Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010

Readiness – I/L – Professionalism

PMC armies are unprofessional – there’s no one there to control what they do.
Scahill 7 (Jeremy Scahill August 15, 2007 from Indypendent Website, http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_blackwater08.htm )KM

Dozens of American soldiers have been court-martialed - 64 on murder-related charges alone - but not a single armed contractor has been prosecuted for a crime against an Iraqi. In some cases, where contractors were alleged to have been involved in crimes or deadly incidents, their companies whisked them out of Iraq to safety. U.S. contractors in Iraq reportedly have their own motto: “What happens here today, stays here today.” International diplomats say Iraq has demonstrated a new U.S. model for waging war; one which poses a creeping threat to global order. “To outsource security–related, military related issues to non–government, non–military forces is a source of great concern and it caught many governments unprepared,” says Hans von Sponeck, a 32–year veteran U.N. diplomat, who served as head of the U.N. Iraq mission before the U.S. invasion. In Iraq, the United States has used its private sector allies to build up armies of mercenaries many lured from impoverished countries with the promise of greater salaries than their home militaries can pay. That the home governments of some of these private warriors are opposed to the war itself is of little consequence. “Have gun, will fight for paycheck” has become a globalized law. “The most worrying aspect is that these forces are outside parliamentary control. They come from all over and they are answerable to no one except a very narrow group of people and they come from countries whose governments may not even know in detail that they have actually been contracted as a private army into a war zone,” says von Sponeck. “If you have now a marketplace for warfare, it is a commercial issue rather than a political issue involving a debate in the countries. You are also marginalizing governmental control over whether or not this should take place, should happen and, if so, in what size and shape. It’s a very worrying new aspect of international relations. I think it becomes more and more uncontrollable by the countries of supply.” In Iraq, for example, hundreds of Chilean mercenaries have been deployed by U.S. companies like Blackwater and Triple Canopy, despite the fact that Chile, as a rotating member of the U.N. Security Council, opposed the invasion and continues to oppose the occupation of Iraq. Some of the Chileans are alleged to have been seasoned veterans of the Pinochet era. “There is nothing new, of course, about the relationship between politics and the economy, but there is something deeply perverse about the privatization of the Iraq War and the utilization of mercenaries,” says Chilean sociologist Tito Tricot, a former political prisoner who was tortured under Pinochet’s regime. “This externalization of services or outsourcing attempts to lower costs - third world mercenaries are paid less than their counterparts from the developed world – and maximize benefits. In other words, let others fight the war for the Americans. In either case, the Iraqi people do not matter at all.”
PMC’s are unprofessional – some straight up kill everything that moves.
Ricks 9 (Thomas E. Ricks Tuesday, November 24, 2009, http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/11/24/hiring_trigger_happy_heroin_addicts_as_security_guards) KM

Call me a fuddy–duddy, but I don't think hiring heroin addicts as security guards makes sense. Especially when they seem to open fire with little provocation. The district chief in Maywand, in southwestern Afghanistan, says that is what is happening. And American officers in the area agree that the guards are a problem, according to a fine article by Sean Naylor in the November 30 edition of Army Times. "They'll start firing at anything that's moving, and they will injure or kill innocent Afghans, and they'll destroy property," Lt. Col. Jeff French, a battalion commander, told Naylor. "We're getting fairly consistent complains about them," added Capt. Casey Thoreen, one of French's company commanders. "Everybody knows somebody who's been shot by the contractors." French has taken to pulling over convoys at gunpoint and taking their security chiefs in for questioning at his base.

Readiness – I/L – Professionalism

PMC employed troops are unprofessional – employers don’t put them up to military standards, and civilian business is by definition incompatible with military professionalism.
Isenberg 10 (“The Presumed and Possible PMC Professionalism”, David Isenberg, Huffington Post March 19, 2010, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11592)KM

In truth there has always been an element of unreality about the argument. One would never find military leaders saying about their troops, well, he's a soldier or marine so I can just trust him. Military leaders understand that part of professionalism means constantly checking and double–checking and training and retraining to ensure that people act the way you want them to. No officer would ever assume that once you achieve a certain degree of professionalism that it stays that way without continued effort. But even if you accept the industry argument there is always one or even a few in the crowd who are an exception. And when you have literally hundreds of thousands of PMC working around the world it only takes a few screw-up's to cause significant problems. Consider Daniel Fitzimons, who worked for British PMC ArmorGroup. Last August, after just three days in Iraq on a third tour as a private security contractor since leaving the British army he killed two of his fellow guards in a drunken brawl. And in December 2006 an off–duty Blackwater employee, Andrew J. Moonen, who served previously in the 82nd Airborne Division of the United States Army, had been drinking heavily and tried to make his way into the "Little Venice" section of the Green Zone, which houses many senior members of the Iraqi government. He was stopped by Iraqi bodyguards for Adil Abdul–Mahdi, the country's Shi'ite vice president, and shot one of them, Raheem Khalif, who died from three gunshot wounds. Are incidents like these just the inevitable death attributable to the fog of war? Or is there something more at work? A recent article in Parameters, the journal of the U.S. Army War College took a look at this in its most recent issue. The article "Contractors as Military Professionals?" by Gary Schaub, Jr., assistant professor at the Air War College and Volker C. Franke, associate professor of conflict management at Kennesaw State University suggests that the military has a different view of what constitutes professionalism. Membership in the military profession traditionally has been limited to the uniformed personnel employed by the state. Although there is some debate regarding whether all military personnel are military professionals––be they officers, noncommissioned officers, career enlisted members, conscripts, reservists of any rank, or national guardsmen––there is a consensus that persons who utilize or manage violence as employees of private entities are not members of the military profession. The authors also write that in modern democracies, the military profession derives legitimacy from its license to implement the state's monopoly on the legitimate use of force in combination with its subordination to civilian command and control. Submission of the military to civil authority is the sine qua non of military professionalism. Civilian professionals, by contrast, gain legitimacy through commitment to their employer's or client's interests. As employees of private firms, security contractors at best have divided loyalties, answering as they do to their employer for their performance rather than directly to their client.