. And then I don't think it's a big problem. Yes, the policy structure can be adjusted to make contractors better. I would say they're doing a fine job overall. Yes, there's issues. There's lots of problems. We've highlighted those. He's highlighted those. That can be addressed. I don't think that's a big deal. Is it easier to go to war with contractors? Well, I don't know. We got into Vietnam where we're using a conscripted military. We got into Afghanistan. I don't think anybody would debate that. If we had a conscripted military, we wouldn't have gotten into Afghanistan. What about the Spanish-American War? We've made lots of bad choices in the past when contractors were not such an issue. The issue of torture, that's a great one. No one should be doing torture, much less contractors. If you're going to have somebody do the torture, then you better damn well have some legitimacy behind it. I don't see it. But certainly shouldn't be a contractor issue. The issue of third country nationals or local nationals being wounded or killed. Well, if they're under US government contracts, they're under the Defense Base Act Insurance Program. It's not a great insurance program, but they are covered. And in fact, there was a number of journalists who went down to Latin America where some of the security contractors had come from. And interviewed some of these people who had been wounded and almost to a man. They said, yeah, as soon as I'm better, I'm going back to work in Iraq again, because it was a pretty good job, and they did take care of me. There are death benefits and other things. I would argue you could actually improve the Defense Base Act DBA program. And I think a lot of companies have some ideas on that. It's a clunky government run program. Could probably be outsourced and improved. Some recommendations in terms of the future. Yes, Africa, we've had security contractors there. I think humanitarian, I agree with my colleague, humanitarian security is a big role for them. Again, on a protective level, these companies do not do offensive combat operations of the security companies we're talking about, but they can protect people. I think it's always been kind of a lark that it's perfectly legitimate to go and protect an oil well in Angola, but God help you if you're trying to protect a village that's under threat. I think there's a big role for that. I think the UN has already started using security contractors for some of the refugee camps and so on. This is normal. I don't think it's a big deal. Yes, we should be hiring locals. Can we do it through a local government? If you can, fine. I think the problem in Afghanistan and Iraq is essentially we took out the governments. That was the very first thing we do. That was the whole point of the mission. You got to create a government. You have to create capacity. Once you have, then they can create their own rules. They can create their own guidelines. Either you hire people through them or you hire companies under their laws and rules and regulations as we do in Afghanistan, as we do in Iraq. And they'll be under local laws. And I think that makes a lot of sense from our industry perspective. I think I have hit everything I need to hit and I still have a minute left. OK, thank you both. What we're going to do is David's going to lead us through the Q&A. But before he starts doing that, you've got the post-debate ballots on your seats. So what I'd ask you to do is take a look at those and fill those out quickly. And some of our staff will come around and collect those. And then we'll do kind of before and after layout after the Q&A period. What do we win? Depends on the score. I want to thank you both for a very thorough review and a pretty dense, in a positive way, amount of information and commentary that you provided in this format. And I think it's very interesting. I would like to ask the first question and then I'll throw the floor open for additional questions. And my question is a rather complex one. Each of you touched on and cited complexities of both government contracting and of government personnel practices. I have a personal long experience in trying to fix these. It is largely unblemished by any dramatic success. But we keep at it nonetheless. On the contracting side, there are clearly, and I was privileged to serve as a member of the Gansler Commission that looked at this very question with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan back in the fall of 2007. There were dramatic shortcomings in terms of defining requirements, of translating those requirements into scopes of work, of having any kind of performance measures built into the execution of the contracts, of having contracting officer representatives for the government who signed the invoices and certified delivery. And they were largely didn't have the background or the experience or the training for that purpose. And in many cases, it was a fifth extra duty as assigned. These are all shortcomings that are not unique to or even dominated by the type of contractors we're talking about today. They actually permeate the entire services contracting business and to some extent all of government contracting. Nor are they unique to the Defense Department. In fact, one of the things that you learn is defense is actually a lot better with this than many other agencies are, which is a bit scary at times. But nonetheless, it is true. Similarly, with personnel system and Colonel Hamas commented that maybe, in fact, the government should be hiring these people. And yet we all have experience, either direct or indirect, with how incredibly long it