Soldiers Of Good Fortune 

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"We can see some merit in using an outside contractor," Charles Snyder, deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs, recently told reporters, "because then we're not using US uniforms and bodies."

Like the Clinton administration, the Bush administration is relying heavily on private military companies to wage the war on drugs in South America. Federal law bans US soldiers from participating in Colombia's war against left-wing rebels and from training army units with ties to right-wing paramilitaries infamous for torture and political killings. There are no such restrictions on for-profit companies, though, and since the late 1990s, the United States has paid private military companies an estimated $1.2 billion, both to eradicate coca crops and to help the Colombian army put down rebels who use the drug trade to finance their insurgency.

The largest beneficiary of this privatized war has been DynCorp, which is helping Colombia's national police destroy coca crops with aerial defoliants. But according to experts familiar with the war, the company's role goes well beyond spraying fields. DynCorp employees "are engaged in combatant roles, fighting in counterinsurgency operations against the Colombian rebel groups," says Peter Singer, a foreign-policy fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Corporate Warriors. "Indeed, the DynCorp personnel have a local reputation for being both arrogant and far too willing to get "wet,' going out on frequent combat missions and engaging in firefights." DynCorp has not responded to the allegation.

Relying on DynCorp and other private military companies has enabled Washington to circumvent Congress and avoid attention. "If the narcotraffickers shot American soldiers down, you could see the headlines: "US Troops Killed in Colombia,'" says Myles Frechette, the US ambassador to Colombia during the Clinton administration. By contrast, the 1992 assassination of three DynCorp employees, whose helicopter was shot down during an anti-drug mission in Peru, merited exactly 113 words in The New York Times. (In February, when another aircraft crashed during a drug operation in Colombia, three employees of Northrop Grumman were taken hostage.)

Private military companies also played an unheralded role in the Balkans. After the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, the United Nations placed an embargo on providing military assistance to either Serbia or Croatia. Some in the State Department, however, wanted to counter the dominance of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic by strengthening Croatian president Franjo Tudjman, a self-proclaimed Aryan supremacist. Private military companies once again provided the answer. In 1994, the State Department issued a license to MPRI to provide military training to the Croatian army.

"It allowed the United States to exert a good deal of political heft while reserving its official stance of not being involved," says Avant, the international-affairs expert at George Washington University.

MPRI insists that it provided no combat training to Croatian troops, saying it merely instructed the country's military in how to operate in a Western-style democracy under civilian control. But according to independent reports, the company taught basic infantry tactics to Croatian soldiers and explained how to coordinate assaults. In August 1995, after the training ended, the Croatian army launched Operation Storm, a US-style military operation designed to take back the disputed Krajina region from the Serbs. The four-day assault was a bloody episode of ethnic cleansing. Croatian graduates of MPRI's training carried out summary executions and indiscriminately shelled civilians, leaving hundreds dead and more than 150,000 homeless. Afterward, the Croatians expressed their gratitude for MPRI's help. "They lecture us on tactics and big war operations," one officer told The Observer of London, "which is why we needed them for Operation Storm."

Such incidents point to the greatest danger underlying the increasing push to privatize war. Soldiers who disobey orders or violate standards of conduct can be court-martialed and incarcerated; their supervisors can be reassigned or forced to retire. Private companies, by contrast, are able to operate in almost complete secrecy, with little accountability to civilian or military authorities. Consider the case of two DynCorp employees who exposed a sex-trafficking scandal in Bosnia, where the company was assisting the American military with peacekeeping operations during the late 1990s. According to court documents, DynCorp employees bought and sold local Bosnian girls, some as young as 13, for use as sex slaves, often confiscating the passports of victims so they couldn't escape. The men were not subjected to local or US criminal charges; DynCorp simply whisked them home -- and fired the two whistleblowers.