[R-G] Uncle Sam Wants Them (Mercenaries and 21st Century War)

[Anthony Fenton]

http://contexts.org/articles/winter-2009/uncle-sam-wants-them/

issues >  Winter 2009  > pp. 14-19
Uncle Sam Wants Them
by Katherine McCoy

Throughout most of the 20th century, warring nation-states generally  
had two options to increase their military strength.

They could create a coalition—as the United States did in World War II— 
or institute a draft—as it did in Vietnam.

Today, though, countries have a third option. Rent.

Hiring private military corporations, sometimes called private  
security corporations or private security firms, has fast become a  
popular way for nations to fight wars.

As a result, much of today’s military workforce isn’t part of the  
military at all. These military contractors come from across the globe  
and challenge how we think about nations, states, citizens, and how to  
exercise accountability in war.

For example, when a Panamanian subsidiary of an American firm hires  
Colombians to fight Iraqis, which country is responsible for their  
welfare and answers for their crimes? Which public is likely to mount  
an anti-war campaign or launch a yellow ribbon drive? And whom do they  
target? These questions, and the answers to them, have significant  
consequences for how war gets waged, when it stops, and who’s  
accountable for it.

These private companies have become major players in all types of  
modern warfare. Many scholars have focused on the increasing role  
these corporations play in weak states, especially in Africa, where  
they are significant domestic players in civil conflict and resource  
wars. Some, like Stephen Brayton, worry that in failed states,  
corporations are gaining the “civic and political loyalty” that should  
belong to the military or police, yet are accountable only to the  
elites who hire them.

Military companies, though, are as much a tool of the strong as the  
weak.

the move to private military corporations

Scholars have long thought of fighting wars as something nation-states  
did through their citizens. Max Weber famously defined the modern  
state as holding a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence,  
meaning that only state agents—usually soldiers or police—were allowed  
to wield force. In contrast to pre-modern Europe, in which local  
rulers often hired mercenaries to protect their kingdoms, modern  
states largely put aside the mercenary option in favor of standing  
armies composed primarily of citizens dedicated (officially, at least)  
to protecting the entire nation. Throughout the 19th and 20th  
centuries, international law was developed based on this idea of the  
nation-state.

There were, of course, exceptions to this rule. In the American  
Revolutionary War the British hired Hessians to fight the colonists,  
while some mercenaries on the American side became famous war heroes.  
Even as late as the 1970s European colonial powers hired mercenaries  
to defeat African “liberation” movements, prompting the United Nations  
to propose an international treaty against mercenarism. Despite such  
exceptions, the shift from premodern to modern warfare was marked by  
the idea that, from here on out, states did—and should—fight wars with  
their own militaries. Mercenaries appeared as an occasional threat to  
governments and international order, but only a marginal threat, and  
one that was waning.

But just as the sun seemed to set on the individual mercenary, it rose  
on the era of the military corporation. Private military corporations  
(PMCs) are legal entities that supply governments, non-governmental  
organizations (NGOs), and industry with private soldiers, often  
referred to as guards or simply “contractors.”

The first modern PMCs can be traced back to the Vietnam War. What made  
the rise of these organizations possible, explains the Brookings  
Institution’s P.W. Singer in Corporate Warriors, is the combination of  
the end of the Cold War, the subsequent downsizing of armies, the  
availability of smaller high-tech weaponry, and the ideological trend  
toward outsourcing and privatizing government functions.

Some argue that PMCs are a stronger, more organized form of  
mercenarism, while others claim they’re a natural extension of the  
defense industry’s shift from providing goods to providing services.  
Contractors today provide nearly all the services previously performed  
by soldiers in war zones, from guarding bases to interrogating  
prisoners to developing military strategy.

Since the 1990s, PMCs have taken on increasingly larger roles in war  
and military campaigns. In fact, the ratio of military contractors to  
soldiers has climbed with each U.S. military intervention since the  
1991 Gulf War, such that more private contractors work in the Iraq War  
than soldiers. And there’s no reason to expect this trend to slow  
down. Already estimated at more than $100 billion, the PMC market is  
projected to be worth between $150 billion and $200 billion by 2010.

logistics of pmcs

Governments that contract PMCs have practical reasons for doing so.  
One is cost. Using contractors instead of public employees saves the  
government from paying employees’ pensions or peacetime salaries,  
potentially producing long-term savings. In the short term, however,  
open-ended contracts and hefty pricetags make contractors more  
expensive than soldiers. Thus, the true cost of contracting remains an  
open debate.

