BOOK
REVIEW Mercenaries or
'contractors'? Licensed to Kill
by Robert Young Pelton
Reviewed by David Isenberg
Sometimes doing a book review is
difficult. An author may write informatively and
lucidly in one chapter and bomb in the next. A
reviewer wants to praise where warranted but also
feel compelled to point out its flaws. Trying to
strike a balance can be difficult.
Fortunately, that is not a problem here.
This book is, in a word, terrific. Anybody who is
remotely interested in the world of private
security contractors should
run, not walk, to the bookstore and buy this book
immediately. It is going to be the gold standard
on private military and security companies for
years to come.
That being said, a little
background is in order. For years now the media
have increasingly publicized what is usually
described in sensationalistic purple prose as the
murky world of corporate mercenaries. While such
firms started gaining attention back in the early
1990s with the exploits of, for example, the
now-defunct South African-based Executive
Outcomes, which did actual combat operations in
Angola and Sierra Leone, and gained more
publicity
with the training contracts of MPRI in the Balkan
wars of the mid-1990s, the war in Iraq propelled
the industry to the top of the media and
pop-culture food chain. Such firms as Blackwater
Security, Triple Canopy, and DynCorp are now
conversational staples.
And yet while
there have been numerous articles in the
periodical press and even many academic books, one
of which - Peter Singer's Corporate Warriors
- even achieved a measure of popular acclaim
when it was published in 2003, they all lacked one
key ingredient essential to a real understanding
of this world. And that is culture. The key to
really understanding any society is to understand
its culture. And, as anthropologists have long
understood, true cultural understanding comes only
from living in the midst of it.
While some
people, usually foreign or war correspondents,
have limited exposure to this world, very few have
the patience, thoughtfulness, humor, objectivity,
curiosity, broad historical perspective, knowledge
of geopolitics, or eye for detail, not to mention
a nonchalant, breezy, blunt but respectful style
of writing that is so entertaining that at times
it will leave you laughing so hard you will be
gasping for air.
It is an intended tribute
to the author that very few people in the world
could have written a book this witty and
informative aside from him. That naturally raises
the question: Just who is Robert Young
Pelton? Originally from Canada, he moved to the US
to make his fortune, which he did with enough
success that one day he decided to get out of it
and start traveling to the world's hot spots and
war zones as a neutral observer and chronicler of
the truth, which is never an easy thing to
ascertain.
As an author Pelton is best
known for his classic work The World's Most
Dangerous Places, which is sort of an
underground Fodor's guide to surviving war zones
and other assorted mean, nasty and dangerous
places, from Grozny to Baghdad.
Licensed to Kill is divided into
three sections, comprising 12 chapters. Some of
these have been news stories in their own right
The first is about the exploits of legendary
US Special Forces veteran and Central Intelligence
Agency contractor Billy Waugh who, after September
11, 2001, was asked by the CIA to recruit
contractors to operate in Afghanistan against
Osama bin Laden and his forces. It was here that
Blackwater got its first CIA contract, to bolster
personal-protection teams for CIA officers.
It is here that one appreciates Pelton's
eye for detail - details that are always
generalized about in the mainstream press, but
never clearly explained. Such as, what are
security contractors actually paid? What is the
difference between Tier 1, 2, 3 and 4 operators?
What the heck is a tier? All these questions get
answered.
It bears remembering, because
this is not an academic work with hundreds of
endnotes, that this is an extremely
well-researched book. Pelton has gained access to
an enormous amount of insider information that
normally never sees the light of the day.
Researchers could undoubtedly spend years happily
sifting though all the material he has
accumulated.
One gets the answers to these
questions only by hanging out with a wide variety
of people where they live and work over the years.
And while Pelton has spent the past three years
sitting down with security contractors on
different continents, often while they were on the
job, whether doing convoy runs from the Green Zone
in Baghdad to the airport or roaming the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border, it is clear that his
prior years touring the world's killing zones have
conferred on him a special sort of street
credibility that has given him a special access to
a tribe that does not normally talk to outsiders.
Chapter 2 is fittingly titled "Edge of the
Empire", because it details his travels with a CIA
contractor, one of those engaged in a truly
"murky" shadow war against the al-Qaeda forces
still present in Afghanistan and across the border
in Pakistan.
Chapter 3 ends the empire
section by recounting the day in the life of a
private security detail responsible for Afghan
President Hamid Karzai. Simply by showing how
utterly dependent Karzai is on foreigners for his
survival, Pelton makes the point that private
security contractors truly can be influential
tools of US foreign policy.
