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Overpriced or Out of Sight: What subsistence history teaches us about contractors and tactical logistics at war

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In this, our second instalment in the PMSCs series, Jill Russell will be taking a look at the practical ramifications of logistical contracting in the US armed forces and will argue that contractors are not sufficient for the critical roles they are often assigned.

Birthe Anders
Department of War Studies, King’s College London
PMSCs Series Editor

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The Private Military Security Contractors Series. Part II:
Overpriced or Out of Sight: What subsistence history teaches us about contractors and tactical logistics at war

by Jill S. Russell

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Siege of Petersburg, Va – Sutler’s tent, 2d Division, 9th Corps, November 1864

Without much fanfare the American armed forces have over the last several decades shifted responsibility for increasing portions of operational and tactical logistics to private contractors. Focussing specifically upon subsistence, and furthermore on the preparation and delivery of food to the front lines, little concern has emerged over the ramifications of this change in practice. Especially at the tactical level [1] this is a dangerous oversight, for as I will argue here, American experience, both distant and recent, demonstrates that contractors are not sufficient to the critical task of feeding troops at war.

The unreliability of the private sector in tactical logistics was one of the first lessons of  American military history. The experience diverged from historical practice, as civilians had long played a part in the delivery of provisions whether as labour, involuntarily with impressments of goods, or enterprise in the food and drink on offer by the local sutler. Considering only the last for the purposes of this discussion, Continental Army leaders might have been able to expect that this character would serve the Revolutionary cause and fill the subsistence gaps the infant army could not handle.

Bordering on catastrophic Revolutionary War subsistence logistics nearly proved the undoing of the Patriot cause. Suffering no lack of provisions extant in the Colonies, plaguing the army’s inability to feed its soldiers were deficiencies rooted entirely in its logistics, from inadequate manpower to a complete lack of professional knowledge and practices. Even still, sutlers could have been the army’s salvation. Unfortunately, in that war, while their propensity to fleece the troops was entirely reliable, their presence where and when necessary could not be guaranteed, in large because the Continental dollars did not interest. However, as the goods were present in the country, it was the want of money in the government coffers that guaranteed the struggle, for were the last not an issue then entrepreneurship would at least have eased many of the logistics challenges.

Thus, weak in the Revolutionary War for reasons of profit, this experience taught that especially at the tactical level, successful logistics could only be guaranteed by the armed forces themselves. The Americans might have been the first to learn this lesson, but the European powers would realize this truth as well over the course of 19th century warfare.

More than a century would pass before this capability was fully developed. The Civil War, for example, was marked by their presence, as sutlers remained an imperfect stopgap when necessary. However, they were never meant to fully serve the logistical needs of the front lines. The long 19th century was a slow march to the military capabilities necessary to manage logistics. Strategic logistics, especially in manufacture and internal transportation, were (and remain) areas in which the private sector outperformed the armed forces.

Cresting in WWII, finally triumphant over most of the challenges, it seemed that the demands of logistics at war had finally been equalled and could soon be mastered. This was not to be the case, and before the lessons of that war’s logistics could be fully learned the apparatus was slowly dismantled. I suspect it was part of the rise of the preference for private sector wisdom regarding what constituted best practices. After all, if America’s businesses could thrive and dominate the global economy then they must have something valuable to teach the armed forces. [2] Except cost savings and efficiency fail war when effectiveness is contested by a determined enemy or the ruthlessness of chance.  What works for Wal-Mart does not necessarily serve the Marine Corps.

Unlike in the Revolutionary War, the matters of resources and expertise have not harmed the private sector’s performance in logistics since WWISS. Rather, the altered terms of warfare define the weakness of private contractors in logistics, their failure to adequately serve is caused by risk. By the 20th century the increasing lethality of war meant that unlike the finite and constrained battles of the past, now combat raged night and day, death reigned, but still soldiers needed to be fed.  Although durable, portable and ready to eat field rations would be developed, even their delivery to the front lines could be contested. Nor was it the case that these rations could serve for the long term to good fighting effect. That is, no one would starve if there were unlimited C-Rats, but that is not the same as sustaining fighting skill. Accordingly, field rations would never preclude the need for some amount of fresh (or near fresh) provisions to be delivered and prepared for front line personnel.

