For centuries, strict rules of warfare dictated how armies engaged on the battlefield. As proxy militias, suicide bombers, and private contractors proliferate, the rules are being rewritten—and Kateri Carmola is attempting to make sense of it all.
By Caleb Daniloff
Photographs by Bridget Besaw Gorman
Kateri Carmola moves across the carpet in Twilight Hall with grace; she was a dancer once. The dreams of her youth are still evident in her smooth gait and the effortless way she uses her hands when she speaks—birds fluttering around the words. In front of her sit 40 students, eagerly scribbling notes.
There are no spare seats in this corner classroom. Her popular War, Law, and Ethics course is usually overenrolled. In it, she explores the laws and moral dilemmas of armed conflict—from the ancient Greeks to the global war on terror.
These days, the development that most interests Carmola is the explosion of private military firms in Iraq and how that trend reflects a morally slippery shift in U.S. military strategy—the outsourcing of missions, from combat to interrogation. In short, U.S. foreign policy is being executed, in no small part, by a largely unregulated private sector.
Carmola steps away from the chalkboard, her fingertips smudged white. Today's topic: the breakdown and restoration of restraint in warfare. The sleeves on her black button-down blouse are rolled to the elbow. White lines from road salt squiggle along the toes of her leather boots.
An assistant professor of political science and a Christian A. Johnson Fellow in Political Philosophy, Carmola has written articles and helped organize national conferences about the topic of outsourcing national security—including one on campus last fall—and belongs to an electronic forum for security contractors in Iraq. She'll take next year off from the classroom to finish a book on the subject.
"I want people to realize the cost of our foreign policies," she says later. "We tend to imagine these policies are costless, when, in fact, they are just being borne by people who are out of our sight."
Carmola is the faculty's lone Vermont native, hailing from St. Albans, an industrial town in the state's northwest corner. She exudes a no-nonsense, down-to-earth sensibility. In class, she explains why it is important for students to own certain books (Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil), quipping that the price of one is equal to "just five Starbucks lattes." Her students consider Carmola firm, yet approachable, as curious about them as they are about her.
Emily Berlanstein '05, an English major from Baltimore, Maryland, says: "This may sound unsophisticated, but Professor Carmola is awesome. She's someone who ignores textbooks because it's much more fun to discover the theories via first-hand accounts. She's energetic and has a real knack for connecting with young people, without failing to remind them who's boss. (I've seen her throw chalk at a boy sleeping in the front row)."
Carmola's lessons are also playing out on the battlefields of Iraq. U.S. Marine Captain Michael Hunzeker, 27, was a student of Carmola's when she taught at the University of California, Berkeley, before coming to Middlebury. He took part in the ground invasion in March 2003 and has trained hundreds of Marines for battle.
"It's easy to talk about a humane war," Captain Hunzeker says. "Explaining it to a group of 18-year-old Marines on the eve of an offensive is a bit more difficult. Ms. Carmola helped me deal with the toughest question, one I heard over and over as I attempted to explain the rules of engagement to every Marine—'Sir, why should we play by the rules when we know the enemy won't?' She helped me understand the larger picture surrounding the rules of war and gave me the tools to explain it in everyday terms so that the people who make the difference—our young warriors—could put it into action."
Because this course is so grounded in the real world, fascinating material arises daily. Aside from frequent bulletins on the war on terror, there are regular developments in a rapidly morphing U.S. military. In mid-February, the New York Times published several articles—one on the immense popularity among civilians of a military-devised video war game, another on the Pentagon's push to develop robots for possible combat operations. The latter speaks to Carmola's concern with moral equality on the battlefield.
"Quick thought: would you want to play sports with robots?" she asks. Carmola posts these articles on the course Web site, and recently added an instant-message exchange between one of her students and a soldier friend now serving in Afghanistan. It touches upon many of her research themes: the glorification of soldiers, the dynamics of protesting war, military careerism, and excessive contracting. ("The stories I have—," the soldier writes, "You'll never want to pay taxes again.") In short, the great appeal of Carmola's course is that it unfolds in real time.
