MITCHELL MCALISTER
Private military security companies (PMSCs) are by no means a new phenomenon, and the outsourcing of military services is as old as war itself. What is new, however, is the highly privatised way in which war is now being conducted and how the corporate world is being contracted to fulfil what have been traditionally state-dominated tasks. The predecessors to the highly publicised ‘civilian warriors’ of today can trace their heritage to a number of highly volatile and unstable continents spanning the globe throughout the latter half of the 20th century.
The contemporary PMSCs of today have grown into something that the ‘mercenaries’, ‘soldiers of fortune’, ‘wild geese’, or ‘less affreux’ of over half a century ago would never have thought possible. This growth has not been without controversy, and this controversy has appeared at both the tactical and strategic levels and has affected both domestic- and international-level political affairs. This evolutionary process has seen the concept of individuals who embraced mercenarianism as simply a lifestyle choice evolve into the highly professional, highly corporate, and above all else, highly legitimised practice that it is today.
Early concepts of private military security companies
By the very nature of the services they provide, private military security companies ultimately thrive in non-permissive environments where violence and instability are commonplace. The decolonisation period that ensued after the Second World War certainly provided an abundance of such regions, and consequently a stage on which the foundations for the modern PMSC could be set. When tracing these origins, the infrastructure of modern PMSCs are generally attributed to the activity of firms that were contracted to provide military and security-related services throughout a number of continents spanning the globe in the latter half of the 20th century.
Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas are littered with examples of military firm activity, with some notable case studies setting the precedent for their effectiveness through widespread utilisation. For instance, Africa, and the war in Angola in particular, could be viewed as one of the benchmarks for PMSCs with firms from around the world lining up to offer their services to assist the Angolan government in their struggle against the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). These services included the training of the Angolan armed forces; logistical support; transport, including the maintenance and flying of Angolan aircraft; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance tasks; demining; and the protection of critical assets and infrastructure such as the diamond fields and key supply routes.
The two notable firms that fulfilled these contracts were Executive Outcomes (EO) and International Defense and Security (IDAS). EO has long been credited as being one of the most influential PMSCs in regards to its modern counterparts; this firm clearly showed how a private entity with better organisation, training, and equipment, as well as an enhanced readiness to respond to crises anywhere in the globe, could fill critical capability gaps that existed in state-supplied military contingencies.
PMSCs such as EO were well organised and suitably enabled to avoid the complications associated with the ad-hoc multinational forces that inter-government organisations, most notably the United Nations, had become renowned for deploying in order to deal with crises and violence (McIvor, 1998 p.3). The success enjoyed by EO in Angola and later against the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone all but confirmed the potential for the highly structured and extremely capable private military firms, which possess the capacity for global reach, at short notice, in order to deliver outcomes that are beyond the means of conventional and multinational military forces.
Contemporary PMSCs were driven not only by this realisation but by a combination of historical circumstances and opportunities that set the conditions for the unprecedented growth of this very lucrative market. The following section will detail the next evolutionary jump that PMSCs took and how this growth has been criticised for encroaching on traditionally state-held responsibilities.
The evolution of private military security companies
The successful performance of PMSCs across a number of different continents were pivotal in establishing a world-wide recognition of their objective-driven solutions as well as their capability to deliver results in a quicker and more cost-effective manner than what governments were able to provide. What these solutions highlighted was an evolutionary departure from the independent mercenaries where, even though these individuals actively sought to participate in conflict for economic gains, their choice of lifestyle, albeit illegal, did not adversely affect or pose serious and direct challenges to the international system and state-dominated responsibilities.
As private military security companies developed their capabilities and increased their scope of operations, they were simultaneously legitimising the lifestyle that the individual mercenaries had lived before them through their highly corporatised emerging structure. This corporatisation-cum-legitimisation can be viewed as one of the evolutionary tipping points that essentially rebranded an activity that had previously been vilified and outlawed under international law. PMSCs have essentially put a corporate face on one of the world’s oldest professions and ultimately catapulted themselves to unprecedented levels of acceptance and utilisation by governments around the world.
The entrepreneurial ambition of those at the helm of PMSCs can only account for so much growth; the market must reflect a need and respond to the product and/or service that they are offering. The end of the Cold War produced favourable conditions for the growth of the private military industry, and the instability present throughout a number of continents accounted for the unprecedented rise of private military services and firms.
