A Crash in Alaska, and the Cost of Borrowed Arms

A charter plane goes down near a long‑range radar site in Alaska. Eight dead, two pilots and six passengers, “dedicated professionals carrying out a vital mission in a demanding environment,” as the commander calls them. It is not even clear who they were or why they were there. This, to me, is the first signal. Where the task is vital, the chain of command and the purpose of each actor should be as clear as a well‑drawn battle line. When the fog of war appears in peacetime logistics, it usually means the state has stretched its instruments until they are half public, half private, and therefore fully exposed.

The aircraft is civilian‑contracted, a hired wing serving a military radar that guards the airspace of a great republic. Here the effectual truth is simple: a function essential to security is being carried by those who do not belong to the state’s own arms. In my book on princes I warned that mercenaries and auxiliaries are “useless and dangerous,” because their interest is not bound to your survival but to their contract, and power borrowed is always recalled at the worst time (as translated by W. K. Marriott). You have repeated the form, only changing lances to propellers and pay-chests to invoices.

Fortuna will always throw storms at such flights. Alaska is described as demanding; distance, cold, and remoteness are rivers in flood. Half of events belong to her, I have written, but the other half to virtù, to the dykes and barriers a prudent commander raises in fair weather. A crash can mean many things: a mechanical flaw, a misjudged route, a sudden gust. I do not pretend to know which. But I know how one should judge. You ask not whether the storm was fierce, but whether the institution built for years as if storms were certain.

Here the reliance on a charter company like Security Aviation is not a detail; it is the heart of the matter. When I wrote The Art of War, I put in the mouth of my Fabrizio Colonna the rule that citizen arms, trained and owned by the republic, are stronger than hired troops because they fight for what they are, not what they are paid. The same logic governs logistics. If those who fly to a radar site live inside the military’s own order, its discipline and incentives hold them firmly; if they sit outside, the bond is looser, the training mixed, the responsibility divided. What belongs to everyone’s contract belongs to no one’s soul.

Some will answer that modern war is complex, that a large republic cannot do everything with its own hands, that contracting pieces of the work is efficient. I do not deny necessity. Even Rome used allies. But Rome never forgot that auxilia remain dangerous if they become essential. The more vital the task, the more it must rest on arms and institutions directly commanded by the republic, or at least on contractors so tightly bound, trained, and overseen that they differ from soldiers only in paymaster, not in discipline. The middle course—vital mission, ambiguous status—is the most perilous of all.

Notice also the language chosen after the wreck. The dead are “dedicated professionals”; the mission is “vital”; the loss is to the “military family and the communities we serve.” This is good politics, and not contemptible. Appearances are an arm in themselves. In tragedy, a commander must preserve morale and reputation, or the enemy that profits is not only foreign but domestic doubt. Yet words without institutional change are like banners without troops: impressive over an empty field. The public will forgive misfortune suffered in clear, well‑ordered service more readily than confusion that smells of improvisation and divided responsibility.

What, then, does virtù demand after such a fall? First, to distinguish fortuna from fault without illusion; second, to ask whether this whole system of civilian‑contracted flights to critical sites is a borrowed arm that has grown too central. If the answer is yes, prudence counsels a ritorno ai principii: either bring such missions back under direct military wings or bind the contractors so closely into the military’s laws, training, and command that they cease to be auxiliaries in all but name. To do less is to trust continually that the river will not flood, and men who trust the river deserve to drown.