Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #65079 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780300152654
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Stanger, professor of international politics and economics at Middlebury College, comes to admirably nuanced conclusions in this important assessment of the trend of outsourcing critical tasks in the areas of foreign aid, defense, diplomacy and domestic security. Her analysis finds nothing inherently pernicious in the Bush administration's outsourcing of Iraqi security and reconstruction; contracting is a necessity given the ascendancy of the private sector as a key player in diplomacy in a globalized world. The executive branch's error has been to outsource proper oversight and contractor accountability—a laissez-faire approach she finds dangerous. Stanger is also troubled by the Pentagon's usurpation (and militarizing) of diplomatic and nation-building roles previously under the aegis of the State Department. She argues that the government must recognize that power in the 21st century flows from new sources and complacency at this stage threatens the government with enervation and possible obsolescence. These are vital, well-made and worrying points—readers will hope that the executive branch will heed the author's call to take the plunge and re-imagine government itself. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"The book aims admirably for both breadth and depth, examining the specifics of private activity in defense, diplomacy, development and security under an intellectual rubric that cuts across all four spheres. This is a fascinating treatment of an important subject." -- Debora Spar, President, Barnard College (Debora Spar )

"A superb work on government outsourcing and contracting for those who want to get past the myths and truly understand this hot topic. One Nation Under Contract should be required reading for all those leaders involved in fixing this process in order to get a clear sense and scope of this critical issue." -- General Anthony C. Zinni USMC (Retired) (General Anthony C. Zinni )

"Allison Stanger argues that the outsourcing of foreign policy functions as currently practiced is scandalous, but we cannot turn the clock back to top-down government. Smart power requires smart government, and this well reasoned book suggests how better to harness all the networks at our disposal in the information age." -- Joseph S. Nye Jr., Harvard University, author of The Powers to Lead (Joseph S. Nye )

"One Nation Under Contract breaks new ground in describing how the emergence of joint ventures between the government and private actors is transforming government accountability and diplomacy." -- Charles MacCormack, CEO, Save the Children (Charles MacCormack )

"As governments around the world contract out important tasks to private corporations, Allison Stanger has asked the key question: how do citizens reestablish effective oversight over private-public partnerships? One Nation Under Contract is a clarion call to bring the business of government under more effective public control." -- Michael Ignatieff, Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada (Michael Ignatieff )

"Slim but powerfully argued.provocative..By shining a light on what she calls America's 'shadow government,' [Stanger] does us the great favor of triggering a long overdue political debate." -- Thomas P.M. Barnett, World Politics Review (Thomas P.M. Barnett World Politics Review )

"The real strength of this superb book is not what it reveals, as stunning as that may be, but how well [Stanger] assimilates the changed circumstances of modern-day governance and simply addresses what now must be done..Stanger deserves a gold medal for this book." -- Boston Globe (The Boston Globe )

"As we debate how many more troops to dispatch to Afghanistan, it might be a good time to also debate just how far we've already gone in hiring private contractors to do jobs that the State Department, Pentagon and C.I.A. once did on their own. A good place to start is with ...One Nation Under Contract." -- Thomas Friedman, New York Times (Thomas Friedman New York Times )

About the Author

Customer Reviews

One Nation Under Contract: Right Diagnosis, Wrong Cure
"The American homeland is the planet." - 9/11 Commission Report

Very rarely do I read a "policy wonkish" book in which I so clearly agree with the diagnosed problem, but feel like the solutions offered leave me completely at sea.

Allison Stanger's One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy is such a book.

Stanger is no slouch. She is Middlebury College's Russell Leng `60 Professor of International Politics and Economics, and directs the college's Rohatyn Center for International Affairs. Her clear, concise, and thoughtful new book is "blurbed" by some high-powered people, including USMC General Anthony Zinni (who calls Stanger's analysis "a superb work on government outsourcing and contracting"); Canadian Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff ("a clarion call to bring the business of government under more effective public control"); and Harvard University professor Joseph Nye ("well-reasoned").

But her book's conclusions left me scratching my head.

Stanger sets out to answer a big and crucially important question: In an age in which governments around the world have "outsourced" nearly everything to private for-profit corporations, how do citizens reestablish effective oversight over private-public partnerships? This outsourcing problem is so vast and extensive that even the Establishment New York Times, an overexuberant cheerleader for U.S. foreign policy if ever there was one, referred to contractors as a "fourth branch of government" in 2007, a sign of just how troublesome things have become.