The collapse of the Soviet Union brought with it the elimination of conventional and nuclear war between the two superpowers and instead instilled a newfound political confidence in international relations and diplomacy. This confidence contributed to the significant downsizing of military forces around the world, which left a surplus of trained military personnel who found themselves without employment. This fresh supply of out-of-work soldiers provided a rich source of recruitment for PMSCs, who were more than willing to employ and relocate them to other parts of the globe in order to meet their particular firm’s contractual obligations. These obligations would be fulfilled in a similar manner to the way most multinational corporations operate.
PMSCs will respond to tenders, negotiate contracts and objectives, hire people on the basis of skill and suitability, manage projects, maintain cost-effectiveness, and manage the long-term company reputation and profitability. A PMSC’s focus is ultimately corporate in nature, where profits are the driving force behind their operations. These operations are geared toward “quickly and cheaply orchestrating a successful end to a conflict on behalf of their client.” It is this privatisation of the conduct of military-like services that has landed PMSCs in a somewhat antagonistic position.
The reallocation of the provision of military services from public to private and an increase in regional and ethnic conflicts around the globe have been two of the major drivers that have expedited the growth of private military security companies (PMSCs) into the multi-billion dollar industry it is today. This growth has been facilitated by their widespread engagement by governments around the world, whose policy changes have been focused on privatising their responsibilities for the provision of an array of services such as military advice, logistics, training, policing, close personal protection, technological expertise, asset protection, and intelligence functions.
If Executive Outcomes set the precedent for PMSCs in the 20th century, then Blackwater undoubtedly set the conditions for the 21st century. Blackwater pioneered the industry by cost-effectively filling gaps in military capacity and capability. They revealed the extent that PMSCs were able to contribute to a government’s military operations and policy objectives within an international system. Erik Prince, Blackwater’s founder, has often mentioned how the relationship between his company and the U.S. State Department was not only one of mutual benefit, but quickly developed into one of absolute dependency.
For instance, one of Blackwater’s first assignments in Iraq was arguably one of their most dangerous. They were to protect Paul Bremer, the appointed administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) following the 2003 invasion. At the time, there was no military solution that was readily available to achieve this exceptional task, so the U.S. government contracted Blackwater to fulfill this obligation. Blackwater completed this assignment and achieved their overall objective. The subsequent demand placed on Prince’s firm was unrelenting, extremely dangerous, but absolutely integral to the conduct of the U.S. operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq. This inter-dependent relationship has created an absolute reliance on private soldiers to accomplish tasks that directly affect the tactical and strategic success of a conflict. This reliance encouraged private military security companies to grow at such a remarkable rate that national and international legislation was, and still is, playing catch-up. This has challenged the traditional functions, roles, and responsibilities of states.
The challenge of private military security companies to traditional state functions
The outsourcing of war is presenting unique challenges to international security and to the traditional understanding of state power. One of the main criticisms that has been leveled at private military service providers is that they are diminishing a state’s power by taking certain functions away from the nation-state and public institutions, and bringing them into an era of neo-classicalism where free markets and private entities attempt to minimise state political and military power. This minimisation of state-supplied military services has effectively broken a core function of the Westphalian paradigm by separating the state from its natural entity of control by way of the legal use of lethal military force.
The distinction between public and private forms of authority is an important one to make, as public security authorities retain legislative authorisation and a jurisdiction that no other actor should possess. Private security, on the other hand, usually operates within a stipulated regulatory framework within this legislative authorisation, not parallel to it or above it. This distinction is important because, unlike other public functions which have seen government involvement significantly reduced, such as trade and finance, removing absolute control of the provision of violence from governments will see the state’s role in the security sphere become deprivileged.
The large-scale employment of PMSCs has also been criticised for lacking the level of accountability that using traditional military forces demands. The extensive use of PMSCs allows governments to effectively relieve themselves of the political liability that comes with sending uniformed soldiers to war. This unaccountability has been labelled by some as ‘anti-democratic’ based on PMSCs exerting power and influence on a stage that has previously been reserved for publicly elected officials and political parties.
Even though PMSCs have supported Western democratic governments in a number of conflicts to augment state- and IGO-initiated responses, PMSCs have on occasion also supported illegitimate governments and rebel forces. Thus, PMSCs are viewed as operating in armed conflict purely on the basis of profit, not out of any moral obligation to international security and peace. This ‘for-profit’ drive has seen PMSCs grow to such size and influence that they are able to significantly impact the outcomes of a given conflict to which they are contracted to provide their services. If violence and war are seen as a “tangled and thorny set of human, legal, political, and economic issues,” then introducing PMSCs into the fold exacerbates these issues to a far greater extent.
