Private security and democracy: Lessons from the US in Iraq

Security Studies

Volumn 19, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 230-265

  Avant, Deborah ^a   Sigelman, Lee ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77953205043     PISSN: 09636412     EISSN: 15561852     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09636412.2010.480906     Document Type: Article

References (227)

1. Adam Przeworski, A. M. E. Alvarez, J. A. Cheibub, and F. Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
2. David Lake and Mathew Baum, "The Invisible Hand of Democracy: Political Control and the Provision of Public Services," Comparative Political Studies 34, no. 6 (April 2001): 587-621. 230
3. Joseph Paul Vasquez III, "Shouldering the Soldiering: Democracy, Conscription and Military Casualties," Journal of Conflict Resolution 46, no. 6 (December 2005).
4. Michael Doyle, "Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 12, no.3 (Summer 1983).
5. Jack Levy, "Domestic Politics and War," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18 (Spring 1988): 653-73
6. Jack Snyder, "One World, Rival Theories," Foreign Policy (November/December 2004).
7. This assumption is prominent in international relations theorizing in general but is particularly so in the literature on the international behavior of democracies. It is explicit in Immanuel Kant, "Eternal Peace," in The Philosophy of Kant, ed. Carl J. Friedrich (New York: The Modern Library, 1949).
8. Anthony Giddens, The Nation State and Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
9. Peter Singer, Corporate Warriors: the Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003
10. Deborah Avant, The Market for Force: the Consequences of Privatizing Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
11. Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971).
12. Ronald Krebs, "In the Shadow of War: The Effects of Conflict on Liberal Democracy," International Organization 63, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 177-210
13. Charles Lipson, Reliable Partners: How Democracies Have Made a Separate Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
14. Peter Singer, "Corporate Warriors: the Rise of the Privatized Military Industry and Its Ramifications for International Security," International Security 26, no. 3 (Winter 2000/2001)
15. Singer, Corporate Warriors
16. Avant The Market for Force.
17. There is a debate over how to characterize these forces. Some distinguish between private military companies (PMCs) and private security companies (PSCs). This distinction is hard to maintain in practice given the large gray area of services that fit uneasily in one or the other category and the many companies that provide services on both sides of the military/security divide. Others come up with new acronyms altogether such as privatized military forces (PMFs), use PMC or PSC to refer to the entire range of services, or use the less-defined term-contractor. To avoid confusion, it is increasingly common to refer to these companies as private military and security companies (PMSC) so we adopt this term to refer to companies that, under contract, perform services that might otherwise be provided by military forces.
18. Congressional Budget Office (CBO), "Contractor Support of U.S. Operations in Iraq," (Washington, DC: August 2008), available at http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/96xx/doc9688/08-12-IraqContractors.pdf.
19. Commission on Wartime Contracting (CWC), "At What Cost? Contingency Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan: Interim Report to Congress," (June 2009), available at http://www.wartimecontracting.gov/docs/CWC_Interim_Report_At_What_Cost_06-10-09.pdf
20. Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (OSD ACQ), "Contractor Support of U.S. Operations in USCENTCOM AOR, Iraq and Afghanistan," Department of Defense Instruction (DoDI), 3020.50, 22 July 2009, available at http://www.acq.osd.mil/log/PS/p_vault/5A_august_3rd_qtr_2009.doc
21. CWC, "At What Cost."
22. CBO, "Contractor Support of US Operations in Iraq."
23. General Charles S. Mahan Jr., then the Army's top logistics officer, was referenced complaining of troops going without adequate support due to problems deploying contractors in a draft of what became Gregory Fontenot, E. J. Degen, and David Tohn, On Point: the US Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, Office of the Chief of Staff U.S. Army (Fort Leavenworth: Combat Institute Press, 2004).
24. In the final version of the document, however, the discussion of the difficulty with logistics did not mention contractors. General Mahan's complaints were also reported by Anthony Bianco and Stephanie Anderson Forest, "Outsourcing War," Business Week, 15 September 2003
25. David Wood, "Some of Army's Civilian Contractors are No-Shows in Iraq," Newhouse News Service, 31 July 2003.
26. CBO, "Contractor Support of U.S. Operations in Iraq."
27. Dana Priest, "Private Guards Repel Attack on U.S. Headquarters," Washington Post, 6 April 2004.
28. Steve Fainaru, Big Boy Rules: America's Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2008).
29. Dahl, Polyarchy
30. Christian Welzel and Amy Alexander, "Rethinking Democracy: How to Capture Democracy's Empowering Nature," paper presented at the annual meeting of the MPSA Annual National Conference, Palmer House Hotel, Hilton, Chicago, IL, 3 April 2008.
