BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY |
ON SEPTEMBER 16, 2007, security guards employed by Blackwater, a now-famous American security contractor—one of a class of businesses known in modern parlance as PMFs, or privatized military firms—killed seventeen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad and wounded another twenty-four. The New York Times subsequently reported that since 2005 Blackwater employees had fired weapons in Iraq on one hundred and ninety-five occasions, and an ongoing FBI investigation has so far determined that at least fourteen of the September killings were wholly unjustified. Blackwater is probably the only PMF most Americans can name; its celebrity springs from both the recent scandal and from an incident predating the September massacre. At the end of March 2004, four of its employees were murdered, mutilated, dismembered, burned, and suspended from a bridge in Fallujah, in an eerily protracted rite that triggered the first round of major combat in that city. For a couple of months at the end of 2007 Blackwater became emblematic of a trend worth following: the remarkable increase in private sector military firms since the early 1990s. With the eclipse of the war in Iraq by the troubles of the housing and credit markets, Blackwater and the phenomena it has been taken to represent are receding from public view, which is regrettable, because the recent and vertiginous rise of PMFs richly deserves increased attention.
Jeremy Scahill, a regular contributor to the Nation, is author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, one of the few books on PMFs you can buy in a chain bookstore, and certainly the only one with a cover noting that it is “A New York Times Bestseller.” Scahill thinks that a few of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s remarks on September 10, 2001, urging a Pentagon managerial model based on the alleged virtues of the private sector, “opened the door for one of the most significant developments in modern warfare—the widespread use of private contractors in every aspect of war, including in combat.” Although PMFs have been on the rise for at least a decade and a half, and their spread has powerful and multiple causes that predate Rumsfeld’s tenure, Scahill has nonetheless discovered and publicized some arresting things about the most famous PMF. Blackwater’s founder (former Navy SEAL, zealous Christian rightist, and industrial heir Erik Prince) and some of its corporate staff have peculiar and deeply unattractive ideas about politics, more of the theo-con than the neo-con variety. Its business has expanded very rapidly, and the company has done very well out of the war in Iraq. Much of the money has come not from the Pentagon but from the State Department, which, since 2003, has awarded Blackwater contracts worth $700 million.
It is difficult to determine how much confidence one can place in some of Scahill’s reporting; he is the sort of person who repeats an allegation, with no apparent skepticism, of “an unending stream of Iraqi women and children who’d been sniped by the Americans” being taken to hospitals in Fallujah. The word “sniped” is a precise one, in this instance meaning that highly trained specialist Marine marksmen coolly and deliberately attempted (but failed) to murder vast numbers of civilians, and most people who have known American snipers will be at best incredulous. One either believes this sort of thing or one doesn’t, and people who do not will be very uneasy about a reporter who uncritically repeats such a charge. Scahill retails many claims about staggering American atrocities as standard practice, reporting both allegations and denials in the same dispassionate tone, although he often seems more skeptical about the latter. For some readers this may erode confidence in his argument. Too pronounced a readiness to assume the worst about regular American forces, and too quick an assumption about the virtues of their current enemies, can combine to weaken one’s outrage about our new reliance on mercenaries. After all, if standard military practice is near-genocidal, where is the scandal in privatizing the use of force?
THE MOST WIDELY praised book on PMFs, first published in 2003 and newly revised, remains Peter Singer’s Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry. Singer, now at Brookings, was at the Department of Defense during the Yugoslav succession wars, an experience that gave him a more ambivalent view of PMFs than Scahill’s. Corporate Warriors opens with two anecdotes, the second concerning the Croatian 1995 offensive Operation Storm, which began the sequence of events that broke Serbian military power in what had been Yugoslavia and within a few weeks stopped the carnage in Bosnia, reversing the balance of power on the ground and bringing the wars to an abrupt and relatively just end. American air strikes on Serbian forces also played a significant role in ending Serbian aggression, but the Croatian offensive is generally acknowledged to have been the more important factor. Operation Storm seems to have been planned by Military Professional Resources Incorporated, a PMF based in Alexandria, Virginia. The company’s success in planning a devastating combined-arms offensive is by no means astonishing, given that its twenty-three founders had between them more than seven hundred years of military experience, many of them in a senior capacity (the company’s CEOs have included a four-star general who was the U.S. Army’s chief of staff during the first Gulf War; the company’s first CEO was a retired major general; and its board of directors includes a number of former generals and admirals).
