Rick Holmes: The new face of America's wars

After a two-year investigation, reporters for the Washington Post estimate that some 265,000 private contractors are doing top-secret work for the U.S. government. Presumably that includes the young man I met this summer at a barbecue.

His name is Bailey ("like in Bailey's Irish Cream") and he's 19. His job, he said, is to operate the unmanned aircraft that track and kill America's enemies.

"I can't tell you what I've done," he said, "but I can tell you where I've been." That includes Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines and, most recently, Somalia.

No, he's not in the military, he said, he works for a government contractor. Insitu Inc., to be exact, a wholly owned subsidiary of Boeing. You need more education and training to rise in the military than with a contractor, he said.

"In the military you can make, what, 50 or 60 grand? And that's if you're an officer," he said. "Working for a government contractor, you can make $250,000 to $300,000, if you get enough hazard pay."

The hazards are real. He works in FOBs -- forward operating bases -- that regularly come under fire. Insitu makes ScanEagle unmanned aircraft. Bailey is on the operations side, running the drones, he said, sometimes pulling the trigger.

"Our company got Zarqawi," the brutal leader of al Qaida in Iraq, taken out in 2006, he said. "I can tell you that."

When the employee in the FOB identifies a target, he communicates up the ladder in the contractor organization, he said, and the top guy there gets the green light from the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Navy. The contractors used to have blanket authority to carry out hits, he said, but now they have to seek real-time orders.

The kid has a flair for the dramatic. "You know that guy Jason Bourne? Basically that's me," he said, referring to Matt Damon's movie spy. His work "is kind of fun, if you think killing people is fun."

I take what he said about his personal adventures with a grain of salt. "Either the kid is delusional, or we're in a world of trouble," said a friend of mine who was present for our conversation.

But Insitu is real. Boeing, the world's largest aerospace, does top secret work in 42 locations for 11 government agencies, according to the Post's comprehensive examination of "Top Secret America," published in the last week. It's one of more than 100 private firms working in U.S. intelligence, an industry that has ballooned since 9/11.

This is the new face of America's war effort.

"Contractors kill enemy fighters," the Post reports. "They spy on foreign governments and eavesdrop on terrorist networks. They help craft war plans. They gather information on local factions in war zones. They are the historians, the architects, the recruiters in the nation's most secretive agencies. They staff watch centers across the Washington area. They are among the most trusted advisers to the four-star generals leading the nation's wars."

Many of the contractors are veterans, often retirees on full pension making far more than they ever did when they were paid directly by Uncle Sam.

Then there are the guys like Bailey, who comes across like a character out of Doonesbury. He's 19 and he acts like it. I'm not sure I'd trust him to repair my car. But the way he tells it, he's the tip of the spear of America's war on terror.

If he was wearing a uniform, I'd thank him for his service. And because of what I know about the military, I'd be confident he was well-trained and competently supervised by officers in the execution of lawful orders.

But Bailey has never been through basic training. Even top officials worry about depending on such people. As Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Post, "You want somebody who's really in it for a career because they're passionate about it and because they care about the country and not just because of the money."

I mean to cast no aspersions on the competence or professionalism of Bailey or his employer. But he works for a private company, and not even a private company exclusively employed by the U.S. government. Insitu's official company history brags that its services are "currently deployed with the United States, Australian, and Canadian military in addition to other global defense forces."

In any private corporation, CIA Director Leon Panetta told the Post, responsibility "is to their shareholders, and that does present an inherent conflict."

How does that conflict play out? We asked Bailey why he and his colleagues hadn't dropped a missile on Osama bin Laden yet.

"Well, there's been some bitterness in the company about that," he said. "Some people want to get him, but the PR people think we're better off not getting him. If he's gone, we don't get the contracts."

Rick Holmes, opinion editor of the MetroWest Daily News, blogs at Holmes & Co. He can be reached at rholmes@cnc.com.