takes the government to hire anybody. And only a little bit of this is dictated by the need to certify and verify requirements. So my real question for you, you may or may not disagree with my premise, but my real question for you is, is the issue of private security contractors, whatever category, however category you want to, is that issue a big enough and powerful enough issue to tackle these larger questions? In other words, is this the right vehicle to go after fixing the contracting problems, fixing the personnel system problems, or the dynamics? Because both of you indicate that, to a great extent, the issue of costs and benefits is driven, in part, by the alternatives. What are the other alternatives that we have here? And if those other alternatives, through better contracting or through better personnel practices, cannot be fixed with this vehicle, then that's really the question that I pose to each of you. Yeah, the lengths to hire all of these things are essentially embedded issues within the US government. One of the problems is we take that embedded problem to Iraq. When I get to Iraq and I'm trying to raise people for the bases and stations, somehow the people who'd been there before had set up this incredible civil service commission, where we had to have seven people interview the person. None of those were Iraqis, and they then had to vote, and then there was a three month process to hire this guy. So we have seven people who don't speak the language, know nothing about the country, are deciding who to hire. Well, I changed them, just said to hell with it, the Iraqis are gonna have to run this. My three Iraqis are gonna be aboard and we're gonna hire people. And after a huge kerfuffle and all kinds of threatening emails and yelling, they finally gave up and just let me do it my way. So you don't have to go by these things, you can do things as neat. But the real problem is the problem in contracting itself. Contracting works well for linear problems, repeatable, measurable, linear problems. Unfortunately, war is by definition non-linear. Minor changes in input have major changes in output. Experts will fundamentally disagree. So all of these things about wicked problems come into play and trying to write a contract for a wicked problem is extraordinarily difficult. That is why lawyers make so much money in the United States. And it's fine if you can, over the next few years, litigate and litigate and litigate, but if you're losing the country at the time you're litigating as we are with Dinecorp and our ridiculous litigation about the police department, then I don't think you can fix it that way. You're trying to take a peacetime, essentially English law problem and translate it 16 centuries back to Afghanistan and make it work under combat conditions. Well, TX is right. The legal issues are huge for our industry and something we've been dealing with quite a bit. But I would say that with the contractors, we've been doing the contracting wrong. It's really interesting when we had our annual summit and we had this sort of final panel. And in the panel, we had sort of the heads of the industry and one of the questions was, what's the difference between working for the government and working for a private entity or a non-governmental organization? And the difference essentially is that the government is all about process and waste, fraud, and abuse. When you work for another company or you work for an NGO, they have a goal. They say, this is what we want you to do. And it's much, much easier. It's much cheaper. I think what we see is that there's a focus on this waste, fraud, and abuse and not the mission. The government needs to give a contract or a mission, protect this or build this or whatever. The scopes of work are there. The Federal Acquisition Regulations or DFAR, the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations, there's thousands of those and they tell you how you do it and they tell you sort of the guidelines of how you're supposed to do that sort of thing. But as any contractor will tell you, they're doing one audit after another. There's an inspector general. There's the Commissioner of Wartime Contracting is doing audits. You have the Special Investigative General for Afghanistan Reconstruction or Special Investigative General for Iraq Reconstruction, constantly being audited and so on. And there's a cost to that and that cost of course gets passed onto the contract. Stuart Bowen and Ginger Cruz of the CIGAR, the Special Investigative General for Iraq Reconstruction, have proposed a separate agency in the government just to do contingency contracting because it is not linear. Essentially you need to change these contracts, you need to have run these contracts a different way, a smarter way. And the government has that capability but they're hamstrung because we essentially use peacetime contracting guidelines to run these contracts and contingency operations where things are changing really fast. Is it worth using government personnel? I mean, we've rarely touched on the issue. Hiring government personnel takes a long time. There's all sorts of rules, regulations on that. And then when you're done with them, how do you get rid of them? They're with you forever essentially. It's almost impossible to get rid of them. It's just a really, really clunky system and it's kind of designed to be that way. You don't want civil servants doing this thing. Our whole industry is built on growth and shrinking and people say this is huge growth in our industry. Well, not exactly, it's like this. Every time you have a conflict, every time you have