The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (4 page)

Like the US Army, the private military sector consists of three categories of units or companies analogous to combat arms, combat service, and combat service support. The
private military companies
(PMCs, the focus of this book) are the private sector equivalent of combat arms, since their job places them in the line of fire. PMCs are expeditionary conflict entrepreneurs structured as multinational corporations that use lethal force or train others to do so.

Five characteristics distinguish PMCs from other armed nonstate actors in global politics. First, they are motivated more by profit than by politics. This is not to suggest that all PMCs disregard political interests and serve merely at the whim of the highest bidder, but they are fundamentally profit-seeking entities. Second, they are structured as multinational corporations and participate in the global financial system. These are not shady “lone wolf” mercenaries stalking the jungles of the Congo during the wars of African liberation. Third, they are expeditionary in nature, meaning that they seek work in foreign lands rather than providing domestic security services. There are exceptions to this, especially when it comes to homeland defense, but in general, these firms are foreign focused and are not domestic security guards. Fourth, they typically deploy force in a military manner, as opposed to a law-enforcement one. The purpose of military force is to defeat or deter the enemy through organized violence, while law enforcement seeks to deescalate violent situations to maintain law and order. This intrinsically affects how they operate. Fifth and most important, PMCs are lethal and represent the commodification of armed conflict. There will always
be exceptions to these five features, but they serve as a good test of whether an armed nonstate actor is a PMC.

There are two kinds of PMCs: mercenary and military enterpriser. Mercenary companies are private armies that can conduct autonomous military campaigns, offensive operations, and force projection. At present, there are no large mercenary firms, but they have existed in the recent past. For example, the now-defunct firm Executive Outcomes, based in South Africa, conducted independent military campaigns in Africa during the 1990s. In 1993, the Angolan government hired Executive Outcomes to defeat the rebel group National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), retake oil facilities in the harbor town of Soyo, and train government soldiers for $40 million a year. Two years later, Sierra Leone’s government hired Executive Outcomes to defeat the Liberian-backed Revolutionary United Front (RUF), retake the Kono diamond area, and force a negotiated peace for $35 million.
⁷
Executive Outcomes provided its own combat units, air forces, global supply chain, and so forth, to defeat the enemy. The United States has shunned strong PMCs, and consequently, they are absent from today’s market for force.

Distinct from mercenaries, military enterprisers raise armies rather than command them. Historically, this type of conflict entrepreneur trains, equips, and fields whole regiments to fight for their clients. Most modern PMCs are military enterprisers and make their money not by deploying their own armies but by making them for someone else. For example, the United States has relied on contractors to develop the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police, even awarding DynCorp International a contract worth up to $1 billion to train the police.
⁸

Raising foreign forces is inherently a PMC function, because only combat arms units can transfer their unique skill sets from one to another. Only an infantry unit can train another country’s infantry units, which is standard practice in military training. The reason is self-evident. Military professional training is derived from the knowledge and credibility of field experience, which cannot be duplicated by a textbook or imitated by a pretender. A quartermaster unit cannot train platoon patrol tactics, nor can an infantry platoon train brigade resupply operations. Nonveteran civilians are unqualified to train military units, which is why PMCs draw their personnel from the ranks of former military and police units worldwide. Furthermore, training others to kill occupies the same moral universe as killing itself and must be considered within the ambit of PMCs.

Military enterprisers are PMCs in another way, too. With their stronger mercenary cousins, military enterprisers share the same competences and could easily be transformed into mercenary firms. In other words, if one has the ability to raise an army, then one also has the aptitude to deploy it, since the skill sets are closely related. In fact, most modern PMCs blend the two categories. The
United States contracts PMCs to help raise Iraqi and Afghan security forces, but these firms also augment the US military there, using deadly force (mostly) for defensive purposes. Examples of these tasks include protecting fixed or static sites, such as housing areas, reconstruction work sites, or government buildings. Other tasks include providing armed escorts to convoys traveling through risky areas or offering bodyguards in dangerous places. Bodyguard teams, called personal security details (PSDs) in industry parlance, protect high-ranking individuals in conflict zones, such as Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, who was protected by DynCorp International in 2002.

