You Can’t Sub-Contract Victory Over Terror

On his September 22 installment of The O’Reilly Factor, Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly proposed a new way to defeat not only the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, but Islamic extremism worldwide. His idea is to create a 25,000 man army of highly-paid, expertly trained and skilled mercenaries to travel around the world to “hot spots” and fight the world’s battle against terrorism. Looking strictly at the merits of this proposal, and current U.S. strategy aside, his idea is wrong from the onset. In his segment, O’Reilly interviewed United States Naval War College professor Thomas Nichols, PhD, an expert in national security and military affairs. Nichols lambasted the proposal, stating “it is a morally corrosive idea to try to outsource our national security.” Nichols is absolutely right, and one only has to look at the history of military strategy and statecraft as a whole to see this. The unintended consequences of creating a modern-day condottieri to fight terror as a proxy for the United States would place our nation on the wrong side of international agreements, and force us down a rabbit hole of messy international politics and more than fuzzy legal standing. These forces would not be held to the provisions of the Geneva Convention or to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and pose a severe risk of opening the U.S. to accusations of war crimes.

With a BA and two Master’s degrees, one can only assume that Bill O’Reilly has read Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince at least once in his life. The Prince is one of history’s most important tomes regarding strategy and statecraft and in it, Machiavelli says this about the use of mercenaries or auxiliaries to fight a nation’s wars:

“I say, therefore, that the arms with which a prince defends his state are either his own, or they are mercenaries, auxiliaries, or mixed. Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy. The fact is, they have no other attraction or reason for keeping the field than a trifle of stipend, which is not sufficient to make them willing to die for you. They are ready enough to be your soldiers whilst you do not make war, but if war comes they take themselves off or run from the foe; which I should have little trouble to prove, for the ruin of Italy has been caused by nothing else than by resting all her hopes for many years on mercenaries, and although they formerly made some display and appeared valiant amongst themselves, yet when the foreigners came they showed what they were.”

Clearly, Machiavelli did not think highly of the quality and reliability of the type of people who would contract themselves to fight a war. Why should we believe that those who would do so today would be any less disunited, ambitious, without discipline, or unfaithful? We have already seen the sort of behavior that “security” contractors are capable of with the numerous federal charges against members of the company formerly known as Blackwater, and these personnel were simply responsible with serving as security guards. If the U.S. put actual combat in the hands of similar companies, the risk would be far greater.

The use of outsourced forces puts the nation in a sort of moral hazard that is not worth assuming in the case of national security. The forces hired have no oath to the nation or to the Constitution, only to being “highly paid,” as O’Reilly says they should be. This truth holds evidence in history, and there is no reason to believe it would not be repeated today. As Oxford history professor Sir Michael Howard says in his book War in European History, the mercenary forces that fought in the 15th-17th centuries were no more than entrepreneurs, only loyal to the guarantee of a payment for services rendered. Howard decries the period as one where there ceased “indeed to be ‘war’ in the sense of politically-motivated use of force by generally recognized authorities,” and that it degenerated into “self-perpetuating violence.” This could surely happen again. Recreating the “Great Company” is no way to fight a war, and no way to defeat terror. As Clausewitz said, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” These other means should not, Mr. O’Reilly, be outsourced to contracted killers, but rather delegated to the honorable men and women sworn to support and defend our nation, and those of other nations who have allied to defeat this very real and very global threat.

Steve Foster is an Active Duty Officer in the United States Army, and is pursuing a Master of Public Policy degree at George Mason University. The views presented here are his own, and do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the United States Army.