31. Przeworski L. et al., Democracy and Development
32. Lake and Baum, "The Invisible Hand of Democracy."
33. Arthur Arblaster, Democracy (London: Open University Press, 2002)
34. David Held, Models of Democracy (London: Polity Press, 2006)
35. Michael Ross, "Is Democracy Good for the Poor?" American Journal of Political Science 50, no. 4 (October 2006): 860-74.
36. Christopher Layne, "Kant or Cant: the Myth of the Democratic Peace," International Security 19, no. 2 (Autumn 1994): 5-49
37. Michael Desch, "Democracy and Victory: Why Regime Type Hardly Matters," International Security 27, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 5-47. Those who argue that democratic processes act as hurdles should be interested in the changes we describe even though they may come to different normative conclusions about their importance.
38. Kenneth Benoit, "Democracies Really are More Pacific (In General): Reexamining Regime Type and War Involvement," Journal of Conflict Resolution 40, no. 4 (1996): 636-57.
39. Doyle, "Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs"
40. Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett, "Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace," American Political Science Review 87, no. 3 (September 1993).
41. Maoz L. and Russett L., "Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace," 624-38. For a focus on liberal norms
42. Doyle, "Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs."
43. For a focus on institutions see Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, and James D.Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003)
44. Brett Ashley Leeds, "Domestic Political Institutions, Credible Commitments and International Cooperation," American Journal of Political Science 43, no. 4 (October 1999): 979-1002
45. Lipson, Reliable Partners.
46. David Lake, "Powerful Pacifists: Democratic States and War," American Political Science Review 86, no. 1, (March 1992): 24-37
47. Dan Reiter and Alan Stam, "Democracy, War Initiation and Victory," American Political Science Review 92, no. 2 (June 1998): 377-89.
48. Dahl, Polyarchy
49. Gordon Henderson, "The Public and the Peace: The Consequences for Citizenship of the Democratic Peace Literature," International Studies Review 8, no. 2 (June 2006): 199-224.
50. Held, Models of Democracy
51. Doyle, "Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs"
52. Lipson, Reliable Partners.
53. Dahl, Polyarchy
54. Kant, Perpetual Peace
55. Henderson, "The Public and the Peace."
56. Doyle, "Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affair" draws up his own scores, most others rely on Polity IV Project, available at http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm, or Freedom House, available at http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=15, scores.
57. See, for instance, David Spiro, "The Insignificance of the Liberal Peace," International Security 19, no. 2 (Autumn 1994): 50-86
58. Henry Farber and Joanne Gowa, "Polities and Peace," International Security 20, no. 2 (Autumn 1995)
59. Ido Oren, "The Subjectivity of the 'Democratic' Peace: Changing
60. U.S. Perceptions of Imperial Germany," International Security 20, no. 2 (Autumn 1995).
61. Dahl, Polyarchy
62. Krebs, "In the Shadow of War."
63. John Owen, "How Liberalism Produced the Democratic Peace," International Security 19, no. 2 (Autumn 1994)
64. Ronald Krebs, "International Conflict and the Constitutional Balance: The Liberal Legacy of Imperial Wars," in In War's Wake, eds., Elizabeth Kier and Ronald Krebs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2010).
65. It is more common to find attention to democratic qualities in the literature on comparative politics-though what qualities authors examine vary. See, for instance, Arendt Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-six Countries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999)
66. Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
67. Farber and Gowa "Politics and Peace"
68. Oren, "the Subjectivity of the Democratic Peace."
69. For arguments that Machiavelli's writings reflect a commitment to a republican form of democracy, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Political Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)
70. John P. McCormick, "Machiavellian Democracy: Controlling Elites with Ferocious Populism," American Political Science Review 95, no. 2 (June 2001): 297-313.
71. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses, with an introduction by Max Lerner (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 53
72. Ibid., 226
73. Felix Gilbert, "Machiavelli: The Renaissance of the Art of War," in The Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 24.
74. Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses, 503
75. James Burk, "Theories of Democratic Civil Military Relations," Armed Forces and Society 29, no. 1 (Fall 2002).
76. Kant, of course, showed disdain for pure majoritarian democracies in favor of republics that guaranteed individual rights and freedoms through a separation of executive and legislative powers. His notion of republican government, though, is similar to our conception of democracy today.
77. Kant, Perpetual Peace, 432.
78. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Vintage, 1945), 228.
79. Even though he agreed with Machiavelli on the preferred mode of mobilization, his reasoning reflects a very different logic. Machiavelli saw military service as instilling a public spirit in the populace, while de Tocqueville saw the same service as ensuring that the military would reflect civilian culture.
80. Eliot Cohen, Citizens and Soldiers: The Dilemmas of Military Service (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).
81. Jean Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, trans. Judith R. Masters (1762; New York: St. Martin's, 1978).
82. Stanislav Andreski, Military Organization and Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954)
83. Cohen, Citizens and Soldiers
84. Giddens, The Nation State and Violence
85. Charles Tilly, ed. Coercion, Capital and European States (Cambridge: Basil Blackwood, 1990)
86. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
87. Giddens, The Nation State and Violence
88. Burk, "Theories of Democratic Civil-Military Relations."
89. Andreski, Military Organization and Society.
90. Giddens, The Nation State and Violence, 253.
91. As Margaret Levi has demonstrated, citizens are more likely to comply with conscription policies that are seen as fair. See Margaret Levi, Consent, Dissent and Patriotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
92. Henderson, "The Public and the Peace." None of this suggests that conscription causes democracy. There are many examples of nondemocracies with conscription. But among states committed to democracy, obligatory military service should strengthen the incentives for the government to attend to the demands of its citizenry in decisions about whether to use force.
93. Cohen claims that small, peripheral wars, which are not crucial to a country's survival, incite greater domestic protest when they are met with a conscript army. In the experience of Great Britain and the United States, he says, "an unfettered press and a powerful and independent legislature have publicized and criticized the prosecution of far flung military commitments." Cohen, Citizens and Soldiers.
94. This, along with the constraints of public opinion led both countries to be more effective with professional armies than conscript armies in these kinds of wars. Cohen suggests that the United States in the Philippines was more successful given that its force of volunteers in that war "precluded some of the violent domestic protest that accompanied the Vietnam War by avoiding any kind of conscription." Cohen, Citizens and Soldiers, 97. Though Cohen's larger point is critical of democratic processes and his suggestion is that the imperatives of small wars require avoiding them by using professional forces-the logic of his argument supports the claim that conscript armies are more sensitive to democratic processes. Whether a volunteer army in fact leads to less critique in today's world is subject to debate. In Somalia, coverage of volunteers dying led to a significant critique of U.S. policy
95. Deborah Avant, "The Implications of Marketized Security for IR Theory: the Democratic Peace, Late State Building and the Nature and Frequency of Conflict," Perspectives on Politics 4, no. 3 (September 2006)
96. Robert Mandel, Armies Without States: the Privatization of Security (Boulder: Lynne Reinner, 2002)
97. Singer, Corporate Warriors
98. Ken Silverstein, Private Warriors (New York: Verso, 2000)
99. Allison Stanger and Mark Williams, "Private Military Corporations: Benefits and Costs of Outsourcing Security," Yale Law Journal of International Affairs (Fall/Winter 2006).
100. Bernard Finel and Kristin Lord, "The Surprising Logic of Transparency," International Studies Quarterly 43, no. 2 (June 1999): 315-39. See 316.
101. See for instance, Freedom House, available at http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=16, or Transparency International, available at http://www.transparency.org/policy research/surveysindices/cpi/2007.
102. Finel L. and Lord L, "The Surprising Logic of Transparency."
103. See U.S. Department of Defense website, available at http://www.defenselink.mil/.
104. Government Accountability Office (GAO), report to Congress, "Rebuilding Iraq: Actions Needed to Improve Use of Private Security Providers," (GAO-05-737), July 2005.