Singer’s first anecdote, also set in 1995, is at least as interesting, and if you are prone to assume that PMFs are always a bad thing, a bit disorienting, for he recounts the swiftness with which truly ghastly anarchy in Sierra Leone was brought to an end when the Revolutionary United Front was turned back from Freetown by a South African-based PMF called Executive Outcomes. For Scahill, who also knows this story, the apartheid-era origins of Executive Outcomes’ personnel seem sufficient to damn the firm; for Singer, the end of the horrific reign of the child soldiers, the first free elections in twenty-three years, and the creation of a democratic government at least complicate the lessons. Sierra Leone’s democratic government did not in fact survive (nor, in the long run, did Executive Outcomes), but the former perished in large part because it thought it could do without the services of a PMF, instead placing its trust in UN and African peacekeepers, and Executive Outcomes, although officially dissolved, has spawned some very effective successors.
MERCENARIES ARE in several senses of the words old news: they predate national armies, and their eclipse by national armies is often, but somewhat inaccurately, taken to be one consistent feature of the rise of the modern state. Most books on the rise of PMFs include a terse section on this history, usually quoting Machiavelli (Singer is peculiar and praiseworthy in that he can also, and appositely, quote Froissart). The recent reappearance and spread of mercenaries in modern dress—PMFs—dates from the end of the cold war and has several causes, one having to do with new supply, another with escalating demand, and a third with perceived (if not real) relative cost. There are also issues of political convenience and the matter of ideology, both of which are significant contributors to the rise of PMFs.
First, supply: At the end of the cold war states employed seven million fewer soldiers. Some of these were highly trained men from first and second world states dislocated by the collapse of the cold war international order, and many were willing and able to sell their services on the open market. In the former Eastern bloc, successor states lacked the capacity and incentive to control the movement of skilled people and weapons. Singer thinks that in South Africa, which produced Executive Outcomes, the new regime may have had an interest in keeping skilled apartheid-era soldiers from old-regime military units out of the country while the first multiracial elections were held. NATO states also dumped large numbers of trained troops into what became an expanding market.
The end of the cold war had other effects that spurred the rise of PMFs. In sophisticated Western states, markets were increasingly assumed to be in almost all cases more efficient than government provision, which meant that no one had to make a very careful case before privatizing parts of the military. In an era of downsizing and financial stringency—post-cold war militaries had a less obvious claim on resources than their predecessors had been able to make—armed forces wanted to concentrate on what they took to be their purest function—high-intensity combat—and fairly happily outsourced logistical, training, and maintenance functions. The end of the cold war world also saw the abandonment of vast quantities of weapons and munitions, so that military goods plunged in cost, which meant new PMFs could equip themselves very cheaply, and with excellent weapons, in some cases weapon types that had recently been state monopolies, such as small but very sophisticated air forces. Technological innovation and other changes also lowered the cost and improved the quality of particular military services—including intelligence gathering and information warfare—to the point that free market provision was competitive with state provision in qualitative terms.
On the demand side, some regimes suddenly bereft of cold war patrons now needed weapons and skilled advisers, just at the point where it was for the first time possible to hire them. Multinational companies attempting to operate in such states also felt the need for such troops, thus creating another significant market for PMFs. For example, 6 percent of multinational firms’ operating costs in Colombia and 9 percent of operating costs in Algeria are for security. In some cases weak states could pay for PMFs with natural resources that were inaccessibly located in rebel territory, so that paying for what one desperately needed with what one did not yet possess seemed like an irresistible bargain (Angola is one particularly striking case of this phenomenon and Papua New Guinea another).