This significant growth in risk means that even given the premiums paid to contractors, there are levels of personal peril which cannot be mitigated by money alone. Uniformed military personnel accept risk, but they are trained and indoctrinated to do so as part of a group to which they have bonded. In fact, I might argue that it is the matter of risk which defines and separates military personnel from others, and perhaps is their inspiration as well. Absent this trained acceptance, there is a limit beyond which it will remain exceedingly difficult to get contractors to operate effectively.

And yet, by voluntarily choosing the private sector to handle an increasing burden of tactical logistics, by the 21st century’s first wars it has been forward into the past with a return to modern day sutlers and civilians who do the cooking. One might assume that this would mean success all around, as there is no real lack of resources within the nation or government. This has not been the case.

Second chances are always written with new twists, and so this time around it is the government rather than the soldiery that is likely getting fleeced. [3] I suppose that is some consolation. Or it would be except for the unholy gap that has been created at the very front lines and for the smallest units. Coping with this gap, the forces have most often returned to the “old ways.” In OIF and OEF, where the FOB feeding paradigm left small, far forward-deployed units unserved, the answer to the feeding gap has been to send a soldier or Marine to do the cooking. [4] And as American defence budgets are reduced, back in garrison, the days of freedom from KP duty may be coming to an end.

Which raises the question, why has the US returned to a mode of tactical logistics that relied upon the private sector? Logistics love ingenuity. In the private sector this ingenuity improves efficiency and cuts costs. However, in war, it simply worries the problem until the job is done. Rather than a private contractor, the guy who will live and die with the quality of the logistics is like to produce the best results.  At least at the tactical level, logistics needs to be returned to the forces. It is part of the fight and needs to be treated as such.

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NOTES

[1] There are many ways – depending on the service questioned – to refer to the tasks I consider within the sphere of tactical logistics. The Marine Corps, eg, uses combat service support. For the purposes of this essay tactical logistics refers to the final delivery and/or preparation of goods or services to manoeuvre units for their use.
[2] Of course, if one stops to consider that most of the private sector experience in logistics had been gained in war, that the armed forces had been the trailblazers in such areas, then its presumed superiority must be questioned.
[3] Attempting to unravel the complexity which is the accounting for recent military operations is well nigh impossible. What is clear is that private contractors have not provided the significant cost savings that were promised, nor have they been found to take particular care of the public funds with which they have been entrusted.
[4] I have extensive evidence on one unit’s experience, as well as scattered anecdotal information across multiple deployments. As the problems were structurally determined, it is likely that similar shortfalls were experienced across the deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The politics of condottieri arms in Renaissance Italy, or why Machiavelli loathed mercenaries

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Contracting for military and security services is an extremely old phenomenon, emerging many centuries previous to the latest generation of contemporary Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs). However, the modern phenomenon has reached unprecedented breadth, given the extent to which contracting for military and security services has grown, covering combat and security training, armed guard, intelligence and combat support logistics.

Since the early 1990s, there have been hundreds of scholarly and journalistic publications on PMSCs. This trend continues as publications about the industry are on the rise -unfortunately with many arguments repeated time and again. This is why the authors in this series have been challenged to take an angle as of yet lacking from debates about private contracting. Framed by a new look at contracting experiences from Machiavelli’s times at the beginning of the series and an examination of current and future regulatory options for private contractors at the end, the series also touches on the US experience of logistics outsourcing, as well as the perspective of individual contractors.

In the first instalment in the series, today’s piece will take us back to an age long past. Pablo de Orellana will take a new look at Machiavelli’s views on mercenaries and will argue that his reservations against contracted forces can best be explained by their impact on Renaissance state-building and governance.

