After more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan,
America’s most profound legacy could be that it set the world order back
to the Middle Ages.
While this is a slight exaggeration, a recent examination by
Sean McFate, a former Army paratrooper who later served in Africa working for
Dyncorp International and
is now an associate professor at the National Defense University,
suggests that the Pentagon’s dependence on contractors to help wage its
wars has unleashed a new era of warfare in which a multitude of freshly
founded private military companies are meeting the demand of
an exploding global market for conflict.
“Now that the United States has opened the Pandora’s Box of mercenarianism,” McFate writes in
The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What they Mean for World Order, “private warriors of all stripes are coming out of the shadows to engage in for-profit warfare.”
It is a menacing thought. McFate said this coincides with what he and
others have called a current shift from global dominance by
nation-state power to a “polycentric” environment in which state
authority competes with transnational corporations, global governing
bodies, non-governmental organizations (NGO’s), regional and ethnic
interests, and terror organizations in the chess game of international
relations. New access to professional private arms, McFate further
argues, has cut into the traditional states’
monopoly on force, and hastened the dawn of this new era.
McFate calls it
neomedievalism, the “non-state-centric and
multipolar world order characterized by overlapping authorities and
allegiances.” States will not disappear, “but they will matter less than
they did a century ago.” He compares this coming environment to the
order that prevailed in Europe before the domination of nation-states with their requisite standing armies.
In this period, before the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 ended decades
of war and established for the first time territorially defined
sovereign states, political authority in Europe was split among
competing power brokers that rendered the monarchs equal players, if not
weaker ones. The Holy Roman Emperor, the papacy, bishoprics,
city-states, dukedoms, principalities, chivalric orders–all fought for
their piece with hired free companies, or mercenary enterprises of
knights-turned profiteers.
As progenitors of today’s private military companies (PMCs), free
companies were “organized as legal corporations, selling their services
to the highest or most powerful bidder for profit,” McFate writes. Their
ranks “swelled with men from every corner of Europe” and beyond, going
where the fighting was until it wasn’t clear whether these private
armies were simply meeting the demand or creating it.
In an interview with
TAC, McFate said the parallels between
that period in history and today’s global proliferation of PMCs cannot
be ignored. He traces their modern origins to the post-Cold War embrace
of privatization in both Washington and London, both pioneers in
military outsourcing, which began in earnest in the 1980s.
By the time the U.S. decided to invade Iraq and stay there in 2003,
its smaller peacetime military force structure could not withstand the
burden. The Pentagon increasingly relied on contractors to support and
wage the war.
“Policy makers, when they started the war in Iraq, they didn’t think
it would last beyond a few weeks. They had three terrible choices – they
could withdraw prematurely, they could institute a Vietnam-era draft …
or they could contract out. So they chose to contract it out,” McFate
said. “That is why you have it now and why it is not regulated.”
The U.S. used contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan more than it had in
any war in its history: in 2010 there were more contractors deployed to
war zones (207,000) than U.S. servicemembers (175,000). In World War
II, contractors only made up 10 percent of the military workforce,
according to McFate.
From 1999 to 2008, at the peak of the wars, Pentagon spending on
outsourcing alone increased from $165 billion to $466 billion a year.
Attempts at oversight have been pathetic, as documented by the
government’s own inspectors general
time and again. Success at regulating or imposing codes of conduct on
contractors has proven elusive, too. The industry remains as opaque as
it has been unassailable where it really counts—the pocketbook.
“The industry is here to stay; it’s not going anywhere,” said McFate a former employee of Dyncorp, which
cut its teeth in Bosnia.
Dyncorp thrived as one of Washington’s primary contractors for both
security and reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq despite intermittent
accusations of overbilling and underperformance on the job.
Perhaps the most infamous of all contractors was
Blackwater, which deflected charges of fraud, violence against civilians and murder for years before it was forced to “rebrand.”
Four of its former guards were convicted of murder in October, however, in connection with the massacre of 17 Iraqis in Nisour Square in 2007.
Blackwater’s founder Erik Prince has dipped and dodged his way
through several incarnations of his company (no longer “Blackwater,” it
was renamed “Xe” and is now
“Academi”),
and has been successful at running a number of other so-called shell
companies and international security operations inside and outside of
the U.S. government trough, including anti-piracy enterprises in North
Africa.
In his post-American days (Prince
left the U.S. for Abu Dhabi
in 2010 amid a series of federal charges and lawsuits dogging
Blackwater), Prince perched himself “at the top of the management chain”
at Saracen International, a security group made up of hard-core
mercenary veterans hired in 2009 to train indigenous forces in Puntland,
Somalia, and to serve as a security detail for the embattled president
of the fragile central government in Mogadishu.
Saracen was officially kicked out of Somalia in 2011 after
accusations were made that it was violating the country’s arms embargo.
