BOSNIA: GENERALS FOR HIRE

THIS IS THE AGE OF PRIVATIZATION. All across America, communities are hiring for-profit firms to perform the tasks that have traditionally fallen to government--educating children, running prisons, even building and maintaining highways. There is one job, though, that seems to be an unlikely candidate for outsourcing: executing the foreign policy of the U.S. If that is not the business of the Federal Government, what is? In Bosnia, however, the U.S. has a problem: there is one particular aspect of its mission that is crucial but that it is loath to carry out. So the very 1990s solution is likely to be hiring a private company to do the job instead.

For anyone who wants to rent a general, the place to go is Military Professional Resources Inc., headquartered in a squat, red brick office building in Alexandria, Virginia. Eight years old and with annual revenues of about $12 million, MPRI is, according to its brochure, "the greatest corporate assemblage of military expertise in the world." With 160 full-time employees and some 2,000 retired generals, admirals and other officers on call, it is making a fair claim. Among its most prominent executives are retired four-star General Carl Vuono, who ran the Army during Desert Storm and now heads the company's growing overseas business, and Crosbie ("Butch") Saint, who was once the chief of the Army's operations in Europe and who oversees MPRI's work there. This is the outfit that the U.S. will probably turn to for help in Bosnia.

Why would the U.S. need MPRI? The Dayton accord calls for disarmament negotiations to reduce the Bosnian Serbs' military edge over the weaker Muslim-Croat Federation. While its European allies vigorously disagree, the U.S. believes that even if arms control shrinks the Bosnian Serb arsenal, the federation will require new weaponry to ensure a military balance in the region. The accord allows arms to start flowing into the region beginning in mid-March. "We will not be able to leave unless the Bosnian government is armed and prepared to defend itself," says Democratic Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware. "That's the ticket home for Americans."

The problem is the Bosnian Serbs. They object to the notion that the U.S., by agreement a neutral party, would make any move to strengthen the Bosnian army. The U.S. fears Serb attacks on its troops if it uses them to arm and train the Bosnians. In fact, the Clinton Administration has pledged that U.S. troops will not play an active role in rearming the Bosnians. So how is Washington to achieve what it considers the necessary balance of power in the region? After months of fretting, the U.S. has come up with a plan. Senior officials told Time that some private company, most likely MPRI, which has done work for the Croats, will train the Bosnians, who will be freshly outfitted with hundreds of tons of new weapons provided by the U.S. and its allies. "MPRI has got the know-how and the track record in the Balkans," says a senior Pentagon official.