Birthe Anders
Department of War Studies, King’s College London
PMSCs Series Editor

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The Private Military Security Contractors Series. Part I:
The politics of condottieri arms in Renaissance Italy, or why Machiavelli loathed mercenaries

by Pablo de Orellana

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The last of the Renaissance mercenary ‘arme ausiliarie’: the Pontifical Swiss Guard swearing-in ceremony

In 1512, the Florentine native military contingent so ardently advocated by Machiavelli in his major works, The Art of War, The Prince and Discourses, was disastrously defeated, bringing about the downfall of the Florentine Republic, the return of the Medici to power and Machiavelli’s own dismissal from government, torture, and exile. Yet in The Prince, written the following year, exactly five centuries ago, he continues to make constant reference to mercenary forces being ‘useless and dangerous’. [1] This article outlines the main reasons as to this position, concluding that Machiavelli’s loathing of mercenaries was not animated by the tired, old, moral analogy of mercenarism and unpatriotic prostitution or even by pragmatic tactical reasons, as it appears from The Prince. No debate on Private Military Security Companies (PMSCs) can omit reference to Machiavelli; however he is still often poorly understood beyond the omnipresent quote of ‘useless and dangerous’. Returning to the original Machiavelli texts, I argue that his concerns about mercenaries were due to the challenge of renaissance mercenary practices to the politics of state-building and governance.

The historical background to the practice as it was during the Renaissance is essential in discussing Machiavelli’s position on the employment of mercenaries. The practice of hiring military forces by feudal lords and cities probably originated in the constant feuds of the 11th Century. ‘[T]here were in Italy at that time many soldiers, English, German and Bretons, brought over by those princes […] it was with these that all Italian princes made their wars’. [2] Feudal lords and republics hired men from the masnadas, bands of soldiers demobilised after the crusades and the Sicilian Vespers; the relationship was determined by a condotta, a contract or agreement between the hiring authorities and the condottiere, the leader of the mercenary force. The practice however, brought about the downfall of many clients: due to dependence of entire states upon their services, condottieri were able to dictate terms to clients, betraying them and in some cases even replacing them. The most notable in this regard were Francesco Sforza (1401-1466), who took over Milan from his clients the Visconti, and Andrea Doria, a Genoese admiral who fought for Charles V of the Austrian/Spanish House of Habsburg.

Machiavelli recounts some of these treacherous actions by mercenaries, but most often (as in The Prince) he chooses to engage with the issue on the basis of their tactical disadvantages: their dubious loyalty; the feasibility of training more loyal native militias to their professional level instead, their prohibitive cost, even their occasional willingness to be paid off by mercenaries employed by an enemy city to the detriment of both their employers. What worried Machiavelli most about mercenaries, however, was the political power and short-term coercive leverage they were able to wield against their own clients. Condottieri were problematic by virtue of limited contractual loyalty based on pay, but even more so because of their capacity to radically upset domestic constitutional order. They were able to blackmail clients and move to the pay of a rival like Federico da Montefeltro, or as Francesco Sforza proved, take over their states. The 1494 French invasion of Italy, for instance, was partly made possible by the defection to France of Milan’s condottiere Gian Giacomo Trivulzio. That invasion, however, not only made clear to Machiavelli the unreliability of mercenary forces, but also proved beyond doubt that national armies with a mix of levies and professionals under the leadership of a skilled and inspiring prince were vastly superior to mercenary forces. This was, Machiavelli explains, due to the relationship between them, which was based on vassalage, loyalty, duty and law. [3]

Even more problematic than mercenary loyalty for constitution and governance, however, was the constitutive effect on the institutions of government, especially the military. In Machiavelli’s view, contracting mercenaries had the effect of destabilising and weakening your own forces. The misguided son of King Charles VII of France, made this mistake: ‘having given reputation to the Swiss [mercenaries], he dispirited his own arms [as] they did not think it was possible to win without them’. [4] This was a twofold political problem in terms of strategic defence: the arms of the state had little morale, confidence and experience; in the longer term this could make defence of a principality entirely dependent on outside forces. Furthermore, this institutional vicious circle made training your own native forces more difficult, slower and less expedient in the short term than hiring mercenaries, further undermining or delaying the establishment of a reliable native force.

