Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010

Hollow Forces Adv. – Link – Generic

PMC’s compete with regular armies

Shishkov 9 (Viktor, Information Liberation staff writer, Information Liberation, Mar 2-9)

Private military companies (PMC’s) have become rather popular nowadays in terms of providing specialized expertise or services of a military nature. These units can compete with special services and regular armies. There are such companies in Russia, although they are not so widely spread in the country in comparison with their prototypes in the West. As experience shows, the PMC’s will prevail in the future. The history of private military companies started on June 24, 1997, when experts of the US Intelligence Department proclaimed the PMC’s as a major tool in the implementation of the military security policy of the United States and its allies in other countries. The professional level of a private military company is its major advantage. Inexperienced military men are not welcome there. A PMC member is usually a man between 35-40 years of age. A human being of this age is resistant to stresses and emergency situations. In addition, a man of this age can also do routine work very well, which can not be said about younger men.

PMC’s are luring away the best members of the military

BASIC 4 (Vritish American Security International Council, http://www.basicint.org/pubs/Research/2004PMC2iii.pdf, date accessed: 6/25/2010) AJK
A drain on the regular armed services? The lure of higher salaries is reportedly causing an exodus of the U.S. military’s most seasoned members of Special Operation Forces (SOF) to higher-paying civilian security jobs in places like Baghdad and Kabul, just as the special forces are being asked to play an increasingly pivotal role in combating terror and helping to conduct nation-building operations worldwide. Of course the same problem exists in many other areas of military specialism, such as information technology. Why work in the Army’s tech operations when you can get a job at three times the remuneration in the private sector? Reportedly, exhausted American and British special forces personnel are resigning in record numbers and taking highly-paid jobs as private security guards in Iraq and Afghanistan. Competition over elite troops from private companies is so intense that the U.S. Special Operations Command has formulated new pay, benefits, and educational incentives to try to retain them. “Competition with the civilian world has never been greater,” said Gen. Bryan "Doug" Brown, commander of the 49,000-strong U.S. Special Operations Command, in congressional testimony.59 Senior enlisted members of the Army Green Berets or Navy Seals with 20 years or more experience now earn about $50,000 in base pay, and can retire with a $23,000 pension. But private security companies, whose services are in growing demand in Iraq and Afghanistan, are offering salaries of $100,000 to nearly $200,000 a year to the most experienced of them.60 But there is no guarantee beyond the contracted period and it is only paid when deployed, i.e., two on, one off – only paid in effect two-thirds of the annual sum. Similarly, British officials say more than 300 soldiers have left the armed forces in six months to take up lucrative jobs with private companies such as Olive Security, Armour Security, Global and USDID.61 In particular, the demand from PMC’s operating in Iraq for former Special Air Service and Special Boat Service soldiers is such that between May 2003 and December 2004, between 40 and 60 men are expected to have sought premature voluntary release from the army and Royal Marines. In operational terms, this could mean that the equivalent of one entire Sabre squadron out of a total of six in the SAS and SBS is on its way to seek its fortune in the new Iraq. 62 According to one British press report there are more ex-SAS soldiers acting as advisers for “private military companies” than currently serving in the elite, 300-man regiment based near Hereford. More than 40 regular SAS soldiers are understood to have applied to leave the Army in the last year, many because of the lure of short-term contracts in Iraq.63

Hollow Forces Adv. – Link – Police Training

Conractors fail at even training local police

Engelhardt 9 (Tom, Fellow @ Nation Institute, teaching fellow @ berk, Jan 11-9, Tom Dispatch)

Afghans protest that such a plan amounts to sponsoring civil war, which, if true, would mean that American involvement in Afghanistan might be coming full circle -- civil war being the state in which the U.S. left Afghanistan at the end of our proxy war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. American commanders, however, insist that they must use militias because Afghan Army and police forces are "simply not available." Maj. Gen. Michael S. Tucker, deputy commander of American forces, told the New York Times, "We don't have enough police, [and] we don't have time to get the police ready." This, despite the State Department's award to DynCorp last August of another $317.4 million contract "to continue training civilian police forces in Afghanistan," a contract DynCorp CEO William Ballhaus greeted as "an opportunity to contribute to peace, stability and democracy in the world [and] support our government's efforts to improve people's lives."
Contractors kill education

Engelhardt 9 (Tom, Fellow @ Nation Institute, teaching fellow @ berk, Jan 11-9, Tom Dispatch)

In other areas less obviously connected to security, American aid policy is no less self-serving or self-defeating. Although the Bush administration handpicked the Afghan president and claims to want to extend his authority throughout the country, it refuses to channel aid money through his government's ministries. (It argues that the Afghan government is corrupt, which it is, in a pathetic, minor league sort of way.) Instead of giving aid money for Afghan schools to the Ministry of Education, for example, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funds private American contractors to start literacy programs for adults. As a result, Afghan teachers abandon the public schools and education administrators leave the Ministry for higher paying jobs with those contractors, further undermining public education and governance.