Stanger's extended case-study is the United States, a "republic-turned-Empire" (to her credit, Stanger is willing to entertain the use of the term "empire" to describe U.S. activities abroad) of 300 million citizens that has emerged over the past several decades as the richest, most powerful, most influential nation in the world, with as many as 1,000 military bases networked across more than 130 countries across the planet, 10,000 nuclear warheads, and an annual "defense" budget (read: "war-making") larger than the next twenty countries combined.

Her conclusions?

What once was considered public oversight (the domain of Congress, the State Department, and other somewhat-publicly-accountable government organizations) for maintaining this emerging global "Empire of Bases" is increasingly being governed by the dictates of private for-profit corporate interests. In her book, Stanger examines what she calls "the evolution of military outsourcing," including the privatization of U.S. matters diplomatic (which she rightly traces to the 1947 Congressional passage of the National Security Act), a process that has emerged in full dysfunctional flower with the 2001 creation of the so-called Department of Homeland Security, as well as the "slow death" of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Stanger is at her best when chronicling the waste, fraud, and abuse that has accompanied ongoing outsourcing. The U.S. government's six year invasion and occupation of Iraq is the most recent reminder of just how nasty things can get: more than 1 million Iraqi lives lost, billions of dollars "disappeared," U.S. tax-supported private corporate armies waging a mercenary war against entire Mesopotamian cities (Fallujah, anyone?) while U.S. diplomats hole up inside the so-called "Green Zone," home to the new U.S. embassy in downtown Baghdad: the largest, most extensive, and most expensive embassy compound the world has ever seen.

And Iraq is just the tip of the "outsourcing" iceberg.

While I appreciated her diagnosis of the "outsourcing" problem, I have two big issues with Stanger's book.

The first is her continual acceptance (not unusual for a U.S. scholar/policy wonk) of the U.S. government's officially stated "party line" on all matters diplomatic. When she asserts, for example, that the U.S.'s primary interest in invading and occupying Iraq was to help bring "democracy" to the Middle East, I found myself scrawling the word "nonsense" in the book's margin. Her unwillingness to push beyond presidential rhetorical rationales for U.S. actions abroad - Oil? Support for Israel? Profit for "Defense" Corps like Halliburton and KBR? - deeply undercuts the credibility of her argument.

Second, and more troubling, are her "solutions," packed into the last few pages of the book, which seem utopian to the extreme, even for this idealist. She speaks of "cultivating an emerging market for virtue" built on the "creativity of free individuals"; of "radical transparency in all government financial transactions" (and oddly, points to Wall-Street-Bankster-Backscratcher President Obama as a model here); of "loosening the grip of special interests on American politics" (yawn); and more to the point, of "restricting the use of no-bid contracts" and "demilitarizing U.S. foreign policy," both wonderful ideas that any D.C. insider will be the first to tell you will never happen.

In short, to this decentralist reader, Stanger's book is right in its diagnosis of what ails the United States, but wrong on the cure. Only a radical devolution of political and economic power away from the center (Washington, D.C. and Wall Street) and towards the periphery (Main Street and individual states, with Vermont leading the way, perhaps) will be able to stanch the "outsourcing" and the complete collapse of this once-great constitutional republic at the hands of those wringing a profit from its ruin.

To explore that phenomenon, however, Ms. Stanger may have to write another book.

Should be Required Reading for Anyone Who Wants to Understand Foreign Policy Today
Allison Stanger has written a tour de force -- the first book that succinctly and accurately describes the new reality of 21st Century foreign policy -- and the urgent need for our government to adapt. Dr. Stanger lays out in lucid prose and deeply researched detail the outsourcing of American government -- not only in the well-documented military sphere, but in our development aid, diplomacy, and even homeland security arenas. She shows how our government has given up much of our ability to implement foreign policy -- and how we have lost the ability to oversee the implementers, private and nonprofit, whom we have hired. For anyone who longs for "smaller government" Dr. Stanger shows the results of those policies in reducing American power worldwide.

Dire as these problems are for America's continued strength, Dr. Stanger's conclusion is wise. She understands what many activists do not -- that private businesses and nonprofit organizations are now part and parcel of foreign policy worldwide, and that the movement towards a more open world in which private citizens make a significant impact on world affairs can't be stopped. The clock can't be turned back, she says: we live in a world where Bill and Melinda Gates can do more for malaria in Africa than most governments, and where the decisions of Walmart affect trade more than the demands of most countries. These are facts on the ground--they are caused by globalization, increased wealth, and the internet--they can't be reversed without returning to totalitarian states or a world of reduced connections between countries that would impoverish billions. Dr. Stanger thoughtfully concludes that when change cannot be fought, it should be understood, and managed. Government must decide what functions are inherently governmental and must be made in the public interest: trigger-pullers in war, for instance, and bring those functions back inside. And it must then regain the capacity to manage, oversee, and police the rest.

