The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order Read Online Free PDF Page A

Personal Protective Services II (WPPS) contract awarded up to $1.2 billion to Blackwater, Triple Canopy, and DynCorp International, which collectively provided some fifteen hundred “shooters,” or armed civilians authorized to kill, in Iraq alone. This contract provided armed escorts for US government personnel around the world, with license to kill under limited circumstances. This contract, though lethal, is not equivalent to the military campaigns waged by Executive Outcomes in Africa, but it does demonstrate that mercenaries and military enterprisers are related and in the same category.
    The
security support companies
are the private sector version of the US Army’s combat services units and are generally unarmed. Examples of security support companies range from Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), which provides intelligence analysis, to the Lincoln Group, which conducts strategic communication in Iraq, to CACI and Titan, which provide interpreters to the US military, to Total Intelligence Solutions, which runs spy rings for the US government overseas. Security support companies are as controversial as PMCs, even though they typically are unarmed and do not employ lethal force. CACI and Titan contractors were implicated in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and Lincoln Group instigated an uproar when journalists discovered that the US government had hired the company to propagandize the US cause in the Iraqi free press.
    General contractors
are equivalent to the US Army’s combat service support units and provide logistical support through supply, maintenance, transportation, medical, and other services that combat units require. General contractors are not members of the private military or security industry, as they perform nonlethal tasks that are not uniquely military or security-related in nature. However, it is important to include them within this typology and acknowledge their presence and complicity in conflict-affected areas. Typical general contractor tasks include equipping soldiers, maintaining vehicles, constructing buildings, driving trucks with supplies, cooking meals, building bases, and performing routine administration. The bulk of contractors in conflict-affected areas fall into this category.
    Table 2.1
Typology of the Private Military Industry

    Focusing on function in relation to combat operations and recognizing the influence of the US Army’s organizational and operational influence on the emerging private military industry produce a more logically coherent typology than earlier attempts, especially for typologies created before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which shaped the industry in substantial ways. Table 2.1 depicts this new typology. 9 A few of the larger companies, such as DynCorp International, operate in all three categories, but this is exceptional; most companies specialize in only one category.
    US military officers frequently discuss tooth-to-tail ratios in campaigns.
Tooth
refers to combat arms units, while
tail
refers to combat service and combat service support. How the private sector’s tooth-to-tail ratio compares with that of the US military is unknown and worthy of further study. Based on preliminary numbers of armed contacts and trainers, such as the WPPS or security force assistance contracts, one would expect the private sector ratio to be overwhelmingly tail compared with that of the US national army. But as the Nisour Square and Abu Ghraib scandals demonstrate, numbers may not be the best measure of campaign significance, as the mistakes of a few contractors had a strongly negative strategic effect for their employer. Owing to these and other incidents, PMCs remain the most controversial component of private armies: they represent for-profit killing and the commodification of conflict.
    Secrecy and lack of data have hobbled understanding of the private military industry, leading to confusing and conflicting accounts of who is and is not a