What about the nonnuclear powers? Well, some of them are U.S. allies. Germany, Italy, Norway—looking down through the rest of human history, I guess you couldn’t totally rule out a war with them, but in a world of limited resources you’d be hard put to spend billions and keep a big force just in case we fight a war with Italy someday.
So who’s left? Brazil is an ally right now, but at some point it might have a Hugo Chavez–type revolution. There’s Hugo himself. There’s Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. There’s the junta in Myanmar. These guys all put together spend about $3 billion a year on defense. How much do we spend? Five-hundred billion? There’s something wrong with this picture.
We’re spending half a trillion dollars, and when you look around, who’s it going to defend us from? It didn’t defend us from Al Qaeda. What are all these armored divisions doing out there, these mech divisions, all this other stuff that’s basically left over from the Cold War and for that matter even World War II? We should shrink the force down to match the threat. Keep a residual force, and get rid of the rest of that nonsense.
Then you ask what you need to fight nonstate threats. There are a lot of nonstate threats—gangs, for example—that are law enforcement problems. Armored divisions aren’t going to help you much there. So what about security threats that are a step up from that? Al Qaeda, or something like the FARC in Colombia if somehow we were to come into contact with them—if Mexico starts to go south, for example. [Israeli historian Martin] van Creveld said that basically, those are already private military organizations, and people who can afford it are already turning to other private military organizations to protect themselves from them.
So then you start looking around, and you see there’s a huge industry out there today supplying this stuff. So why don’t we harness that? Why leave [national security] in the hands of a state-sponsored bureaucracy, which has proven to be the least efficient, the least creative, the least dynamic sector of our society?
Reason: I’m naturally sympathetic to turning government functions over to private enterprise, but I’m also naturally suspicious of government contractors. When you talk about contracting with private companies, how do you avoid the problems we’ve had with, say, Pentagon procurement?
Richards: I’m not sure you can. But if you have competition, and if you’ve got incentives for companies to rat out other companies if they break the law, then at least you have a mechanism for shutting down the ones that break the rules too egregiously and put the perpetrators in jail.
Over on the government side, unless you’re willing to court-martial somebody, those mechanisms aren’t there at all. When was the last time we court-martialed the commanding general of a division? But if you’re the commanding general of a professional company and you’re not getting the job done, you lose your contract. And if you start doing illegal things, you can be dragged into both civil and criminal court.
Reason: What’s the possibility of private military companies being retained by Americans who aren’t in the government? Say some people decide they want to assist the people in Darfur and raise the funds and hire a company to do the job.
Richards: I think there’s a 100 percent chance of that happening. I couldn’t tell you when.
Reason: Do you think it’s desirable?
Richards: Oh, yeah. Again, let’s have some competition there.
I’m not sure private military companies, the way we have them right now, are going to evolve into what I’m talking about. They might. But they bring a lot of baggage with them.
Reason: Your book compares the Department of Defense to “the experience of large commercial organizations since the end of WWII. Most of them will go out of business before they make the changes necessary to survive.” Government bureaucracies tend to be even more calcified than large corporations. How likely do you think it is that the military will restructure itself, in the directions you suggest or any other directions?
Richards: Not until they lose a big war.
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