The integration of private militaries into the operations of, and outcomes sought by, the most powerful militaries in the world means that they are now a permanent feature of these states’ order of battle (ORBAT). The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have all but cemented the necessity of PMSCs in 21st-century conflict; U.S.-led military operations in both of these wars were the first in history to be dependent upon the services provided by private contractors. PMSCs are gearing up for another structural change in which private military firms distance themselves from the kinetic and offensive functions that have dominated the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, moving instead into a fundamentally more acceptable space. The following article segment in this series will detail how PMSCs are again rebranding themselves, trying to undo the stigmas that more recent wars have brought.
PMSCs have transformed from “historically ubiquitous mercenaries” to highly corporatised firms that have dominated the conduct of every major American military operation in the post-Cold War era, and they appear to be making yet another professional evolution. PMSCs have drawn a considerable amount of criticism in recent times and as such have been labelled by some as a negative phenomenon that has eroded political accountability and democracy, as well as states’ control over violence and other traditionally held responsibilities.
The contracting of PMSCs and other military service providers by different states has also been seen as a deliberate attempt to circumvent the responsibilities to human rights that most are obliged to uphold as signatories to the Geneva Convention. PMSCs, as non-state actors, are not impelled to abide by these regulations, and are criticised for being able to operate outside of these moral boundaries. This was seen on a number of occasions throughout the Iraq War where PMSCs such as Blackwater, Titan Corp., KBR, DynCorp, CACI, and Aegis Defence Services acted at times with impunity and a complete disregard for the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC). In the same way that mercenaries of the 20th century earned themselves a complete distrust based on their professional and personal conduct, history appears to have repeated itself with PMSC involvement in events such as the Nisour Square massacre and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
With their reputation and perceived trustworthiness steadily on the decline, PMSCs have focused their efforts on branding and carefully selecting the types of operations they are conducting in order to reverse the ever-growing public scrutiny. As with any business, corporation, firm, or publicly traded company that operates on a ‘for-profit’ basis, negative public perception can adversely affect their reputation and, ultimately, their profits. PMSCs have reverted to again filling capability gaps, but this time they are applying a humanitarian approach to the services they are providing. Private military firms are forging very close alliances with more traditional humanitarian actors and non-government organisations in order to soften their image and to distance themselves from the damaging reputation that contemporary PMSCs earned during the height of the Iraq War.
PMSCs framing their operations in the most positive light possible and working with NGOs has been seen by some as an attempt to present themselves as the “new humanitarians.” Adding another complex layer to the international security landscape, PMSCs are now combining the military, business, and humanitarian worlds in new and unfamiliar ways, sometimes “presenting themselves according to their clients’ needs, sometimes as force-multipliers…other times as genuine firms that follow a client-focused approach, and occasionally as humanitarians interested in saving the world.”
This tactic is being used extensively by some PMSCs in order to differentiate themselves from the ‘bad-eggs’ and increase their pool of clients, market share, and overall profitability. There is a growing body of research that clearly identifies how a number of PMSCs are appropriating the humanitarian frame through a number of their marketing and advertising applications, from the designs of their websites, their company overviews, services, mission statements, as well as through multiple trade association memberships such as the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers (ICoC), International Stability Operations Association (ISOA), and the British Association of Private Security Companies (BAPSC).
Despite this attempt by PMSCs to distance themselves from their traditional functions, the shift to adopt a humanitarian identity by engaging in altruistic discourse is still driven by factors that primarily serve the business interests of these firms. As private entities, these interests invariably revolve around the sustainability and profitability of the company. It is always going to be a delicate subject when combat-related services are performed by private companies and driven by money rather than by the moral obligations such as those championed by the international community. Although the humanitarian approach may not be the silver-bullet solution for PMSCs, it certainly is a step in the right direction to consciously apply self-driven regulatory procedures, even if profit is still the underlying driving force.
Contemporary PMSCs have evolved into one of the most powerful non-state actors that currently operate within the international security and political landscapes. This unprecedented influence is the direct result of their extraordinary and unchecked growth since the end of the Cold War, and this growth has generally been attributed to large-scale military reductions, the push to privatise government services, and an increase in regional conflicts around the globe. Military overstretch and operational failure of inter-governmental organisations such as the United Nations created solution gaps that needed additional support to effectively mitigate them.
