Contractor deaths surpass U.S. military losses in both Iraq and Afghanistan

Foreign Policy

Sometimes it takes me awhile to catch up on the news. Yesterday I finally read an article from the September 2010 issue of Service Contractor magazine that I'd been carrying for awhile in my Land's End canvas attaché bag.

The news: It concludes that more than 2,000 contractors have died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Contractor deaths now represent over 25 percent of all U.S. fatalities" in those conflicts, write Steven Schooner and Collin Swan of the George Washington University Law School. (I would bet that contractor KIAs are far higher, since there is no indication that non-U.S. deaths have been tracked with any fidelity.)

In Iraq in both 2009 and 2010, and in Afghanistan in 2010, contractors were running ahead of the U.S. military in losses, the article indicates...

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Mercenaries to Fill Void Left By U.S. Army
As American troops leave Iraq, private security contractors will take over many of their tasks.

Khalid Mohammed / AP

A private security company’s armored vehicle rolls through al-Nisoor Square in Baghdad earlier this year.

As the U.S. military continues to draw down its forces in Iraq later this month and complete a full exit by the end of next year, analysts say the withdrawal will be a boon for the private security industry, whose employees will likely undertake more quasi-military functions such as defusing explosives and providing armed response teams. “They [private security contractors] are going to have to do everything that we expect soldiers to do without going out on patrols to engage the enemy,” says one former industry insider. “There are some pretty smart number crunchers in all the major contractors who are figuring out how much of this increasing pie we’re going to be able to get.”

What exactly that pie will consist of remains to be seen. During the first four years of the war—the most recent available estimate—the U.S. spent as much as $10 billion on private security contractors, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Yet this occurred at a time when the military employed far fewer than the roughly 11,000 private security contractors that it employs today. Just how many will remain in Iraq when the U.S. leaves will depend on the conditions on the ground. Yet analysts say the number of mercenaries will likely remain stable and could even increase slightly. And, as these contractors expand into new roles, “the price of them goes up,” says Stephanie Sanok, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies...

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