There are some issues with the military-industrial complex. In principle, contracting some of the more mundane functions of the military or even intelligence services out to private companies makes a lot of sense, as they can most likely find the most efficient means of delivery when profit is on the line. But as Ms. Hillhouse reminds us in a chilling coda, the extent to which our government's most sensitive functions--from counterintelligence to humint to operations and logstics--have been farmed out to private companies is worrisome. Especially when some of these companies (QinetiQ and Aegis Defense Services come immediately to mind, but there are others) are foreign owned and thus owe allegiance not just to their share holders but potentially to other governments as well.
This is where Outsourced comes into play. Like another current events fiction book I loved--A Corpse in the Koryo by James Church--RJ Hillhouse uses a fictional story to highlight the severe danger Private Military Corporations, or PMCs, represent. This allows her to explore how and why this system can break down (and often does, told through real life news stories excerpted at the beginning of most chapters) without coming off as a preachy, and quite possibly shallow, polemic.
In that sense, she is writing in the vein of early Tom Clancy, demonstrating extensive research, deep literacy of the political, social, and military issues involved, and a good eye for thrill. The writing is crisp, the pacing good, and the descriptions both enjoyable and clearly born of knowledge and not assumption. A love story between a warrior woman named Stella but known as her alias Camille, and Hunter Stone, a Pentagon Spy caught in a collapsing circle of competing agendas, forms the general framework of the story. Through this story, some of the more pernicious aspects of the chaos in Iraq come to light, including just how very easy it is to make people disappear there without explanation or investigation.
Just that section alone, showing how easy it is for personal agendas to not just set back the mission of peace but to rapidly spiral into a murderous cycle of revenge, would make this keen reading. But it is when the book morphs into a larger critique of how the War on Terror is conducted (including the interesting claim that bin Laden was captured in Waziristan in 2002 and his death covered up so al-Qaeda would remain rudderless, as well as stories of relentless border clashes with Syria, Iran on both sides, and Pakistan) that its real value becomes clear.
For example, a significant chunk of the book takes place in the Uzbek portion of the Kyzyl Kum Desert, at first near the vanishingly small town of Sukuti then an al-Qaeda training camp further south (Hillhouse helpfully provides coordinates, which can be plugged into Google Earth to see it's right between Bukhara and Samarkand). A fake PMC called Rubicon is running a secret prison nearby--a black site. By having a private company run the prison (either for the CIA or DoD), the government itself avoids, to a large degree, the brunt of the criticism. It is not Langley which is responsible for the fatal torture of suspects, it is the company they hired out--blame the company, not The Company, as it were.
In this conceit, showing both how utterly reliant upon and utterly powerless the government is to stop these companies, Hillhouse's novel can be considered a success. I was a bit disappointed she didn't explore how these companies might undermine the War on Terror more, though the ending, which wound up surprisingly satisfying, does approach the subject from a slightly oblique angle (especially the revelation that some PMCs, and some parts of the government, might not want the war to actually end).
But it seems silly to complain that a novel didn't properly address the complexities of the political and social realities surrounding privatized armies. The volume of literature on the subject, from the mercenaries of medieval Europe to the mercenaries of today, is small but growing every year. The new political and legal tangles these corporations create, including messy issues of legitimacy, legality, and jurisdiction, are so new no one really knows how to address them properly. For example, when Blackwater accidentally kills an innocent Iraqi, to whom must it ultimately pay the price? If a DynCorp spraying agent murders an Afghan villager, how do they get justice? These "soldiers" are not bound by US law while in-country, and neither Iraqi nor Afghani law applies to them. The new rule placing them under the UMCJ is weak and easily gotten around. So who do they answer to? Are they only responsible to their shareholders?
Some situations that arise in the book are eerie if only for how plausible they seem: a border clash between PMCs and the Taliban inside the NWFP in Pakistan, or along the border with Syria. I had some trouble believing that all the havoc these companies caused during the various chase scenes would go unnoticed by either the military or the press, but then again I have no idea what doesn't get reported or who turns a blind eye.
Ms. Hillhouse has accomplished something very few have: she has forced me to reexamine my own relationship with the government, including who I support and why. Who in charge is really looking out for our interests? And even if they are, is it moral for me to bask in our safety and prosperity when it comes at such a tremendous cost? Whatever answers I eventually settle out in my own head, the process of answering them will have proven extremely valuable. If for no other reason, even if it weren't an exciting spy thriller, I'd recommend it. As it is, there are many reasons to buy this and read.
