This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, December 29, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown. Private contractors in a war zone present a unique set of

challenges and unique political opportunities for lawmakers.

Heto Institute adjunct scholar David Eisenberg, author of the new book Shadow Force,

has some advice for the new administration about how to handle these contracts in the coming years.

Since the United States initially invaded Iraq and since even before that it and since it first went into

Afghanistan the utilization of contractors has only increased dramatically so in Iraq but also steadily in Afghanistan.

It is a fact that there are now more contractors in total operating in Iraq when you have active duty military forces,

all U.S. forces together are less than the total number of both security and a greater

proportion of logistics contractors. You now have over 200,000 contractors of

all types post-surge. You're now down to between 130 and 140,000 US forces.

Given our experience in Iraq for the past five-plus years and in Afghanistan even longer, what advice would you have given

that experience to the incoming Obama administration about how the military ought to use what the proper uses are of

contractors and where they're simply inappropriate to use. I think there are two

points to be made. One is that the United States

government desperately needs more people of green eyes shades. By that I mean

the longstanding scandal regarding the utilization of

private contractors both logistic and security contractors if you do not

have sufficient nor enough experience and qualified personnel to formulate

contracts to review the contracts when they're being bid to monitor them once they've been awarded and implemented

that everybody who works in the industry has understood this for years of people who

have been dodgy successfully understood it to be able to exploit contracts. That's why you have

...