In high school, it was dance, not war that fired Carmola's mind. After graduating in the early 1980s, she left Vermont to attend NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. She was an eager teenager with a head full of city dreams. But life has a knack for sticking its foot out.
Tisch freshmen were required to take a yearlong writing course; Carmola's was taught by a grad student and aspiring playwright. "He came in and said, 'You're all dancers, or you're actors, or Tisch School of the Arts students, so by my definition, you're all dumb,'" she recalls. "'You've allowed your body to be the tool of someone else's mind, and I want you to reacquire your mind.'"
The instructor's name was Tony Kushner, destined to become one of America's most influential playwrights. And his words helped set the tone for Carmola's intellectual life.
"By the end of that year with him, I was so taken with thinking about the world," she says.
Carmola gave up dance and transferred to Columbia to pursue a degree in Russian, but she says she wanted even greater academic intensity and left the following year for the University of Chicago, an institution known for devoting entire courses to a single text. ("I felt I had years of education to make up for," she says.)
On campus, the intellectual energy was palpable. Students protested not investment in South Africa but the slashing of library hours. One of Carmola's professors, a Holocaust survivor, had taught himself Greek and read Thucydides by candlelight in hidden crawl spaces. Carmola felt she'd found a home.
In the summers, she returned to Vermont and worked "totally non-intellectual jobs. It was the perfect balance," she smiles. "I needed to get away from the city and from books. On the farm, we used to say you'd go beyond boredom. And there was kind of a neat, trippy space beyond boredom."
After graduating magna cum laude with a degree in tutorial studies, she moved to New Mexico. Figuring law school was next, she worked at a large law firm. In the evenings, she tutored at the Santa Fe Indian School, supervising ninth-grade Pueblo and Hopi students serving detention. It was here that her interest in warfare began. To engage the boys, many of whom were the relatives of Vietnam vets or interested in World War II Navajo code breakers, she brought in books on war. The connection was immediate, deep, and she still keeps in touch with some of those students.
Carmola grew tired of law work and taught at a private school for a year, but her mind was still restless. She applied to Berkeley to study the political role of women in Shakespeare but found herself distracted by thoughts of war—the Gulf War and later the paradoxical "humanitarian" wars—Somalia, Kosovo, Rwanda.
She stayed at Berkeley for 10 years, earning a Ph.D. and giving birth to two kids along the way. She went on to a postdoctoral position at the university, focusing on military ethics, and was considering a run for the local school board when an ad appeared for a political philosophy position at Middlebury. Three months later, she was on her way home. "When we landed it was manure-spreading time," she laughs. "You could smell it at the airport. It smelled like Vermont. I remember saying, 'I feel like kissing the ground.' Which is overinflated, but I felt that way."
Kateri Carmola sits at a table at Amigos Cantina, a Mexican eatery in downtown Middlebury. It's a mild February evening, and the restaurant fills up quickly—groups of friends, local families with babies, an English professor and his son. Carmola plucks a tortilla chip from a basket and starts talking about some of the issues from her forthcoming book: Global Warriors: Private Contractors and the Ambiguities of National Strategy.
There are 20,000 private contractors currently on the ground in Iraq, an unprecedented development, Carmola says. They carry out missions once handled by the military—guarding top U.S. officials, protecting oil pipelines, training Iraqi police, providing food for prisoners. Some 200 have been killed, but none make the official casualty count. It's a $100-billion-a-year industry that makes up a quarter of the U.S. defense budget. Regulation is mild. The ethical implications have yet to catch up. "I think 10 years down the line, this will all be more easily understood," she says. "Now, it's in this gray area."
Private companies can ease an overstretched military, freeing up more soldiers for battle, she says. But some critics see the contractors as modern mercenaries motivated by salaries that run as high as $15,000 a month.
