Dogs of War on the Leash

Maybe it is even one of the very few businesses that is totally resistant to today’s financial crisis. Many countries can not or do not want to afford a large standing army any more. Modernization and maintenance costs are about 80% of a modern defense budget. Outsourcing seems to be the solution paying specialists for particular tasks.

Despite being the dominant military and economic power in the world, the United States makes the most extensive use of the privatized military industry. The United States Defense Department closed approximately 4,000 contracts since 1994 with US based companies alone, with a total value of more than 400 billion USD.

Areas like security, military advice, logistics support, policing, intelligence and even food services are outsourced. The US Marine Corps for example outsourced about 1,000 cook positions. In the last decade the US even outsourced maintenance and administration of strategic weapons like the B-2 stealth bomber and a large number of warships.

It is not only logistics that provides work for private military company personnel, and it is hardly what the public would have in mind when the discussion comes to Private Military Companies (PMC). PMCs provide fighting troops to ensure security, either for public or military installations, or for certain personnel such as politicians and other VIPs.

Expert PMCs are taken for special tasks, like finding and destroying landmines. Employees of such PMCs are very often wrongfully called mercenaries, or even “Dogs of War,” a term that remains from the old days of foreign intervention in Africa during the decolonization wars of the 1960s and 1970s.

PMCs make the news

It is not the first time that “mercenaries” make the headlines. The assistance of a small mercenary army during the liberation of Stanleyville, Congo, in 1964 made worldwide news, where the so-called mercenaries were the good guys.

It was not so in 2004, when soldiers from a PMC called Blackwater where killed, mutilated and dragged through the streets of Fallujah, Iraq, after they got lost. Blackwater caused another scandal in 2007, when its employees killed 17 innocent civilians and injured many more.

Incidents like these do not shine a glorious light on the privatized military industry. Another example of bad news coming from the privatized military industry was the involvement of CACI International Inc. and the Titan Corporation in the tortures of the Abu Ghraib prison.

Professionals only

In fact, incidents like the Blackwater scandal are very rare. Modern PMCs recruit professionals, not adventurers, as it was back in the 1960s when the newspaper ad read “Have Gun, Will Travel.” Today’s professionals have several years of experience in a modern army and need to show an honorable discharge.

Furthermore they are experts, trained in much more than just straight shooting; and are highly paid, so as to make them resistant to looting and bribery when working in a conflict zone.

As the PMC industry is the fastest growing business of the last two decades, there were suddenly hundreds of PMCs providing services for peace operations or protection. For potential clients it is hard to differentiate between them.

Nobody wants to risk the reputation of hiring guns that could turn on them once the contract is fulfilled. Today’s clients of PMCs are governments and private companies alike, even NGOs hire PMCs – the UN, the OSCE, and even the WWF uses PMCs to control poaching in certain areas.

Join the Club

As a consequence of this large number of PMCs in the market and to meet the need for standards in this business, the “International Peace Operation Association” (IPOA) was founded in 2001. IPOA declares that its goals are to “promote high operational and ethical standards of firms active in the peace and stability operations industry” and “to inform the concerned public about the activities and role of the industry.”

More than 60 companies of the private security and military industry are already members of IPOA, and all members have to commit themselves to the Code of Conduct. With its membership, the PMC automatically pledges itself to accept the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions as well as its additional protocols: the Convention Against Torture, the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights and the Montreux Document on Private Military and Security Companies of 2008.

Interestingly enough, Xe Company LLC, formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide, is not a member of the IPOA, but other important names are, like MPRI or DynCorp.

A year earlier than IPOA, the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) was established by the Swiss government. This center focuses on military reforms in a variety of programs and created the International Security Sector Advisory Team, which is an initiative that “brings together policy and operational security sector reform (SSR) expertise, from the developmental, security, defense and diplomatic domains, in order to provide the international community with comprehensive advice both on the technical and the process aspects of supporting SSR.”

This center currently has 13 countries and NGOs as members, among them the European Commission, and the Department for Peacekeeping Operations of the UN. More and more research is being done by DCAF in the area of monitoring and even controlling the privatized military industry.

The future today

The voluntary approach of IPOA is highly appreciated in the market, but not satisfying enough, which is shown by the markets interest in a newly created institution, the RIR Group (Research – Intelligence – Reconnaissance). RIR is a newly created Private Intelligence Company that already has the attention of the United States Agency for International Development and big PMCs like SOC-USA LLC.

One of the services of RIR is the monitoring and active control of PMCs and their services. It understands itself as an independent power that ensures the service quality of the PMC, the security of non-combatants and the fulfillment of the contract on both sides. RIR even considers providing a quality certificate for PMCs, which could separate the good ones from the rest.

Private Intelligence Companies are currently the fastest growing business in the world and leave the private military and security sector in terms of growth far behind. They are highly valued by governments, NGOs and companies alike, although their employees originate from intelligence services worldwide.

“And PICs are more trustworthy,” as Mr R., one of the founders of RIR, pointed out. “PMCs have the reputation to be interested in an ongoing armed conflict. That’s how they make money. But you don’t have to be in a warzone to have the need for thorough intelligence!”

This article is written by Gregor Waldhauser and will be published in the magazine GLOBAL VIEW 04/2009 (end of December 2009)

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