a contingency operation, whether it's Haiti or the Korean War or whatever, the number of contractors goes up and then it goes down again. It's a wonderful resource for the military. They can, or the US government, they can just tap into this expertise, bring it in for a short time and then let it go and stop paying for it. It's just a huge value. Yeah, I would say war is not linear and this is a fundamental reason why we use contractors and every contractor has changed contracts. Every, if there's a problem, you get rid of one contractor. If you need a different kind of contractor, you can go and get them and they're able to tap into international resources. If we allow them to, they can go to China to get resources. They can go to the Philippines to get talent or expertise. Does an engineer have to be an American to do engineering or can an engineer be a Filipino or an Indian? It's a lot cheaper to the US government but it doesn't necessarily have to be an American to do that kind of work and it saves the government money. What's important is the fact that we're hiring Americans as a jobs program for Americans. You're just wandering off in unarmed contractors. Well, you are too. But the point is these resources are available. The contracting community provides them on a short term basis and it's an enormous amount of capability that we don't want to ignore and yes, for security contractors there's a role for that as well. All right, here's the way we do our questions. You would indicate to me that you want to ask a question. The easiest way for you to do that is to raise your hand and I'll make eye contact with you so you know you're on my list. You'll wait for the microphone. We do have microphones that'll come to you. That's so our web audience will be able to hear you. People in this room obviously will but we'd like that to reach out as well. And then using the microphone, you identify who you are and your affiliation and then ask your question. You can direct your question to either or both of our debaters here this morning. Do I have anyone who wants to raise the first question? All right, let's start out right over here if you would, Nick. Hi, Richard Lardner from the Associated Press. You talked a little bit about accountability and I wonder if you could get into that a little bit more. Doug, you mentioned the audits that are done, IG reports, the Commission on Wartime Contracting. What I have found, because this is an industry I cover a little bit, is the number of audits, the number of reports pales in comparison to the amount of money and the amount of people involved. So just a couple of specific things. Should companies be required, whether they're public or private, to report how many employees have been fired or disciplined while under contract? And the second part of that is, does anybody know how many contractors have been prosecuted under UCMJ or any other statute since, picking up since 2001? The number of audits reports, I mean, you can ask for all the audits and reports you want. I mean, it just gets added to the cost of the contract. I think when you talk to these companies, they're constantly being audited and so be it. That's the price of working for the US government. As long as everybody's audited the same way, then it's a level playing field for the competition, they'll do that. It's not that big a deal. I think it gets ridiculous because essentially the government's spending a lot of money, a lot of taxpayer money to do the same thing again and again and again. I think that can probably be rationalized. I think you'd probably agree on that. Public, private contractors reporting the number of contractors or private contractors reporting the numbers of contractors that they actually have. I was kind of thought that was a bad idea in the early days. The numbers people were claiming the numbers of security contractors were 30,000, 50,000. One famous reporter, I think it was AP, said there was 300 armed contractors that implied they're all Americans working in Iraq at one point. It was crazy. And these numbers were just going through the roof. There was one AP report. It said 300,000 armed contractors in Iraq. Oh yeah, okay. Yeah, 300,000, sorry. It's not that important when you're a contractor. Put it on the end of the contract. Anyway, so these reports were just going through the roof and finally the US government went to the Department of Defense and said we need to know how many contractors there are and they started coming out with these quarterly reports as we know exactly how many contractors there are. But it's kind of a snapshot in time because contractors are hired, they're fired, the contracts change. And so it's somewhat useful, but then we find out that we actually have what? In Iraq, 11,628 contractors doing security, of which... But those DOVs numbers almost. No, this actually includes a lot of state people as well. And they've been charged with actually covering all the state contractors as well. So, I mean, the numbers are coming out and the state contractors are much fewer. So this is a predominant one and these numbers have been challenged. But what it did show was that the actual numbers of contractors were well below what were being reported. So it's actually been quite beneficial. But again, I would just say even something that is this detailed, you got to be careful because contracts are being started every month, they're being closed every month and so on. In terms of the numbers, fired, prosecuted, whatever. I think, you know, should a company report that? That's fine. I think if that's part of the contract then they're