Blurring matters is the fact that Pentagon contracts are often awarded to U.S. firms that employ ex-military personnel from various countries—South America, South Africa, the former Soviet Union, Israel. Obviously, upholding the U.S. Constitution is not in everyone's professional DNA. So identifying the buck, let alone figuring out where it stops, can become a puzzle.
"Contracting makes a lot of economic sense but it also has this effect that the government can deny responsibility," Carmola says, cutting into a chicken enchilada. "There are so many chains, so many links."
Two private military firms have been implicated in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal—CACI International Inc., of Arlington, Virginia, and Titan Corporation, of San Diego, California. Several of their civilian translators and interrogators are under investigation.
Carmola has recently returned from a security conference at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. Aside from regulation issues, panelists discussed tensions between the military and private sector, from bidding wars over translators to fundamental conflicts of interest. In many cases, both parties are serving the U.S. government. She recalls one exchange between a military official and a contractor.
"'You proceed at 90 miles an hour in armored vehicles through the streets of Baghdad,' the officer said. 'If you run over anybody or draw incoming fire or piss off a bunch of Iraqis, you don't care because your mission is to keep your clients safe. Our mission is doing appropriate counterinsurgency which is trying to win the hearts and minds of these people.'"
Carmola takes a sip from her drink. "It's a clash of ethos—of the business culture and military culture, which are totally opposed," she says. "You never hear words like 'virtue' and 'honor' in the business world."
Carmola believes that this new mix reflects the Pentagon's adjusted approach to warfare. While the September 11 terrorist attacks and the war on terror have obviously influenced strategy, the military had already been redefining itself. After Vietnam, the military, as well as the public, developed what Carmola calls "casualty phobia"—an aversion to soldier deaths and mutilations. Fighting from the air (as in Kosovo, where not a single plane was lost) became the norm. There was an increased use of Special Forces ("the darlings of the Defense Department," she says). And the U.S. began to rely on indigenous outfits to help fight its battles, like the oft-abusive Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. In an article published last year in the International Journal of Politics and Ethics, Carmola raised the provocative question of whether this meant the U.S. was outsourcing war crimes, too.
"One of my early thoughts was, Is our regular military so legally bound, so transparent, so professional that if you want all this dirty warfare going on, you have to sort of do it in a parallel universe, whether it's special ops, CIA, or private contractors. Sort of like the Colombian military, which has paramilitaries do its dirty work. How much of that is really going on? It's really hard to come out and say that.
"There are a lot of decent, hard-working people in the security business, but recent allegations make me wonder what kind of restraints really work for this industry, particularly during this conflict."
Mark Evans, a professor of politics and international relations at the University of Wales Swansea, says Carmola is helping shape an important moral discussion on the shifting nature of war, especially as waged by the West. He anthologized one of her articles in his 2004 book Ethical Theory in the Study of International Politics. In the article, Carmola focuses on proxy forces, private security firms, and the proportional use of force. "Her ideas have helped to clarify—indeed, render very vivid—the issues at stake and have made significant contributions to this ongoing and highly relevant
controversy," Evans says.
"Kateri's current research explores a very hot topic," says Allison Stanger, a professor of political science and the director of Middlebury's Rohatyn Center for International Relations. "I very much look forward to reading the fruits of her upcoming research year."
And by the looks of it, Stanger won't be alone. Publishers have already expressed interest. Carmola doesn't seem too fazed by the attention. She compares herself to an anthropologist, simply trying to uncover what makes people and organizations tick. Rather than seeking to influence policy, she hopes her book will tell readers something about being a citizen in today's complicated world.
"I think it's every academic's dream to just find some kind
of puzzle out there and try and loosen it up, make it more understandable, so that our decisions are more informed."
After dinner, she asks the waitress to wrap the rest of her chips and guacamole. A few minutes later, she steps outside and walks across Main Street toward her station wagon, keeping time with the forces shaping our world.
Caleb Daniloff is a freelance writer in Middlebury. He's a commentator for Vermont Public Radio and has written for the New York Times, Boston Globe, Boston Phoenix, and Publishers Weekly.