Analyst: 'Private Contractors are as American as Apple Pie'

"While many commentators acknowledge that private military and security contractors are not mercenaries, some of them still contend that their use, both qualitatively and quantitatively, is a new phenomenon, something that emerged full blown from free market apostles like Ronald Reagan, George Bush (senior and junior) and Bill Clinton," military analyst David Isenberg writes in his "Dogs of War" column for UPI.

"But any fair-minded reading of history should quickly expose such a view for what it is: namely nonsense.

"Private contractors are as American as apple pie. In fact, without private contractors there would not have been an America. Or, to paraphrase Genesis: In the beginning, God created private contractors.

"Private contractors helped set the stage for what would become America. Consider that Capt. John Smith was hired by the Virginia Co. to provide security and conduct military operations for the English settlers at Jamestown. He led the 1606 [sic] expedition to Virginia and was elected head of Jamestown colony."

And so on. Isenberg goes on to quote generously from a history of the 400-year tradition of private military contractors that appeared last year in Serviam, the magazine of the private contractor industry. A good reminder to those who think that the Blackwater phenomenon is something new.

(Pictured: Captain John Smith, the first PMC in America, is honored on a 1907 US postage stamp.)

Blackwater is part of 400-year American tradition

"Private security contractors, or PSCs, have been part of building the civilization that became the United States for 400 years. They are a founding part of the American entrepreneurial tradition of risk-taking and civic duty," scholar Michael Waller writes in RealClearPolitics.com.

Commenting on the Blackwater controversy, the Institute of World Politics professor says that outsourcing defense and security services dates to the first English colony in the Americas. "The first PSC on our shores was little more popular than his descendants today. Captain John Smith, a professional soldier who was paid to protect the interests of the Virginia Company of London in 1607, was accused of conspiring to subvert legal authority and locked in irons during the voyage to America, only to be exonerated and made chief of the expedition that founded the colony at Jamestown."

Waller follows with descriptions of PSCs including Captain Myles Standish, who was hired to protect the Pilgrims in 1620 in Massachusetts, a range of European officers who helped the United States during the American Revolution, the privateers of the Revolution and of the War of 1812, private counterintelligence and intelligence contractors during the Civil War, and the Flying Tigers under Gen. Claire Chennault in China during World War II.