Perhaps more important than cost is strategy. PMCs can be rapidly  
deployed in unanticipated, short-term conflicts.

As such, they can free up soldiers for more sustained military work on  
other fronts. Moreover, outsourcing “tail-end” jobs, such as laundry  
and construction, to civilians reduces the demands on a stretched  
national army.

Many analysts argue a reliance on contractors has allowed the United  
States to pursue two simultaneous wars despite the 1990s military  
downsizing. But in countries with weak armies, PMCs can provide a  
decisive military boost. Sierra Leone is the classic example—it  
successfully used Executive Outcomes, a South African PMC, to drive  
back rebels from the capital city in the mid-1990s.

While most PMCs are headquartered in militarily powerful countries  
such as the United States, Britain, and Israel, a disproportionate  
number of the PMC workforce itself comes from the global South.  
According to a survey conducted by the PMC industry’s think tank, the  
Peace Operations Institute, in U.S. operations only about 10 percent  
of contracted workers are Americans, while 60 percent belong to the  
country in which military operations are taking place (Iraqis in Iraq,  
for example) and 30 percent come from other countries. A Congressional  
Research Services report reveals those numbers are fairly  
representative of U.S. efforts in Iraq, with a slightly higher  
percentage of contractors (65 percent) being Iraqi and about one- 
quarter being other foreigners.

That last group, called “third-country nationals,” (TCNs) is made up  
of workers from around the world. They are routinely paid about one- 
tenth of what their American counterparts earn. Host-country nationals  
(HCNs) tend to be paid wages commensurate with local jobs.

The international composition of the PMC workforce is notable. Former  
Haliburton subsidiary KBR alone has employees from 38 different  
countries working in Iraq. Some third-country nationals—Filipinos and  
Indians, for example—perform the bulk of support work on American  
military bases, such as laundry and food service, while others— 
especially Nepalese, South Africans, and Latin Americans—are hired for  
security work. The latter usually come from countries with a recent  
history of counterinsurgency or other claims to military expertise.

Despite the division between those performing more “tooth-end” and  
“tail-end” jobs, in war all are vulnerable to attack. The chart above  
shows the breakdown of contractor casualties in Iraq by job type.

consequences of contractors

The move to PMCs changes the entire spectrum of military labor. It  
marks a dual shift in the way we think of a military labor force: from  
public to private, and from domestic to international. This shift  
affects more than the clothes people wear in war or the languages they  
speak on base. It undermines old lines of accountability. Military  
historian Martin van Crevald argues the monopoly over force meant that  
in war, “it is the government that directs, the army that fights, and  
the people who suffer.” This may be a dysfunctional relationship, but  
one with the potential to curb violence nonetheless.

To the extent that the state, the army, and the people all represent  
the same nation, their fates are interconnected. In democratic  
countries, “the people” must approve the government’s decision to send  
the military, and they might retract that approval as military  
casualties start mounting. Having public, national forces fight wars  
helps the whole nation experience and internalize their costs.  
Citizens see “our men and women in uniform” being shipped off to war  
and the flag-draped coffins when those same soldiers don’t make it  
home alive. This helps bring the costs of war home to the voting public.

In contrast, using PMCs externalizes the costs of war and outsources  
accountability. As private employees, contractors don’t leave the same  
impression on public consciousness that soldiers do, and they’re less  
amenable to public oversight.

This is truer for some contractors than others. Recent history shows  
deaths or disappearances of American contractors do make political  
waves in the United States. Military analysts James Manker and Kent  
Williams point out that, “Regardless of where the responsibility is  
placed contractually, [when American contractors are involved] the  
media reports it as a U.S. casualty, a U.S. captive, or a U.S. wounded  
without respect to who is at fault.” Indeed, author Jeremy Scahill  
points out that the 2004 deaths of four Americans working for  
Blackwater in Fallujah made headlines in the United States for days,  
and the 2003 capture of three American contractors by FARC guerrillas  
in Colombia led to ongoing Congressional inquiries throughout their  
five years of captivity.

Captured or killed foreign contractors don’t receive such treatment.  
For instance, there was limited political response in the United  
States when insurgents captured and beheaded 12 Nepalese contractors  
working in conjunction with the U.S. mission in Iraq. For this very  
reason, companies sometimes enlist foreign contractors for high-risk  
or high-visibility roles, such as gunners or pilots. This first became  
evident to me during my fieldwork on PMCs in Colombia, when I asked a  
State Department employee why Central Americans were flying U.S.- 
sponsored counter-drug and counter-insurgency missions there.