happy to do that sort of thing. The Department of Justice unfortunately handles the MEJA, Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act which was the sort of the primary law for holding contractors legally accountable. And the actual numbers, well as of two years ago what we had heard, and this is unfortunately very informal, was over 65 contractors that were in the process at some stage, either been charged, had been convicted or they were looking into the case. Now that was like two, three years ago, that's old information. And I would agree with you that this should probably be public. We would appreciate it certainly as an association if they actually had a website or if they had some single office that handled all this. I think that kind of transparency just makes sense. UCMJ, I know less about it and I think constitutionally that's probably a tougher sell in terms of trying civilians. It's been thrown out a couple of times in the past. And I think most DOD lawyers that I've talked to say UCMJ's a bad idea for contractors because it's really more of a code than it is a law. And it sort of applies less to civilians. And as I said, the Supreme Court has thrown it out in capital cases in the past. But I know there's been at least one or two UCMJ cases against contractors that have gone through. It's the DOD guidelines are essentially say use UCMJ as a last resort. And the one particular case that was quite well covered was a Canadian Iraqi translator working in Iraq. And he had been in a knife fight with another translator. So they confined him to quarters, but he escaped. They had to retrieve him from a nearby town. And then they're like, okay, well we have to if we're gonna incarcerate him, we have to charge him. And the question is, which law do we charge him under? So they figured, okay, let's go to local government because he's half Iraqi. And the local government said, we don't wanna touch this guy, he's your contractor, so you deal with it. So the military then went to the Department of Justice said we wanna try him under Mija. And the Department of Justice says, well Mija doesn't apply because he's an Iraqi. Well at least half of it. And that was enough for them to sort of back out of it. So the military ended up trying him and they gave him several months in prison. And I don't know if it was challenged or not. I'd be interested if somebody here knows it, but it did work. I don't think it's ideal. I don't think you're gonna be able to have perfect accountability in any of these places. And when I started working with this association, one place we were looking was Eastern Congo. We have contractors operating in Eastern Congo. There's no legal system there. Not even for the locals. And one idea we came up with is why not use say Tanzanian courts, which everybody recognizes legitimate, or South African, or Belgian courts. I mean it could be anything. But as long as the contractors know they're going to have a fair shake, I think it can work. Most of those convictions, as I understand it, are for fraud. Much easier to convict, much easier to set. I don't know of any conviction other than the one where he knifed another translator who was also working for the US government, that there's been a conviction for violence. There have been no convictions for violence on locals that I know of. And Moshe and I were looking about this six months ago and we couldn't find any record of it. You can Google it, you can't find it. I would think the press would probably have covered that if they had something like that. That's interesting. Hundreds of thousands of people rotating through, nobody's ever done anything bad. This is really a remarkable group of people. Or there's no accountability. I suspect it's the latter. Now, we argue about that. We also argue about the number of contractors. We say we've got accurate numbers, we don't. One of the reasons the Constitution enshrines the press as a protected entity is the founding fathers didn't trust government. This may surprise you, but from time to time the government gets its numbers really, really wrong. And other times they'll flat out lie to you. The safety check is the press. I don't know if you saw that whole series on the contractors running the convoys into Afghanistan. We don't know how many people they have. The media goes out and talks to locals and there are large convoys with battalions of troops protecting them, firing weapons in all directions. We're buying them over a million dollars worth of ammunition a month. How much of that goes to the Taliban and how much gets shot at the Taliban is a question. But in essence, we don't know. And the media's out there crawling over the problem and can't figure it out. We get a neat boxed report and somebody believes it. So, but that really gets at the wrong thing. This is all looking at the aspects of can we figure out efficiency? But in more time, efficiency is not important. Effectiveness is. And all the argument about efficiency detracts from the fact we should be looking at whether these people are effective in our strategic approach or not. And I think the more you study it, the more you come down on, again, you're back to the fundamental strategic problem in a counterinsurgency is legitimacy. Contractors are inherently illegitimate. A foreign contractor who is not subject to any form of punishment is illegitimate in the eyes of the population. And therefore, you make the government illegitimate. If you're in a competition for legitimacy, put yourself in the position of the Taliban propagandist. You couldn't make this stuff up. It's just too good. And so you can