One Nation Under Contract should be required reading for everyone serving in government, and everyone who wants to understand today's world. I run an organization that trains young leaders, and believe that every single one of them needs to understand the crucial points this book makes.

Good Material, but Too Verbose
The intent of this book is to highlight the implications of privatizing government policy, that present practice is scandalous, and that undoing government privatization is not the answer. Unfortunately, Stanger's overly academic treatise fails in all three missions, though her anecdotes and documentation of some of the numbers involved make the book worthy of a quick skim.

The Dept. of Defense is a good place to start. Stanger points out that the Pentagon's acquisition workforce shrank 25% between 1990-2000, while the volume of contracting increased 7X, and that between 2002-2005, the number of its contract employees rose from 3.4 million to 5.2 million. A key point here is that the simplest way to handled increased contracting with reduced staff is to issue giant contracts that allow subcontracting as desired - including evaluations. Thus, we end up with contracts that generate sub-contracts that generate sub-contracts, etc., for as many as five layers - adding costs at every layer. Then there's the missing billions in Iraq. Another typical problem is that various reports on procurement estimate that at least half of these contracts take place without full and open competition. Thus, there is no need for surprise when Stanger points out that a school costing ASAID $25,000 to build in Afghanistan could have instead be built for $50,000 by local Afghans (and probably generated good feelings for the U.S. at the same time). As for quality - shoddy electrical work by KBR is blamed for the deaths of at least 18 soldiers in Iraq, and Blackwater Security severely damaged U.S. credibility when it killed 17 civilians in Baghdad.

Sranger is correct that private contracting weakens control over government policy, but she does not account for some of the major mechanisms by which this occurs. A major source of the problem is that creative people can always find their way around a government contract; this problem is sometimes further acerbated intentionally by government managers, and the fact that government contract positions are not attractive to anyone with high skills and initiative. Then there's the 'revolving door problem. A USAToday article (11/16/09) pointed out that 158 retired general officers now consult for the Pentagon, and most also work for private industry - all at salaries far exceeding their former military pay. Clearly, the potential lure of those jobs can skew thinking of today's active-duty leaders. My own experience with contractors and consultants is that they spend about half their time looking for ways to extend and expand their scope of work, are much harder to get rid of than to bring in, and become a crutch for weak managers to lean on and hide behind - as a result, their advice must always be taken with a grain of salt. Another problem is that bringing in contractors usually reduces flexibility (eg. the outsourced warehouseman can no longer be asked to pitch in to help with a delivery crisis) and unforeseen changes in technology and/or task requirements create never-ending 'discussions' over who is responsible. Another problem with privatization is that it creates a powerful never-ending incentive to for private contractors to lobby for more government services etc., and a major new source of campaign donations.

In another section, Stanger points out that U.S. interests in the Mexican embassy were (and probably still are) promoted by representatives from 32 different agencies, that in 2005 the federal government had contractors in every U.N.-recognized country but Bhutan, Nauru, and San Marino, and we have military bases in 130+ countries. This gets to an even bigger problem - the size, reach, and complexity of American government. We end up with spaghetti-like organization and flow charts, never-ending coordination meetings, and obvious silliness such as the Director of Homeland Security giving briefings on the availability of swine flu vaccine. More important, it just doesn't work - both 9/11 and the Ft. Hood shooting took place despite numerous warnings, government's response to Hurricane Katrina was horribly botched, Madoff's Ponzi scheme was missed until he turned himself in, our financial system nearly collapsed last year, and pupil test scores and dropout rates have stagnated for decades,

Bottom Line: I doubt that any 'super-manager' (eg. a composite of Peter Drucker, Andy Grove, Steve Jobs, Jack Welch and anyone else you might want) would even want to try managing the federal government as it now stands. Significantly improving government performance requires that we first stop digging holes - the most obvious example is the link between our overly-biased support for Israel and the ensuing increased motivation for terrorism. A second is staying out of the affairs of other nations - our own 'bought and paid for' democracy is an embarrassment, as well as our financial management, and we need to stop telling others how to run their affairs - especially China and Russia. A third is reducing our dependence on foreign oil and associated interference in Iran, Iraq, and (formerly) Saudi Arabia. Fourth, get out of Afghanistan and Iraq - there is no reason to be there. At that point we need to implement a major government downsizing - eg. at least 50% in the Pentagon (we already spend about as much as the rest of the world combined), 75%+ in Departments of Commerce, Labor, State, and others; this would need to be accompanied by significantly reducing the accompanying rules and regulations. Then, reconsider restructuring. Only then does it make sense to consider Stanger's question of "What should be privatized?" Perhaps nothing.