BTC News has an excellent piece on the state of our troops in Iraq as well as the complicating factor of private security companies, a sort of outsourcing of the war. A NYT Magazine piece is referenced:
And the private security companies are, almost surely, eroding elite sectors of the military; the best-qualified troops, the men most desirable to the companies, are lured by private salaries that can be well more than twice their own. The Special Forces have lately responded with re-enlistment bonuses of up to $150,000. It's not enough.
We have heard a bit about this issue in the news, especially when four private contractors were cruelly strung up by insurgents (insert correct name here). Nonetheless, actual open debate and planning have been somewhat lacking:
Yet it is hard to discern who authorized this particular outsourcing as military policy. No open policy debate took place; no executive order was publicly issued. And who is in charge of overseeing these armed men? One thing is sure: they are crucial to the war effort. In April 2004, within a few months of Triple Canopy's arrival in Iraq, its men were waging a desperate firefight to defend a C.P.A. headquarters in the city of Kut. The Mahdi Army had launched an onslaught. ...
Back in October of last year, a Congressional bill demanded that the Department of Defense come up with a plan to manage the security companies -- to investigate individual backgrounds and inculcate rules of engagement and enforce compliance. ... Nine months have passed. The Pentagon has now promised the document any day; there's no telling whether it will change anything -- what guidelines it will give, what level of commitment will be behind them. ... It was hard not to think that the infant government of Iraq would be left mostly on its own to control the thousands of private gunmen that the American-led occupation has introduced to the country. It was hard not to think that the companies would be left to govern themselves.
Meanwhile, Juan Cole has some good ideas [which include a realistic view on the value of oil security] on what our next steps will be. This might be taken to mean that some of them will be since after a point even unrealistic backassed backward policy has to face up to reality, while others will be done in a haphazard messy way if at all. This is why I tend not to dwell on this situation too much -- it was wrong from the beginning, and even good results are often hard to contemplate.
This is why I'm about to read a book on the Prohibition movement in the United States ... either that, or because this sort of thing drives one to drink.