105. The Department of Defense is now required to keep regular census numbers of contract employees in Iraq but that information is not publicized. See Department of Defense Instruction (DoDI), no. 3020.41, "Contractor Personnel Authorized to Accompany the U.S. Armed Forces," 3 October 2005, Section 4.5. and 6.2.6.
106. Erik Eckholm, "Now You See It: An Audit of KBR," New York Times, 20 March 2005.
107. The Los Angeles Times requested access to the data on reports of violent incidents by contractors but received only a heavily redacted version of the data that omitted the names of the security team members as well as the names of armed forces members and government employees. The newspaper filed suit in November 2005 but was unable to get access to the information. See David G. Savage, "U.S. Can Withhold Security Firm Data," Los Angeles Times, 27 July 2006, for one of many similar stories.
108. See information about the DoD Press Office at http://www.defenselink.mil/news/dodnews.aspx.
109. Deborah Avant's conversations with Steve Farenau of the Washington Post
110. T. Christian Miller of the Los Angeles Times
111. Renae Mearle of the Washington Post.
112. Roxanne Tiron, "Contracting Faulted in Abu Ghraib Abuse," The Hill, 28 September 2005, available at http://thehill.com/business-lobby/contracting-faulted-in-abu-ghraib-abuse-2005-09-28.html.
113. While contract interrogators are no longer permitted and this particular issue is not likely to reoccur, the use of umbrella contracts remains common.
114. See CACI website at http://www.caci.com/webapp/Apps/JobSurvey.aspx.
115. These data were amassed by running Lexis-Nexis searches and then reading each article to ensure its coverage of military, PMSCs, or both. We then created archives of the text of all articles counted.
116. Renae Merle, "Census Counts 100,000 Contractors in Iraq," Washington Post, 5 December 2006
117. GAO, "Contingency Contracting: DOD, State and USAID Contracts and Contracting Personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan," (GAO 09-19), October 2008
118. CBO, "Contractor Support of U.S. Operations in Iraq."
119. Given that many who work for the U.S. government are third country nationals who may have difficulty filing these claims, most agree that the number of actual contractor deaths is undercounted. See Steven L. Schooner, "Why Contractor Fatalities Matter," Parameters 38, no. 3 (Autumn 2008): 78-91.
120. Avant, Market for Force, 124-25.
121. Schooner L., "Why Contractor Fatalities Matter."
122. Julian Barnes, "U.S. to Boost Combat Force in Afghanistan," Los Angeles Times, 2 September 2009.
123. Ken Silverstein, "Privatizing War: How Affairs of State are Outsourced to Corporations Beyond Public Control," The Nation, 28 July 1997.
124. Harold Koh, The National Security Constitution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990)
125. James M. Lindsay, Congress and the Politics of U.S. Foreign Policy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1994).
126. See Koh, The National Security Constitution
127. Lindsay, Congress and the Politics of U.S. Foreign Policy.
128. Even scholars who see a greater role for the court in foreign policy overall still agree that it is likely to defer to the executive on issues surrounding war powers. See Kimi Lynn King and James Meernik, "The Supreme Court and the Powers of the Executive: the Adjudication of Foreign Policy," Political Research Quarterly 52, no. 4 (December 1999): 801-24.
129. Paul Hammond, Organizing for Defense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961)
130. Samuel Huntington, The Common Defense (New York: Colombia University Press, 1961)
131. Deborah Avant, Political Institutions and Military Change: Lessons from Peripheral Wars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994)
132. Mark Brandon, "War and the American Constitutional Order," Vanderbilt Law Review 56 (2003):1,860
133. Jon D. Michaels, "Beyond Accountability: the Constitutional, Democratic, and Strategic Problems with Privatizing War," Washington University Law Quarterly 82 (2005): 1,001.
134. Michaels, "Beyond Accountability"
135. Avant, Political Institutions and Military Change
136. Lindsay, Congress and the Politics of U.S. National Security Policy.
137. Terry Moe, "The Politics of Structural Choice: Toward a Theory of Public Bureaucracy," in Organizational Theory: From Chester Barnard to the Present and Beyond (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
138. Michaels, "Beyond Accountability"; and David Auerswald and Peter Cowhey, "Ballotbox Diplomacy: The War Powers Resolution and the Use of Force," International Studies Quarterly 41 (September 1997): 505-28.
