Rise of the American mercenary

US Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has asserted several times, and quite vociferously, that there will be “no American ground troops in Syria” if she is elected president in November.

While the definition of “ground troops” is flexible, there is a second reality that very few people are talking about in Washington today. Not unlike the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq —where private military contractors fed, trained, equipped, and protected U.S. military forces “on the ground” in unprecedented numbers—an escalation of hired security forces in a hot spot like Syria would likely boost the presence of U.S. “boots”. Of course it is done so without causing the political heartburn of putting more actual soldiers and Marines in harm’s way! In fact, it may already be happening. Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, a Washington, DC-based freelance reporter, has shed light on the rising American mercenary.

Over the summer, a no-bid contract was reportedly awarded to Six3 Intelligence Solutions, a company based in McLean, Va., which in 2014 was acquired by major defense-industry player CACI International. According to an otherwise pedestrian notice, the $10 million award was for “intelligence analysis services” to be performed “in Germany, Italy, and Syria.” It was probably the first sliver of proof that U.S. contractors are actually operating there, despite persistent evasions by military officials.

Author Sean McFate, also an Army special-forces veteran and assistant professor at the National Defense University, said: “I don’t know if there are any contractors in Syria but I suspect there are a lot. We just can’t sustain military operations today without the private sector. We are strategically dependent on the private sector.” When asked about the Six3 contract—what it’s for, how many contractors would be in Syria working under it—Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. David S. Hylton said the Syria part of the notice was “a mistake” and has been since amended. Hylton said that “The Performance Work Statement for the contract states that ‘support is required at multiple locations to include fixed sites in Central Europe, Germany and Italy, possible future fixed sites in Eastern Europe -e.g., Bulgaria, Romania, Poland - in deployed contingency operations areas to include the Balkans, and other contingency areas.’”The contract is on behalf of U.S. Army in Europe and “intended to provide intelligence analysis, operations and planning, security support, and information systems operation, maintenance and sustainment.”

The Pentagon did provide quarterly numbers on the private forces currently in Afghanistan and Iraq, but when asked how many, if any, contractors are in Syria at this time, officials did not respond. Meanwhile the White House has authorized the deployment of 300 U.S. Special Operations Forces to Syria, 40 of which were reportedly sent to northern Syria with Turkish troops and the so-called vetted “Syrian opposition forces” on an ISIS clearing mission in September. According to the Pentagon, “Operation Noble Lance,” as it has been dubbed, would continue the ongoing “advising, assisting and training” mission the U.S. has conducted with so-called moderate Syrian rebel forces and anti-ISIS Kurdish and Arab fighters. But it appears, according to The Hill, that we don’t really know how many troops are really there either, or even in Iraq right now.

US Secretary of State Ash Carter announced the addition of 600 more troops to Iraq in September, bringing the official number there up to about 5,000. However, that doesn’t count the “temporary” forces that may drift in and out of the Area of Operations (AOR), and it certainly doesn’t include contractors. The issue has become a sticking point, with critics pressing the Pentagon for more transparency, and that there were upwards of 900 additional “temporary” troops on the ground in Iraq that “tend to run around.” There is no clue on how many temps are “running around” Syria at this time.

Some worry that officials are hiding the deepening U.S. involvement in the fight against the ISIS, quoting an Army colonel who cited “orders” for not giving out anything beyond the official “force management” figures. Spokesman Army Col. Steve Warren, back in March, said “There’s been a decision made not to release that number.” “The number that we release is our force management level. … I don’t have a reason for not releasing this number other than it’s the orders that I’m under.”

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr. tried to soften those words a bit later, saying the military wasn’t reluctant to release more, but has done things this way for 15 years. If nailing down the number of troops is hard, the extent of the contractor force may never be known, particularly in Syria. But if recent history is any indication, as the footprint grows, so will the private shadow army. Some argue that a global industry has been unleashed by the American reliance on the hired guns overseas since 9/11. It is unstoppable, partly because militaries like the U.S.’s have become so dependent on it. Private contractors also offer a cloak of deniability, and frankly, the ability to operate outside of institutional laws and boundaries. There is no oversight, no tracking mechanisms. Obama pledged to hold this industry accountable, and did nothing about it—the lack of response is a story in itself.

In fact, the Foreign Policy writer Micah Zenko argued, the rise of the contractor to wage America’s military operations is Obama’s silent national-security legacy, with more dead contractors on his watch and little or no transparency about who these contractors are and what they do. He scoffed at Obama’s insistence that he has pursued a “light U.S. footprint” across these conflict zones. Zenko wrote, “Were it not for these contractors, Obama’s ‘light footprint’ would suddenly be two or three times as large”.

Neil Gordon, a contracting expert for the Project on Government Oversight, agrees, noting: “It’s the classic dodge—here we are shrinking the size of the government when in reality it is all being made up by contractors.”

We do know from a Bloomberg business snapshot that Six3 provides, in part, “identity intelligence and biometrics, forensics and analysis, counterintelligence operations support, anti-terrorism and force protection, diplomatic security support, consulting and policy development, and analytic transformation.” In addition, no one knows how many contractors might be working for the CIA in Syria or anywhere else, because that information is classified. We do know that the number of private military contractors in Iraq has soared since 2015. At the beginning of the year there were 250, according to CENTCOM data. CENTCOM, which covers the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, is the only geographic command that currently releases such data. As of July of this year there were 2,485.

In Afghanistan, where there are supposedly around 9,800 U.S. military left in the country, there were 26,435 contractors as of July, nearly three times as many “boots on the ground.” Of that number, 8,837 were listed as U.S. citizens, 5,774 as third-country nationals, and 11,824 as Afghans. In Iraq, 1,605 of the contractors were American in July; 528 were third-party nationals, and 352 were Iraqis. In addition to Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. deployed 13,774 contractors in “other CENTCOM locations.”

According to a report by the Defense One earlier this year, there were an additional 5,800 contractors working in Iraq for other agencies, including the State Department, as of February. Of course, not all contractors are hired guns. The majority in Iraq as of this summer, for example, were logistics and maintenance contractors, followed by translators, construction, transportation, and management, and then security professionals—of which there were 142. “Intelligence services” weren’t listed, but there were 62 people categorized under “other.”

But what the breakdown shows—and it is similar for Afghanistan—is that nearly every level of what we would consider military operations has been farmed out. Choosing to use contractors to stave off the difficult decision to put troops in harm’s way “circumvents democratic accountability of the armed forces.

The key is to watch how the next president deals with the pressure to get more involved in Syria come next year. Continue to keep an eye on the quarterly reports from the US Department of Defense and press for the full story, guessing the number of contractors would be rising steadily. By the way, keep in mind, contractors don’t count as “boots on the ground;” “Americans don’t care about dead contractors the way they do about dead soldiers.”

EA