Having an unstable and untrustworthy defence force has dramatic effects on governance, Machiavelli argues. He sees a crucial relationship between governance and defence as the main engine of state-building and governance: ‘the principal fundamentals that link all states, those new, old or mixed, are good laws and good arms: […] there cannot be good laws without good arms.’ [5] This is due to the risk of remaining undefended, which destabilises the state: ‘among the reasons that bring you harm, being unarmed makes you contemptible’. [6] Clearly, for Machiavelli there cannot be a stable practice of governance without the assurance of a dependable defence force to protect the territory, its people and governors against the ambitions of ‘the barbarians’ or foreign invaders, other lords, other states and transnational factions. The latter were particularly problematic, as they were both external and internal to any single city-state in Renaissance Italy. Guelphs (supporters of Papal supremacy) and Ghibellines (supporters of the supremacy of the Holy Roman Empire) had fought over control of many Northern Italian city-states for the three centuries preceding Machiavelli, routinely taking over power and exiling each other from their native states. Notably, Guelphs and Ghibellines were domestic factions in each city, and were able to appeal to the help of successful members of their faction in other cities. Additionally, as is evident from the Discourses, mercenary forces are to Machiavelli the employees of their client, not the state directly, which has a distinct political effect among subjects: ‘when you disarm [the people] you are starting to offend them: you are showing that you distrust them either for cowardice or little faith, and either of these opinions generates hatred against you’. [7] Thus the immediate political effect is to suggest among citizens a sense of occupation and repression, which has repercussions for how a government or a lord comes to be appreciated by their subjects, and subsequently for their loyalty. This aspect of how mercenary forces come to be perceived  has a reverse corollary: whilst the people come to see their prince as dependant on foreign forces and distrusting his subjects, the former becomes more and more dependent upon the condottiere, the mercenary leader, which has the direct effect of undermining his sovereignty and that of the state. This was not only true of autocratic rulers, it also greatly affected republican regimes such as in Machiavelli’s own Florence during his time as segretario of the Republic.

Machiavelli’s work remains extremely influential and iconic in a number of fields, including the study of PMSCs. This paper has offered an exploration of Machiavelli’s historical and political context before marking a return to his original texts, advancing the argument that Machiavelli’s consideration of mercenaries was not only the view that they were ‘useless and dangerous’, or the ramblings of an amateur tactician complaining about unreliable troops, but rather that the use of mercenary troops posed very serious political challenges. What follows from the argument I have made here, is that Machiavelli saw the extensive use of, and indeed dependence upon mercenaries as a roadblock to state-building and to the consolidation of stable sovereign rule. Good governance was directly challenged by the use of hired forces: they did not provide a stable, loyal or reliable line of defence; they rendered the organisation of a native force more unlikely and challenging and finally, and most problematically, they created political strife by placing all military power in the hands of the prince or an official, rather than making it a collective defence duty that could, additionally, unify the population and inspire loyalty. The prince or official were in turn dependent on the leadership of the mercenaries, the condottiere, which vastly eroded their independence.

Hiring mercenaries, we might conclude, was a dual political bind in the Italian Renaissance. They rendered more difficult the creation of an alternative defence force, making the state dependent upon them. They also undermined governance itself by undermining the domestic political value of defence, stable defence itself, as well as the independence of the ruler, thus making ‘good laws’ or governance more difficult. The use of mercenaries and security contractors was to change in the following centuries, and it is of interest to enquire as to how the political bind posed by the employment of mercenaries, problematised by Machiavelli and explored here, was addressed by successive rulers and governments.

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NOTES
[1] The Prince XII
[2] Istorie Fiorentine, I, XXXIV, all translations my own.
[3] The Prince, XX
[4]  The Prince, 13
[5] The Prince XII
[6]  The Prince, XIV
[7] The Prince, 20

The lost art of propaganda

By Thomas Colley
(@ThomasColley)
Soldier Silhouetted in Afghanistan
Much has been made of the recently revealed MOD report on how to ‘sell’ war to the British public.

