The United States should use private military firms abroad to pursue its military objectives.

Thanks to our opponents for a solid debate on a difficult topic. Burdens: We agree with our opponents: this debate is about net benefits. Whether it's costs, lives, perception or general strategy, we must establish the importance of those effects and weigh them against one another. That will be the focus of this round. But first, an overview. OV1: Regulation A common response Pro has given in this round is that we can regulate away the problems. We can use fewer PMFs and rely on them less. We can institute a bidding process. We can increase transparency. We can screen better. Unfortunately for them, none of this will happen. Pro provides absolutely no reason to believe that the U.S. would pass laws to accomplish these; they've certainly had time to do so. Even if they did, these policies would be purely symbolic. Pro is depending on self-regulation to remove major advantages it perceives in employing PMFs, particularly the low visibility that comes with their usage.[1] Using PMFs less extensively means that the U.S. government still has to up its recruitment to make up the difference. Bidding for contracts has been implemented before, and it resulted in contractors with lower qualifications, as the trained members will simply take other contracts.[2] Despite knowing that the U.S. has funded warlords who are disrupting the Afghani government, the U.S. has continued to do so due to a lack of other options in the region.[3] Pro gives us no reason to believe the U.S. would handicap itself in any of these areas, and doing them minimizes any benefit to Pro's case. Onto the arguments. 1. Manpower This argument assumes that PMFs are sending out qualified individuals. However, as we explained last round, even PMFs have only delayed access to those with significant training, and their numbers are far too few to meet U.S. demands. The result is sending people into the field who have extremely minimal or no training. Even when they have prior training, experts from PMFs are often ill-equipped to fight abroad. We"ve shown that any given PMF has an apparatus that exists outside of the military chain of command, which hampers the flexibility of the military as a whole, resulting in botched missions and dead and injured people. Even where PMFs provide some benefit, they are a crutch that the military relies upon. They can always take their business elsewhere, depriving us of resources we have become more and more dependent upon. Every deployment with PMFs increases that dependency. Pro's has argued that we need to have the tools available to us to combat unknowns, but all they do is cite a handful of potentially problematic countries and non-state entities without any explanation as to why hard power is a) required (our soft power is dominant [4, 5]), b) net beneficial (hard power has failed against terrorism and comes at the cost of soft power [6]), and c) insufficient without PMFs (we are the world leader in hard power [7]). Pro is reliant on an unknowable future with unknown demands, whereas ours are based solely in the known failures of PMFs. 2. Costs We've explained over the last two rounds how the costs of PMFs exceeds the costs of expanding military recruitment. Pro's numbers don't approach the hundreds of billions we've spent on PMFs. Pro only quantifies a single cost they claim will close this gap: injured soldiers. However, those injuries and casualties occurred in a system with PMFs commonly being used, which means they exist in both our worlds. If they do increase in our case, then the demands of injury and death would drive popular opinion against a given conflict, ending it sooner and reducing the overall toll. The double-bind doesn't exist. The cost of PMFs has clearly not functioned as a strong disincentive against military action abroad. Polls show that the vast majority of Americans are fine with current military spending or want more.[8] And it stands to reason that finances aren"t the reason we hire PMFs. Polling shows an inverse correlation between were awareness of total wartime casualties in Iraq and overall views of the war itself.[9] Voters are swayed by loss of life, not monetary costs. PMFs are a means to avoid public outcry. So, why does this matter? Pro drops the benefits of closing the VA shortfall and equipping and training our soldiers, both of which would save lives. Pro drops that spending abroad has resulted in money getting into the hands of dangerous warlords. Even spent judiciously, this money would go to other economies. Only in the instance where that money is paid out to U.S. soldiers is it assured to stay within and boost the U.S. economy. 