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Whatsapp Foreign private security contractors stage a drill in Baghdad in September 2004. Scores of contractors, hired by the coalition, have been killed in ambushes across the war-torn country.

Increasingly, America, Britain and even Australia are relying on ‘private security contractors’ to fight their wars. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry, but it’s also largely unregulated. Are we heading towards a world where armies and navies are available to the highest bidder? Antony Funnell investigates.

At the northern end of the Arlington National Cemetery in Washington DC there’s a statue that symbolises the way America sees its military.

Six WWII marines are set in bronze, frozen in time as they hoist the Stars and Stripes over the Japanese island of Iwo Jima.

The memorial was created from a real life photograph.

At the bottom of the statue there’s an inscription set into the pedestal in gold lettering. It reads: ‘Uncommon valour was a common virtue.’

‘The biggest concern about this industry is that it's growing organically, we are not taking a good look at it. A world with private military companies means a world with more war.’

This is the way most Americans still like to think of their soldiers: men and women determined in their duty and confirmed in their patriotism.

Whether that ideal was ever a universal reality is impossible to know, but it’s fair to say that for most of America’s history the stated motivation of the average American soldier has been national service.

Something unexpected happened after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, however.

Over a relatively short period of time, the complexion of the US military’s presence in the Middle East began to change. Increasingly, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the military personnel chosen to prosecute Washington’s interests took on a very different hue.

As conflict escalated, the ranks of the US military contingent became populated by many combatants motivated more by profit than by patriotism: servants not of the American people, but of a host of private military companies contracted to the US Department of Defence.

Their duties—and even the length of time they spent in the field—were determined not necessarily by any ideological agreement with America’s mission, but by commercial considerations.

As a result, the US military is now the world’s largest contractor of armed mercenaries; it’s been that way for more than a decade.

Sean McFate describes the United States as the industry’s ‘sugar daddy’. He’s an academic, a former American soldier and the author of The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order.

‘The private military sector went from almost nothing to a multi-billion dollar industry today, and that’s what we know. There’s much that we don’t know,’ he says.

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Whatsapp Blackwater security contractors securing the site where a roadside bomb exploded near the Iranian embassy in central Baghdad.

According to McFate on thing is clear, however; the industry is still expanding.

McFate, who lectures at Washington’s Georgetown University, was once a mercenary himself, working for a private operation called Dyn Corp International in Africa; a role he says he sought out more for reasons of curiosity than financial gain.

By the height of America’s engagement in Iraq, he estimates, the percentage of private military contractors employed by the Pentagon was equal in scale to its regular army commitment.

‘In Iraq it was 50 per cent, in Afghanistan it was about 70 per cent. That's huge. In another generation it could be mostly contractors fighting US wars.’

Those contractors, according to the former US paratrooper, can’t simply be dismissed as the providers of non-combat-related logistical support—private soldiers were employed in Iraq to pilot drones and to undertake reconnaissance. Ten to 15 per cent were directly employed in armed roles.

Another trenchant critic of America's growing reliance on the use of private military contractors is former US Army colonel Andrew Bacevich, a veteran of Vietnam and the first Gulf War.

‘The architects of the Iraq war in 2003 thought that our relatively small but very competent force could win a decisive victory in Iraq,’ says Bacevich. ‘When that turned out not to be the case and we faced a prolonged insurgency, the army was too small, and that's what opened the door to the great use of mercenaries to make up for the absence of active duty forces.’

Bacevich, an emeritus professor of international relations at Boston University, argues America’s use of private military contractors has had a corrupting effect on the military and its values. He stops short of saying that US authorities have been using mercenaries to deliberately hoodwink the American public about the true costs of war, though.

Sean McFate, on the other hand, is adamant that policymakers in Washington have exploited what he terms the ‘grey area benefits’ of the private military industry.

‘The first is plausible deniability. If a mission is really politically risky, it's easier to have a company do it than having US Marines do it, because Americans don't like to see Marines coming back in body bags. But they don't really care that much about contractors.