say, look, they brought in contractors. We're here risking our lives for no money to drive out the foreign invaders. They have brought in contractors. They won't even spill their own blood. They're trying to enforce a Northern Alliance government on you which doesn't care enough to send its own people but has to hire contractors. That's a huge win in a legitimacy argument in counterinsurgency. And so from a strategic level, we're striking directly at legitimacy in conflict. And you're right, conflict in various places. I think if the US government is involved with US forces, then we don't want armed contractors there. If they're not, there are big void areas where we're not getting involved and other nations want to hire contractors or certainly extraction companies have to hire contractors, that's a legitimate role. But it should not be tied to the US government. Just a couple of quick points that I could just follow up. On the convoys in Afghanistan, it's an interesting point and there's a quality aspect here. There's a program where we're supposed to hire Afghan companies to do a lot of this work and that makes a certain degree of sense but you also lose a lot of oversight, transparency and quality. On the effectiveness, I would say, effectiveness in wartime is absolutely essential but I don't see that it's so effective having your militaries guard the sewage plants. So if you want an effective military, let them focus on the core mission and these sorts of ancillary sorts of things can be done by the security contractors. But you're presenting an official argument. We either use the US military or we use US contractors. No, no, I would say use both. Contractors, why can't we use the US military and host nation military? For instance, in Iraq, we had the Facilities Protection Service which had we dedicated the effort to the FPS that we did to contractors, we could have had a legitimate government force. I was responsible all FPS for the Ministry of Defense which frankly was only about 1,000 people. But by assigning one Romanian officer and one former Iraqi NCO, we got them so I could drop in at various times. The guards would be there, they would know what they were doing. They didn't have any arms or equipment because we wouldn't buy them arms or equipment. This was 2004. So that program was killed as we poured money into contractors. That made no sense to me. Any other questions? Rick, would you like to wrap things up here? Oh, I'm sorry. One question here in the upper left. Where's our mic? There you go. Ray Dubois, CSIS. This has been a very wide ranging discussion and I wonder whether, I have a couple of thoughts. First of all, the issue of whether we go to war or execute regime change, as you both said, is real policy issues and we shouldn't freight those decisions on the back of it seems to me, armed contractors or unarmed contractors. To follow on David's question about an alternative or alternative path of inquiry, it seems to me that we run a risk if as TX has said, perhaps we should use soldiers more often than not. I wanna make a distinction between the nouns that Doug talked about, people, places and things. And let's talk about the people piece of this, which I think is the most problematic and the one that's created the most difficulty and challenges and bad outcomes. So the PSDs are personal security details. I'm concerned that we, if we were to train soldiers in uniform as PSDs, first of all, I don't believe there is an MOS for that in the military. Well, we do, yes, but it's very carefully circumscribed in CIS. It's within the CID and the army, et cetera. It's a very small, well-trained, very professional operation, similar to the diplomatic security service I might add. And I always question why they weren't putting their best and brightest in Iraq, in Kabul, in Baghdad. But were we to expand that, which is the implication, I think, of what you were going at, TX. Soldiers trained as PSDs, should they be? I am worried that it might smack of a little bit of a presidential guard kind of outcome, a military within a military, which bothers me a little bit. The other issue that I wanted to raise was, I was at a meeting last night with Refugees International. And we had a discussion around the NGOs. And the NGOs are all a little bit different in terms of to what extent they work with the military in conflict situations where security is important in order to execute a humanitarian mission or in a fragile or failing state, which is a conflict, maybe small C. The interesting discussion ensued about using, or the NGOs did not want soldiers, whether it was US military or host country military to provide their security because they wanted to remain the neutrality question was very important to them. And in that regard, then you only other alternative is to have something, some organization in civilian clothes, not in uniform, providing that kind of need. Now it's true, some NGOs absolutely flat out won't use of any kind, but certainly that is an issue that it would, at least in my mind, you have to ask, well, under those circumstances would, isn't an armed security contractor a benefit to execute the humanitarian mission where a US soldier, a host country national soldier is not a benefit? The cost amortization issue we could get into, but I think you've got some costs on either side of the equation and probably not a... I don't think it's pertinent to some of the more, what I call really thorny issues here and I get to focus on the people part as opposed to the other place and thing issue. I think you raised some great points and I know that State Department