http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/02/02/war-new-normal-seven-deadly-reasons-why-americas-wars-persist
[…]
The U.S. military’s recourse to private
contractors has strengthened the profit motive for war-making and
prolonged wars as well. Unlike the citizen-soldiers of past eras, the
mobilized warrior
corporations of America’s new mercenary moment -- the Halliburton/KBRs (nearly $40
billion in contracts for the Iraq War alone), the DynCorps ($4.1 billion to
train 150,000 Iraqi police), and the Blackwater/Xe/Academis ($1.3
billion in Iraq, along with boatloads of
controversy) -- have no incentive to demobilize. Like most
corporations, their business model is based on profit through growth, and
growth is most rapid when wars and preparations for more of them are the favored
options in Washington.
"Freedom isn’t free," as a popular conservative
bumper sticker puts it, and neither is war. My father liked the saying,
“He who pays the piper calls the tune,” and today’s mercenary corporations have
been calling for a lot of military marches piping in $138 billion in contracts
for Iraq alone, according
to the Financial Times. And if you think that the
privatization of war must at least reduce government waste, think again: the
Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan estimated in
2011 that fraud, waste, and abuse accounted for up
to $60 billion of the money spent in Iraq alone.
[…]
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