PMCs routinely deploy armed personnel, convoys, and helicopters to protect people and things for their clients. In 2005, the State Department’s Worldwide Personal Protective Services II (WPPS) contract awarded up to $1.2 billion to Blackwater, Triple Canopy, and DynCorp International, which collectively provided some fifteen hundred “shooters,” or armed civilians authorized to kill, in Iraq alone. This contract provided armed escorts for US government personnel around the world, with license to kill under limited circumstances. This contract, though lethal, is not equivalent to the military campaigns waged by Executive Outcomes in Africa, but it does demonstrate that mercenaries and military enterprisers are related and in the same category.

The
security support companies
are the private sector version of the US Army’s combat services units and are generally unarmed. Examples of security support companies range from Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), which provides intelligence analysis, to the Lincoln Group, which conducts strategic communication in Iraq, to CACI and Titan, which provide interpreters to the US military, to Total Intelligence Solutions, which runs spy rings for the US government overseas. Security support companies are as controversial as PMCs, even though they typically are unarmed and do not employ lethal force. CACI and Titan contractors were implicated in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and Lincoln Group instigated an uproar when journalists discovered that the US government had hired the company to propagandize the US cause in the Iraqi free press.

General contractors
are equivalent to the US Army’s combat service support units and provide logistical support through supply, maintenance, transportation, medical, and other services that combat units require. General contractors are not members of the private military or security industry, as they perform nonlethal tasks that are not uniquely military or security-related in nature. However, it is important to include them within this typology and acknowledge their presence and complicity in conflict-affected areas. Typical general contractor tasks include equipping soldiers, maintaining vehicles, constructing buildings, driving trucks with supplies, cooking meals, building bases, and performing routine administration. The bulk of contractors in conflict-affected areas fall into this category.

Table 2.1
Typology of the Private Military Industry

Focusing on function in relation to combat operations and recognizing the influence of the US Army’s organizational and operational influence on the emerging private military industry produce a more logically coherent typology than earlier attempts, especially for typologies created before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which shaped the industry in substantial ways.
Table 2.1
depicts this new typology.
⁹
A few of the larger companies, such as DynCorp International, operate in all three categories, but this is exceptional; most companies specialize in only one category.

US military officers frequently discuss tooth-to-tail ratios in campaigns.
Tooth
refers to combat arms units, while
tail
refers to combat service and combat service support. How the private sector’s tooth-to-tail ratio compares with that of the US military is unknown and worthy of further study. Based on preliminary numbers of armed contacts and trainers, such as the WPPS or security force assistance contracts, one would expect the private sector ratio to be overwhelmingly tail compared with that of the US national army. But as the Nisour Square and Abu Ghraib scandals demonstrate, numbers may not be the best measure of campaign significance, as the mistakes of a few contractors had a strongly negative strategic effect for their employer. Owing to these and other incidents, PMCs remain the most controversial component of private armies: they represent for-profit killing and the commodification of conflict.

Secrecy and lack of data have hobbled understanding of the private military industry, leading to confusing and conflicting accounts of who is and is not a member. The best way to comprehend the contours of the industry is in terms of the United States’ own military. The United States birthed this industry for its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, unsurprisingly, the industry mirrored the client’s own army. PMC leadership, culture, and operational concepts are all derivative of the US military, which is very appealing to the client.

However, this raises disconcerting questions about the relationship between client and companies. Are the bonds between the United States and the private military industry too close? Do conflicts of interest exist? Does this relationship ultimately extend or limit American power? When the United States invaded Iraq, few imagined at the time that it would also introduce a new norm in modern warfare: the privatization of war. The next chapter explores the deepening dependency between the superpower and the private military industry and implications for the American way of war.

To place any dependence upon militia, is, assuredly, resting upon a broken staff.