people were a bit concerned using military DOD, military to protect them because they're supposed to be on a civilian mission and the idea of having all these uniforms around them when they're moving around Baghdad and stuff, they found that in conflict with their mission. So they did prefer to use people in civilian clothes. I think your point about NGOs is also a good one. Now most non-governmental organizations will not use security of any kind. They try to develop these sorts of relationships where they get their security essentially from the population and more power to them. But if you have a reasonably large organization and especially in places like Haiti or something, you're gonna have warehouses with food, with equipment, that has to be protected. And no, it doesn't make any sense to use military to do it and yes, that would be probably a violation of their principles. It makes sense to use security, much lower level, much lightly armed personnel and under strict rules under how they can use the force. For these sorts of things and you see it in the field all the time, yeah, I think this is a great point. One thing that I do find frustrating personally is that we've had a lot of NGOs weigh in on our own code of conduct that we have for our association and they've also been helping on the international code of conduct. But you don't often see that trickle down to the field that those kinds of policies that they're helping to develop at the higher level doesn't seem to reach the policies in the field. And so when they hire their own security, it's often thugs are us or whoever the local warlord provides and I don't think that's particularly beneficial. So one interesting plug is an outfit called HPN, Humanitarian Protection Policy Network, I think. They just came out with their latest version of sort of guidelines for operating in contingency operations. And it actually has a section there on using armed security, whether you should use armed security or not. And then a section on if you're going to hire private security, these are the things you need to pay attention to. And it's just really good, common sense stuff. I mean, there are many cases when things get too dangerous and NGOs should pull out. But there are times that some NGOs will find it worthwhile to hire private security and it gives you some good guidelines on how you should do it so that you don't cause problems by hiring them. So, yes. You asked a wide range of questions, starting with the policy decision. No, I do not think the presence of contractors had obviously no impact on going into Afghanistan. Little on going into Iraq other than the failure to mobilize large numbers of logistics forces to move. Different thing in armed contractors, but also very important. Would there have been a more serious discussion if we had a large scale mobilization? That's a little bit of a problem because we had a vision for Iraq and there's a fine line between vision and elucination. We apparently crossed that line and once you've crossed into elucination, there's no logic to the argument. So, yeah, but what it does is it makes the decision to stay much easier. And so we are going to stay, I mean, from the beginning of November to today, we've gone from 2011 to 2014 in Iraq with no discussions if there's no big deal. We're gonna spend a half trillion dollars there. We're gonna lose 2000 American military, have another 10,000 to 12,000 wounded badly and another 10,000 wounded less seriously. And God knows how many contractors, because we don't know. We absolutely do not know. So it makes it much easier to stay. That's a bad policy precedent to make it easy to stay in a war. Second thing, the question on NGOs. NGOs have a vision of themselves as totally neutral. But in an insurgency, you are, by definition, if you're providing government services to the inside the insurgent zone, you're on the insurgent side. Because again, this is a competition for legitimacy of governments, for hope for the future. If you're providing hope for that future and you're doing it in an area of the insurgent controls, you're working for the insurgent. If you're doing it in an area of the government controls, you're working for the government. So for us to accept that the NGO position at Oh No, We're Neutral is just insane. You are not neutral in an insurgency. In an area where there's not a conflict, not the US government involved, then they're gonna hire locals and they will hire guys like the technicals in Somalia. And as soon as we showed up, we got those guys under control, disarmed, and put very, very strict controls on them. Why do we have strict controls on them? Because we are there and sufficient numbers we keep an eye on. So I think NGOs, this is a whole discussion about NGO presence and conflict zones and whether they're neutral or not. Do you, is there a danger of creating a military within a military if you create personal security details? Yeah, but we've got that with force reconnaissance, we've got that with special forces, we've got that with SEALs, we've got that with fighter pilots. All of these are communities that have an identity and believe in themselves. We are going to have to put those people out there. Whether they are US government employees or contractors is the only question. In order to make them work at state, they've instigated a rigorous training program, a certification program, and then a state security officer travels everywhere they go. Why don't we just make them work for the government? That's a problem because it's a personnel problem within the government, as you've noticed, you've had no