modestly, MPRI described itself as “the greatest corporate assemblage of military expertise in the world.”
In 2000, MPRI (its many talents in tow) was bought for $40 million by a company called L-3, which envisioned a bright future for it. The company profile noted “changing political climates have led to increased demand for certain services… these programs tend to expand.” At that time MPRI was already training America’s future officer corps, having taken charge of key jobs in ROTC programs at more than two hundred universities. So pleased with MPRI were Clinton’s guys at Defense that they had basically handed the privateers the keys to what should be a public kingdom. In 1997, when the Pentagon wanted to overhaul its doctrine for working with private contractors, it outsourced the writing of that doctrine to a private contractor, MPRI.
It was like the old Baltimore pol/saloon owner who was asked if he should recuse himself on a pending question about how to regulate saloons:
Private contractors in general, and MPRI in particular, had not demonstrated that they had improved the dollar cost of doing US military business. In fact, the sort of huge cost overruns the government had encountered on Brown & Root’s original Balkan contract were the norm on even the most straightforward contracts. The Army, according to a 1997 investigation by the US General Accounting Office, “did not implement a systematic method of inspections to monitor contract performance. As a result, they could not ensure that the contractor performed work in accordance with contract provisions, used the minimum number of resources to meet the Army’s requirements, and furnished the appropriate level of support.”
In other words, nobody was sure exactly what we were getting for our money. Whatever the aggregate weight gain among the soldiers stationed in Tuzla or Slavonski Brod, nobody could tell if private contractors were more cost-effective, or more effective in general, than the military would have been, doing its own work. The soldiers flying the DynCorp-serviced helicopters that came out of the little chamber of horrors at Camp Comanche were certainly no safer. Neither was the local population, for that matter.
Meanwhile, all through the Clinton years, the stench at the center of the privatization experiment was obscured by all the Al Gore–created systems-efficiency nosegays about the flexibility and the streamlining and the sewage and solid-waste disposals and transportation grids and the generally empowering quality-of-life services at work in the fields of civilian augmentation and outsourcing. And so nobody in the Clinton administration ever really apprehended the acute and lasting problem of LOGCAP and the thousands of other small privatization ploys they unleashed; the acute and lasting problem was that they cut that mooring line tying our wars to our politics, the line that tied the decision to go to war to public debate about that decision. The idea of the Abrams Doctrine—and Jefferson’s citizen-soldiers—was to make it so we can’t make war without causing a big civilian hullabaloo. Privatization made it all easy, and quiet.
Like Reagan, President Bill Clinton had come to appreciate the merits of shifting ever-greater slices of difficult-to-sell foreign policy missions into the private sector. Unlike Reagan, who had secretly and illegally privatized military and fund-raising operations in support of the Contras, Clinton’s “outsourcing” allowed him to do much of what he wanted on the books, legally, as a matter of policy, but without the public much noticing. Take, for example, the Balkans.
Commander in Chief Clinton had inherited this disaster when he came into office in 1993. The bloodbath had begun in the George Herbert Walker Bush years, when, in the euphoria of the Soviet breakup, the state of Yugoslavia started spinning off its component parts with all the centrifugal force that ethnic and religious differences can muster. Roman Catholic Slovenia declared its independence, as did Roman Catholic Croatia, as did the ethnoreligiously mixed state of Bosnia. Bosnia’s population was part Muslim, part Eastern Orthodox Christian (Serbs), and part Catholic (mostly Croats). Slobodan Milosevic, incensed at having lost much of the Yugoslav federation he had just taken over, stirred his Serbian followers into a fury of paranoid ethnic and religious hatred, seized control of the Yugoslavian Army (JNA) and its arsenal, and began a series of punishing attacks on these new, internationally recognized sovereign countries.
The worst Serbian rampage was in Bosnia, where the JNA and bands of Serbian paramilitary thugs cut a vicious swath beginning in April 1992. The Serbs killed more than twenty-five thousand Muslims, along with many Bosnian Christians who tried to protect them; they burned out entire villages, tortured and killed Muslim leaders and intellectuals, and raped more than twenty thousand women and girls. All told, a million and a half Muslims fled their homes during the Serbian blitz. The Serbian strongman on the ground in Bosnia called it “ethnic shifting.” A US State Department Human Rights Report called it “ethnic cleansing,” and said that the killing “dwarfs anything seen in Europe since Nazi times.” Others called it flat-out genocide. The Serbs were undeterred by the world’s condemnation. They continued to shell civilians in the capital of Sarajevo, cluster-bombed other urban Muslim and Croat areas, and even shot down a plane carrying relief supplies into Bosnia. The Bosnian president lamented the “threat of extinction.”
But the Bush administration had its hands full and was determined to steer clear of this European war. Their shiniest new hero, Gen. Colin Powell, reportedly called Bosnia a “nonstrategic interest.” He wrote in a
Clinton had talked tough on Bosnia during the 1992 campaign. He said as president he would likely lift the UN-imposed arms embargo and help arm the Croatians and the Bosnians to fight the Serbs themselves. He also said he would order bombing runs on Serb artillery positions near Sarajevo and use military force to make sure relief supplies got to the Bosnian refugees. “I specifically would not foreclose the option of the use of force on that issue, because I’m horrified by what I’ve seen.”
“We lay great hopes in the new administration,” Bosnia’s foreign minister said a few days after Clinton’s election. “We hope they will fully understand the importance of the American role in halting the tragedy.” Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel buttonholed Clinton at a public event a few months into his presidency and implored him to do something to stop this unfolding European disaster. And Clinton really wanted to do something, really
But by the time the president bent himself to selling to the American people the notion of using American power to halt the Serbian-run massacre in Bosnia, he was already taking hard knocks in the public arena. A series of air strikes, critics sniffed, was a hopeless tactic suggested by a national security naif. Sen. John McCain, a hero pilot and the country’s most famous Vietnam prisoner of war, was leading the charge against. “Can you guarantee me that no American will be killed?” he asked a fellow senator who was supporting the use of air power.
In public, McCain was even more forceful. “Air strikes would frankly not affect the situation, unless—and this is a huge unless—we are prepared to commit ground troops in a prolonged military operation in Yugoslavia. And frankly, the polls show, by two to one margins, the American people even oppose air strikes…. I will not place the lives of young Americans, men and women, at risk without having a plan that has every possibility of succeeding, a way in, a way to beneficially affect the situation, and a way out, and we do not have that.” Clinton’s plan, said McCain, “has a hauntingly familiar ring to me. It was the same rationale we used to start the bombing of North Vietnam. That’s the way we got our fist into a tar baby that took us many years to get out of and twenty years to recover from.”
McCain was carrying a lot of water for the Pentagon in those days. Popular myth to the contrary, the American institution often least interested in going to war is the US military; it is especially wary of a war civilian leaders promise will be limited. “The use of force was controversial,” wrote Nancy Soderberg, Clinton’s deputy assistant for national security affairs, “and the strongest opponent was the Pentagon and Powell.”
The holdover chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin Powell, seemed to be aware that he was already a few points
