Column: Putin’s contracting with Wagner and Eisenhower’s warning for America

In a New York Times op-ed earlier this month, Colin Clarke described the contracted services the for-profit Wagner Group provided to the Russian government, services that enriched their CEO, Yevgeny Prigozhin, while compromising Russia’s military capability.

The essay described how Prigozhin’s private army acted as a proxy for Russian foreign policy, deploying thousands of Russian mercenaries in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa that helped Russia secure natural resources while “allowing President Vladimir Putin of Russia to conveniently distance himself from the group’s unsavory alliances and ruthless tactics.”

Wagner — and Prigozhin — earned millions from Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Khalifa Haftar in Libya by protecting the oil and gas installations in those nations and extracted gold, diamonds and timber from other African governments for stamping out protests, launching disinformation campaigns and interfering with elections.

Given Wagner’s track record in Russia’s proxy wars abroad, Putin contracted with them to support his invasion of Ukraine. Prigozhin, though, became disenchanted with the course the Russian Army was taking there and decided to turn against Putin and his army. This has left Putin with a series of distasteful choices, choices that all seem bad for the Russian leader.

Wagner’s failed mutiny should serve as a cautionary tale for countries that rely on mercenaries to provide services in lieu of the military. Putin’s decision to contract with Wagner meant he did not need to send unwilling conscripts to places like Libya, Syria, Madagascar, Latin America … or Ukraine. And because he did not have to recruit unwilling conscripts, Putin retained some modicum of support for his ongoing war efforts.

But when the invasion of Ukraine did not result in the quick victory Putin expected, he decided to draft civilians into the armed forces, a decision that resulted in outmigration of tens of thousands of able-bodied young men. The lesson from this sequence of events, a lesson the British learned in the 1700s, is using mercenaries to engage in wars that lack public support is a path to defeat.

In some respects, our country’s recent military engagements rely on contractors the same way Putin has relied on Wagner. After our experience in Vietnam and our protracted engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, our country has avoided sending troops into combat. Instead, we and our allies are engaged in proxy wars.

In these proxy wars our country provides armaments, technical support and limited military support to nations who are invaded by or threatened by leaders we oppose. To date these proxy wars have not required us to expand our recruitment efforts, especially since our all-volunteer army is now augmented by contractors who perform tasks that were formerly done by enlisted military personnel.

Since the soldiers and contractors are all volunteers and we have not levied taxes to fund these conflicts, public opposition to our proxy wars is minimal. Indeed, since our economy is buttressed by the federal funds that underwrite the weapons used in these wars and pay for employees of the corporations and contractors who support our troops in these wars, funding for war receives bipartisan support.

Over 70 years ago President Dwight Eisenhower saw this coming. In his farewell speech to the nation at the conclusion of his eight years as President of the United States, Eisenhower warned that America had been “compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions,” an industry that resulted in “3½ million men and women .,, directly engaged in the defense establishment and a budget that resulted in military spending that exceeded the net income of all U.S. corporations,” He observed that the influence of this “military-industrial complex” permeated the economy, politics and spirituality in “every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government” and feared that without “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” to ensure “the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals” our nation would be imperiled.

The phrase “military-industrial complex” is the most remembered one from Eisenhower’s address, and the “military-industrial complex” Eisenhower described in 1960 persists today with the “permanent armaments industry of vast proportions” joined by a permanent industry of for-profit military contractors. And his description of the direction our nation was headed in 1960 has proved to be especially prescient:

“As we peer into society’s future, we — you and I, and our government — must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.”

Our replacement of recruits with contractors and our spending on armaments is one example of mortgaging “the material assets of our grandchildren … for our own ease and convenience,” and our unwillingness to raise taxes to fund wars adds even more to the mortgage future generations will need to pay.

Our continued reliance on fossil fuels that fouls the atmosphere and warms the earth is another example of mortgaging the future as is our relentless consumerism that stuffs our landfills and oceans with detritus.

These decisions to avoid unease and inconvenience now are making Eisenhower’s prediction for the future come true. We are losing of our political and spiritual heritage, a heritage that called for us to value our interdependence as well as our independence, a heritage that called for us to do everything possible to ensure the lives of our children and grandchildren were better than ours.

We didn’t heed Eisenhower’s warning decades ago. It would be wise to do so soon.