Critics have lambasted the MOD for attempting to manipulate the public to support war, evoking memories of Iraq in 2003. Anger was particularly generated by the suggestion that the profile of repatriation ceremonies should be reduced in order to reduce the casualty aversion of the British public. Unfortunately, by focusing on this, the media have missed the point of an astute report on how Britain should conduct future wars. Nonetheless, the report’s release under the Freedom of Information Act reveals a number of insights on how British strategic communication could be improved, and the continuing importance of its bedfellow, propaganda.

Much has been made in the literature on political communication of the difference between propaganda and strategic communications. The definitions of these terms are as most experts admit almost identical, being based essentially on the variety of methods used to influence people to think and/or act in a desired way for political purposes. Yet many experts insist that they are distinctly different. Strategic communications is supposedly based on transparency, openness and truth, and is favoured model for political communication in the information age. Propaganda on the other hand is seen by many experts as nefarious, based on selectivity, manipulation and deceit, a relic of the time of Goebbels and inapt for the modern media environment. However, as the controversy surrounding the MOD report demonstrates, the principles of propaganda should not be forgotten.

Firstly, presenting to the public an article explaining how war is to be sold to them would make Goebbels turn in his grave. As any good propagandist or strategic communicator knows, as soon as a message is revealed as propagandistic, it will be immediately rejected. People tend not to welcome evidence that their thoughts and behaviour are being influenced by their political overseers. Strategic communicators may preach openness and transparency, but surely the information operations of the MOD would be better served by never letting such an article see the light of day? Either that or employ propaganda’s old ally, censorship, and remove content sure to provoke public outrage. This could have prevented a sensible report explaining how future war should be conducted being framed as a scandalous attempt to prevent the public from honouring their dead in order to maintain support for war.

Critics may argue that it is wrong on principle to advocate government secrecy, propaganda and censorship. Others may claim that since it is highly likely that information will be revealed in an age where it is so freely available, being ‘first with the truth’ is preferable to secrecy. However, the point is that if the government is to conduct a communication campaign, openly telling the public how you intend to influence or manipulate them is neither sensible nor strategic.

As it is, whilst the report is insightful regarding public antipathy towards war, the profile of repatriation ceremonies is a peripheral point at best.   Casualty aversion in liberal democratic states is not primarily determined by the sight of the dead. Liberal democracies have had no problem accepting mass casualties when the cause has been seen as sufficiently important, be it the defeat of fascism, communism or the explicit threat of terrorism. Casualty aversion originates before a conflict even begins, based on whether the reasons for military action are sufficiently strong. Minimising casualties during a conflict will sustain public opinion, but that is nothing new. By far the greatest problem the MOD faces is convincing people that military action is worthwhile in the first place.

The almost sole focus on reducing casualty aversion also represents incomplete analysis of the public reluctance to go to war. Mercenaries, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Special Forces are intelligent ways to depersonalise future warfare, reducing the body count and thereby mollifying public opinion. However, casualty aversion is not the sole source of public opposition to war. Having studied the online commentary on both the Libya intervention and the debates surrounding intervention in Syria, much of the British public’s concern is actually economic. In Libya, public opinion was more concerned that the government should solve the domestic economic crisis rather than expending funds on ‘yet another war’.

So where should Britain’s strategic communication go from here? As the MOD suggests, a ‘clear and constant information campaign’ is needed to persuade a cynical public to support future wars. The primary focus should be in constructing a convincing strategic narrative to explain why Britain’s forces should be employed, whether in Syria or wherever the next conflict will be. This strategic narrative should explain the political and economic reasons for intervention in ways that relate to the lives of the British public. However, the government needs to be prepared to adopt the principles of propaganda in order to preserve the efficacy of these operations. One thing is certain; telling people how you intend to sell war to them is not a good start.