After 2003, the demand side also contributed to the explosion of PMF use in Iraq, where the Bush administration needed vast numbers of troops for the occupation and could not obtain them in sufficient quantity and quality from the existing regular force, the reserves, U.S. allies, or the newly-raised Iraqi security forces. It is possible that even had the administration been able to deploy sufficient American regular forces or reserves, it would soon have had a political incentive to use PMFs: the number of U.S. troops deployed in Iraq was and remains a controversial matter, while the number of PMF personnel in Iraq is not nearly as contentious (at least in U.S. politics; there is perhaps more controversy in Iraqi politics). The use of PMFs in Iraq is so much less controversial than the commitment or withdrawal of a few thousand regular troops that it is impossible to determine with any confidence how many contractors have been (or now are) deployed in Iraq. One mid-2007 Department of Defense estimate put the number of U.S. troops in Iraq at 160,000, and the number of contractors in the country at 180,000—a figure that did not include any Blackwater employees, because DOD counted neither State Department (nor any other U.S. agency) contractors, nor NGO-employed contractors. By that time, more than 1,000 contractors had been killed in Iraq and more than 13,000 wounded.
HOW MANY of these contractors were and are performing what would recently have been functions performed only by soldiers? Again, it is impossible to say, but in a postscript to the revised edition of Corporate Warriors, Singer quotes one estimate of at least 100,000, and another somewhat higher one contending that the number almost certainly exceeds the number of American soldiers in Iraq. Much depends on what one is counting, and there are cases for counting very different things. To some eyes, the most obvious scandal is the matter of armed contractors serving in combat, working as mercenaries in the oldest and most pejorative sense of the word. To others, the radical dependence of the armed forces on private contractors who cannot be disciplined, either promptly or perhaps at all; who cannot in an emergency be redeployed as infantry; and who cannot be reliably coordinated with regular forces on the battlefield is at least as serious and scandalous. To pick one example: if, as seems to be the case, significant numbers of contractors driving ammunition to American troops in Iraq at one point decided to abandon their jobs on account of increased risk, the results could have been disastrous for the troops. To pick another, in 2000 a commercial dispute between two contractors left a transport ship returning a Canadian armored unit from Bosnia sailing in circles offshore for two weeks, while two management teams deadlocked over who was responsible for what; the Canadian Army eventually seized the ship and its cargo with a commando unit. In the aftermath a military analyst writing for a Canadian newspaper remarked that what looked like a farcical situation would have been much uglier had Canada been attempting to deploy troops rather than retrieve them.
So the relative loss of military efficiency in some third world states corresponded with the rise in efficiency of some private sector firms newly staffed with highly trained and otherwise redundant military specialists, and comparable firms were created by the decision of Western states to shed all but what were taken to be the core combat functions. Although these are separate trends with somewhat different origins, both are likely to be self-reinforcing: a third world country that hires an off-the-shelf military for a specific task does not necessarily acquire learning-by-doing skills and risks the loyalty and morale of its regular forces, so that it may well depend more and more on PMFs. Similarly, the rising demand in advanced states for PMF provision of maintenance, transport, logistics, training, and other support once performed by armed forces for themselves produces an increasing loss of institutional capability, and that makes for an expanding market for PMFs in first world states. The United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia (among others) increasingly rely on PMFs for these services. The scale, and scope, of expenditure is impressive: from 1994 to 2002—in other words, even before the war in Iraq greatly boosted demand—the U.S. armed forces entered into contracts worth $300 billion with U.S.-based PMFs alone. Maintenance and training once performed by the armed forces themselves but now done by PMFs include maintaining strategic aircraft like the B-2 and the F-117 stealth aircraft, refueling aircraft, U2 reconnaissance aircraft, and a large number of surface warships. Baldly put, many modern NATO militaries cannot deploy or operate abroad—indeed operate at all—without massive contractor support.
