At a forum on foreign policy, Lorelei Kelly, a former Capitol Hill national-security aide who blogs at democracyarsenal and the Huffington Post, made the interesting point that the Bush Pentagon’s ballooning use of private contractors has created a political opening between “progressives,” as liberals are generally called here, and the military. In power, she said, conservatives have systematically attacked and depleted “one of most valuable parts of the progressive legacy” : the value of public service. But public service is part of the military ethic, too. And the privatization of military functions is a direct attack on that ethic. This is something of which people in uniform are beginning to take note.
Ms. Kelly observed that here has been very little public debate or discussion about military privatization. In that connection, she made another point that was new to me. The military-industrial complex produced by the Cold War (which still consumes untold billions even though the weapons systems it builds are perfectly useless for the national-security threats the country now faces) was and is able to prosper in the absence of actual fighting. The purpose of piling up all those missiles targeted on the Soviet Union, after all, was to avoid using them. But the kind of privatization represented by the gun-toting Iraq war contractors has created what she called “a live war military-industrial complex”—that is, an industry that depends for its profits, even its existence, on hot wars, wars that kill people. “Free-market conservatives have given us this,” she said. “In conversations with military people, it’s an opening to all sorts of other issues.”
That's one of the more fascinating and urgent issues we need to get our heads around. Thanks to Rick Hertzberg for pointing it out in his commentary from YearlyKos.
