US to send military contractors to Ukraine

For nearly three years now, President Joe Biden has said that the US stands with Ukraine and will support its ability to defend itself.

That support has come through diplomatic cooperation, intelligence sharing, and most significantly, military aid.

What Biden has said he won’t do is put US boots on the ground.

Christopher Kinsey, a professor of international security at King’s College London, expanded on that: “They can’t deploy US troops — that would be political suicide for them, to put it bluntly.”

He said that there are multiple reasons why the US won’t send regular troops into Ukraine.

“I don’t believe there’s any appetite from the US public to put uniformed personnel on the ground. It would also be seen as an escalation of the war, and it’s not an escalation they would want.”

There are other reasons, though, why the US would want to send personnel into Ukraine, and that’s where military contractors come into the picture.

Robert Hamilton is a retired US Army colonel with the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.

“A lot of them are former military people, because to get the training, to service this type of equipment, you don’t develop that skill outside of the military,” he said.

“Whether it’s a patriot air defense system, or an M1 tank, or an F-16 or whatever, what we’re talking about here in Ukraine is you got contractors who service specialized equipment that either the US military, or the partner nation, in this case Ukraine, doesn’t have the capability to do that level of maintenance itself,” Hamilton said.

He said that the US and other countries have already done this type of maintenance work outside of Ukraine’s borders. But that model has been too slow and too costly. So, the contractors will be closer to where the fight is.

Hamilton said these contractors get paid well, because they have highly specialized skills and most of them know how to work in a war zone.

“I think the Russians, if they know where they are, they will target them, and so there will be an operational security requirement that’s going to be pretty high, to make sure that the Russians don’t know where they work, don’t know where they live, their profile is low, they’re not going to be driving around in vehicles with the name of the company emblazoned on the door.”

And that’s another reason why, according to Kinsey, contractors are a useful resource for governments.

“What they’re able to do is they can escalate up, and they can escalate back down, and they can do that out of sight of the public. Also there’s this notion of deniability, the American government can’t be blamed if things go wrong, they will blame the contractor.”

Kinsey said that one of the biggest critiques against the use of military contractors is that they come with less transparency and accountability.

“You can bypass Congress. So, that’s another reason why people are opposed to it, it makes actually engaging in war easier, because you don’t have society to buy in, in this respect, because you don’t need conscription.”

In this case, the contractors that are being sent to Ukraine will be limited to upkeeping and repairing weapons systems. So, they won’t be directly involved in fighting, and likely won’t be positioned near the front lines. However, Kinsey said that their presence in Ukraine already sends a message to Russia.

“We may not be putting ground troops in, but we’re certainly putting people in with weapons systems that know how to use these weapons systems. So, if you don’t toe the line, then I’ll just increase the number of contractors.”

According to recent polls, a significant portion of the US public does not support continued aid for Ukraine. That’s especially true among Republicans. So, whether the incoming Trump administration will carry on with this policy remains a question.