Necessary Roughness

Paravant LLC, an arm of defense contractor Xe, formerly Blackwater Worldwide, has admitted to involvement in an incident in Kabul early this month: several off-duty Xe contractors were involved in a car accident with a vehicle they believed hostile, and subsequently shot at it. Disciplinary channels will sort out the facts of the encounter, but the immediately noticeable detail is that off-duty contractors are not supposed to carry weapons. The inflammatory detail, and Blackwater’s  notoriety, obscure another pertinent fact: in a war zone, there is no such luxury as ”off-duty.”

Former Blackwater contractors, now of Xe.

The United States is actively engaged in several armed conflicts around the world. Its military is stretched thin, its defense budget jeopardized, its soldiers tired. Many have been deployed for years, on unexpectedly lengthy tours, and even reserves have felt the pinch. Record numbers of Army reserve units have been called to duty in both Iraq and Afghanistan. As active fighting consumes the majority of military resources, necessary support structures are left dangerously under-staffed.

Defense contractors like Xe are effective gap-fillers. Private contractors provide the requisite support, from flying transport planes and guarding food convoys, to protecting American diplomats and training foreign police units. In dangerous countries, contractors risk their own lives in furtherance of American goals. They perform a function as necessary to American victory as it was when their professional forebears, Hessian mercenaries, fought alongside outnumbered and out-gunned American patriots in our own Revolutionary War.

It is often the case that private industry moves at a more efficient clip than the Federal government does. In the case of defense contractors, the clip is all the more efficient because of the pressures of the field: mistakes aren’t a matter of beaurocratic review and audit, but of life or death. And while unnecessary violence is never to be condoned, it must also be understood that America’s soldiers, and the contractors who support them, are hardly engaged in a high school debating contest. They are not in a gentle country, and they were not sent there because of any local love of peace and tranquility. While peace must always be the ends, the means must unfortunately sometimes be violence. When that violence requires an out-sized proportion of America’s armed forces, the infrastructure positions which provide for the mechanics of peace are left to private industry, and companies like Xe are contracted with accordingly.

The methods of contractors will, and should, always be subject to the strictest scrutiny and the most severe discipline. But methods aside, the necessity of these men and women, and the trying conditions in which they earn a living, are not to be easily overlooked.

Reviewed: Losing Mum & Pup: A Memoir

Christopher Buckley’s Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir is in bookstores now, and reviewed here by Thomas Mallon.

Camelot Redux

“Beautiful, vivacious, bright, witty, and very naughty… a Kennedy, through and through” writes Chris Buckley of his daughter’s friend Kate Kennedy. Buckley’s philosophical apple may have fallen far from his father’s, William F. Buckley, Jr.’s, tree, but his description of America’s answer to English gentry is spot on. Joe Kennedy’s dynasty has fascinated, intrigued, infuriated, and – with questionable success – governed America for decades. And they’re at it again, in the re-issued PBS documentary “The Kennedys.”

Joe Kennedy, pocket-square afficionado.

 The film, scaled back from its original four hours, traces the family’s rise from investor, influencer, and bootlegger Joe to his nine children, and their heirs. The documentary is worthwhile historically, and also for its rare footage of super-lawyer Clark Clifford (a native Missourian), enlisted by Jack Kennedy to talk his father, Joe, out of an ill-conceived decision to have Jack’s brother Robert made attorney general. Joe was shortly thereafter relieved of an Ambassadorship for his Nazi sympathies.

If nothing else, the film is an eloquent study in power and drive: Joe’s. By hook or by crook, the Kennedy patriarch built an empire for his family and saw to it that they took advantage of his work. “The Kennedys” is a story of that uniquely American vision, to build a family, twisted to the power of one hundred, and its tag-line could well be Hawthorne’s old adage: “Families are always rising and falling in America.” In Joe’s family, the rise is meteoric. The fall is equally so, although more quiet: the family’s position, so painstakingly constructed, is the perfect foundation for infighting and dysfunction. The documentary, in detailing an American dream gone awry, is an equally American cautionary tale.