‘Similarly, when the US wants to put boots on the ground in a place like Iraq to fight ISIS, you can put 1,000 Army soldiers there and call that boots on the ground, but nobody counts the number of contractors. You could have 5,000 contractors there and nobody from Congress seems to know or ask. Certainly no one in the US government seems to track it. Having contractors offers policymakers a wider range of opportunities.’

According to Bacevich, a ‘disconnect’ between the American public and its military is at the heart of the issue.

‘American people are not particularly invested in their military and in the wars that the military are sent to fight,’ he says. ‘The consequence of that is that the state, the government, has a free hand to abuse that military by sending them to fight wars that are foolish and ill-managed.

‘We've been in Afghanistan, easily the longest war in American history ... that war is ending unsuccessfully. New campaigns continue to evolve. So we are, in effect, in a circumstance of permanent war.’

The University of Western Australia’s Sarah Percy agrees. However, as a specialist in mercenaries and international politics, Dr Percy is quick to point out that the problem is not just an American one.

‘When you think about it, 40 years ago in most western states, people would have known someone personally who had served in the armed forces,’ she says.

‘There was often still a form of national service that existed, so people had to go and serve for their country. Now a lot of studies suggest that lots and lots of people don't know anyone who serves in the armed forces of their nation.

‘I don't think any government really wants to have an open and honest discussion about the fact that they are relying on paid contractors who could be called mercenaries to do the job of what we used to expect a citizen soldier to do.’

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Whatsapp Members of the US Blackwater private security company patrol Baghdad while providing security for Paul Bremer, the US civil administrator in Iraq in 2006.

Although no country comes close to the United States in terms of the sheer number of contractors it engages, many western countries now use private soldiers to bolster their military capacity in one way or another—Australia is one of them.

Canberra’s outsourcing of military functions has not gone without controversy.

In 2011, troops guarding the Australian embassy in Iraq were withdrawn and replaced with employees from a private military contractor based in Dubai. The security guards that that company supplied were ex-Chilean military and paramilitary soldiers.

Australia did not officially acknowledge those guards as ‘mercenaries’. The preferred jargon is that such people are members of a ‘private military company’ or PMC.

The fact remains, however, that the Chilean guards were armed and expected to engage in conflict if necessary to secure the embassy; they had no personal allegiance to Australia or its values; and their military service and commitment was entirely based on financial considerations.

How you determine the definition of a ‘mercenary’, it seems, depends on who you are and whether or not you are employing any. Sydney-based international law expert Katherine Fallah says western nations prefer to use euphemisms when talking about their own arrangements.

‘The definition of a mercenary isn’t really a very workable definition at international law to begin with. Not many private military contractors will fall within the definition of a mercenary. It was, I think, an intentionally restrictive definition, because western states weren’t really that committed to outlawing mercenarism.

‘When I started my research we were able to talk about “private military contractors”, and that was kind of set up in opposition to “mercenaries”; so something better than mercenarism—something softer.

‘The language has softened even more now. So now we talk about “private security contractors”. There’s a reluctance to use the word military anymore; there’s a disavowal of that military function. Sometimes, in the United States, for example, they’ll talk about “stability operations contractors” rather than even security.’

The uneasiness over definitions may well betray an underlying concern among western politicians about the direction the military outsourcing process is leading them in.

Sarah Percy says policymakers in the US and the UK, in particular, now find themselves caught in a kind of ‘Faustian pact’.

‘Everybody knows that you have to use them,’ she says. ‘You don't necessarily like having to use them and you know that if you do use them they are going to be extremely difficult to regulate.’

That’s not to say that there haven’t been attempts to rein in the industry or at the very least make it more accountable, though.

There is a United Nations treaty governing the use of contractor combatants. It’s called the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries.

It very clearly outlaws the use of soldiers of fortune. Ironically, it came into force in the early 2000s, at exactly the time the United States began hiring more and more private contractors in the Middle East.

To date, neither the United States nor Australia nor the United Kingdom have formally signed the convention.

‘It’s true to say that the existing mercenary conventions don’t really envisage the nature of the industry as it is now,’ says Katherine Fallah from the University of Technology Sydney.

‘They don’t envisage the kind of size and organisation of the industry—the relationship between the industry and states now. International law was more concerned with small bands of mercenaries going into Africa, Latin America, Asia to stage military coups to overthrow governments.