“Since these are combat missions, [the U.S. government] didn’t want  
American pilots flying because of risk and liability,” he responded.

The pattern seems to hold in some other contexts. A Swisspeace report  
notes that in Afghanistan, security-heavy PMCs such as Blackwater,  
Dyncorp, and ArmorGroup have some of the highest ratios of third- 
country nationals. Indeed, some military analysts consider the  
relative invisibility of foreign contractors to be one of  
privatization’s key benefits. As a 2005 Rand report notes, the  
advantages of PMCs are greatest “when policymakers worry less about  
the safety of non-American contract personnel than about American  
lives.”

In Iraq, non-American contractors are the hidden casualties of war.  
Among state-supported coalition troops, Americans make up 93 percent  
of the casualties. Among contractors, they represent only 43 percent  
of casualties. The rest are third-country nationals from Europe, Asia,  
and the Middle East. This percentage would be even smaller if Iraqi  
contractor deaths were included, but such data are not currently  
available. Because they aren’t Americans, Iraqi and third-country  
contractor deaths generally aren’t reported in U.S. newspapers, even  
though contractors work side-by-side with coalition troops.

Using contractors—especially foreigners—also makes it difficult to  
determine who’s legally responsible when something goes wrong. This is  
a problem both for protecting contractors’ welfare and for holding  
them accountable for crimes. For example, in Iraq there have been  
widespread reports of PMCs confiscating foreign contractors’ passports  
and keeping contractors against their will. This led the Defense  
Department to issue a memorandum in 2006 calling on the companies to  
clean up their act, but little seems to have changed.

One likely explanation for this inertia is that the foreign  
contractors are hired through an international web of subcontractors  
and subsidiaries, effectively deflecting responsibility from any one  
company.

A Washington Post article from 2004 outlined the contract chain for a  
group of Indian support contractors: “[The Indian company] Subhash  
Vijay had hired them to work for Gulf Catering Co. of Riyadh, Saudi  
Arabia, which was subcontracted to Alargan Group of Kuwait City, which  
was subcontracted to the Event Source of Salt Lake City, which in turn  
was subcontracted to KBR of Houston.”

Having such a multinational, highly subcontracted workforce further  
complicates the already difficult task of holding security contractors  
legally accountable when they commit crimes. Moreover, without knowing  
who contractors are or how many are out there, it’s hard even for the  
state to exercise accountability over them—numerous government reports  
acknowledge the lack of an accurate count of the number of contractors  
and subcontractors involved in U.S. military operations.

In some cases, PMCs offer governments strategic flexibility at the  
expense of full political accountability. For instance, the Defense  
Department and State Department have effectively used foreign  
contractors to exceed Congress’s limits on the number of troops  
involved in a military campaign. (In an effort to contain certain  
military operations, Congress may place a ceiling, or cap, on the  
number of soldiers that can be deployed on a mission. But caps  
generally don’t apply to contractors.)

Congress has tried at times to close this loophole by capping the  
number of contractors as well, but these caps apply only to Americans,  
not foreigners. This is the case in Colombia, where the use of foreign  
military contractors allows U.S. companies to deploy more than the 600- 
person cap imposed by Congress. This official invisibility of foreign,  
private participants in such military campaigns makes the conflicts  
seem smaller and more controllable.

A few groups have tried to increase accountability by reinforcing the  
political relationships between states and their contractor citizens.  
In the United States, human rights organizations are advocating for  
Defense Department contractors to be brought under the military chain  
of command; this will probably come before the U.S. Supreme Court  
later this year. The UN’s Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries has  
pushed PMC recruitment countries to enact stricter domestic  
legislation to control the flow of their citizens to the PMC market  
abroad. Some countries see legislation as a way to help their  
governments control potentially violent citizens. For example, South  
Africa has enacted strict, but arguably ineffective, laws intended to  
stop Apartheid-era shock troops from selling their services on the  
international market.

On the other hand, some developing nations see this market as a  
solution to the problems of insecurity. For countries like Colombia,  
the international war market provides a way to employ demobilized  
paramilitaries and retired soldiers. Whether this is an effective way  
to reintegrate ex-combatants remains to be seen.

