Private Security Contractors and New Wars

Risk, Law, and Ethics

Kateri Carmola

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415771719
• eBook ISBN: 9781135153274
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia militar y marítima

This book addresses the ambiguities of the growing use of private security contractors and provides guidance as to how our expectations about regulating this expanding 'service' industry will have to be adjusted.

In the warzones of Iraq and Afghanistan many of those who carry weapons are not legally combatants, nor are they protected civilians. They are contracted by governments, businesses, and NGOs to provide armed security. Often mistaken as members of armed forces, they are instead part of a new protean proxy force that works alongside the military in a multitude of shifting roles, and overseen by a matrix of contracts and regulations.

This book analyzes the growing industry of these private military and security companies (PMSCs) used in warzones and other high risk areas. PMSCs are the result of a unique combination of circumstances, including a change in the idea of soldiering, insurance industry analyses that require security contractors, and a need for governments to distance themselves from potentially criminal conduct. The book argues that PMSCs are a unique type of organization, combining attributes from worlds of the military, business, and humanitarian organizations. This makes them particularly resistant to oversight. The legal status of these companies and those they employ is also hard to ascertain, which weakens the multiple regulatory tools available. PMSCs also fall between the cracks in ethical debates about their use, seeming to be both justifiable and objectionable. This transformation in military operations is a seemingly irreversible product of more general changes in the relationship between the individual citizen and the state.

This book will be of much interest to students of private security companies, war and conflict studies, security studies and IR in general.

Kateri Carmola is the Christian A. Johnson Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College in Vermont. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

1
The complex identity of the PMSC

In the last decade, private military and security companies (PMSCs) have been the objects of great interest. Scholars, policy-makers, and journalists have worked to define who these new actors are, and how they should be used and judged. Two issues arise consistently amidst all of this attention. First, PMSCs defy easy categorization: we do not really understand what they are. Second, regardless of what they are, we suspect that they are tainted, potentially corrupt, and somehow suspicious entities: whatever they are, we do not like them. These two issues are fundamentally connected. Can there be a legitimate mercenary-like force operating in war zones around the world? Should there be any such thing as a “corporate warrior”?

Protean shape-shifters

All studies and accounts of PMSCs begin with the problem of simple definition: they are ambiguous or polymorphous entities—a mix of old and new, public and private; slippery, and hard to pin down analytically (Avant 2005:22; Singer 2003: 40; Alexandra et al. 2008:7; Chesterman and Lehnardt 2007:3). Researchers, governmental agencies, and Congressional subcommittees decry the lack of even the most basic information regarding the number of PMSCs worldwide, what they are doing, and whom they employ. In January 2008, the Chairman of a Senate Subcommittee on Oversight of Contingency Contracting, Senator Thomas Carper (D-DE), noted that “five years after going into Iraq, we still do not know how many contractors are there. We have estimates, but they differ” (US Senate Committee on Homeland Security 2008:2). Seven months later, after an extensive attempt by the US Government Accountability Office to narrow down these numbers, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the current estimate of the amount of money spent on private contractors was between $15 billion and $20 billion (Congressional Budget Office 2008). In “the most definitive account yet of the private security industry in Iraq,” wrote T.Christian Miller of the Los Angeles Times, “the numbers are, to put it mildly, squishy” (Miller 2008).

The task of characterizing PMSCs qualitatively is also difficult. During a 2002 House of Commons hearing, a Member of Parliament commented on the difficulty of regulating these firms, noting that keeping track of the facts was “like sand going through your fingers: companies dissolve, ownership is vague and the soldiers themselves are not known or named…[these companies] are very protean, they are like amoeba; they come and go” (MacShane 2002: question 158; my emphasis). Years later, and despite continued study, little has changed. The corporate structure of these firms, their exact affiliations with governments and businesses, and their legal status remain murky. On the ground, it is difficult even to identify who they are or for whom they work. Some security contractors might be well-trained, with recognizable uniforms. Others are outliers among an already hard-to-classify force. As one Marine Colonel put it:

On the other hand, there were other security contractors over there that were just cowboys. They clearly had neither the training nor the experience. Could I identify them? No. They wore a mixed bag of uniforms. Nobody wore name tags. They didn’t have unit logos. You’d run into these people in town; you would see them handling weapons improperly. You would see them with really kind of a bad attitude, and there’s nothing you could do about it. How do you identify them? Well, there’s no license plate on their car. They’re driving an SUV. Some of them weren’t even in any uniform even within the team.

