http://lobelog.com/trump-and-the-return-of-private-military-contractors/#more-37636

Trump and the Return of Private Military Contractors

by David Isenberg
In 2005 the Marine Corps University published a paper entitled “The Professional Military Services Industry: Have We Created a New Military-Industrial Complex?”
To consider that question now, more than a decade later, is the equivalent of asking if the Pope is Catholic. The United States has not only created such a new complex, but it has also systematized, legalized, normalized, and, in all important aspects, accepted it. Yet, with the advantage of hindsight, America has never really had a deliberate, thoughtful debate over whether this was a good thing. Frankenstein’s monster was created with more forethought than the contemporary private military and security contracting (PMSC) industry.
Yet, when it comes to PMSC the train left the station decades ago. It just took the passage of many years, and multiple wars, starting with the U.S. involvement in the Balkan wars in the 1990s and then, much more prominently, with the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, for the public to begin to understand just how far the neoliberal phenomenon of outsourcing and privatizing functions that once upon a time were considered “inherently governmental” had gone. http://lobelog.com/trump-and-the-return-of-private-military-contractors/#more-37636