The War profits that Never End

[pynchonoid]

[...] Private corporations have penetrated western
warfare so deeply that they are now the second biggest
contributor to coalition forces in Iraq after the
Pentagon, a Guardian investigation has established.

While the official coalition figures list the British
as the second largest contingent with around 9,900
troops, they are narrowly outnumbered by the 10,000
private military contractors now on the ground.

The investigation has also discovered that the
proportion of contracted security personnel in the
firing line is 10 times greater than during the first
Gulf war. In 1991, for every private contractor, there
were about 100 servicemen and women; now there are 10.

The private sector is so firmly embedded in combat,
occupation and peacekeeping duties that the phenomenon
may have reached the point of no return: the US
military would struggle to wage war without it.

While reliable figures are difficult to come by and
governmental accounting and monitoring of the
contracts are notoriously shoddy, the US army
estimates that of the $87bn (£50.2bn) earmarked this
year for the broader Iraqi campaign, including central
Asia and Afghanistan, one third of that, nearly $30bn,
will be spent on contracts to private companies.

The myriad military and security companies thriving on
this largesse are at the sharp end of a revolution in
military affairs that is taking us into unknown
territory - the partial privatisation of war.

"This is a trend that is growing and Iraq is the high
point of the trend," said Peter Singer, a security
analyst at Washington's Brookings Institution. "This
is a sea change in the way we prosecute warfare. There
are historical parallels, but we haven't seen them for
250 years."

When America launched its invasion in March, the
battleships in the Gulf were manned by US navy
personnel. But alongside them sat civilians from four
companies operating some of the world's most
sophisticated weapons systems.

When the unmanned Predator drones, the Global Hawks,
and the B-2 stealth bombers went into action, their
weapons systems, too, were operated and maintained by
non-military personnel working for private companies.

The private sector is even more deeply involved in the
war's aftermath. A US company has the lucrative
contracts to train the new Iraqi army, another to
recruit and train an Iraqi police force.

But this is a field in which British companies
dominate, with nearly half of the dozen or so private
firms in Iraq coming from the UK.

The big British player in Iraq is Global Risk
International, based in Hampton, Middlesex. It is
supplying hired Gurkhas, Fijian paramilitaries and, it
is believed, ex-SAS veterans, to guard the Baghdad
headquarters of Paul Bremer, the US overlord,
according to analysts.

It is a trend that has been growing worldwide since
the end of the cold war, a booming business which
entails replacing soldiers wherever possible with
highly paid civilians and hired guns not subject to
standard military disciplinary procedures.

The biggest US military base built since Vietnam, Camp
Bondsteel in Kosovo, was constructed and continues to
be serviced by private contractors. At Tuzla in
northern Bosnia, headquarters for US peacekeepers,
everything that can be farmed out to private
businesses has been. The bill so far runs to more than
$5bn. The contracts include those to the US company
ITT, which supplies the armed guards, overwhelmingly
US private citizens, at US installations.

In Israel, a US company supplies the security for
American diplomats, a very risky business. In
Colombia, a US company flies the planes destroying the
coca plantations and the helicopter gunships
protecting them, in what some would characterise as a
small undeclared war.

In Kabul, a US company provides the bodyguards to try
to save President Hamid Karzai from assassination,
raising questions over whether they are combatants in
a deepening conflict with emboldened Taliban
insurgents.

[...] 

The Pentagon will "pursue additional opportunities to
outsource and privatise", the US defence secretary,
Donald Rumsfeld, pledged last year and military
analysts expect him to try to cut a further 200,000
jobs in the armed forces.

It is this kind of "downsizing" that has fed the
growth of the military private sector.

Since the end of the cold war it is reckoned that six
million servicemen have been thrown on to the
employment market with little to peddle but their
fighting and military skills. The US military is 60%
the size of a decade ago, the Soviet collapse wrecked
the colossal Red Army, the East German military melted
away, the end of apartheid destroyed the white officer
class in South Africa. The British armed forces, notes
Mr Singer, are at their smallest since the Napoleonic
wars.

The booming private sector has soaked up much of this
manpower and expertise.

It also enables the Americans, in particular, to wage
wars by proxy and without the kind of congressional
and media oversight to which conventional deployments
are subject.

>From the level of the street or the trenches to the
rarefied corridors of strategic analysis and
policy-making, however, the problems surfacing are
immense and complex.

One senior British officer complains that his driver
was recently approached and offered a fortune to move
to a "rather dodgy outfit". Ex-SAS veterans in Iraq
can charge up to $1,000 a day.

"There's an explosion of these companies attracting
our servicemen financially," said Rear Admiral Hugh
Edleston, a Royal Navy officer who is just completing
three years as chief military adviser to the
international administration running Bosnia.

He said that outside agencies were sometimes better
placed to provide training and resources. "But you
should never mix serving military with security
operations. You need to be absolutely clear on the
division between the military and the paramilitary."

"If these things weren't privatised, uniformed men
would have to do it and that draws down your
strength," said another senior retired officer engaged
in the private sector. But he warned: "There is a
slight risk that things can get out of hand and these
companies become small armies themselves."

And in Baghdad or Bogota, Kabul or Tuzla, there are
armed company employees effectively licensed to kill.
On the job, say guarding a peacekeepers' compound in
Tuzla, the civilian employees are subject to the same
rules of engagement as foreign troops.

But if an American GI draws and uses his weapon in an
off-duty bar brawl, he will be subject to the US
judicial military code. If an American guard employed
by the US company ITT in Tuzla does the same, he
answers to Bosnian law. By definition these companies
are frequently operating in "failed states" where
national law is notional. The risk is the employees
can literally get away with murder.

Or lesser, but appalling crimes. Dyncorp, for example,
a Pentagon favourite, has the contract worth tens of
millions of dollars to train an Iraqi police force. It
also won the contracts to train the Bosnian police and
was implicated in a grim sex slavery scandal, with its
employees accused of rape and the buying and selling
of girls as young as 12. A number of employees were
fired, but never prosecuted. The only court cases to
result involved the two whistleblowers who exposed the
episode and were sacked.

"Dyncorp should never have been awarded the Iraqi
police contract," said Madeleine Rees, the chief UN
human rights officer in Sarajevo.

Of the two court cases, one US police officer working
for Dyncorp in Bosnia, Kathryn Bolkovac, won her suit
for wrongful dismissal. The other involving a
mechanic, Ben Johnston, was settled out of court. Mr
Johnston's suit against Dyncorp charged that he
"witnessed co-workers and supervisors literally buying
and selling women for their own personal enjoyment,
and employees would brag about the various ages and
talents of the individual slaves they had purchased".

There are other formidable problems surfacing in what
is uncharted territory - issues of loyalty,
accountability, ideology, and national interest. By
definition, a private military company is in Iraq or
Bosnia not to pursue US, UN, or EU policy, but to make
money.

The growing clout of the military services
corporations raises questions about an insidious,
longer-term impact on governments' planning, strategy
and decision-taking.

Mr Singer argues that for the first time in the
history of the modern nation state, governments are
surrendering one of the essential and defining
attributes of statehood, the state's monopoly on the
legitimate use of force.

But for those on the receiving end, there seems scant
alternative.

"I had some problems with some of the American
generals," said Enes Becirbasic, a Bosnian military
official who managed the Bosnian side of the MPRI
projects to build and arm a Bosnian army. "It's a
conflict of interest. I represent our national
interest, but they're businessmen. I would have
preferred direct cooperation with state organisations
like Nato or the Organisation for Security and
Cooperation in Europe. But we had no choice. We had to
use MPRI." 


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003 

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4815701-103681,00.html>

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