Lynn Rudmin Chong

To the editor,

New information, for me, that I read in my April 1 Progressive Populist, is about P.M.F.’s, “private military firms.” The article, “Saving Private Profit: The Outsourcing of War,” is written by Nicholas von Hoffman of Tenants Harbor, Maine.

“The American military…can neither move itself nor supply itself unless serviced by gigantic private corporations on which it depends for … food, water purification, electrical generation, construction of roads, bridges, mail delivery, medical services, land-mine clearance, communications and scores of other tasks …are jobbed out to multinational corporations which, in turn, job them out to subcontractors.”

Twists to this:

1.ROTC is now run “by employees of contractors who wear Army uniforms but are not subject to military discipline.”

2.A soldier doing substandard work could be punished. The private contractor’s employee can only be sued.

3.DynCorp’s …cutting corners with staffing (profit motive here) includes maintenance employees for U.S. combat aircraft “whose only previous work experience was as waitresses, security guards, cooks and cashiers. As one DynCorp mechanic … writes, ‘We have people working on aircraft with absolutely no aviation experience nor ground-equipment skills’.” So much for the gains of outsourcing. In the name of rewarding contracts to ex-generals who now head P.M.F.’s, to what fates do we send our young servicemen and women?

Von Hoffman highly recommends Corporate Warriors (Cornell University Press, 2003) by P.W. Singer. While our New Hampshire bookstores may not yet have available Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies — it may be Singer’s book is one to read to understand the changed face of war. What will the old soldiers amongst us make of profit being the point, not our countries’ policies, poorly formulated as Iraq may prove current ones to be? The implications of P.M.F.’s shock. No good songs can be sung about these non-heroics.

Lynn Rudmin Chong

934-6486