Singer is good about mentioning what can be said for these developments, and it is possible to make that part of his intricate case more aggressively. Although the Clinton administration’s use of MPRI in Croatia almost certainly involved the breach of both a UN weapons embargo (one the earlier Bush administration had voted for in the Security Council) and a UN-ordered cease-fire, some readers may consider this scorn for international law offset by the fact that the UN embargo was an instrument of de facto (and eventually vicious) complicity in gross aggression and, on some occasions, mass murder. The intervention also irritated important NATO allies, but those allies were at the time behaving contemptibly—they were increasingly accomplices to the destruction of the sovereign Bosnian state and many thousands of its citizens. The offensive led to a number of war crimes committed by the victorious Croats and created 170,000 refugees, but the number and character of those war crimes were dwarfed by the crimes committed by the side the Croats routed. Singer at one point suggests that if a democracy cannot muster support for the use of its own regular forces, perhaps the policy goals semi-covertly achieved by PMFs cannot be justified, but that is unlikely to be the view from Srebrenica. On the other hand, PMFs are normally only moved by the need to profit, and there is no reason to assume that they will “normally” be hired by the relatively virtuous. PMFs may claim that neither gross misconduct nor service to vicious regimes are compatible with rational business practice, but the lure of short-term income has already proved irresistible on a number of unpleasant occasions (for example, in Equatorial Guinea, where one of the more reputable PMFs was willing to work for an odious regime), and the logic of an absolutely unregulated market ensures more of the same.
DESPITE SOME appealing outcomes in the Balkans and elsewhere, honest reflection suggests that had PMFs been available during the 1980s, when the Reagan administration waged covert and illegal war against Nicaragua, they would have been used in that campaign, as more traditional arms dealers were used, to circumvent or clearly break the law. So while PMFs allow the American government to deny its culpability when it conducts a militarized foreign policy, the virtues of deniability, and of escaping legislative oversight, can be oversold. There are other very gross problems in using contractors, some still only theoretical possibilities inherent in the substitution of market-oriented private actors for regular troops, others already experienced by more than one modern military force. For example, it is not clear what legal authority exists for punishing war crimes or lesser infractions committed by military contractors, and there is some evidence that there is none. No contractor serving in Iraq has yet been punished, or even prosecuted, for any battlefield crime. Given various allegations of murder, along with the Army’s determination that contractors were present at more than a third of the crimes the Army thinks occurred in interrogations at Abu Ghraib—the Army did not think it had jurisdiction to prosecute—this is a startling figure. In his postscript, Singer makes an illuminating comparison: Westport, Connecticut, a town with the same average income as military contractors in Iraq, has a crime rate of twenty-eight per thousand, as against zero per thousand among the contractors. One common understanding is that successful counterinsurgency warfare requires troops who will restrain themselves in the face of systematic and cruel provocation, provocation sometimes designed to elicit atrocities. The systematic use of contractors often untrained in this level of restraint, and so far immune from criminal sanction when restraint fails, seems bizarre.
The great defense of PMFs, at least by advanced Western militaries, is that they save money. The evidence on this is at best patchy, and for a good reason: the number of officers monitoring contracts has fallen while the value, and number, of contracts has risen sharply, and there is very imperfect competition (and much reported cronyism and other abuse) in the market. Government Accountability Office investigations suggest that at least three-quarters of the billions in savings that the first (early 1990s) wave of DOD outsourcing was supposed to generate never happened, and the situation has probably grown worse since then. There have been very few if any good studies of the real long-term economics of military outsourcing, although much anecdotal evidence suggests lost institutional capacity, fraud, and waste. The amount of money the Army thinks one contractor alone (Halliburton) has overcharged it in Iraq exceeds the aggregated constant dollar cost of a number of successful American wars. The improbability of some hypothesized savings becomes obvious when one considers the fact that in these service businesses ex-soldiers earn between twice and ten times what they had earned as government employees. Market perversity seems especially striking when one considers a second fact: the military trains, at very great expense, highly skilled employees whom it then permits to work for private competitors, against whom it must bid if it seeks to retain the services of such employees when they are most desperately needed, in time of war.
THERE HAS already been some legislative reaction, both in the United States and in Iraq, to the alleged crimes committed by American PMFs. In the wake of the September 2007 killings in Baghdad, the Army, the State Department (which employs Blackwater security guards in Iraq), and the Iraqi government have revised the rules governing the behavior of Blackwater employees in Iraq. In 2006, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) got language into the 2007 Defense Bill that may place contractors under the UCMJ (the Uniform Code of Military Justice), although how (and whether) this will work in practice remains unclear. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) has sponsored a bill (the Transparency and Accountability in Military and Security Contracting Act of 2007) that will, if passed and enforced, address a large number of problems, and Senator Jim Webb (D-VA), among others, is also interested in problems raised by PMFs. If the Democrats retake the White House and retain the Congress, reform is possible but by no means certain. The rise of PMFs, while inaugurated under a Republican administration, continued through both Clinton terms. A knowledgeable observer, a former officer, privately remarked that although he thought Blackwater worse than most, it was in a sense merely the favorite of the hard right, while liberal Democrats had their own favorites, many of them quite corrupt and inept, and that a change of administration would merely see a change in the allocation of no-bid, cost-plus contracts to some of the old favorites.