According to Jeremy Scahill’s seminal
“Dirty Wars”,
however, by 2013 it was not clear that Saracen had ever left, and it
was likely still operating in Somalia at the time with a handful of
other international PMCs, including Dyncorp.
This is the world that Prince has both made and has thrived in.
According to McFate, “‘irregular’ warfare is more regular than the
‘regular’ warfare,” as the number of internal conflicts have tripled
while interstate wars have dwindled in number since a peak in 1965. As a
result, PMCs have been used increasingly over the last 15 years by
countries, NGOs, and corporations alike to protect ships on the high
seas and oil fields in the deserts, to secure humanitarian missions, to
raise armies against insurgencies, and to serve as security details at
embassies, military bases, and palaces across the Middle East and
beyond.
On the darker side, many of the multinationals once on the U.S. dole
as PMCs in places like Iraq have since started their own enterprises and
taken their skills to clients no matter the mission. They are hard to
track, and impossible to rein in.
For example, before Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi was killed, he
hired mercenaries from across Africa, “to brutally suppress the popular
revolt against him,” McFate points out. Likewise, papers
reported in 2011
that one of Prince’s companies, Reflex Responses, was hired to raise a
force of several hundred guards for the emir of Abu Dhabi, to “assist
the UAE government with intelligence gathering, security,
counterterrorism and suppression of any revolts.”
By no means has the U.S. stopped using PMCs—they are protecting
diplomats in Afghanistan and Iraq, training foreign militaries, and
conducting intelligence. At this point they are more agile and better
equipped to do this work overseas than even their military paymasters,
McFate argues, and their use prevents the public angst—and scrutiny—that
accompanies putting American soldiers into harms way.
“The argument about private militaries being here to stay – that is
the truth or unfortunate truth depending on your position,” said Peter
Singer, senior fellow for the Future War project at the New America
Foundation and author of
Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry.
“For those who thought this would all be over with the end of Iraq
2.0 or Obama’s presidential victory, the facts just don’t bear that
out,” he told
TAC in an interview. Singer agrees with McFate’s assessments in
Modern Mercenary, which he said
“mixes the analytic and academic side with his own personal experiences
working for one of the firms; that combination is rare in this space.”
McFate details for the first time in public how he was hired by
Dyncorp on behalf of a secret U.S. contract to help prevent a group of
Hutu rebels, the Forces Nationales de Liberation (FNL), from sparking
another genocide of the Tutsis during the ongoing
civil war in Burundi.
McFate was tasked at one point with guarding the president of Burundi
from impending assassination. The president remained safe, and the civil
war was brought to an end by 2005.
McFate said he wrote about this, and Dyncorp’s training of the
Liberian army in 2011, to show in part that PMCs can be used to positive
ends. But he is not naïve. He is clear about where they can fail,
invite mission creep, or seize power for clients through violence. By
their very nature, PMCs profit from conflict and are always at risk of
creating and expanding it for their own benefit. McFate cites numerous
examples throughout history in which mercenaries have played both sides,
only to come out with full pockets.
In addition, private armies live by no rules of war or international
conventions; here, Erik Prince is the best example. PMCs can hide in
countries with the lowest standards and norms. They have access to a
global arms trade and the latest military technology, including drones.
They are a risk to civilian populations, and their operations are never
transparent. “You can FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) the CIA, you
can’t FOIA this industry,” said McFate.
So what to do? McFate suggests that banning PMCs or trying to
regulate them into submission won’t work because it would only drive
them underground and into the realm of rogues. He suggests letting the
market work to “incentivize desirable practices by making them
profitable” might be the best course. He notes, however, that when the
U.S. military had “market power” and was in the best position to set
price and practices at the beginning of its wars, it “failed to do so.”
Whether the cons of private contracting outweigh the pros is a debate
McFate chooses not engage, and his background as both soldier and
contractor figure heavily in the tenor of his book. “I leave it
deliberately up to the reader,” he said. “The book is not an argument;
it’s more about exploration. There is a big global trend happening right
under our feet. I think we are in the precipice of a big decision.”
That decision is how to deal with the privatization of war effectively,
if at all.
It will not be easy. U.S. agencies knowingly hired companies with
spotty records. They used private contractors for controversial secret
operations, including the
detainee interrogations at Abu Ghraib, and a
covert CIA assassination program involving
Blackwater. It will take a lot more trust in Washington to believe that
“best practices” in this industry can genuinely come from government
itself.
“In an idealized world the companies with the best practices and best
performance records would end up with all the contracts, and the bad
actors would be eliminated from the field,” said Singer. “That hasn’t
happened in regular business, much less when you cross regular business
with what you call politics.”
Or war. Get your seat belt on, because if McFate is right, it is
“back to the future,” and any choice we might have had in the matter is
long gone.
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance reporter and TAC
contributing editor. Follow her on Twitter.