3. Conflict We're talking about future hypotheticals; there are no guarantees about what conflicts will happen or how they will end. What we can guarantee is that the means to fight these wars are going to be limiting. How will that affect the way that the U.S. wages war? Pro tells us that the U.S. would spread its troops too thinly, though there's no incentive to do this. It would put every mission at risk; it's completely unsustainable. As for duration, a profit motive certainly hasn't stopped PMFs from accepting long missions in both of the wars where they have been employed the most: Iraq and Afghanistan. The alternative is to reduce the duration or overall number of missions and locations in which troops are needed, reducing loss of life and costs. Future conflicts would be limited as well by the size of the military. Both public support and limited human resources would require the government to reduce loss of life. 4. Risks The risks we've cited (engaging in massacres, sex trafficking, torture) actually are both systematic and inherent. A lack of training that results from increasingly large troop demands brings in untrained individuals with disturbing behaviors. That isn't changing so long as troop demands are high, nor is the lack of military decorum and visibility that the separation between PMFs and the military engenders. PMFs will always be private. And these acts aren't isolated examples " we've shown in the previous round that many of the detrimental behaviors they engage in are all too common among PMFs. But it's not required to be systematic or inherent. Despite Blackwater only representing small proportion of contractors in Iraq, their name is best remembered and their effect on U.S. perception is huge. Clearly, instances like this have greater fallout for the U.S. than the random soldier engaging in destructive behavior. The accountability of the U.S. is the problem, not of the PMFs. Pro drops that the U.S. can and has used PMFs as shields from legal action and blame for human rights abuses. This was the case with DynCorp, which we contracted to spray herbicides on Colombia. In doing so, the U.S. essentially gave itself carte blanche to violate basic human rights in pursuit of its goal of eradicating narcotics, resulting in the widespread health problems we mentioned in R1, as well as tremendous environmental damage.[10, 11] DynCorp was let off by the U.S., and no one was punished. There may be other means by which the U.S. can avoid facing the consequences of its actions, but this one can be rapidly deployed anywhere, as our opponents have been quick to argue. They are legal shields for clearly illegal actions. 5. Side-Effects Where our troops come from, and who is funded as a result, are key considerations we should make. Pro is quick to dismiss this, however a) they fail to provide anything beyond theoretics to showcase the benefits employing locals for conflicts, and b) the Afghanistan War is ongoing and these same groups are still employed by the U.S. government, which means even if the warlords example is unique, the harms are ongoing.[12] We have argued, and will continue to argue, that PMFs have an outsized, negative effect on the world that only the U.S. can address. Pro has argued that PMFs have the potential to provide protective effects, yet all of the examples in this debate demonstrate the opposite. In many states, PMFs are stronger than the national militaries. These nations have lost a monopoly on force, creating fragile and conflict-driven states that exist in a constant state of disorder.[13] This pushes the U.S. to spread itself more thinly in order to respond to these threats, which requires more PMF support, which in turn increases reliance on and the power of PMFs worldwide. Pro drops that the U.S. is integral to the persistence and growth of PMFs, and thus our ability to affect them stands. It is only by spurning them completely, by recognizing the harm that they do in the world and rejecting it, that we can have any means of reducing the problems they create. Conclusion We've shown how, on nearly every level, the hiring and utilization of PMFs by the U.S. yields a net negative for the U.S. and other nations. If we have to rely on training our own soldiers, this long-term investment in our continued military prowess is not a negative, nor is making our own sourcing decisions separate from PMFs for non-combat activities and bringing them in under the chain of command. PMFs have clearly shown a willingness to throw untrained, destructive individuals into the field, sourcing from and enriching our enemies in the process. Whether we're talking about perception, success, lives, monetary costs, or accountability, PMFs are failing on every front. The idea that we need this resource in our toolbox only sets us up for failure in future conflicts, increasing our dependency on PMFs that have no allegiance to anyone. Vote Con. 1. http://bit.ly... 2. http://bit.ly... 3. http://bit.ly... 4. http://bit.ly... 5. http://bit.ly... 6. http://bit.ly... 7. http://bit.ly... 8. http://bit.ly... 9. http://pewrsr.ch... 10. http://bit.ly... 11. http://bit.ly... 12. http://bit.ly... 13. http://theatln.tc...