The next
section takes you to Iraq, where he covers both
the well-known ambush of Blackwater contractors at
Fallujah and the vastly under-covered stories of
Blackwater contractors who engaged in combat at
al-Kut and al-Najaf.
This is followed by a
chapter on the training and selection process that
Triple Canopy, a major security contractor, puts
candidates though at its facility in the US state
of Arkansas. The same chapter also describes the
Blackwater training facility in North Carolina. As
Blackwater is the alpha male of the US private
security contractor world, no description of the
world would be complete without it.
Chapter 8 describes making the run on the
road (Route Irish) between the Green Zone and the
airport in Baghdad. For a long time this was one
of the most dangerous places in Iraq. For many
making this trip, death was not a possibility but
an inevitability. Contractors who made this run
took big hits, which makes for some interesting
psychology and motivation. As Pelton notes, "The
business end of warfare requires a mercenary
attitude. Private security has no ideology, no
homeland, no flag. There is no God and country.
There is only the paycheck."
Chapter 9
starts the last section, the one dealing with
various rogues and tycoons. While the vast
majority of security contractors do exactly what
they sign up for without complaint, their world is
not without opportunists. One of the better known,
now serving a sentence in an Afghan prison for
illegally running his own prison and torturing its
prisoners, is Jonathan "Jack" Keith Idema. The
chapter on Idema is priceless, and it is worth
buying the book just for that. It also serves as a
warning that there is a downside to relying too
heavily on the private sector for traditional
military tasks, as it leaves the door wide open
for the unscrupulous.
But if Idema
represents the pond-scum side of the private
security world, the following chapter, which
explores the creation of Executive Outcomes and
Sandline, two private military firms that were
prominent in the 1990s and helped propel the
industry into public prominence, offers a
fascinating look into that rarified world where
high finance and venture capital, old boys'
networks, multinational corporations, foreign
policy, the legacies of colonial empires, and
public relations intersect. It is surprising to
realize what a small world it really is. It
provides an invaluable perspective for better
understanding an industry that is attempting to
"find the sweet spot - the balance between naked
aggression and passive peacekeeping - the
neo-mercenary", as Pelton puts it.
Chapter
11 details both the past and the plans of
Blackwater Security. Blackwater is not only one of
the biggest players in the private-military world
today, it is also one of the most ambitious,
spinning off new business divisions left, right
and center. When Blackwater speaks, people listen.
One example was this year when one of its
officials said that Blackwater was prepared to
provide its own brigade-sized private army for
hire to support United Nations peacekeeping
efforts like the one in Darfur.
The last
chapter deals with the attempted overthrow in 2004
of Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, president of
Equatorial Guinea, a small, poor country in West
Africa but one that has enormous oil reserves. The
attempt put together by Simon Mann, a former
soldier in Britain's Special Air Service and
ex-employee of South Africa's Executive Outcomes,
was publicly presented as an attempt to overthrow
a violent dictator but in reality was an attempt,
albeit clumsily organized, to seize control of its
oil. The lesson of this chapter is sobering. Many
proponents of private military and security
contractors argue that they should be allowed to
be all that they can be; that they are capable of
greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness than
regular military forces, and since they are
motivated by profit rather than ideology, they are
freer to intervene in a conflict that a regular
state would ignore as it would be irrelevant to
their national interest.
But as Pelton
notes, "If there is a lesson in all of this, it is
that once the security business is unhitched from
established corporate or government clients, its
proponents can quickly turn it into the insecurity
business."
Since the end of the Cold War
in 1989, the international system has developed a
vacuum. Private military and security contractors
have emerged in increasing numbers to help fill
this void. Up to now, nobody has been sure exactly
what they do or how they work. But now, thanks to
Pelton, an enormous number of dots have been
connected.
While some may still not have
an interest in understanding the brave new world
of private military and security contracting, they
can no longer claim they lack the means. If the US
intelligence establishment could connect dots as
well as Pelton, Osama bin Laden would have been
captured years ago.
Licensed to Kill:
Hired Guns in the War on Terror by Robert
Young Pelton. Crown Publishers, September 2006.
ISBN: 1400097819. Price US$24, 358 pages.
David Isenberg is a senior
research analyst at the British American Security
Information Council, a member of the Coalition for
a Realistic Foreign Policy, and an adviser to the
Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for
Defense Information, Washington. These views are
his own.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times
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publicity
with the training contracts of MPRI in the Balkan
wars of the mid-1990s, the war in Iraq propelled
the industry to the top of the media and
pop-culture food chain. Such firms as Blackwater
Security, Triple Canopy, and DynCorp are now
conversational staples. 
