Contractor combatant

Author and United States Department of Defense (DoD) contractor Carter Andress coined the term “contractor combatant” in his book about the Iraq War titled: Contractor Combatants: Tales of an Imbedded Capitalist. He defines the term specifically in an interview with the National Review Online as “a civilian who works in a war zone for a lawful belligerent in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, yet taking the place that in past history would be served by an armed soldier.”
Contractors at War
The requirement for a new job title in modern warfare originated in the Iraq War when contractors took on controversial (see Blackwater and KBR) but mission-critical roles that revolutionized US military logistics on the battlefield by substantially reducing the requirement for the limited number of available uniformed troops to undertake roles that contractors could fill. Military scholar John J. McGrath, in his authoritative paper “The Other End of the Spear: Tooth-to-Tail Ratio,” estimated that in 2005 contractors amounted to 58,000 personnel directly supporting a military force of 133,000 in Iraq. Thus civilians provided an unprecedented 30% of the total US force deployed inside Iraq. Tooth-to-tail ratio traditionally means the number of combat-arms soldiers proportionate to combat-support and combat-service-support troops. In the Iraq War, the relatively large number of contractors has redefined the term while allowing a significant shift of the ratio in the direction of combat-arms soldiers.
Security Contractors on the Battlefield
What differentiates a “contractor combatant” from a mercenary? The Geneva Conventions define a mercenary as someone that is an illegal combatant working “essentially” for monetary reward and not a citizen of a “Party to the conflict,” such as the U.S. or Britain that provide the majority of contractor combatants in the Iraq War and the current conflict in Afghanistan. In The Law of Land Warfare, contractor combatants are civilians accompanying the armed forces of a lawful belligerent.
Some would challenge that security contractors working in Iraq and Afghanistan for DoD and the US Department of State are combatants, including a review of Contractor Combatants in the The Army Lawyer where the reviewer, a US Army Judge Advocate General Corps officer, writes: “Andress … incorrectly refers to himself as a ‘combatant,’ even though his company’s primary mission is to provide life support to the local Iraqi police and security forces.” However, as many have noted since the Jessica Lynch incident, convoy security is one of the riskiest military missions in a counterinsurgency where there are no frontlines.
The confusion therein may lie with an anachronistic legal analysis; thereby calling for a new definition to modern warfare - contractor combatant. A combatant is someone who takes a direct part in the hostilities of an armed conflict, according to . Throughout the Iraq and Afghan conflicts, civilians armed with military-type automatic weapons, authorized and contracted by the US government, engaged in firefights with insurgents to protect critical supply lines and personnel for the US and Coalition military effort. This is the very reason the US government hired the services of these individuals: to defend convoys traversing the combat zone.
<references/>

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu