The US should discontinue its use of private military contractors

Thanks blackvoid. I'll be re-grouping all the arguments into a more convenient order and internally, I'll extend my arguments and address the main voting issues. 1. Brain Drain My opponent hangs most of his case on this argument. His own source says that the brain drain is unique to specialized workers, like Navy SEALS, not the average soldier. And without PMC's willing to pay them more, for all we know these SEALS would retire, and we'd lose them anyway. Remember, 50% of our military is composed of contractors, according to the CRS, and most of them do base support and logistics, not soldier duty. When a PMC needs someone to do laundry, they hire unskilled labor. When a PMC needs a construction worker, they hire a construction worker. If they need a translator, they hire someone that speaks English and Pashto. This is much more efficient than what the military used to do: take regular soldiers and have them to laundry, teach them to do construction, and make some of them learn Pashto to become translators. Most of what PMC's do is noncombat, so the argument that PMC's are poaching a few soldiers who would have re-enlisted does not prove that without PMC's there would be enough personnel. Replacing laundry workers with troops is a bad use of resources, no matter how you look at it. Also, the fact we achieve huge cost savings with PMC's proves that most PMC's pay less than the military, except for particular specialized personnel like Navy SEALS. Without contracting with civilian translators, the military would have to train their own, which is costly and would take many years. Extend my turn that this empirically damages relations between local civilians and our troops, since if they can't communicate, when our troops do search missions they have to adopt more brutal tactics when they can't ask nicely to search a home. My opponent is advocating a huge change from the status quo and never explains how the military would replace one out of every two essential personnel. Congress would be so desperate next time we needed to fight a war that they would have to implement a draft, something that no one wants. 2. Civilian casualties turn people against us If my opponent loses brain drain, he loses this argument since it's his only response to the Senlis Afghanistan evidence, that when we have fewer boots on the ground, we have to rely more on air support, which kills many times more civilians. And General McChrystal was fond of saying that every dead civilian means 10 more insurgents join the cause. Getting rid of the maintenance workers and communications specialists on the bases will mean the military will have to shift more soldiers to base support, which means more reliance on air support in the field. The Wikileaks evidence does say that our military was responsible for the 15,000 civilian casualties that they had failed to disclose; why else try to hide these deaths? So I've provided evidence that our military killed 15,000 people in Iraq, and my opponent provides evidence that PMC's killed maybe 100 civilians. Obviously, PMC's are no worse, and are in fact better than our military. Lastly, remember the CRS evidence that the new Armed Contractor Oversight Division decreased the number of times that PMC's fired weapons by 67%, getting them to obey clear rules of engagement. My opponent makes a big deal that I "dropped" his argument, which was just a quote from the report that the CRS had some concerns that the army might not sustain the oversight. No evidence is provided that the DOD didn't sustain this division. 3. PMC's work both sides My opponent never provides evidence that PMC's have started WORKING FOR the Taliban. He provides evidence that we fund local warlords (whose affiliation is unknown), but remember my argument that in the world's second most corrupt country, we have to tolerate some things that we prefer not to. Warlords set up checkpoints along roads and demand money. It's easier for a PMC that we pay for logistics (to transport supplies) to just pay the extortion fee than to hire a huge security detail to fight off the warlords. My opponent claims his evidence says that PMC's pay the Taliban to attack them. First, this makes no sense; they are putting their own lives and supplies in danger if they do so. Second, the part of the sentence he cuts out says that this is one of many "allegations" and the source provides no evidence to back this allegation. Lastly, we wouldn't hire a contractor that worked with our enemies, and just like we have agreements with procurement companies that they can't sell US military technology abroad without our approval, we can also limit who PMC's work with. 4. Other disads My opponent doesn't extend his impacts here. It's just one example of a contractor building something badly and the army doing a terrible job of being accountable and reporting electrocution incidents to the contractor through proper channels. Once they were reported, KBR did country-wide inspections and repairs. That covers my opponent's case, now moving back to my own. 5. Better oversight than the regular military The DOD now has an Armed Contractor Oversight Division, which appears to have been effective in getting contractors to obey clear rules of engagement, decreasing the amount of times contractors resorted to using weapons by 67%. The army has no such oversight division if a soldier misfires a weapon; in fact, Wikileaks proves that empirically the military tries to cover up such incidents rather than holding soldiers accountable. I also made the argument that the new Status of Force agreements in Iraq and Afghanistan have clauses that the two countries cannot prosecute our soldiers (who have immunity), but for the first time, may prosecute our PMC's. [1] The source I provided last round showed a case where a contractor was jailed under Afghan law. As far as money, at least there is a division to oversee contractor expenses. No such division exists for the regular military, and we should assume there is widespread waste there as well, but unfortunately, the military refuses to publish a breakdown of its expenditures. Chalmers Johnson in "Dismantling the Empire" talks about a secret golf course the military set up in Kuwait for officers to take vacations from Iraq. Even with some abuse, contractors are still much cheaper. It costs 90% less to hire a contractor for logistical support than for the military to do this itself, according to the CBO. If PMC's waste some money that just means it could actually be 95% or 99% cheaper, with more oversight. My opponent claims my source says soldiers are cheaper than PMC's in war time, but this is simply not the case. The source says PMC's are $15,000 cheaper in peace time. It says nothing about war. 6. Humanitarian assistance Remember my argument that PMC's can do a lot of good in the world because they allow presidents to intervene to stop genocides, when they don't have the political cover to send in the regular military. MPRI stopped the Balkans from breaking down into a protracted civil war when Yugoslavia split into different nations. My opponent claims that his Sierra Leone evidence is about peacekeeping, but it isn't. It said that when the government hired (African) contractors to fight the rebels, they also gave guns to rebels. The U.S. could use PMC's to save hundreds of thousands of lives, stopping genocides like in Rwanda. Blackwater says that they would welcome the opportunity to do peacekeeping. 7. Guard Duty The Iraqi Army does not do guard duty; they have other things to worry about. Extend my turn that local police are viewed as thousands of times more corrupt than contractors. Without contractors, our State Dept officials would have no protection in Iraq. Voting Aff and getting rid of the PMC's that guard them signs their death certificates. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org...