President Obama has set a number of milestone records while in the White House.
One of those being the only two-term president to be at war every single day.
Another milestone Obama has set gets even less attention, and involves the nature of how the wars are being fought.

Now, a new report compiled by the Congressional Research Service, which produces reports for members of Congress, reveals that the number of U.S. service members in Afghanistan is dwarfed by the nearly 29,000 Department of Defense private contractors in the country, outnumbering American troops three to one.
“As of March 2016, there were approximately 28,600 DOD contractor personnel in Afghanistan, compared to 8,730 U.S. troops,” states the report, authored by Heidi Peters, Moshe Schwartz and Lawrence Kapp.
Such private contractors comprise 77 percent of the total DOD presence in Afghanistan, the authors conclude.
According to the report, which examines the federal years 2007 to 2016, there have been more private contractors than U.S. troops in Afghanistan since the middle of 2011. But that gap has continued to grow, with a staggering 117,000 contractors and 88,000 U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan in 2012.
The most recent available figures for early 2016 show that roughly two-thirds of DOD contractors are foreign and Afghan nationals.

Is it really that hard to not see the connection between the war in Afghanistan going badly, and the war in Afghanistan being contracted out to mercenaries?
It would be a mistake to think that this trend is isolated to Afghanistan.
Increasingly our presence in Iraq is being contracted out.

In Iraq today, 7,773 contractors support U.S. government operations — and 4,087 U.S. troops. These numbers do not include contractors supporting CIA or other intelligence community activities, either abroad or in the United States.

Even in Syria.

This appears to be the first time the Pentagon has publicly acknowledged that private contractors are also playing a role in the fight against the so-called Islamic State inside Syria, and it’s one more signal that the U.S. military is deepening its involvement in the fate of the country.

There are several political advantages to having a war with mercenaries. Namely, the news media often overlooks or ignores mercenaries that get killed in our name.

Between Jan. 1, 2009, and March 31, 2016, 1,540 contractors were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan (176 in Iraq and 1,364 in Afghanistan). During that period, 1,301 U.S. troops were killed in Afghanistan and Iraq (289 in Iraq and 1,012 in Afghanistan). Last year was even more skewed toward contractors than the preceding six years; 58 contractors died in Afghanistan or Iraq, while less than half as many U.S. troops did (27) fighting in either country, including Syria.

Would the American public care if they knew that the number of Americans getting killed in Obama's wars were 100% higher than reported? Probably.
There is also the lack of transparency. The Pentagon can't even tell Congress how many military contractors it employs. This leads to other political advantages, such as lack of accountability.

What complicates matters is that sometimes the contracting activities are subcontracted to host-nation nationals, who fail to report deaths to the original contractor due to a lack of literacy or improper documentation. Thus, contractor fatality numbers are almost certainly undercounted.

All this allows Obama to have a supposed “light” military footprint in his wars, a reputation he mostly doesn't deserve.

Of course there are also drawbacks to having mercenary armies. Mostly their legendary lack of effectiveness.
But that is not all.

There have also been plenty of issues revolving around poor contract oversight, human rights issues revolving around contractors from third-world countries, and plenty of waste, fraud, and abuse. In fact, the Commission on Wartime Contracting has reported that as much as $60 billion was lost to waste or fraud in Iraq, as contractors often subcontracted out to other contractors and the trail of money went wobbly.

So mercenaries steal your money, kill the locals, and don't win the wars.
But otherwise mercenaries are a great idea because the whole operation is hidden from public oversight and accountability. Which is why Obama has endorsed a massive and historic build-up of a global mercenary army.

In World War II, for example, 12 percent of the total force was made up of civilian contractors (at the time doing support jobs only). During the Iraq War, they comprised about 15 percent of the total military presence, but they got into the news because for the first time they were given jobs that were formerly relegated exclusively to armed soldiers....
By 2011, the use of military contractors has risen to 50 percent. Today, in Afghanistan, the percentage is 75 percent. The cost for all military contractors in the 2014 fiscal year was $285 billion.

That’s equal to 8 percent of federal spending, and three and a half times Britain’s entire defense budget. About 45 percent of those contracts were for services, including private military contractors.

If mercenaries are not cheaper than regular military, then they are being used for political reasons. They are being used to avoid shedding the blood of citizens (the death rate for mercenaries is now higher than that for US combat troops). While we do not want to see the blood of our soldiers shed at all, this means that the government can now engage in military adventures without the public weighing in on whether the adventure is worth the risk - since from our new view as hiring managers, the risks are only financial. Hiring mercenaries who are not under military or civil law means that they can do things that our troops would never be allowed to do, yet America will still be held responsible. But most of all, we the people no longer know where our armies are.

Think about that.

Will Democrats actually think about that? Not likely in an election year.