Who Bears the Risk of Privatized War? Troops, Contractors and Third-Country Nationals

When a government hires firms to do part of the work of war, some of the risk of dying moves with the work. This paper measures how much moved in Afghanistan and Iraq, combining the Pentagon's contractor census, official troop counts, military death records and Labor Department contractor death cases. In Afghanistan, contractors' share of the reported deaths on the U.S. side rose from 44 percent in FY2010–FY2011 to 75 percent in FY2015–FY2017. About four-fifths of the rise in its log-odds came from the force mix, as contractors per soldier rose from about one to three, and one-fifth from relative risk. On the reported figures, contractors were less likely to die than soldiers during the surge (rate ratio 0.75, 95 percent confidence interval 0.68 to 0.83) and about as likely during the advisory mission (0.98, 0.70 to 1.39), and the ratio did not rise steadily as troops left. Correcting two known errors in the official counts raises these ratios to about 0.9 and 1.2 but leaves the force mix the main source of the rise. These figures may understate contractors' risk: workers from Afghanistan and third countries filed far fewer claims than Americans, although the Labor Department also counts other agencies' contractors. Scaling the reported deaths by the Costs of War project's under-reporting factor gives contractors 1.4 to 2.1 times the soldiers' risk (1.5 to 2.7 with both corrections). Third-country nationals rose from 13 to 41 percent of DoD contractors in Afghanistan, mainly because the number of Afghan workers fell.