luck changing that. But in the past when we've gone to war and we've actually thought it was a serious war and this was serious business, we've been willing to change that. We direct commission people to Lieutenant Colonel, not because we don't think you can do the job, he's not a Lieutenant Colonel, but because we want to control his action, be responsible for him. Your point about we've got accountability and we've got a strict set of rules, yeah, but there's no teeth. I mean, if in all this time we haven't convicted anybody of violence on an Iraqi. Actually, I was thinking about that and there have been convictions under local law, which is contractors do operate under local law in most cases. Okay, but as a general rule, there have been very little and I know of none in Afghanistan other than at Goofball and went and ran his own prison for a while, but God knows where he came from. Also, I do want to say on the terms of contractors, Kilburn injured, if they're working for the US government under DBA, those numbers are actually reported to the Department of Labor. Now, I think as you probably know, getting the numbers out of the Department of Labor ain't easy. It takes a crowbar and a Freedom of Information Act to do it. They post it online. Do they go? They didn't use it. They post it online for all insurance claims. The only way it's reported is via insurance. The total numbers, but they don't break them down, I think. That's where you have to go for the FOIA. Right. Right, so the details are where the FOIA will come in. But yeah, in any case, yeah. But they don't report foreign. I give you a Filipino. Oh, no, they do. They do. Yes, they do. If I'm a subcontractor of a subcontractor of a subcontractor. You're still under DBA and you're still reported. Trust me. One other point I'd like to make is the whole term technical, which was used in Somalia, apparently, came from the line item for the UN. Which was technical assistance, yeah. And they became known as the... Somalis thought it was pretty funny because the actual technical assistance was armed. Security. I noticed that we really only have time for one more question. When the State Department came into the conversation, Ambassador Courtney requested the opportunity for the final question. So we'll move to him and then we'll do our wrap up. Thank you, David. As you know in foreign countries, the chief admission of the ambassador has unified control over US government activities unless a unified commander or combatant commander is operating in the country. So for example, in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is not a unity of US operations if you are command and control. The combatant commander controls certain things. The ambassador controls certain things. Let's take two cases and I'd be interested in your perceptions of where the dividing line between the military and the State Department should be. Let's take a country in South America that produces a lot of drugs. So you have an ambassador and the United States government may have, through the State Department, a program to do counter drug spraying. And that might include suppression of ground fire against the spraying aircraft, for example. That's all done through the State Department under the chief admission authority. Suppose the situation, security situation in that country deteriorates and Southcom goes in to do some operation. Under your concept, would all of the counter drug spraying, the personal security details for embassy people, all then suddenly become a military function or would the State Department continue its function and the unified commander just focus on its own. Let's take another example, South Sudan. It is likely that in South Sudan, the United States is going to be carrying out operations under the State Department control, under the control of the ambassador. There will be NGOs working for USAID, State Department, perhaps others as well. A number of them are going to need protective capabilities of one sort or another, both fixed and mobile capabilities. Those will be under the State Department control under the ambassador. But suppose the situation deteriorates and AFRICOM goes in to provide some combat role, then do all the private security operations that were under State Department control, do they suddenly go to AFRICOM or do you keep them under the State Department with a division of authority of a combatant commander and the ambassador having different authorities? If you could limit the conflict to a single country, I'm a big proponent of the country team approach where the ambassador's in charge and the military works for him. Interesting enough in history, when we tried this, the ambassadors always said, ooh, don't want to do it, not interested. It's not what we trained to do. Even in Vietnam, when we were trying to do this and they took Maxwell Taylor, a four star general and made me ambassador specifically to do this, the culture of State Department was strong enough, State was never really willing to run the thing. We need a unified entity. That is something we haven't worked out. We don't have a colonial office to run this because we're essentially trying to run pieces of an empire without an empire structure with a republic structure. I don't want to change the structure. I like the republic structure. I'd rather have the inefficiency overseas. The real problem becomes when you're in a place like Afghanistan and the problem spans borders. You have stovepipes in state that lead into each country but the problem spans the border. So how do you deal with that? Well, we, we, we run would think the combatant