Privatizing War

[OB Kenobi]

Privatizing War
by Greg Guma

The use of mercenaries was once a dirty, little secret most governments were loath to acknowledge. But today they're called private military contractors and perform almost every function essential to military operations. The Financial Times has labeled this trend the "creeping privatization of the business of war."

During the first Gulf War, about two percent of U.S. military personnel were private workers. As of 2003, it had reached 10 percent. The Pentagon employs more than 700,000 private contractors, and at least $33 billion of the $416 billion in military spending overwhelmingly approved by the Senate last week will go to PMCs.

In Iraq, these companies supply more trainers and security forces than all remaining members of the "coalition of the willing" except the United States. Approximately 15,000 civilian security guards are stationed there, at least 6,000 of them armed. Some contractors maintain sophisticated weapons systems that used to be handled by the army. More than $20 billion -- almost a third of the Army's budget for Iraq and Afghanistan -- goes to contractors.

One advantage of using private forces is to keep down the casualty count. Although non-military casualties aren't included in official Pentagon reports, Peters Singer, author of "Corporate Warriors," estimates that at least 30 contractors have been killed in Iraq and about 180 have been wounded.

But giving contractors prominent roles does pose risks. For example, Caci International and the Titan Corporation have been implicated in charges of torture, humiliation and rape leveled at the U.S. military in Iraq.

How did we get here?

In 1969, the U.S. Army had about 1.5 million active duty soldiers. By 1992, the figure had been cut by half. Over the last decade, however, the United States has mobilized to intervene in several significant conflicts, and as a result, a corporate "foreign legion" has filled the gap between policy imperatives and what a downsized, over-stretched military can provide.

The push to privatize gained significant traction during the first Bush administration. After the Gulf War, the Pentagon, then headed by Defense Secretary **** Cheney, awarded a Halliburton subsidiary nearly $9 million to study how PMCs could support soldiers in combat zones. The company has since won at least $2.5 billion to construct and run military bases, some in secret locations, as part of the Army's Logistics Civil Augmentation Program.

Although the number of active duty U.S. troops has recently climbed to 1.4 million, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's desire to make forces lighter and more agile has helped to accelerate the trend.

Use of high-technology equipment also feeds the process. Private companies have capabilities that the military needs, but doesn't possess. Contractors maintain the B-2 stealth bomber and F-117 stealth fighter and operate some of the newer weapons systems, such as the Global Hawk and Predator unmanned drones. Military systems like the Army's Guardrail surveillance aircraft are designed to be operated and maintained by private companies.

DynCorp, the largest PMC in Iraq, has Department of Defense contracts worth more than $2 billion to provide "post-conflict police training" around the world. Over the last decade, it has dispatched trainers to Haiti, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Liberia, East Timor, Afghanistan and now Iraq.

The company has also handled aviation services for drug-eradication programs in Latin America as part of Plan Colombia; updated information systems for the State and Justice departments, Department of Defense, FBI, Internal Revenue Service, Security and Exchange Commission and Drug Enforcement Agency; and maintained or managed U.S. border posts, weapons-testing ranges, Air Force bases and the president's fleet of planes and helicopters.

All this government work made it an attractive acquisition target for Computer Sciences Corp., a software company that branched into federal contracts. One of its key clients became the National Security Agency. Acquiring DynCorp cost $950 million, but meant that a leading information technology firm was joining forces with one of the largest PMCs, making it a major force in the military-intelligence-industrial complex.

It was a timely move. In April 2003, just a month after the deal with completed, DynCorp won a 5-year, $500 million contract to build a private police force in post-Saddam Iraq, with some of the funding diverted from an anti-drug program for Afghanistan.

With 92,000 employees worldwide, CSC works with virtually every major U.S. agency. Through its State and Defense Department contracts, it implements foreign policy by proxy. Its "private security personnel" are effectively immune from criminal sanctions.

Through its Information Technology work with the NSA, it upgrades and maintains the world's most expansive and highly secure surveillance and communication systems. It also manages Air Force bases and information warfare planning, Army weapons systems, naval security, most of NASA's air fleet, and Department of Homeland Security border-crossing technology.

In Britain, the debate over military privatization has been public and sensitive, since the activities of one U.K. company, Sandline, in Sierra Leone and Papua New Guinea embarrassed the government in the late 1990s. But no country has clear policies to regulate PMCs, and the limited oversight that does exist rarely works.

In the United States, hey have mostly escaped notice, except when U.S. contract workers in conflict zones are kidnapped or killed.

It's a troubling situation. PMCs have become an adjunct foreign policy apparatus that is largely invisible, rarely mentioned by the press, and not currently subject to congressional oversight. The Freedom of Information Act doesn't apply, and any background on how they operate is private, proprietary information.

In some cases, the use of private contractors is a way to get around congressional scrutiny. But it also represents something deeper: the gradual outsourcing of U.S. defense and national security.