139. Ike Skelton, letter to Donald Rumsfeld, 2 April 2004, available at: http://www.house.gov/skelton/4-2-04_Skelton_letter_to_Rumsfeld_re_contractors.pdf
140. Robert Schlesinger, "The Imperial Pentagon," Salon.com, 20 May 2004, available at http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2004/05/20/secrets/print. html.
141. Lora Lumpe, "U.S. Foreign Military Training: Global Reach, Global Power, and Oversight Issues," Foreign Policy In Focus, Special Report, May 2002.
142. Congress has complained in its legislative drafts. See Stop Outsourcing Security Act of 2007, HR 4102,110th Cong., 1st sess., section 2, paragraph 6.
143. Prison interrogators at Abu Ghraib were hired through a Department of Interior contract. See Major General Antonio M. Taguba, "Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade," report to U.S. Central Command, March 2004
144. Major General George R Fay and Lieutenant General Anthony R. Jones, Investigation of the Abu Ghraib Detention Facility and 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, AR 15-6, August 2004
145. Steven L. Schooner, "Contractor Atrocities at Abu Ghraib: Compromised Accountability in a Streamlined, Outsourced Government," Stanford Law and Policy Review 16, no. 2 (2005): 549.
146. This is a common feature of contracting in general. See John Donahue, The Privatization Decision: Public Ends, Private Means (New York: Basic Books, 1989)
147. Daniel Guttman and Barry Willner, The Shadow Government (New York: Pantheon, 1976).
148. GAO staff member, interview by Deborah Avant, May 2002.
149. Michaels, "Beyond Accountability" cites Swain versus United States, 28 Ct. Cl. 173, 221 (1893) "Congress may increase the Army, or reduce the Army, or abolish it altogether...," 1,054.
150. It is likely that there were more than twenty thousand in Iraq in May 2004. The twenty thousand number was estimated by onald Rumsfeld in discussion paper responding to a congressional inquiry. Donald Rumsfeld, letter to Ike Skelton, ranking Minority Member, Committee on Armed Services, U.S. House of Representatives from Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, attachment "Discussion Paper on Private Security Companies Operating in Iraq," May 2004, 4. Those following private security matters at the time were dubious about that figure. Analyst estimates ranged from forty thousand to sixty thousand though one former member of the CPA claimed that no one really knew how many private security personnel were in the country. CPA official, interview by Deborah Avant, March 2004. Even assuming the sixty thousand figure was correct in May 2004, there was a surge that more than doubled the number of contractors in response to the insurgency.
151. As specified in the International Transfer of Arms Regulations (ITAR) of the Arms Control Export Act, contracts for the export of military services must be licensed by the State Department's Office of Defense Trade Controls, available at http://www.pmddtc.state.gov/regulations laws/itar official.html.
152. Avant, Market for Force.
153. Deborah Avant, "Are the Reluctant Warriors Out of Control?" Security Studies 6, no. 2 (Winter 1996/1997).
154. See DoDI Number 3020.41, "Contractor Personnel Authorized to Accompany the U.S. Armed Forces." The Synchronized Pre-deployment Operation Tracker (SPOT) database now implements this requirement. Although problems remain (see GAO, "Contingency Contracting," 2008 and 2009), this is a vast improve-ment on the early years of the wars. See GAO, "Contingency Contracting: DOD, State, USAID are taking actions to track contracts and contractor personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan," (GAO-09-538T), testimony to Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Committee on Armed Services, United States House of Representatives, 1 April 2009.
155. See the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007 (P.L. 109-364), Section 552. Previously this extension only occurred in instances of declared war.
156. See Jennifer K. Elsea and Nina M. Serafino, "Private Security Contractors in Iraq: Background, Legal Status and Other Issues," Congressional Research Service Report to Congress (RL 32419), updated 11 July 2007, 20-24.
157. See "Transparency and Accountability in Military and Security Contracting Act of 2007," S 674, 110th Cong., 1st sess.; "National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2008," S 1547, 110th Cong., 1st sess.
158. "Transparency and Accountability in Military and Security Contracting Act of 2007," HR 369, 110th Cong., 1st sess.
159. "Iraq Contracting Fraud Review Act of 2007," HR 528, 110th Cong., 1st sess.
160. "New Direction for Iraq Act of 2007," HR 663, 110th Cong., 1st sess.
