What does the return of mercenaries tell us? It tells us, William S. Lind says, that state militaries have become so bureaucratic, expensive, and top-heavy that they are losing the ability to fight:
As expensive as mercenaries are — and the Post article quotes a figure of $1,000 per day for skilled bodyguards — they are still cheaper than state military forces. This is not because the U.S. Army overpays its privates and sergeants, but because the $400 billion America pays each year for defense buys very few privates and sergeants in the combat arms, guys who can actually fight.
Most of the money goes for overhead: contractor welfare in the form of multi-billion dollar programs for irrelevant weapons like the F-22, endless consultants (most retired generals and colonels who already collect large pensions), a bloated officer corps above the company grades, a vast rear area made ever-larger by the needs of complex, computerized “systems,” and layer upon layer of headquarters, each with a small army of horse-holders and flower-strewers.
If you want to imagine a modern state military (others differ from our own only in degree), think of a brontosaurus with three teeth.
I wonder if that’s a fair assessment. In a force like Blackwater’s, most of the troops engage in fighting. In a state force, most of the troops are a deterrent so that there is less fighting. Also, the overhead of a state military allows it to skim the very best of a very large pool of troops and equipment and mount operations like the bin Laden raid that smaller forces could not accomplish.