But the decision to construct a 64,000-foot command and control facility has since come to exemplify the U.S. military’s careless waste in Afghanistan. After $34 million was spent on its construction, the tall, windowless building was never, ever used, except perhaps for target practice by the Taliban, according to U.S. officials. The facility was officially turned over to the Afghan Army last fall, but it remains empty and lies in a part of Afghanistan where U.S. personnel rarely if ever travel now.

The question posed by the initial exposure of this costly debacle in July 2013 is, who was responsible? And will anyone in the military be held accountable?

After two internal investigations, and considerable hemming and hawing, the Pentagon’s definitive answer is finally available in a newly released federal report: No one in particular made a bad call, and if the question arose again under similar circumstances today, the same cavernous facility would be still be ordered up. Therefore, no one in the chain of command can or should be held responsible.

This reply has outraged several key lawmakers. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chairman of the Sen. Armed Services committee, told the Center for Public Integrity in a written statement that the project was a “boondoggle” and that the Pentagon’s claim that its construction was prudent is “patently false.”

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., a ranking member of the governmental affairs permanent investigations subcommittee, similarly called the facility’s construction “one of the most outrageous, deliberate, and wasteful misuses of taxpayer dollars.” She expressed shock that the Pentagon “completely failed to hold any officials accountable after all the facts came to light.”

Their criticisms were shared by the author of the new federal report, John F. Sopko, the presidentially-appointed Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). In it, he accused a senior Army general of insisting in August 2010 that the facility be completed merely because Congress had already agreed to fund it.

This decision was made over the objections of three generals who were arguably closer to the actual U.S. military deployments in Helmand province, where Camp Leatherneck was located, and who were aware that the surge of forces there was unlikely to be long-lasting. One of them sponsored a May 2010 review that declared the command center was “not necessary to execute our mission.” Another general agreed in a memorandum the following month that “this project is no longer required.” And a third said that month that the requirement for a facility “has already been met and thus this project is no longer required.”

These recommendations were rejected by then-Major General Peter M. Vangjel, the deputy commander of the Army’s forces attached to Central Command. He said in a note at the time that because Congress had already approved the construction, shifting those funds to another project was “not prudent” — an apparent reflection of the infamous “use it or lose it” ethos that federal bureaucracies use to keep their spending levels intact.

Vangjel, who went on to become the Army’s top inspector general before retiring in February, told one of Sopko’s aides that his decision was made with the “knowledge that there would be other opportunities to de-scope, or even cancel the project if the situation dictated.” Even though that never happened, and the facility was almost fully finished before its abandonment, Vangjel said that in his opinion, proceeding was “the right decision.”

Robert Work, the deputy secretary of defense, endorsed this decision in a Feb. 9 letter to Sopko, saying he was speaking on behalf of then-Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. Work wrote that a review showed Vanjel’s decision to proceed over the others’ objections “was prudent” because Camp Leatherneck was then “being considered as a potential enduring location for the U.S. military.”

Sopko also said that the two internal Defense Department probes of the facility’s construction were flawed. One of the investigators — an Army general named James M. Richardson, falsely claimed to have conducted interviews of key decision-makers, Sopko said. Instead, Richardson later said, all questioning was conducted by email.

Drafts of the second DOD investigation were sent in advance to the Army general who insisted that the construction proceed, to solicit his comments, Sopko said. Sopko further noted that the top legal adviser to a key Army commander advised colleagues not to cooperate fully with his investigation and called for a “slow roll” approach to answering his inquiries. Sopko called for a determination of “appropriate administrative or disciplinary action” against the advisor, Col. Norman F. Allen.

“SIGAR believes Col. Allen’s actions constituted both misconduct and mismanagement, and violated his professional and ethical responsibilities as an Army lawyer,” Sopko said in his report. Allen, in a written reply to one of Sopko’s aides, denied trying to impede the inquiry or “coach the testimony of witnesses.” Allen, who subsequently moved to the U.S. Special Operations Command legal office in Tampa, said his motive in calling for slow responses to Sopko’s probe was merely to allow enough time for consideration of the legitimacy of its “scope.”

What really troubled Sopko, however, was the failure of more senior officials at the Pentagon — including those at its own Office of Inspector General — to open their own inquiries into the flawed internal probes. “DOD stated that the DOD IG [had] decided not to investigate, while the DOD IG stated that he declined to investigate because DOD didn’t ask him to,” Sopko summarized.

By R. Jeffrey Smith

Prosecutors say, Slatten began the massacre by firing at the civilian occupants of a car caught up in traffic at the roundabout in Nisour Square, Baghdad. In the ensuing confusion three armoured vehicles opened fire, strafing the cars and pedestrians in and around the square with heavy machine guns and grenade launchers, causing what the lead prosecutor described as ‘a shocking amount of death, injury and destruction’. The defendants’ claim that they believed they were under attack did not convince the jury, who convicted them in October 2014.

