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one way into this then is separating the question of contractor use in military contexts generally from the way the bush administration has chosen to play this game in particular.
the general issue seems tricky to me.
some of the responses above emphasize speed, efficiency, flexibility--private contractors would theoretically be more able to complex complex projects---but in a context like iraq, it seems to me that these advantages, assuming they exist, are mitigated because the contractors are integrated into a military situation that locks them in place. the problem, though, is not really that so much as it is the fact of operating in a military theater while that theater is still active. in other words, i think that the efficiency arguments might obtain for "reconstruction" projects---but i am not sure about whether having a bunch of private contractors running around active military areas is desirable.
you could say that private contractors should be better at moving stuff from place to place---but much---most, really--of war is logistics. actual battles etc are the expressions of logistical configurations and outcomes are, in the main, expressions of flows of materials through logistical systems. but if you accept this, then it follows that an active military theater extends from one end of a military-logistical apparatus to the other.
so the question i suppose comes down to whether modern warfare is necessarily the monopoly of states, and by extension whether the modern state can still be understood as having a "monopoly on legitimate violence"---war being a legal state of affairs, so war being an expression of that monopoly---is there a problem with farming out operations to private firms in this context? if there is, what kind of problem is it--and ethical matter? a political matter?
one way of looking at this is historically: the centralization of european states was driven by military developments from the 16h century forward. if you think about the french revolution as following from the french state's defaulting on bonds it floated to pay for fucking with the british during the american revolution (which it was), then you can see the modern state as a mutation that substituted an old form of surveillance (the state is oriented around military operations and surveillance of the aristocracy in general, which in turn, along with the police, surveil the people) for a new one (the state is orented around a direct surveillance of the people) that was driven by the need to work out steadier and more predictable revenue streams in order to pay for increasingly mechanised and capital-intensive types of war.
but if that's true, then the state's monopoly on "legitimate violence" in this respect is the result of an expedient. so it could be undone, i guess, following on new sets of expedients. and since you and are are nice, adaptive creatures, we would be inclined to map whatever ethico-political grids matter to us on whatever the existing state of affairs is.
in which case, the problem the bush people raise through their use of contractors is mostly that it's new.
another way of looking at this is as a matter of political accountability---war as a legal state of affairs necessarily involves a wholesale suspension of conventional ethics (people are trained to kill each other, they go out and kill each other)---which makes it a Problem even if, like lots of americans, you kinda like violence. it's maybe because war is such a problem that it's reassuring to imagine it a state function because in principle the state can be held politically accountable for it.
private firms need not be politically accountable for anything.
they are economically accountable to shareholders, arguably ethically accountable to stakeholders--but there's no mechanism that hold them politically accountable to anyone for anything.
so perhaps the unease that i at least experience with all this is a function of seeing in it a giving-away of the already minimal and apparently largely illusory sense of being able at some level to hold the state to account for the Problems that are war.
and maybe this general question loops back onto the present: that the war in iraq is a vast theater of impunity, a huge example of the illusory nature of accountability---but even within that, there's still something really quite disturbing about the integration of de facto mercenaries into the ordinary functioning of the military.
is this an ethical or political problem?
probably both--but what do you think?
is this an interesting way to frame this?
how would you frame this problem, in order to make clear what the problem(s) is (are)?
what seems kinda obvious from the nyt article and most other materials that i've seen about this matter is that the problems are being framed as technical/administrative--in *this* situation, arrangements were not adequately thought out--which seem to concede the larger question a priori, reducing it to a matter of adjustments and the need for them...
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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