Ted Koppel has sounded off about the current state of our military and he brings up some excellent points:

Little known to the American public, there are some 50,000 private contractors in Iraq, providing support for the U.S. military, among other activities. So why not go all the way, argues Ted Koppel in a New York Times op-ed on Monday, and form a real “mercenary army”?

Such a move involving what he calls “latter-day Hessians” would represent, he writes, “the inevitable response of a market economy to a host of seemingly intractable public policy and security problems.”

It is make necessary by our “over-extended military” and inability of the United Nations to form adequate peace forces. Meanwhile, Americans business interests grow ever more active abroad in dangerous spots.

“Just as the all-volunteer military relieved the government of much of the political pressure that had accompanied the draft, so a rent-a-force, harnessing the privilege of every putative warrior to hire himself out for more than he could ever make in the direct service of Uncle Sam, might relieve us of an array of current political pressures,” Kopple explains.

They have damn near done this already so they might as well go all out. We have all heard stories about people in the Army who are suppose to be cooks. They end up going to Iraq to find themselves not cooking but rather on the front line (same goes for motor pool, clerks, etc.). Why is this? Because we have sub-contracted out the functions that these people have been trained to do. Yes – Rumsfeld really knows how to run a military – NOT!