Thread by @SamoBurja

What happens when an American businessman tries to make US military contracting radically more efficient?

They are violating America's unstated rules by doing so, expect them to have few friends.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Prin…

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America as all hegemonic powers do, has to juggle several incompatible ideologies and appear at least moderately legitimate to all of them:

Liberalism, Libertarianism, Protestant Christianity, Social Justice, Scientism, Neoconservatism...

How?

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The society compartmentalizes ideologies to the sector where they beset serve:

Libertarians will be quite happy to work as start up entrepreneurs and individuals contractors. Liberals as CEOs and academic administrators. Protestants as marketers.

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This semblance of a free society then has ideological self-similarity sorting. Industry standards always biased to fit a particular ideology.

So when an American businessman tries to make the Pentagon more efficient they breach this compartmentalization.

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Making Pentagon efficient at US goals messes with legitimacy in two ways:

1. Makes it harder for the managerial class to maintain complicit ignorance of what those goals are.

2. It messes with the defense patronage structure: The inefficiency is the point.

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With the theory out of the way let's now examine Erik Prince's impressive career and how it shaped the world.

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'Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears, I come not as the head of a private military corporation but a logistics company!'

I want a future where we rename the DoD the Department of Logistics. 😆👌



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In the lecture Prince lucidly notes US & UK cumulative spending on the the small wars of the last 20 years exceeds $10 trillion.

Yet, despite such exorbitant expenditures US fleets are ageing and only a small fraction of the paper air-force is ready for use.

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Prince correctly notes vital role of private military organizations played in American history be they trading companies, privateers or military advisors (Lafayette, von Steuben).

This delegation arguably fit past governments with lower state capacity quite well.

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In the 1930s the US government not yet at war with Japan gives service members leave o work for a company called CAMCO that builds and organizes a Chinese air force.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_A…

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_…

I'm reminded of Russia's Wagner Group.

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"I'm not here to debate the politics and justifications of anything or everything the East India Company did ... but ... this is a much more cost-effective model than what we've done over the last 15 years."

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