command would go across those borders, but we've structured the NATO command ice after only deal inside Afghanistan. So the heart of the problem is on the border region and we're dealing with is that these are two totally different entities that barely touch each other. The AFPAC experiment with a master whole brick, you can't break the iron pipes back here. If we are going to continue to go out and fix the world then we better do some serious thought about how we do that. This goes way beyond contractors and way beyond who works for who but a coherent approach and a deep understanding of what we're trying to do. We have, we're a little bit misanical that we'll go out and fix the world. I.e. we're gonna bring Afghanistan, the cities in Afghanistan roughly about where Europe was in the 14th century. Feudal with the first emergence of cities which creates an alternative power center to the feudal power center. So early 14th century. The countryside is really about 8th century Europe. We've designed a government that is late 19th century and the most centralized version of that anywhere in the world outside of North Korea. What could possibly go wrong with this approach? And that's the problem is we don't have a government that is in any way good at doing this overseas. And if we're gonna continue to do this or try to do this, then we need to build an entity that allows these entities to come together, work together on a regional basis rather than a country by country stove pipes. That may not be possible. Obviously the question wasn't really addressed at me but it brings up the interesting point of how you do a civil military operation and who's in charge and how that's run. And my own academic background, I did my master's thesis looking at Vietnam in the Cords program. And I don't think a lot of people understand the Cords program. It was very successful. As was pointed out many times, Saigon used to be bigger than Bangkok. It was a thriving city and until 1975 it was actually a very successful reconstruction program but it was a joint civilian and military program initially run by a wonderful Ambassador Comer whose nickname, I'm not making this up, is Blowtorch. But he killed everybody together. It was interesting too because of the risk that was involved. It was civilians and soldiers and Marines going out in small numbers and living in the villages and in the provinces and sometimes getting killed. And that was part of it. It was part of the US policy we're going to go, we're going to take these risks and we're going to make this happen. And it was maybe something we need to think about today. You do have to take risks. And TX has made the point and one of my favorite quotes was when he was talking about the bubble that was protecting Ambassador Bremmer in Iraq and how that bubble was undermining the larger mission. He said, well, maybe you don't need such a large bubble and he says, there's more ambassadors where Bremmer came from. Tough thing to say, but it's the reality that if you're going to do these missions, you can't do them perfectly safe. It is a dangerous environment. And it's dangerous for the military. It's dangerous for the civilians, but you can't do this all military. You can't do it all civilian. You gotta have the mix and how are you gonna coordinate it? I hope you have better ideas than I have, so. Well, with that, I would note that over the course of the last hour and a half, in some ways we've actually raised more questions than we've resolved. When you're in a think tank, that's a very good outcome because we like to think that we will continue to provide some opportunity to wrestle with some of these questions. And so I wanna thank all of you here in the room for your attendance this morning. I wanna thank those of you on the web for your engagement and participation with us today. We'll be back to you with subsequent events shortly. We are tackling the question of how do you cost properly a government employee and how do you cost properly a contractor, not only for comparison purposes, is one more expensive than the other, but actually for knowing what the real implications of your decisions are when you make them because there are cost implications regardless of whether it's comparative or not. We also have an event at one o'clock next Wednesday. It'll be on the web as well, where we look in depth at defense contracting, both for products and research and development, as well as for services, because a lot of these issues do come up again with respect to how do we spend our money and what do we get for it. So I look forward to engaging with you on those as well. Colonel Ronan, would you like to wrap it up here and we'll be on our way? Yeah, thanks, David. Just two quick things to wrap it up. First of all, I'm sure everybody waits with bated breath concerning the positions on the question. Before the debate, eight people agreed that the benefits of armed contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan outweighed the cost benefits. Six disagreed and seven were undecided. After the rhetorical skills of our two speakers, eight people agreed, seven people disagreed, and five people were undecided, so one person didn't vote in the post-balance. So very, very little change. Just to close up, I wanna reiterate and reinforce David's thanks to everybody for participating, especially to the CSIS staff for putting together the event, especially Christina Obesny in the back for managing and getting everything together, and particularly to our two participants for lending their expertise if we could all give them a round of applause. Thank you.