BOOK REVIEW
The secret world of corporate mercenaries
Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry by Peter W Singer

Reviewed by David Isenberg

It is rare in the field of international security to find a new book dealing with a subject that hasn't already been covered to death. It is even more rare when that book makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the subject and promises to be the gold standard of analysis for years to come, a-la Samuel Huntington's The Soldier and the States. And, most unusual of all, is when said book was formerly a PhD thesis and is published by a university press.

Congratulations then to Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution whose book Corporate Warriors, published earlier this year, wins the trifecta. His book provides the first comprehensive, and by far the best, analysis of the emerging field of private military companies (PMCs), often derogatorily referred to as corporate mercenaries, whose role in international security affairs has become increasingly high profile over the past decade.

Although the use of private sector firms involved in military affairs is not new - in fact, most organized warfare throughout history was done by nonstate actors, given that people were fighting wars long before we created states - their role and impact is commanding increased attention and scrutiny, and much media coverage, albeit much of it distorted and sensationalized.

During the 1990s, Kellog, Brown & Root, for example, had been supporting the United States military in places like Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, the Balkans, East Timor and at present is supporting the US army in Jordan, Kuwait, Turkey, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Djibouti.

Currently, PMC personnel are working, and dying, in places like Iraq, helping to provide security for its oil fields, provide training to the army's new Stryker brigade which has just been deployed there, and train Iraqi police and prison guards. They are recruited as operatives for the Central Intelligence Agency's paramilitary division. They are piloting drug fumigation planes in Colombia, where they have been killed and captured by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. They are training the Saudi National Guard, serving as bodyguards to interim President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, and providing security to US diplomats (where three of them, working for the firm Dyncorp, died in a bomb blast in October). They are recruited from big states like the US and Great Britain and microstates like Fiji. There are probably 10,000 to 20,000 private contractors working overseas just for the US Defense and State departments alone.

In short, they have come a long way since the early 1990s when a then little known South African group by the name of Executive Outcomes reversed the fortune of wars on the battlefield on behalf of the governments of Angola and Sierra Leone, beating Jonas Savimbi's National Union for the Total Independence of Angola and the Sierra Leone-based Revolutionary United Front (whose signature trademark was hacking off people's arms and legs).

PMCs are no longer occupying just a small market niche out on the fringes of the developing world. They are now very big business and major corporations have sat up and taken notice. Firms like L-3 have acquired MPRI, ArmorGroup bought up Defense Systems Ltd, Computer Sciences Corporation bought DynCorp.

All of this makes Singer's book an indispensable guide to a world that is both new and, unavoidably, murky. Murky, if for no other reason, because many PMC clients simply don't want it known that they hired one, or won't allow the details of the contract to be revealed.

Singer makes a number of valuable points. First, the sheer global scope and range of activity of PMC activities. As he notes they "have become active on every continent but Antarctica, including in relative backwaters and key strategic zones where the superpowers once vied for influence".

Second, they are now indispensable to Washington. The US may be the world's only military superpower, but thanks to the wave of privatization and outsourcing, which has been sweeping the US for the past 20 years, the Pentagon finds itself in the somewhat disturbing position of not being able to deploy overseas without their assistance. Much like the American Express credit card motto, the Defense Department finds it can't leave home without them. Singer notes that from 1994 to 2002, the US Defense Department entered into more than 3,000 contracts with US based firms estimated at a contract value of more than US$300 billion. The areas being outsourced are not just minor ones but include a number of areas critical to the US military's core missions.

Another useful contribution by Singer is his chapter on privatized military history. It has been forgotten by nearly everyone, in the centuries since nation states rose to power and created mass armies, especially after the French Revolution, that hiring mercenaries is virtually a part of the human condition. Singer writes: "Hiring outsiders to fight your battles is as old as war itself. Nearly every past empire, from the ancient Egyptians to the Victorian British, contracted foreign troops in some form or another." While he is hardly the first to make this point, he does dredge up some relevant historical details, including an explanation of why Machiavelli's denunciations of mercenaries was inaccurate and unwarranted. It is also useful to note how long some of the former PMCs, such as the Dutch East India Company, Canada's Hudson's Bay Company and English East India Company lasted; 194, 200 and 258 years respectively. If past is prologue then current marquee PMC names like MPRI, SAIC and DynCorp may be around for a very long time indeed.

Singer is also helpful in trying to establish an analytical framework for PMCs in order to help define what they are. This is something that those who follow the issue have been fiercely debating for years, ie, groups who engage in actual combat, provide combat support services, specialized in force multiplier niches like intelligence gathering and analysis. While Singer's typology is unlikely to be the final word, his analysis is at least as good as the rest and better than most. Plus he brings perspectives of corporate organization and financing that one does not normally find in most discussions of the subject, which all too often descend into impassioned diatribes about "dogs of war".

There are some points in the book that are debatable. Singer worries that PMCs may engage in human rights abuses, for which they will not be held unaccountable. He cites secondhand reports about alleged napalm use by Executive Outcomes, which have never been verified. More to the point, it is a little difficult to get upset about possible future violations of the rules of war by the private sector when it is national militaries who are, far and away, the greatest violators. After all, it wasn't PMCs who developed nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, antipersonnel landmines, aerial bombing campaigns, or the collateral damage that has killed and wounded thousands in Afghanistan or Iraq, or killed millions in the ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Singer has also made the news by estimating that the annual global PMC revenue is over US$100 billion. The truth is that nobody knows for sure. Too many PMC contracts remain undisclosed for anyone to have any certainty on this.

Singer also fears that PMC personnel may cut and run when the going gets tough. But consider the current war in Iraq. Already some US military personnel in the reserves have said they object to being deployed to Iraq, and significant numbers of soldiers, both active and reserve, are not reenlisting. In contrast, there are no documented examples of PMC personnel in the field who have said they want out.

But these are small points and do not detract from Singer's distinct message that it is time to wake up and smell the coffee; states no longer enjoy a monopoly on the means of violence. The sooner we recognize and deal with that fact the better off we will all be.

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry by Peter W Singer, Cornell University Press, 2003. ISBN: 0-801-44114-5. Price: US$39.95. 242 pages.

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