What is clear, however, is that governments currently have neither the  
authority nor the responsibility over private employees that they have  
for their own citizen-soldiers operating abroad. The triple challenges  
of a lucrative international market, weak government controls, and  
lack of political will to control contractors all lead contractors to  
operate as free agents. The Blackwater armed guard in Iraq has no more  
ties to his home state than his compatriot who works at a hotel in  
Jordan. From the perspective of their governments and their fellow  
citizens, both are simply international labor migrants.

the rub of controlling pmcs

The Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano argues that nations do have  
the tools to hold today’s private soldiers, and those who hire them,  
accountable. In Private Sector, Public Wars, he argues that “Unlike  
medieval kings [who used mercenaries], modern nations can use the  
instruments of good governance to control the role of the private  
sector in military competition.” Among those instruments he lists  
“[a]n enabled citizenry with ready access to a vast amount of public  
information.”

But there’s the rub. Which citizenry is he talking about? Under  
Weber’s ideal, this was never a question—those who fought, those who  
ordered them into battle, and those who elected the decision-makers  
were all citizens of the same country. But with privatization and  
internationalization, there’s no national constituency that  
automatically identifies with contractors, or with the wars they  
fight. This poses its own security risk. Privatization removes war one  
step away from the country that orders it, and internationalization  
removes it yet another. When the workers of war become more remote and  
more invisible, the entry barriers to war are lowered. It’s easier to  
wage war with anonymous soldiers.

Any serious attempts to regulate PMCs will have to deal with this  
issue. There are many proposals for making the industry cleaner, such  
as increasing contractor professionalism and creating greater  
transparency in bids for government contracts. These steps are  
important for increasing what political scientist Deborah Avant calls  
“functional control” of the PMC industry, but they do nothing to  
increase what she calls “political control.” That will only come  
through laws that help people feel some sense of ownership over the  
PMC world. Our ability to re-create that sense of public empowerment  
in this new world will help determine what military privatization  
means in the long run. It may make the difference between the state  
hiring out some of the functions of war, and having a private shadow  
army.

...

[further reading on the web]

Shadow Company

Check out the 2007 award-winning documentary, Shadow Company (http://www.shadowcompanythemovie.com/ 
) for an inside look at the world of PMCs through personal experiences  
from Iraq and interviews with PMC staff, owners, and lobbyists, former  
mercenaries, academics, journalists, and authors. Check out clips from  
the film on their website, including segments on Sierra Leone,  
Equatorial Guinea, and the structure of the industry.

Meet the PMCs

Curious who these companies actually are? The Center for Public  
Integrity compiled a database of more than 150 PMCs with contracts in  
Iraq and Afghanistan. Their Windfalls of War project (http://projects.publicintegrity.org/wow/ 
) includes information about each company (through 2004), the work  
they’ve been contracted to do, and the value of their contracts (the  
database documents up to $48.7 billion in Iraq/Afghanistan contracts).  
You might also look at info from the industry itself: browse  
privatemilitary.org or the PMC trade association, International Peace  
Operations Association.

Human Rights and PMCs

The International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations  
High Commissioner of Human Rights further explore the accountability  
issues raised in the article. These sources discuss the humanitarian  
and human rights obligations of PMCs and the states that hire them.

Finally, keep an eye on ongoing public commentary on PMCs from The  
Brookings Institute’s Peter Singer and The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill.
further reading in print

Deborah Avant. The Market for Force (Cambridge University Press,  
2005). A political scientist takes on the question of what political  
and security tradeoffs we can expect with military privatization.

James Jay Carafano. Private Sector, Public Wars: Contractors in Combat— 
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Future Conflicts (Praeger Security  
International, 2008). This security analyst believes PMCs are an  
important military tool that can be adequately controlled by improving  
the existing system of government contracting.

Jennifer K. Elsea and Nina M. Serafino. “Private Security Contractors  
in Iraq: Background, Legal Status, and Other Issues.” Congressional  
Resource Service Report for Congress, July 11, 2007. This report  
discusses the role and status of third-country nationals, as well as  
Americans and Iraqis, in the current Iraq campaign.

P.W. Singer. Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military  
Industry (Cornell University Press, 2003). The author introduces the  
wide variety of contexts in which PMCs operate and develops a  
framework for dividing the industry between security and support  
functions.

United Nations Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries as a Means of  
Violating Human Rights and Impeding the Exercise of the Rights of  
People to Self-Determination. Annual Reports. The UN group charged  
with studying PMCs releases annual reports detailing the labor  
violations against third-country national contractors and the human  
rights violations committed by contractors.

...


About the Author

Katherine McCoy is a Ph.D. student in the sociology department at the  
University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her forthcoming dissertation focuses  
on the use of private military corporations in war and conflict.