The theoretical hazards of PMFs should be set against the fact that some people who have seen them in action in Iraq are less alarmed by what they have seen. Gerry Schumacher, a retired American colonel with twenty years as a Green Beret, came to admire most of the security contractors he observed in Iraq while writing A Bloody Business: America’s War Zone Contractors and the Occupation of Iraq (2006), which gives a mostly enthusiastic account of what he saw. Schumacher proceeds from the assumption that either by design or default the current American military cannot operate without vast numbers of contractors, that it certainly cannot successfully fight the war it is now engaged in without them, and that the true costs of maintaining an armed force that can at any moment do what the American services must sometimes do would be immense. The first two assumptions seem indisputable, the third, while true enough, assumes what is at issue, which is whether PMFs allow the services to do the job they must sometimes do at any real saving and without producing other great non-economic costs. Schumacher’s book will strike many as oddly old-fashioned, stories of tough, patriotic, and adventurous men doing hard work while earning an honest dollar. This departure from current taste does not mean that Schumacher’s reporting is badly off: a number of former soldiers and embedded journalists who have seen PMFs at work in Iraq report a mixed but often positive picture. Some PMFs working in Iraq, composed of very skilled ex-soldiers, do an excellent job, and some PMFs using low-wage foreign nationals do an extremely good job. In conversation, a retired American officer, a man strongly opposed to the rise of PMFs, noted that Peruvian and Turkish guards at American installations are able and conscientious, as are security contractors from other nationalities. Precisely because many employees of the best PMFs are former elite soldiers, they have internalized many of the norms and loyalties of the modern profession of arms.
Most commentators who know the recent history cannot imagine the American armed forces operating without vast numbers of contractors, and academics who have surveyed both that phenomenon and also the recent role of military contractors in weak states seem to think they are analyzing an irreversible trend. Deborah D. Avant, the author of one recent academic work, The Market For Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security (2005), is typical when she concludes, “Rather than arguing about its overall costs or benefits, policy makers and their constituents would be well-served by thinking about the trade-offs involved in the different strategies involved for participating in and managing this market.” Perhaps that is so, given the very high initial costs of repatriating all functions now outsourced by NATO militaries and the continuing weakness of many new states, but vast reforms are at least possible, and probably less unlikely than they seemed in 2005. Ideological fashions are volatile. Some generations ago, American corporations hired purveyors of armed force on a massive scale, one dwarfing the amount of force at the disposal of the American government, which would have astonished any classical (and most subsequent) theorists of the modern state. A generation later the armed forces of the United States ranked somewhere between those maintained by Paraguay and Bulgaria, a fact that astonishes my students today. Some recent scholarly writing about PMFs simply assumes the permanent retreat of the modern state from a claimed and exercised monopoly on legitimate force, with an irritating tone of “Hah! Weber was wrong,” exacerbated by a conviction that the hot news consists of the state fading and the globalized market on the rise. This may change: Singer’s first edition seemed to foresee PMFs as possibly irresistible threats to the state’s former monopoly status, but his revised edition argues strongly for the necessity of reform and regulation. Singer lectures at military staff colleges and testifies before Congress; he is the leading figure in the field, with a strong presence outside the academy, and his new argument may be a bellwether.
In the case of first world states, the recent assumptions of an ever-rising tide of privatization seem at least overstated; given the experience of the Iraq War, a continued escalation of outsourcing on anything like the recent scale looks improbable. For weak states, the picture looks darker. There seems to be no general trend of increasing competence among weak-state militaries, the threats continue to rise, the ability of private actors to assemble and sell effective military power continues to rise as well. And in the wake of Iraq, the willingness of first world states to guarantee weak-state security seems at least as likely to further contract as it is to expand. The Chinese, of course, may be more obliging.
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