(Col. Thomas X.Hammes, in Gaviria and Smith 2005)

Among scholars, the most common complaint is that PMSCs lack accountability. First, PMSCs are literally hard to count: it is difficult to ascertain how many there are (estimates of firms providing armed security in Iraq range from 50 to 75, and if the definition is widened to include firms that provide “security services” but are unarmed, the number could be as high as 280). It is hard to know how much money the government has paid for armed security contractors (estimates range from $6 to $10 billion) (GAO 2005; Congressional Budget Office 2008; Hartung 2006). And it is unclear what kinds of jobs they are doing and where. Second, it is unclear exactly who is in charge—what the lines of authority are within companies and between firms, and their contracting and sub-contracting authorities—and so not obvious who is liable for mistakes or breaches of contract or crimes. Third, PMSCs literally lack “an account”—a story or narrative that can make sense of their role. The lack of an explanation of what these firms are, and how they came about, contributes to the sense that they are indeed shape-shifting, not just numerically and factually, but as organizations themselves.

PMSCs are what organizational theorists refer to as “informal organizations,” entities whose basic structure resists easy categorization. Such organizations can act effectively in unclear situations, are quick to adapt, and cohere through informal trust networks. Many times, such informal organizations play a “boundary-spanning” role between two other formal organizations—in this case the military and the bureaucracy (Scott 1981:185; Williams 2002).

In public policy analysis, boundary-spanning organizations are often called “hybrids” or “quasi-organizations,” since they combine aspects of both public and private organizations. In 2007, the Congressional Research Service issued a report on the role of these hybrids in “the quasi government.” The report focused on public-private partnerships with non-governmental organizations (NGOs), federally funded research organizations like the RAND Corporation, and any private business with “the federal government as a guaranteed customer”:

The quasi government, virtually by its name alone and the intentional blurring of the governmental and private sectors, is not easily defined. In general, the term is used…to refer to entities that have some legal relation or association, however tenuous, to the federal government While different categories of quasi governmental organizations can be described and found useful as an analytic tool, such categories are artificial, with porous lines of distinction and differentiation, and tend to be imposed upon the disparate entities after the fact.

(Kosar 2007:2; my emphasis)

One reason PMSCs are hard to pin down is that they are more than one thing at once, and any analytical categories or typology will have “porous lines of distinction and differentiation.” In itself this may not be such a strange thing— many organizations may blur categories—but in the case of PMSCs, the categories being blurred are ones that have typically resisted any such combinations.

A good (if superficial) example of the difficulty of trying to clarify what PMSCs actually are is the longstanding debate about which name (or acronym) to assign these firms. Originally they were called PMFs—private military firms— which emphasized their use of former soldiers and their connection to the military. Firms resisted this moniker; wanting to downplay their offensive military capabilities, they referred to themselves PSCs—private security companies. Recently, a compromise was reached: the name was combined, and they are now routinely referred to as PMSCs. In some circles, a new name is being tried out: they are “peace and stability operators” in “contingency operations” (Brooks 2009).

PMSCs are not the only current aspect of conflict that is inspiring ambivalence and perplexity. Current conflicts are called “new wars”: they are challenging old ideas about strategy and tactics, and they are requiring a mix of actors and agencies on the ground. They are filled with a “polymorphous violence” that runs the gamut of precision missile strikes and human suicide bomb attacks (Aron 1959:57). In the battle against transnational terrorist networks, the US is at war with an enemy—al-Qaeda—which has been described as a “protean enemy” with shape-shifting qualities (Stern 2003). These enemies exist in the midst of a “new world disorder,” marked by much conceptual anarchy (Jowitt 1992:308). The etymological root of the English word for war—werre, from the Germanic verwirren—meaning “to bring something into confusion, to perplex,” has never been more accurate. Confusing entities in the midst of a confusing form of war, in a confusing time, call for some attempt at establishing conceptual clarity.

