{"id":40664,"date":"2017-10-31T05:00:24","date_gmt":"2017-10-31T09:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=40664"},"modified":"2017-10-30T17:33:56","modified_gmt":"2017-10-30T21:33:56","slug":"the-adage-when-you-get-a-free-good-you-use-a-lot-more-of-it-also-applies-to-the-military","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/10\/31\/the-adage-when-you-get-a-free-good-you-use-a-lot-more-of-it-also-applies-to-the-military\/","title":{"rendered":"The adage “When you get a free good, you use a lot more of it” also applies to the military"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Stossel<\/a> talks to Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater:<\/p>\n

The military uses contractors to provide security, deliver mail, rescue soldiers and more. Private contractors often do jobs well, for much less than the government would spend.<\/p>\n

\u201dWe did a helicopter resupply mission,\u201d Prince told me. \u201cWe showed up with two helicopters and eight people \u2014 the Navy was doing it with 35 people.\u201d<\/p>\n

I asked, \u201cWhy would the Navy use 35 people?\u201d<\/p>\n

Prince answered, \u201cThe admiral that says, \u2018I need 35 people to do that mission,\u2019 didn\u2019t pay for them. When you get a free good, you use a lot more of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prince also claims the military is slow to adjust. In Afghanistan, it\u2019s \u201cusing equipment designed to fight the Soviet Union, (not ideal) for finding enemies living in caves or operating from a pickup truck.\u201d<\/p>\n

I suggested that the government eventually adjusts.<\/p>\n

\u201dNo, they do not,\u201d answered Prince. \u201cIn 16 years of warfare, the army never adjusted how they do deployments \u2014 never made them smaller and more nimble. You could actually do all the counter-insurgency missions over Afghanistan with propeller-driven aircraft.\u201d<\/p>\n

So far, Trump has ignored Prince\u2019s advice. I assume he, like many people, is skeptical of military contractors. The word \u201cmercenary\u201d has a bad reputation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He moved on after selling Blackwater, and dabbled in fighting piracy:<\/p>\n

In 2010, Prince sold his security firm and moved on to other projects.<\/p>\n

He persuaded the United Arab Emirates to fund a private anti-pirate force in Somalia. The U.N. called that a \u201cbrazen violation\u201d of its arms embargo, but Prince went ahead anyway.<\/p>\n

His mercenaries attacked pirates whenever they came near shore. His private army, plus merchant ships finally arming themselves, largely ended piracy in that part of the world. In 2010, Somali pirates took more than a thousand hostages. In 2014, they captured none.<\/p>\n

Did you even hear about that success? I hadn\u2019t before doing research on Prince. The media don\u2019t like to report good things about for-profit soldiers. Commentator Keith Olbermann called Blackwater \u201ca full-fledged criminal enterprise.\u201d One TV anchor called Prince \u201chorrible \u2026 the poster child for everything wrong with the military-industrial complex.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I showed that to Prince, he replied, \u201cthe hardcore anti-war left went after the troops in Vietnam \u2026 (I)n Iraq and Afghanistan they went after contractors \u2026 contractors providing a good service to support the U.S. military \u2014 vilified, demonized, because they were for-profit companies.\u201d<\/p>\n

If we don\u2019t use private contractors, he added, we will fail in Afghanistan, where we\u2019ve \u201cspent close to a trillion dollars and are still losing.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

H\/T to Stephen Green<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Stossel talks to Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater: The military uses contractors to provide security, deliver mail, rescue soldiers and more. Private contractors often do jobs well, for much less than the government would spend. \u201dWe did a helicopter resupply mission,\u201d Prince told me. \u201cWe showed up with two helicopters and eight people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[370,5,13],"tags":[218,333,1161,30,468],"class_list":["post-40664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-middle-east","category-military","category-usa","tag-afghanistan","tag-iraq","tag-mercenaries","tag-navy","tag-piracy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-azS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40664"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40665,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40664\/revisions\/40665"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}