The issues to which you point help explain the manpower that is readily available to the likes of Blackwater, but it doesn’t explain why the government chooses to use the services of such companies.

One of the major reasons for the growth of private military organizations like Blackwater stems from the degradation of the Unites States Military and its personnel. Pay rates and ‘fringe benefits’ (housing, medical, etc) for military personnel have always been substandard. Citizens give much lip service about respecting soldiers, but the VA has always been underfunded and overextended. Congress routinely plays games with military funding. Private companies provide security for most military post’s gates because the military can’t staff the positions because you can’t raise a family on a private’s salary and Congress won’t raise the base pay. Congress will however pay to hire a private firm to provide Rent A Cops to check id’s at the gates.

The end result is a military that is too small to do what it is asked to do. This isn’t a new problem in US history. The reason the British were able to burn D.C. in the War of 1812 was the Army and Navy were reduced to an insignificant size in the preceding decade. The US got its ass handed to it in the opening days of the Korean War because when Truman and Congress ‘cut the fat’ after WWII, they cut through to the bone and the Army was unable to put sufficient, well trained forces into Korea in a timely fashion without stripping Europe bear.

If we want to stop using private contractors then we’re going to have to make the military into a place were people can have a career, not just a way to pay for college.

But with Iraq, the causae belli were disingenuous and so even from the beginning there were a sizable number of people who believed that our invasion was based on a lie, or who saw the invasion as a deliberate attempt to subvert the desire of both the UN Security Council and the US Senate to allow for UN arms inspectors to do their job.

The point was that public engagement requires that some trust exist between the public and the leadership and the administration never sought that trust in the first place– which may explain why it has called on mercenaries and not for public sacrifice.

When people had to wait days or weeks for good information about what was happening to their troops overseas, I suspect people hung on every bit of information they could glean. Now we seem to have gone too far the other way. We get so bombarded with information that the general public grows inured by it.

I don’t think that its an accident. If most news people saw was important and could be connected to something meaningful in their lives we would not see the apathy that is so rampant today.

I find the whole disconnect between the public and the war fascinating. It just seems so odd to me that when the war is brought up to them specifically people will speak out against it but unless it is thrown in their face they just don’t care.

No matter how many pictures or shown or how many stories are told people just seem not to care. Can you think of any other time in society where people just didn’t car if their nation was at war?

The general public is not being asked to sacrifice anything. This concentrates the sacrifice in the hands of the families of our military almost exclusively. I think that is why a figure like Cindy Sheehan could attract such attention.

I think the use of contractors, not personnel oriented contractors like Blackwater, but also the outsourcing of laundry and mess hall services contribute to the disconnect between ordinary citizens and the war. During World War Two, people at home bonded over common sacrifices they made for the common good. I don’t even see people making much of an effort to take care of the families of our troops that are still here.

I’m not sure what kind of sacrifice could be asked of citizens now days that wouldn’t have negative ramifications on the nation’s economy. It’s not like growing a garden will put more or better food on the plates of our military. There are grassroots efforts that private citizens have undertaken to help out. Books for Soldiers (http://www.booksforsoldiers.com) comes to mind, but for every place like that where individuals can donate books, you get something like BooksAMillion.com’s clone (http://tinyurl.com/3xdkr2) where you can PURCHASE books and they will send them to Iraq for you.

The reaction to both 9/11 and the tsunami both freaked me out a little bit in the way people would go to a website, like the Red Cross page, and donate a few dollars and that was it. One of my best friend’s took 6 weeks off work to go down and help the Red Cross after Katrina. THAT is engagement. I know not everyone can do something like that, but we can certainly help support the people who do. We outsource our emotional investment in lots of things now, not just the war.