Private Security Companies during the Iraq War

Military Performance and the Use of Deadly Force

Scott Fitzsimmons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138844261
• eBook ISBN: 9781317541707
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book explores the use of deadly force by private security companies during the Iraq War.

The work focuses on and compares the activities of the US companies Blackwater and Dyncorp. Despite sharing several important characteristics, such as working for the same client (the US State Department) during the same time period, the employees of Blackwater fired their weapons far more often, and killed and seriously injured far more people in Iraq than their counterparts in DynCorp. In order to explain this disparity, the book undertakes the most comprehensive analysis ever attempted on the use of violence by the employees of these firms. Based on extensive empirical research, it offers a credible explanation for this difference: Blackwater maintained a relatively bellicose military culture that placed strong emphasis on norms encouraging its personnel to exercise personal initiative, proactive use of force, and an exclusive approach to security, which, together, motivated its personnel to use violence quite freely against anyone they suspected of posing a threat. Specifically, Blackwater's military culture motivated its personnel to fire upon suspected threats more quickly, at greater distances, and with a greater quantity of bullets, and to more readily abandon the people they shot at when compared to DynCorp's personnel, who maintained a military culture that encouraged far less violent behaviour. Utilizing the Private Security Company Violent Incident Dataset (PSCVID), created by the author in 2012, the book draws upon data on hundreds of violent incidents involving private security personnel in Iraq to identify trends in the behaviour exhibited by the employees of different firms. Based on this rich and original empirical data, the book provides the definitive study of contemporary private security personnel in the Iraq War.

This book will be of much interest to students of the Iraq War, Private Security Companies, Military Studies, War and Conflict Studies and IR in general.

1
The nature of Blackwater and DynCorp’s security operations during the Iraq War

This chapter provides essential background information on private armed forces in general and Blackwater and DynCorp in particular. It introduces the concept of PSCs, differentiates these actors from other firms in the private military industry and traces the development of the contemporary market for private armed forces. It then discusses the origins and early development of Blackwater and DynCorp. Finally, it provides a detailed overview of their security operations in Iraq between 2003 and 2009, including information on the insurgent threats they faced, the kinds of security missions they undertook to address these threats, the structure and organization of their security forces and the equipment they used during their security operations.

What is a private security company?

A private security company (PSC) is a legally-established commercial firm offering services that could involve the use of deadly force to support the needs of its clients. These services can include fielding personnel, weapons and other equipment to defend a client’s staff and facilities from potential threats. According to this definition, Blackwater and DynCorp should be considered PSCs during the period under study because they conducted static security operations, in which they deployed teams of armed personnel to defend the US Embassy to Iraq and other fixed sites, and mobile security operations, in which they deployed armed security teams in convoys of armoured vehicles to ensure that their clients could safely travel through unstable territory.

PSCs are but one of several types of firms in the contemporary private military industry. Private training and consulting companies (PTCC) focus on training armed forces and providing advice on, for instance, how to organize a military force, which weapons to purchase and how to conduct military and security operations. For example, Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI), an American company founded and run by retired US military officers, earned its reputation as the world’s premier military consulting firm in 1995, during the Bosnian War, when it conducted an extensive training operation to vastly improve the combat capabilities of the Croatian armed forces. The firm also provided advice to the Croatian military regarding how to defeat their Serb opponents in that conflict. After years of bloody stalemates, the retrained Croatian armed forces launched an offensive on 4 August 1995 that, along with a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) aerial bombing campaign against Serb targets, ended the Bosnian War and allowed both Bosnia and Croatia to become fully independent states.¹ Such firms generally do not employ deadly force in their work.

As their name implies, private logistical support companies (PLSCs) offer services ranging from constructing military bases to maintaining weapons systems, cooking food, doing laundry, collecting and analyzing intelligence, and transporting supplies. KBR and Halliburton, both based in the United States, are among the largest PLSCs. PLSCs tend to have more employees and generate greater revenue than other any other type of firm in the private military industry. They are also the most important type of firm to highly developed military forces, such as the US and British armed forces, because they provide the logistical and other support functions that these developed military forces have not been able to provide for themselves since downsizing or eliminating many of their own logistical support units during the 1980s and 1990s. PLSCs rarely, if ever, employ deadly force in their work.