161. "Iraq and Afghanistan Contractor Sunshine Act," HR 897, 110th Cong., 1st sess.
162. "Iraq Reconstruction Improvement Act of 2007," HR 1581, 110th Cong., 1st sess.
163. "National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2008," HR 1585, 110th Cong., 1st sess.
164. "MEJA Expansion and Enforcement Act of 2007," HR 2740, 110th Cong., 1st sess.
165. "Providing for Operation Iraqi Freedom Cost Accountability," HR 97, 110th Cong., 1st sess.
166. See summaries of each in Elsea and Serafino, "Private Security Contractors in Iraq."
167. See "National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2009," S 3001, 110th Cong., 2nd sess.
168. "Contractor Personnel Authorized to Accompany the U.S. Armed Forces," DoDI 3020.41, October 2005
169. "National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2010," HR 2647, 111th Cong., 1st sess.
170. "National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2005," HR 4200, 108th Cong., 2nd sess.
171. See "National Defense Authorization Act for FY 07," HR 5122, 109th Cong., 2nd sess. Thus far the constitutionality of prosecuting civilians under the UCMJ has not been upheld by the Supreme Court. See Reid v. Covert, 345 US 1 (1957).
172. Statement at the Joint Hearing on Management and Oversight of Contingency Contracting in Hostile Zones, Federal News Service, 24 January 2008.
173. Del Quentin Wilbur and Karen DeYoung, "Justice Department Moves Toward Charges Against Contractors in Iraq Shooting," Washington Post, 17 August 2008.
174. Matt Apuzzo, "Judge Slams DOJ Prosecutors, Dismisses Blackwater Charges," Associated Press, 4 January 2010.
175. One might argue that checks could come within the executive branch rather than from the legislative-perhaps in competition between bureaucratic agencies. We look only at checks and balances among the branches of government here, but encourage others to examine how the use of contractors matter for checks and balances within the executive branch.
176. Eugene Gholz and Harvey M. Sapolsky, "Restructuring the U.S. Defense Industry," International Security 24, no. 3 (Winter 1999/2000): 5-51.
177. The Gansler Report outlines some options. See Jacques Gansler et al., Report of the Commission on Army Acquisition and Program Management in Expeditionary Operations, Urgent Reform Required: Army Expeditionary Contracting, 31October 2007. The final report of the Commission on Wartime Contracting is likely to yield others.
178. John Mueller, War, Presidents and Public Opinion (New York: Wiley, 1973)
179. Benoit, "Democracies Really Are More Pacific"
180. Scott Sigmond Gartner and Gary Segura, "War, Casualties and Public Opinion," Journal of Conflict Resolution 42, no. 3 (June 1998)
181. Cohen, Citizens and Soldiers.
182. Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E.Trainer, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon, 2006).
183. Kant, "Eternal Peace"
184. Lipson, Reliable Partners.
185. See http://www.propublica.org/series/disposable-army. These numbers are from the Department of Labor and are estimates based on insurance claims. The Defense Base Act (passed in 1941) requires that personnel working overseas for the U.S. government on a military base or for national security purposes be issued life insurance and other benefits.
186. See http://www.defensebaseact.com/. By requesting information on claims made through Defense Base Act insurance, T. Christian Miller of ProPublica has estimated the human costs paid by contractor personnel.
187. See also T. Christian Miller, "Civilian Contractor Toll in Iraq and Afghanistan ignored by Defense Department," ProPublica, 9 October 2009, available at http://www.propublica.org/feature/civilian-contractor-toll-in-iraq-and-afghanistan-ignored-by-pentagon-1009.
188. Schooner, "Why Contractor Fatalities Matter."
189. Stanger and Williams, "Private Military Corporations."
190. John Oneal and Anna Bryan, "The Rally 'Round the Flag's' Effect on US Foreign Policy Crises 1950-1985," Political Behavior 17, no. 4 (December 1995)
191. Richard Hermann, Phil Tetlock, and P. Visser, "Mass Public Decisions on Going to War: A Cognitive-Interactionist Framework," American Political Science Review 93, no. 2 (June 1999): 553-574.
