America's paid boots on the ground

The U.S. may turn to military contractors to fight ISIS. What are the implications of outsourcing war?

Private contractor
(Image credit: (AP Photo/Marko Drobnjakovic, file))

What are military contractors?

They are the legions of civilian workers who are hired to provide support tasks for the military. Some are former soldiers, but the vast majority of them don't carry weapons. The jobs they do range from building barracks and staffing cafeterias to guarding diplomats and intelligence gathering. Armies have always relied on such support staff. But since 9/11, U.S. reliance on contractors has metastasized. In the Iraq conflict, the U.S. employed 155,000 contractors — about the same as the number of U.S. soldiers there — while toward the end of the Afghanistan War, 207,000 contractors supported 175,000 soldiers. Even now, there are some 1,600 military contractors still working for the U.S. in Iraq. It's unclear what role they're playing and whether any of them will directly join in the fight against ISIS. For contractors paid by the U.S., "it's technically illegal to operate offensively or to take part in combat," said Molly Dunigan of the RAND Corp. "But lines blur quickly in the fog of war."

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