After Nisour Square

In the fallout from the massacre in Nisour Square, Blackwater was blocked from providing diplomatic security in Iraq – the so-called ‘cowboys’ were sent home. Indeed, you might have expected a general cooling off in the relationship between the private security companies and state militaries.

But there’s been nothing of the kind. Between 2008 and 2011 there were more military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan than soldiers. Compare this to the First Gulf War, when there was one contractor to every hundred soldiers. Most of the contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan were working in logistics: building bases, doing the laundry, cooking the food. But a significant chunk – 18% in 2012 – were involved in providing security, exactly what Slough, Liberty, Heard and Slatten were supposed to be doing on that fateful day in Nisour Square.

Even Blackwater is still involved, albeit under a new – less threatening – name: ‘Academi’. As part of the failed counter-narcotics effort in Afghanistan, Academi has received $309 million from the US government. Erik Prince, Blackwater’s founder, escaped any liability for what happened in Nisour Square and is now gallivanting around Africa for Chinese mining, oil and gas companies as part of his new outfit, Frontier Services Group. In the war against ISIS, Prince has called for the US government to ‘let the private sector finish the job’.

Rotten apples?

The use of private military contractors by governments has increased, not decreased, since the Nisour Square massacre. But does it really matter? After all, weren’t Slatten and co. just a few rotten apples, caught up in the heat of the moment?

It is difficult to know how many ‘rotten apples’ are working for private military companies. In 2012, Faiza Patel, then Head of the UN Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries, claimed that the rot was widespread, alleging that private military contractors had been involved in extrajudicial killings and sex trafficking. A 2008 RAND survey found that 20% of diplomatic personnel who had worked with armed contractors in Iraq found them to be ‘unnecessarily threatening, arrogant or belligerent’. This was echoed by a 2010 New York Times article, which claimed that American troops saw contractors as ‘amateurish, overpaid and, often, trigger-happy’.

Regulating the cowboys

It is difficult to control what goes on in the shadows. Since the fifteenth century and despite Machiavelli’s warnings about the ‘undisciplined and treacherous’ nature of mercenaries, states have failed to effectively regulate the role of private companies in war. Even today, there is no effective system of legal accountability to check the behaviour of private military contractors; they typically operate beyond the jurisdiction of both national and international law.

For a long time it looked like Slough, Liberty, Heard and Slatten would evade justice too. It took over seven years before they were found guilty of the killings in Nisour Square, so long that the statute of limitations kicked in and prosecutors had to drop manslaughter charges against Slatten. In fact, the case only made it to trial after a personal intervention by Vice-President Joe Biden. Blackwater/Academi itself never got anywhere near the courtroom. If a case as high-profile and horrifying as Nisour Square proved so fragile, it is little wonder that private contractors rarely end up in court.

But even if there were effective regulation, even if we did live in a world where international law meant something and international institutions worked; even then it would still be better to reject the turn towards using private contractors instead of the regular state militaries.

More wars, bigger wars

This is because private contractors make war easier. With the support of private contractors, states can engage in more wars, and on a far grander scale than would otherwise be possible. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan would not have gone ahead without the support of private contractors: there just weren’t enough soldiers.

In particular, private contractors make unilateral wars easier. There’s a good reason that unilateral wars are unilateral: no one else supports them. If states could only entertain the possibility of going to war if that war had multilateral support, then both the legitimacy of the war and its prospects of success would be greatly increased.

Private contractors make war easier, and they also try damn hard to make it desirable. We should not kid ourselves into believing that these contractors are sitting quietly, twiddling their thumbs, waiting for the government to pick up the phone and call on their services. On the contrary, they are incentivised to lobby the hawks in government to make war. For the contractors, war equals money. It is no surprise that from 1998 Kevin Prince became a steady contributor to the Republican right – one of his recipients was, of course, George W. Bush.

Disturbingly, the more the government outsources its military needs, the more pervasive the war incentive becomes. Intelligence analysts working for companies like Blackwater are now judging security threats. Strategy experts working for these companies are now being asked their advice about the risk of prosecuting such-and-such a war. Those who stand to make money from war are gaining more and more influence in the corridors of power.

While we should welcome the weighty sentences handed down to the ‘cowboys’ responsible for the massacre in Nisour Square; it is no cause for celebration. There has been precious little change since the massacre. The state is still in thrall to the private contractors, and the contractors still operate in the shadows, beyond the eyes of the media and beyond the reach of the law. This matters. We have so far failed to tame the cowboys, we must not let them make violence an easy option.

By: Charlie de Rivaz is an MA student on the Conflict, Security and Development programme at King’s College London. For three years he worked in Argentina and Colombia as an English teacher and journalist. His main interests include the political economy of war, international human rights law, conflict resolution, and state-building. Charlie is the Managing Editor of Strife blog.