Finally, private military companies (PMCs) directly take part in sustained violent operations against other armed forces. Like some PSCs, firms in this category also use deadly force, but they tend to do so on a larger scale because they tend to be hired to accomplish highly ambitious objectives. For example, such firms may be hired to win a civil war on behalf of a government or rebel faction, or to launch or prevent coup attempts against the government of a state. The now-defunct South African firm Executive Outcomes, which won the Angolan and Sierra Leonean civil wars during the 1990s on behalf of the governments of these states, was among the most successful PMCs.² At present, there are few active PMCs due to their questionable legality and the comparatively high risks involved in their work and because of the greater stability and financial rewards associated with the work performed by other types of firms.

Although this typology relies on ideal types that may not perfectly reflect the nature of any particular real-world firm, it has advantages over most other categorization schemes. It is a relatively simple and straightforward scheme because it distinguishes firms purely on the basis of their functional behaviour – that is, on the basis of what they actually do. Most other typologies add other criteria, such as attempting to differentiate firms by the nature of their clients and their proximity to the front line of a battlefield. As discussed throughout this section, adding additional classification criteria makes it difficult for scholars to classify real-world firms. Furthermore, unlike most other typologies, which lack a means for deciding which category multi-service firms should be placed in, this typology sorts firms on the basis of the most lethal service they provided during the period under study. Therefore, even though Blackwater and DynCorp offered a variety of other services during the period under study, including training and support services, they are classified as PSCs under this scheme because they provided lethal security services for some of their clients. A firm such as Halliburton, on the other hand, which provided logistical and support services but did not provide lethal security services during the period under study, is rightly classified as a PLSC.

Other scholars of international relations have put forward alternative typologies to try to make sense of the private military industry. In 2002, Robert Mandel developed one of the first typologies. It differentiated firms on the basis of their geographic scope (inside or outside of their home state), client (a state government or a non-state actor such as a corporation, gang, militia, NGO or terrorist group), purpose (maintaining the status quo or significantly modifying it) and the nature of the services they provided (armed combat support, training, logistics, etc.).³ As with some of the more recently-developed typologies, Mandel’s scheme is best suited to classifying highly-focused firms that serve a single client in a single country and provide a single type of service – few of which exist – but cannot adequately categorize the diversified major players in the industry. For example, Blackwater started as a domestically-focused training and supply firm with an almost exclusively government (local, state and federal) client base. Within a few years, however, it began supplementing its original services and client base by providing armed security details and designing armoured vehicles and by maintaining several government and non-governmental clients.⁴ It is difficult to determine where Blackwater should fit in Mandel’s typology because he does not provide clearly-defined rules for deciding how complex firms should be categorized.

Peter Singer put forward perhaps the best-known typology of firms in the private military industry in his 2003 book Corporate Warriors.⁵ His “tip-of-the-spear” typology distinguishes firms on the basis of how close their operations are to the front line in conflicts. Military provider firms operate on the front-line tactical battlefield; military consulting firms operate within conflict zones, but not quite on the front lines; finally, military support firms operate within conflict zones but are usually far back from the front lines. Singer presumed that the firms in each of these categories offer a distinct set of services. Military provider firms offer front-line tactical combat services. In other words, these firms provide services that are directly related to fighting and winning a conflict. This can involve taking a direct part in fighting enemy military forces on behalf of a client by, for instance, providing ground troops or specialists to undertake certain tasks that their clients cannot handle themselves, such as flying helicopters. For example, Executive Outcomes provided both ground troops and specialist pilots when it helped the governments of Angola and Sierra Leone win civil wars against determined rebel forces during the 1990s. Although Singer developed his scheme before the outbreak of the Iraq War and the rise to prominence of the current generation of PSCs, he later placed Blackwater in this category.⁶ Military consulting firms, in contrast, provide advice and training services to help enhance their client’s own military or security forces. They offer the benefit of their years of experience and expertise in how to properly structure a military force, train its personnel and fight and defeat enemy military forces. MPRI, introduced earlier in this chapter, is the best-known firm in this category. Finally, military support firms, such as Halliburton and KBR, provide supporting services f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The nature of Blackwater and DynCorp’s security operations during the Iraq War
• 2 The ideational theory of tactical violence
• 3 The military cultures of Blackwater and DynCorp
• 4 The relationship between military culture, tactical behaviour and casualties inflicted on suspected threats
• 5 The relationship between military culture, tactical behaviour and friendly casualties
• 6 The implications of Blackwater and DynCorp’s tactical behaviour in Iraq
• 7 Conclusion
• Index