192. Arthus Lupia, Mathew McCubbins, and Samuel Popkin, Elements of Reason: Cognition, Choice and the Bounds of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
193. Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, ed., Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
194. The survey experiment was made possible by Time-Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences, whose support we gratefully acknowledge
195. see http://www.experimentcentral.org. The stories, questionnaires, and data are available from the authors.
196. Because it appears that the story of "Americans" and "soldiers" dying elicited similar responses, as did the two stories of contractors dying, we grouped our subjects accordingly to create two groups for analysis. The resulting table yields a chi-square value of 109.49 (p <.001) and suggests that the respondents did view the motivations of contractors as distinctive.
197. Deborah Avant and Lee Sigelman employed a consultant who recruited the respondents and then conducted and recorded the interviews (Avant was present to observe the process) according to their script. The stories and interview scripts are available from the authors.
198. Interviewee 1.
199. Interviewee 7.
200. Christopher Gelpi and John Mueller, "The Cost of War," Foreign Affairs 85, no. 1 (January/ February 2006).
201. Chaim Kaufmann, "Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas," International Security 29, no. 1 (Summer 2004): 5-48
202. See also Jack Snyder and Karen Ballentine, "Nationalism and the Marketplace of Ideas," International Security 21, no. 2 (Autumn 1996): 5-40.
203. Jane Kellett Kramer, "Militarized Patriotism: Why the US Marketplace of Ideas Failed Before the Iraq War," Security Studies 16, no. 3 (July-September 2007): 489-524.
204. A. Trevor Thrall, "A Bear in the Woods: Threat Framing and the Marketplace of Values," Security Studies 16, no. 3 (July-September 2007): 452-499.
205. Ronald R. Krebs and Jennifer K. Lobasz, "Fixing the Meaning of 9/11: Hegemony, Coercion, and the Road to War in Iraq," Security Studies 16, no. 3 (July-September 2007): 409-451
206. David Forsythe, "Democracy, War and Covert Action," Journal of Peace Research 29, no. 4 (November 1992): 393-394.
207. See, for instance, Mark Mazzetti, "CIA Sought Blackwater Help to Kill Jihadists," New York Times, 20 August 2009
208. Jane Mayer, "The Predator War: What are the Risks of the C.I.A.'s Covert Drone Program?" New Yorker, 26 October 2009.
209. For general analyses of the George W. Bush administration's use of threat inflation see Kaufmann, "Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace for Ideas"
210. Kramer, "Militarized Patriotism"
211. Thrall, "A Bear in the Woods"
212. Krebs and Lobasz, "Fixing the Meaning of 9/11."
213. Leeds claims that inability to adjust policy quickly is a key to democratic foreign policy behavior. Leeds, "Domestic Political Institutions."
214. Skeptics include Desch, "Democracy and Victory,"
215. Layne, "Kant or Cant."
216. See, for instance, Theodore Lowi, "Making Democracy Safe for the World: On Fighting the Next War," in American Foreign Policy: Theoretical Essays, ed. G. John Ikenberry (New York: Harper Collins, 1989).
217. Eliot Cohen, "Defending America in the Twenty-first Century," Foreign Affairs (November/December 2000): 40-56.
218. Max Boot, "Mercenaries Are Inevitable and, If Employed Wisely, Can Be Effective Adjuncts of U.S. Policy," The American Interest (May/June 2008): 37-42. Whether neoconservatives such as Eliot Cohen and Boot are actually conservatives is subject to some dispute. Despite the fact that they identify themselves as conservative, their enthusiasm for empire leads some to argue that they are, at least, a different breed. Jack Snyder categorizes their arguments as a combination of realist and liberal principles
219. See Snyder, "One World, Rival Theories."
220. Douglas Foyle, Counting the Public In (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
221. Burk, "Theories of Democratic Civil-Military Relations."
222. Avant, Market for Force, 118.
223. Silverstein, Private Warriors
224. Ann Markusen, "The Case Against Privatizing Security," Study Group Meeting, Council on Foreign Relations, 2001
225. Stanger and Williams, "Private Military Corporations."
226. For initial research along these lines, see Elke Krahmann, States, Citizens and the Privatization of Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
227. Nicole Deitelhoff and Anna Geis, "Securing the State, Undermining Democracy: Internationalization and Privatization of Western Militaries," TranState Working Papers, no. 92, University of Bremen, 2009.