The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (3 page)

Now the situation is changing back. The growing willingness to employ private force and subsequent erosion of the taboo against mercenarism signal a return to the premodern norm of medieval times, when mercenaries were common and states did not enjoy the monopoly of force. Moreover, states are no longer the principal actors in international affairs as they were a century ago. Today they compete with others who also have political power: multinational companies such as ExxonMobil, international organizations such as the United Nations, and nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty International. As in the Middle Ages, today’s world order is polycentric, with authority diluted and shared among state and nonstate actors alike.

The gradual return to the status quo ante of the Middle Ages is best described as
neomedievalism
, non-state-centric and multipolar world order characterized by overlapping authorities and allegiances. It is a metaphor for a global phenomenon and is not intended to be Eurocentric. Nor does it imply worldwide atavism. States will not disappear, but they will matter less than they did a century ago. Nor does neomedievalism connote chaos and anarchy; like the medieval world, the global system will persist in a durable disorder that contains rather than solves problems.

As in the Middle Ages, a key challenge of neomedievalism will be controlling private military force. Offering the means of war to anyone who can afford it will change warfare, why we fight, and the future of war. The commodification of conflict could reintroduce contract warfare, which has the power to transform world politics back to the future.

This is a disturbing observation, that states soon may not be expected to retain a monopoly on the use of force. Instead, private armies may return, in which case a sharper understanding of today’s industry is needed to grasp the scale of this danger and what it portends for the future of peace and security. Key questions
include: Who are these new private military actors? How are they different from those of the past? Who is hiring them? What kinds of services do they provide? Where are they based, and where do they tend to operate? Answering these and other questions will explain the contours of today’s market for force and suggest where it will go after Iraq and Afghanistan.

The market economy as such does not respect political frontiers. Its field is the world.

—Ludwig Edler von Mises

The private military industry has surged since the end of the Cold War and is now a multibillion-dollar business. Today’s military firms are sophisticated multinational corporations with subsidiaries around the world and quarterly profit reports for investors. These companies are bought and sold on Wall Street, and their stocks are listed on the London and New York exchanges. Their boards consist of Wall Street magnates and former generals, their corporate managers are seasoned Fortune 500 executives, and their ranks filled with ex-military and law-enforcement personnel recruited from around the world. They work for governments, the private sector, and humanitarian organizations. The industry even has its own trade associations: the International Stability Operations Association (ISOA) in Washington, D.C. the British Association of Private Security Companies in London, and the Private Security Company Association of Iraq. Despite the surfeit of coverage in recent years, the industry remains confusing, because it is notoriously impervious to outside investigators. Consequently, little is known about how and why these private military actors exist.

The private military industry has become a fashionable subject for study over the past decade, but knowledge about the industry is still thin. The primary obstacle to research is the lack of data available on the industry. The firms themselves can be more opaque than the US military or intelligence agencies, because they are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act or similar legislative tools that
impose transparency. Even members of Congress do not have direct access to the contracts by which these firms are employed, even though Congress is writing the checks.

Journalists’ and academics’ analyses of PMCs are anemic, because the industry is media-phobic, owing to its roots in the military, which traditionally eschews public scrutiny. Reporters, who are typically not even allowed to interview members of, much less embed in, PMCs, can only record the events surrounding the industry. Academics depend almost entirely on the work of journalists for their analyses of these firms. Consequently, their mutual conclusions can be speculative and even factually erroneous. This has stultified understanding of the industry.

Government inquiry into the industry is limited and, at times, convoluted. Currently, there is little, if any, meaningful regulation of or reporting requirements from this industry, which is remarkable given that the firms are authorized to use lethal force abroad under the US flag. Reports produced by government watchdog agencies such as the Congressional Research Service, the Congressional Budget Office, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, and the Government Accountability Office offer excellent snapshots of discrete problems with the market but lack analysis of macro trends.

Remarkably, government investigators are often given limited access to the industry’s internal workings, owing to issues over proprietary knowledge. What genuine investigation has occurred is narrow and limited to three areas: the legal status of armed contractors on the battlefield; monetary fraud, waste, and abuse; and experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wider ramifications of this industry are left relatively unexamined, such as how the commodification of conflict might undermine long-term foreign policy objectives. Congressional hearings on PMCs, such as those held by Congressman Henry Waxman, spotlight problems with these firms but do little tangibly to resolve them and are often little more than political theater.

Much of the media discourse on the industry is framed in acrimonious and demonizing terms, owing in part to the sensationalistic lure of labeling PMCs as mercenaries and the promise of an audience. A sample of headlines from mainstream news outlets reveals some of this: “Dogs of War: From Mercenary to Security Contractor and Back Again,” “Making a Killing: The Business of War,” “Modern Mercenaries on the Iraqi Frontier.”
¹
Reporters-turned-authors fan the fire of conspiracy theorists by insinuating that PMCs represent a shadow government manipulating or coercing the national security establishment, with provocative books such as Jeremy Scahill’s best-selling
Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army
, Stephen Armstrong’s
War PLC: The Rise of the New Corporate Mercenary
, and Robert Young Pelton’s
Licensed to
Kill: Privatizing the War on Terror
. Such distortions of the industry are more inflammatory than informative.

Industry defenders are equally problematic, as they tend to treat it as just another services industry, overlooking the moral, strategic, and policy complexities of the issue. They maintain that the private sector is more efficient and effective than the public sector at finding solutions to difficult security challenges but offer little evidence to outside researchers to corroborate these claims. They even inoculate the language used to describe the industry with euphemism. ISOA is disparaging of the terms
private military company
and
private security company
and promotes the softer phrase
contingency contractors
. Perhaps Erik Prince, founder and CEO of Blackwater, best articulates the industry’s self-image: “Our corporate goal is to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did to the Postal Service.”
²
However, after a handful of Blackwater personnel killed seventeen innocent Iraqi civilians at Nisour Square in Baghdad on September 16, 2007, his company rebranded itself from the militaristic “Blackwater,” a term used by Navy SEALs to describe covert nighttime underwater operations, to “Xe,” which stands for xenon, an inert, noncombustible gas. Some might view this as disingenuous and even cynical. The company has changed its name once again, to “Academi,” and Prince has since left the company and the country.

Amid the public debate, a broad range of scholarly literature has emerged on the private military industry within international relations, law, political science, and economics, mainly dwelling on a few aspects of the issue: vague regulatory options for the industry at national, regional, and international levels; normative challenges to the state’s monopoly on force; and typologies that clarify the industry’s organizational structure. The conclusions drawn are generally theoretical and speculative, however, pointing out not only the lack of data needed for rigorous analysis but even disagreement about how to define a PMC.

Despite the glut of attention lavished on this topic in recent years, there still is no common definition, typology, or understanding of who exactly is a member of the industry. Consequently, there is a range of terms used to describe these firms, further confusing the issue:
private military contractors, private security companies, private military companies, private security/military companies, private military firms, private security contractors, private military corporations
, and
military service providers
. Some analysts and organizations, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), use terms interchangeably—say,
private military company, private security company
, and
private military/security company
(
PMSC
)—sowing further conceptual disorder. The US government generally
favors
private security company
, yet this term means wholly different things to different parts of the bureaucracy, as noted in a congressional investigation into the matter, which itself uses the term in an exceptional manner.
³
Still others use
PMSC
as a catchall definition, but such an all-encompassing category is not analytically meaningful. The lack of a common lexicon handicaps discourse on a topic already shrouded in secrecy.

Definitions range from the very narrow to the overly broad, and both ends of the spectrum are unsuccessful from a critical perspective. Not surprisingly, the industry defines private security too narrowly as the commercial act of physically protecting a person, place, or thing—or, in the words of Doug Brooks, former president of the ISOA, private security is any activity directly related to protecting a “noun.” Similarly, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2008 defines private security functions as the guarding of personnel, facilities, or properties and any other activity with armed personnel.
⁴

These definitions may sound fairly comprehensive, but they fail to account for the many activities the industry’s firms are involved in, such as intelligence analysis, military operational coordination, security force training, and logistical support in nonpermissive and hostile environments. Moreover, they ignore the moral aspects of conducting business when it comes to the application of lethal force.

