Big hat tip to Glenna for pointing out this Wall Street Journal piece on defense contractors expanding to justice sector work in Liberia and elsewhere. This is not new; PAE (a Lockheed Martin company) has trained prosecutors in Liberia for years. What is new? Using defense contractors to, “test an emerging tenet of [US] security policy[...] ’smart power’ [...] blends military might with nation-building activities.”
My questions:
- Does it work? The WSJ reported several years ago that the US refused to reveal the details of its contracts with defense companies to the Liberian government, despite the fact that these companies were training Liberia’s army. I imagine the US has done studies to evaluate the effectiveness of these contractors, but I wonder if the Liberian government has been allowed to see these studies.
- What are the long-term implications of the short-term presence of these contractors? Could their presence somehow supplant the work of local civil society groups?
An excerpt from the article:
Others worry that once defense firms get into this business, their longstanding relationship with the U.S. government will end up driving more money into these initiatives, no matter the results. “It’s sort of like the soft-power industrial complex,” says William Hartung [...]
Yes, the story not so much that the US government is spending money on nation building, but is funneling that money through the Defense department to military contractors rather than through USAID to NGOs. I’d have liked to have read more about how those channels were affected in the last administration and this one.
Or an article on how the impact might be different when money goes through the different channels. (eg USAID v. Defense Department)