‘There’s actually a great deal of regulation, but it’s operating at a number of different levels. So a company that operates in the United States will be governed by law at many levels: probably not mercenary conventions; if they’re operating in war zones they’ll probably be covered by international humanitarian law, so by the Geneva Conventions. They’ll probably be covered by United States contract law and international contract law sometimes.’

While the regulations do exist, albeit in a confusing and multi-jurisdictional manner, according to Fallah the major difficulty is their enforcement.

‘We’ve seen companies involved in major, major scandals without suffering too much reputational damage or without suffering criminal sanction,’ she says.

‘Blackwater, for instance, after the Nisour Square incident, continued to receive contracts. It even continued to operate in Iraq for some time and its successor Academi continues to receive multi-billion dollar contracts. In terms of prosecution we’ve only seen prosecutions in relation to Blackwater.’

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Whatsapp After Hurricane Katrina parts of New Orleans were kept secure by private security companies.

In fact, it was only this month, almost eight years after the event, that four former Blackwater mercenaries were sentenced in a Washington court for the murder of 17 Iraqi civilians at Nisour Square. One was given a life sentence, the other three were given 30-year prison terms.

Fallah says efforts by the UN Working Group on Mercenaries to force countries to take a hardline against the private military industry have met with little interest or support from major western nations like the US, Britain and Australia. Industry players have now begun pushing for self-regulation.

‘When we look at the industry standards that have developed, they’re placed in softer language than existing hard law obligations. For instance, contractors are responsible as a matter of international law for ensuring that they’re not involved in the trafficking of persons.

‘There are allegations that contractors in the Balkans were engaged in people trafficking, drug trafficking, weapons trafficking. In some of the industry standards, the language will be used in a really soft way: “We’ll endeavour to—where possible—make sure that we don’t traffic.” It doesn’t include, for instance, positive obligations to ensure that they’re not trafficking.’

Fallah also accuses private military companies and governments of deliberately trying to avoid scrutiny by using the cover of national security and commercial-in-confidence.

‘States can always appeal to military secrecy arguments to say that we shouldn’t have to give out information on operations. Very early on in the day [former US Defence Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld was asked to provide a list of the numbers of US contractors in Iraq. He wrote a letter in response saying, “I can’t tell you because of commercial secrets; it’s commercially sensitive information.” So there’s a huge degree of secrecy around the industry.’

Sean McFate says there are already signs that the major corporate military providers are now trying to extend their business way beyond national governments, a development he says could have significant additional consequences for global stability.

‘In the last 10 years the market for force has pretty much been under US control, but as the US leaves Afghanistan and doesn't use these companies anymore, where are they going to go? They are not just going to hang up their hats and go home or they will go bankrupt. They're going to find new clients.

‘So right now we are starting to see private military armies, private navies appear all over the world in conflict zones. We have rich people who want to hire them to do humanitarian intervention. We have oil companies.

‘The biggest concern is what's going to happen when private military companies are fighting each other and may have a profit incentive to elongate and expand conflict? In fact, they could even create conflict for profit reasons too: in Africa, for example.

‘The biggest concern about this industry is that it's growing organically, we are not taking a good look at it. A world with private military companies means a world with more war.’

‘Right now the world is on a precipice about this industry. Left on autopilot we will develop true mercenaries and a free market for force, which was the norm for millennia. We’re going back to that world unless we do something about it.

‘That world is a scary world, because it means anybody who’s rich enough to afford a private army can do so and wage war for whatever reason they want.

‘It’ll make very rich people and corporations into a type of superpower. That’s disconcerting. So I think as we’re focusing right now on issues like ISIS, we have a bigger phenomenon slowly growing beneath our feet that we have to pay attention to.’

The market for mercenaries Listen to the first part Future Tense's look at mercenaries to hear more about private armies and the concerns around commercial combatants.

Mercenary world Listen to the second part of Future Tense's look at mercenaries to hear how 'commercial combatants' are left largely unregulated.

Exploring new ideas, new approaches, new technologies—the edge of change. Future Tense analyses the social, cultural and economic fault lines arising from rapid transformation.