Broad definitions also exist and tend to emanate from the academic community. The seminal book
Corporate Warriors
by Peter W. Singer catalyzed the debate over private military force in 2003 and remains one of the best analyses of the industry to date. Singer defines private military firms (PMFs) as “private business entities that deliver to consumers a wide spectrum of military and security services, once generally assumed to be exclusively inside the public context.”
⁵
This definition provides a good baseline for study but ultimately depends on the subjective assessment of what military services are inherently governmental or “assumed to be exclusively inside the public context.” This will vary greatly from observer to observer.

Another important book is Deborah Avant’s
The Market for Force
, in which she divides the industry into two categories: external and internal security. External security consists of combat operations, military advice and training, and logistical support, whereas internal security includes policing, intelligence services, and static defense.
⁶
This is helpful, because it differentiates security based on what happens inside versus outside a state. External security deals with force projection and protecting national borders from invaders, while internal security maintains domestic order. One limitation of this approach is that it is highly state-centric in an era when national borders matter less and less; weak states have notoriously porous borders, while strong ones are plugged into a globalized world that frequently blurs the line between internal and external affairs.

Despite these difficulties, Singer and Avant represent some of the best scholarship on the topic. But, like many, they are challenged by a lack of industry data and insider knowledge, resulting in definitions that are too expensive to parse the complex private military industry. A new definition and a new taxonomy are needed, ones that provide analytical and theoretical coherence for modern private military actors.

The organization of the industry reflects the market and how it evolved. At present, the market for force is not a free market but rather a monopsony, a market with a single buyer. The current market marker for modern force is the United States, as it has turned to the private sector in unprecedented ways to support its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While other outfits exist, such as the French Foreign Legion, they are not part of today’s market for force, because they are not free-market actors, selling their services to different customers. The Foreign Legion is part of the French Army, is led by French officers, takes its orders exclusively from Paris, rewards its legionnaires with French citizenship, and only serves the French government at cut rates. It has little in common with the armed contractors operating in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The United States’ insatiable need for security in Iraq and Afghanistan fueled the growth of today’s private security industry. This also gave the United States market power as the consumer-in-chief to shape business practices and norms during the industry’s formative years, as it grew from a multimillion-dollar to a multibillion-dollar market. Not surprisingly, market actors now look very American, as firms naturally pattern themselves after their biggest client to attract more business. Owing to this, a fitting typology for the private military industry is based on the US military.

Specifically, the mold of the modern private military industry is the US Army, for two reasons. First, these new firms are land forces and fundamentally private armies, as the United States has hired no private navies or air forces. Second, former US Army and Marine Corps personnel fill the management ranks of these companies to instill confidence in and ensure interoperability with the client, because they understand the operations and culture of the US military. The boards of directors for these corporations are stocked with retired generals to help win contracts from the US government, anticipate future government needs, and lend credibility to the firm for its chief customer. This produced a US-centric industry to appeal to its primary customer.

The categorization of activities required to support land warfare is similar regardless of private versus public providers, although different armies have
slightly different approaches. Because combat can occur anywhere in the modern theater of war, the typology is based on function rather than location in the battlespace. For the US Army, military units fall into one of three general categories based on their function or mission: combat arms, combat support, and combat service support. The function of
combat arms
units is to kill or train others to kill the enemy in foreign lands, unless a foreign enemy is invading the homeland. Combat arms units include infantry, special forces, armed aviation, and armor (e.g., tanks).
Combat service
units provide operational support to the combat arms units, allowing them to engage the enemy more effectively, but they do not directly engage the enemy themselves unless in self-defense. These units include the military police and military intelligence.
Combat service support
units provide logistical and administrative support to combat arms and combat service units, thereby supplying and sustaining the force. Like combat service units, combat service support components are not expected to engage the enemy unless in self-defense. This category includes quartermaster, ordnance, transportation, adjutant general, finance, and medical services corps. The chief distinction between combat service and combat service support is that the former offers operational support while the latter offers logistical and administrative support to combat arms units.