Knight-Ridder reports:
As the insurgency and violence in Iraq intensify, the Department of Defense has proposed a new rule for most of the estimated 70,000 civilian contractors working in the war-torn region: They can’t carry guns.
At the same time, a top Defense Department official this week acknowledged publicly for the first time that the war effort was suffering a “brain drain” of civilian workers who were fleeing Iraq because they didn’t feel safe. . . .
Now I realize that contractors’ carrying guns can cause hazards as well as benefits:
Supporters of the new rule — including the biggest contractor in the area, Halliburton’s Kellogg Brown and Root — said there are three big drawbacks in allowing contractors to carry weapons. Armed contractors would be more likely to be shot at or kidnapped. Also, as civilians, they don’t follow the same strict rules of force as the military. And by picking up weapons, contractors could lose any death and accident insurance coverage they may have. . . .
But “Nick Sanders, who chairs the contract finance committee for the National Defense Industrial Association, a trade group for traditional defense contractors,” has it right, I think, on the bottom line:
The problem with the rule is that it tells contractors that they’re responsible for their security, but then says they can’t be armed . . . .
So while I may well be mistaken — the rules for survival in war zones are complex, and inexperienced civilians like me are hardly the best judges of them — it seems to me the government’s proposal is not the right approach. (Thanks to Dan Gifford for the pointer.)
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