—George Washington

Contractors have been present on US battlefields since the American Revolution, but never before has the country relied so heavily on their services to wage war. Consequently, war has become big business again. In little more than a decade, the industry has expanded from a multimillion-dollar to a multibillion-dollar affair. The market’s value remains unknown; expert estimates range wildly from $20 billion to $100 billion annually.
¹
What is known is that from 1999 to 2008, the US Department of Defense (DOD) contract obligations—for both security and nonsecurity functions—increased from $165 billion to $414 billion.
²
In 2010, DOD obligated $366 billion to contracts (54 percent of total DOD obligations), an amount seven times the United Kingdom’s entire defense budget.
³
Moreover, this only entails DOD contract obligations and does not include contracts made by other government agencies, such as the State Department or USAID, through its “implementing partners.” The actual amount the United States paid for purely security contracts remains unknown.

The manifestations of the new market are stark. Not surprisingly, the number of contractors supporting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan has reached historic proportions compared with earlier US wars (see
figure 3.1
). For example, in 2010, the United States deployed 175,000 troops and 207,000 contractors in war zones. During World War II, contractors accounted for only 10 percent of the military workforce, compared with 50 percent in Iraq today, a 1:1 ratio of contractors to military personnel. As the number of troops in Iraq has decreased, so, too, has the number of contractors. From 2008 to 2010, troop levels dropped by 57,400 (37 percent) and the number of contractors by approximately 67,000 (41 percent). However, this reduction is not uniform across the types of contracted personnel. Those providing base support and construction declined by approximately 27,400 (31 percent) and 34,000 (94 percent), respectively, whereas the number of armed contractors actually increased by 2,417 (26 percent), which is significant.
⁴

Figure 3.1
Contractors as Percentage of US Military Workforce in Theaters of War (as of March 2010).

Contractors are also paying the ultimate sacrifice, accounting, in a rising trend, for 25 percent of all US fatalities since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began. In 2003, contractor deaths represented only 4 percent of all fatalities. That number rose to 27 percent from 2004 to 2007, and from 2008 to 2010, contractor fatalities accounted for 40 percent of the combined death toll. In 2010, more contractors were killed than military personnel, marking the first time in history that corporate casualties outweighed military losses on US battlefields. In the first two quarters of 2010 alone, contractor deaths represented more than half, 53 percent, of all fatalities (see
figures 3.2
and
3.3
).
⁵

The exact numbers are difficult to reach, as the US government does not track such data, and companies have a propensity to underreport their wounded and dead, as it is bad for business.
⁶
But overall, this trend suggests a growing US dependency on the private military industry in warfare, and unless the United States decides to significantly expand its public armed forces or reduce military engagement abroad, this trend toward the privatization of warfare will continue.

To address this development, the US Army commissioned an independent internal study led by top military logisticians, who issued their report in 2007, titled
Urgent Reform Required: Army Expeditionary Contracting
, also known as the Gansler Report after its chairman, Jacques Gansler. The panel found that the “Operational Army” is “expeditionary and on a war footing but does not yet fully recognize the impact of contractors in expeditionary operations and on mission success.” Furthermore, panel members unanimously agreed that “acquisition failures in expeditionary operations urgently require a systemic fix of Army contracting” and recommended sweeping changes in four broad areas: first, establishing effective laws, regulations, and policies to govern contracting, especially for expeditionary operations; second, fundamentally restructuring and reorganizing Army institutions to better manage and integrate contractors into operations; third, increasing the stature, quantity, and career development of military and civilian contracting personnel (especially for expeditionary operations), including introducing contract management into all levels of military education; and fourth, providing the training and tools necessary for overall contracting activities in expeditionary operations.
⁷

Figure 3.2
Percent Breakdown of Fatalities in Iraq.

Figure 3.3
Percent Breakdown of Fatalities in Afghanistan.