For the sake of both accuracy and consistency, I will use the term “protean” to refer to PMSCs: they are more than just hybrids, since they combine more than two organizational types. “Protean” suggests a flexible, changing, and multifaceted organization—but one that also has underlying ominous powers: after being captured, Proteus the sea god changed into a lion, a serpent, and a leopard, before he could be subdued. One way to understand the conceptual (and normative) confusion that surrounds PMSCs is to see it as a direct result of their protean character. We do not know how to judge what we cannot understand, and existing categories of classification and judgment fall short. The fault here is with us, not them; we are stuck with outdated ways of seeing, and need to adapt. And in the meantime, we greet unfamiliar categories with a mixture of paranoia and suspicion. The anthropologist Mary Douglas argued famously that “dirt is just matter that is out of place”: shoes on the kitchen table are much harder to tolerate than shoes on the floor; trash at the dump is not as offensive as trash by the side of the road (Douglas 1966:50). Cultures invent complex rules to assign places to things, and to order and make sense of the world. Objects “out of place” then come to inspire varying amounts of animosity and anxiety, as well as a desire to clean them up and order them into place. They are described as “dirty,” but that is only because they are out of place, not because they actually are dangerous.

Ambiguous and hard-to-place entities also inspire fascination and wonder. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates tells his interlocutors that philosophy begins in questioning, and questioning begins with a puzzle, and ambiguous entities are always puzzling. These ambiguous things “roll around” between categories and appear to be more than one thing at the same time (Plato 1991:479d). The fascination that PMSCs hold for scholars is partly due to this ambiguous character.

The mercenary problem

To those who express confusion about what private military and security contractors are, there is a ready answer: they are merely modern versions of the age-old mercenary fighter, a throwback to the day of mercenaries and pirates, private actors wielding deadly force as proxies for governments and corporations. This negative characterization is one that PMSCs have been unable to shake.

Two related criticisms have always dogged mercenaries: lack of discipline and lack of reliability. At least since the beginning of the modern state system, every description of them refers to their general untrustworthiness and risk aversion. Frederick the Great, in the eighteenth century, claimed that contracted mercenary forces possessed “neither courage, nor loyalty, nor group spirit, nor sacrifice, nor self-reliance” (quoted in Singer 2003:33). Clausewitz noted that the contracted forces he observed were “an expensive and therefore small military force. Even smaller was their fighting valued: extremes of energy or exertion were conspicuous by their absence and fighting was generally a sham” (Clausewitz 1976:232).

PMSCs garner the same criticism. Any attempt to legitimize the business has been met with the suspicion that security contractors or the firms they work for are ineffective, untrustworthy, undisciplined, disloyal, corrupt, and generally renegade. We hear about the “cowboy” attitude of security contractors, endangering regular military forces with their bravado, or we hear of contractors underperforming— doing an incomplete or substandard job, and then running away with the money. There is good evidence that these claims are often exaggerated, and historical examples of organized mercenary groups have often belied this criticism (Thomson 1994:67; Singer 2003:34). Certainly, regular troops also shirk and mutiny and underperform. But in comparison to regular, state-based militaries, who can be ordered into combat under highly policed command-and-control structures, security contractors most often seem like just a trumped-up version of their mercenary cousins: as both a risk to operational control and risk-averse. Nothing captures this tension like the ongoing debate about the use of the “M” word.

In 2005, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights established a Working Group to study the problem of PMSCs, which it steadfastly referred to as mercenaries.¹ The group expressed concern about “the new modalities of mercenarism, and noting that the recruitment of former military personnel and expolicemen by private military and private security companies to serve in their employ as ‘security guards’ in zones of armed conflict seems to be continuing” (United Nations 2009). In response to the efforts of this group, Doug Brooks, the head of the PMSC industry trade group, objected to the use of the term “mercenaries”:

The Working Group’s continued use of “mercenary” is perceived as derogatory and presents a significant obstacle to exactly the kind of cooperation vital to successfully addressing the key issues…. IPOA recommends that the Working Group remove the word “mercenary” from both its name and mandate. A change to “the UN Working Group on Stability Contractors (or something similar) will…reflect the true nature of the industry…

(Brooks 2009)

So far, the group has kept its name, perhaps echoing the sentiment expressed by Washington Post reporter Steve Fainaru, who—when he was criticized for using the term “mercenary” in many of his accounts—replied:

The other day you were suggesting that I used the M word, as you call it, because it sells. In fact, I think it’s self-evident that we’re talking about mercenary activity. I wouldn’t use it if I didn’t believe it, and I’m not throwing it arou...

Table of contents

• Contemporary security studies
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The complex identity of the PMSC
• 2 The multifaceted origins of the PMSC industry
• 3 Contracting and danger in the risk society
• 4 PMSCs and the clash of legal cultures
• 5 Frontier ethics with a cosmopolitan goal
• Problems and solutions Epilogue
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index