[OB Kenobi]

Should We Be Alarmed by the Wide Use of Mercenaries?
By Nikolas K. Gvosdev

Mr Gvosdev is a senior fellow for strategic studies at The Nixon Center in Washington and a writer for the History News Service.

The recent carnage in Iraq has made public a dirty little secret: some of the personnel on duty there are not volunteer patriots dedicated to bringing liberty to Iraqis but paid professionals -- private military contractors, or, more plainly, mercenaries. Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution estimates that private contractors now make up the second largest military contingent in Iraq, after the (official) U.S. military force.

Mercenaries are being hired by governments for a number of duties once thought to be the function of the military, from providing security for diplomats and heads of state (including Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai) to enforcing peace settlements and training fledgling militaries. More than 20,000 private contractors are operating in more than fifty countries from Albania to Zambia.

The use of private entities to carry out the governmental functions of waging war (and peace) is no longer an isolated phenomenon. This is why Congress should examine the recommendations made in a 2002 British government Green Paper for a "licensing regime" to distinguish between "reputable and disreputable" private sector military operators.

Mercenaries -- professional soldiers who fight for pay rather than out of ideological conviction -- have been the rule rather than the exception in the history of warfare. If war was the sport of kings, then mercenaries, immortalized in Biblical verse and Shakespearian drama, were the professional athletes of their day.

The British hired more than 30,000 German soldiers -- the famed Hessians, some of whom were defeated by George Washington in his Christmas Eve attack across the Delaware River. In fact, more than a third of the "British" forces in America were hired guns. Meanwhile, the United States turned to private merchants to operate naval vessels (privateers) under letters of marque. And America's first naval war hero, John Paul Jones, later found paid employment in the Imperial Russian navy.

Mercenaries fell out of favor because they tended to view war as a pragmatic, if risky, business enterprise. Neither heroes nor martyrs, their loyalty was to an employer, not to a cause or country. The rise of mass armies filled by low-paid conscripts indoctrinated by patriotism (beginning first with the levee en masse in France in 1793) eliminated the need for governments to hire professional soldiers.

For much of the twentieth century, mercenaries were hired either by aspiring dictators or by multinational corporations. Defense Systems Ltd., a British-based mercenary firm, has contracts with major oil companies such as Texaco and Chevron to protect their assets and infrastructure in volatile places like Angola or Nigeria.

But in a post-nation-state era, the mercenary is making a comeback. In a world no longer characterized by Great Wars, but rather by low-level insurgencies and nation-building, in a political environment when the death of a single soldier -- whether draftee or volunteer -- can create enormous pressure to terminate a mission, the mercenary is filling the manpower gap in a number of dangerous parts of the world.

Why use mercenaries? Expertise, for one. Leading firms advertise around the world for candidates who have at least five years of experience. In some countries, such as Chile, experienced police officers find that employment with a private military company brings double or triple the salary.

And no one weeps for mercenaries. When a handful of U.S. soldiers died in Somalia in 1993 during Operation Provide Comfort, the outrage among Americans helped to scupper the entire mission. By contrast, the continuing death toll among American private contractors aiding Colombia's war against narco-terrorists barely makes the headlines.

Mercenaries can be a force for good, as long as they remain on the job. When the South African firm Executive Outcomes was hired by the government of Sierra Leone in 1995, the outside contractors helped to defeat the notorious RUF guerrillas -- famous in the West for amputating the arms of their captives. Mercenaries trained the armed forces and created stable conditions for democratic elections to be held. All of this was done with a fraction of the numbers and the cost of an "official" UN peacekeeping force. But when their contract expired in 1997, the professionals left. Four months later, the democratic government in Sierra Leone was overthrown.

But mercenaries should not be mistaken for an armed version of the Peace Corps. They expect to be paid -- in some cases, by obtaining valuable natural resource concessions. And a private firm that today might be training police forces in a democratizing country might tomorrow be hired by a repressive regime to crack down on opposition political movements. Most firms operate with little governmental oversight and almost no accountability for the behavior of their personnel. This is especially true when their employees are operating in areas where the rule of law is weak or non-existent.

So what's to be done? John-Peter Pham, an international diplomat with extensive experience in coping with African civil conflicts, concludes, "Privatized peacekeeping may be the only feasible alternative to watching thousands die. Better to co-opt the phenomenon than to continue to piously denounce it while offering no real alternatives."

If governments are going to use mercenaries, they should deputize them so that they are held to the same rules as uniformed soldiers. It also means that governments that hire private forces must be prepared to hold them accountable in courts of law for their actions -- just as privateers had to appear in special "prize courts." Congress could take an important step by developing a code of conduct for private military contractors and encouraging other states to do the same.

King David and St. Ignatius Loyola (the founder of the Jesuit Order), former mercenaries both, would approve.

[Argyll]

I'm gonna lock this one straight off as there are no mercenaries woking in Iraq on the side of the coalition,this argument has been beaten to death before,and I for one am pig sick of the same individuals who jump on this Bull**** term mercenary...........try looking up the definition for a change!!