A year later, Congress established the Commission on Wartime Contracting, an independent and bipartisan panel of eight senior experts, to study wartime contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its purpose was to examine waste, fraud, abuse, accountability, and other issues in conflict-zone contracting and to make recommendations for improvement. The commission found that at least $31 billion, and possibly as much as $60 billion, was lost to contract waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan, much of which was avoidable.
⁸

The commission also discovered that contractors were often performing jobs that law, policy, or regulation required government employees to do. Excessive reliance on contractors also had other deleterious effects: creating unreasonable risks to mission objectives and other key US interests, eroding federal agencies’ ability to perform core capabilities, and overwhelming the government’s ability to effectively manage and oversee contractors.

One of the commission’s central questions was what tasks are “inherently governmental” and should never be outsourced. It found that existing guidelines are inadequate for war-zone contracting, and, not surprisingly, security is of special concern, since armed civilian contractors can kill innocent civilians. Additionally, it discovered that convoy security in parts of Afghanistan invites pay-for-protection extortion that diverts taxpayers’ funds to local warlords and insurgents. In 2011, the commission released its 248-page final report, which made fifteen recommendations, including phasing out the use of private security contractors for certain functions.

To date, the recommendations of both these studies have been largely ignored, as the military persists in viewing contractors as temporary augmentations to its campaigns, even as, for nearly a decade, contractors have constituted half of US forces in war zones. As industry expert Christopher Kinsey explains, “the military still sees contractors as a bolt-on asset that it can utilise in an ad hoc fashion as required, when in fact the military needs to come to terms with the idea that contractors are now part of its force structure.”
⁹

The 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review by the military finally acknowledged the military’s “dependence” on contractors and its intention to reduce it through an “in-sourcing initiative.” However, this program will not apply to contractors in conflict areas.
¹⁰
In a widely distributed memorandum, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates confirms that the number of contractors in war zones “well exceeded” military personnel and added, “I do not expect this to change now or in future contingency operations.”
¹¹

In addition to the increasing US dependence on the private sector to wage war, the types of private actors are also expanding. The vast majority of contractors in Iraq and other places are unarmed and provide nonlethal logistical support, such as construction, maintenance, and administrative duties (see
figure 3.4
). Logistics is the traditional role of contractors on the battlefield, and today’s largest contracts remain logistical in nature, such as the US Army’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP, worth up to $22 billion). What is new, and controversial, is the presence of armed contractors. To many, the decision to outsource lethality to armed civilians in foreign lands, who are tasked to kill people when necessary, smacks of mercenarism.

Figure 3.4
US Military Contractors in Iraq by Type of Service Provided (as of March 2010).

PMCs account for 12 percent, or 11,610, of the overall contracting force in Iraq in 2010 and 14,439 in Afghanistan, representing a minority of all contractors in theater.
¹²
But size does not matter when it comes to armed contractors. Even though they are fewer in number than their unarmed brethren, their actions resonate disproportionately more loudly, owing to the nature of their work: they kill people. When a handful of Blackwater personnel killed seventeen innocent civilians at Nisour Square in Baghdad on September 16, 2007, it created a firestorm of anti-US sentiment that undermined the US counterinsurgency strategy of “winning hearts and minds” in Iraq and generated such international ill will that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had to publicly address the shooting and launch an official investigation.
¹³
Despite the pandemonium, the Blackwater contractors walked free, because they are immune from Iraqi law, in accordance with Order 17 of the Coalition Provisional Authority.
¹⁴
Many were outraged, including Iraq Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who angrily declared, “It cannot be accepted by an American security company to carry out a killing. These are very serious challenges to the sovereignty of Iraq.”
¹⁵

A common misperception is that private military contractors make enormous sums of money when they serve overseas. This is not necessarily true. Companies make their profit on “time and materials,” meaning that they charge the client a premium for every hour an employee works or for every item purchased, no matter how small. For example, a firm may bill the government $40 an hour for an employee’s time yet only pay that person $30 an hour. The difference between the “billing rate” and what a firm actually pays for the time or material covers the contractor’s indirect costs, overhead, and profit.