Outsourcing risky military work fractures accountability, enabling unpunished abuses.

Evidence

There is a growing trend in warfare to outsource risky security and military services to private contractors as the proxy agents. The contractual delegation of responsibility raises complex issues: Who are the authorizers? … Who is accountable for the conduct of private employees conducting risky operations in harm’s way (Francioni & Ronzitti, 2011)? These employees’ actions are those of a private company, not of a nation-state. Moreover, they perform their operations abroad, beyond national jurisdiction, so they are not bound by domestic law. It remains uncertain how private employees can be held accountable for abuses and human rights violations under international and humanitarian laws. The outsourced operations include ambiguous chains of command, spotty oversight, weak regulatory and enforcement systems, and a code of silence regarding transgressive conduct. These conditions provide a fertile ground for corruption and abuse. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 138

Categorization

• XREF: Structural diffusion of responsibility directly parallels Bandura’s displacement of responsibility mechanism that links to Cooper’s social-conservatism content on ordinary people rationalizing harmful policy by deferring to remote authorities.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 138