State- and inter-governmental-supplied force contingents were not able to quell the long-suppressed ethnic and regional rivalries erupting throughout different continents. What emerged were practical and efficient remedies in the form of the private military security company. These firms were contracted to fulfill a variety of roles that had traditionally been the responsibilities of states and IGOs. This has led to some significant issues and challenges to traditional understandings of power. The growth of this industry and the subsequent reliance on their services by even the most powerful countries drove PMSCs to amass so much influence that they are now considered to be threatening the traditional Westphalian paradigms of the state.
One of the main criticisms that has been leveled at PMSCs is that they are eroding the monopoly that states should ostensibly have over the implementation of violence. Unlike finance and trade, two fields in which governments have grown to minimise their involvement, the consequences of privatising war and conflict may not yet be fully realised. This new and unfamiliar dynamic is highlighting the very real dilemma that questions state relevance. The trend toward privatisation of services relevant to the conduct of war may unfortunately set an irreversible precedence. If PMSCs are to distance themselves from criticism, they must minimise their offensive and kinetic focus and reframe their services in a humanitarian and altruistic light.
Private military security companies (PMSCs) are by no means a new phenomenon, and the outsourcing of military services is as old as war itself. What is new, however, is the highly privatised way in which war is now being conducted and how the corporate world is being contracted to fulfil what have been traditionally state-dominated tasks. The predecessors to the highly publicised ‘civilian warriors’ of today can trace their heritage to a number of highly volatile and unstable continents spanning the globe throughout the latter half of the 20th century.
The contemporary PMSCs of today have grown into something that the ‘mercenaries’, ‘soldiers of fortune’, ‘wild geese’, or ‘less affreux’ of over half a century ago would never have thought possible. This growth has not been without controversy, and this controversy has appeared at both the tactical and strategic levels and has affected both domestic- and international-level political affairs. This evolutionary process has seen the concept of individuals who embraced mercenarianism as simply a lifestyle choice evolve into the highly professional, highly corporate, and above all else, highly legitimised practice that it is today.
Early concepts of private military security companies
By the very nature of the services they provide, private military security companies ultimately thrive in non-permissive environments where violence and instability are commonplace. The decolonisation period that ensued after the Second World War certainly provided an abundance of such regions, and consequently a stage on which the foundations for the modern PMSC could be set. When tracing these origins, the infrastructure of modern PMSCs are generally attributed to the activity of firms that were contracted to provide military and security-related services throughout a number of continents spanning the globe in the latter half of the 20th century.
Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas are littered with examples of military firm activity, with some notable case studies setting the precedent for their effectiveness through widespread utilisation. For instance, Africa, and the war in Angola in particular, could be viewed as one of the benchmarks for PMSCs with firms from around the world lining up to offer their services to assist the Angolan government in their struggle against the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). These services included the training of the Angolan armed forces; logistical support; transport, including the maintenance and flying of Angolan aircraft; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance tasks; demining; and the protection of critical assets and infrastructure such as the diamond fields and key supply routes.
The two notable firms that fulfilled these contracts were Executive Outcomes (EO) and International Defense and Security (IDAS). EO has long been credited as being one of the most influential PMSCs in regards to its modern counterparts; this firm clearly showed how a private entity with better organisation, training, and equipment, as well as an enhanced readiness to respond to crises anywhere in the globe, could fill critical capability gaps that existed in state-supplied military contingencies.
PMSCs such as EO were well organised and suitably enabled to avoid the complications associated with the ad-hoc multinational forces that inter-government organisations, most notably the United Nations, had become renowned for deploying in order to deal with crises and violence (McIvor, 1998 p.3). The success enjoyed by EO in Angola and later against the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone all but confirmed the potential for the highly structured and extremely capable private military firms, which possess the capacity for global reach, at short notice, in order to deliver outcomes that are beyond the means of conventional and multinational military forces.
Contemporary PMSCs were driven not only by this realisation but by a combination of historical circumstances and opportunities that set the conditions for the unprecedented growth of this very lucrative market. The following section will detail the next evolutionary jump that PMSCs took and how this growth has been criticised for encroaching on traditionally state-held responsibilities.
The evolution of private military security companies
The successful performance of PMSCs across a number of different continents were pivotal in establishing a world-wide recognition of their objective-driven solutions as well as their capability to deliver results in a quicker and more cost-effective manner than what governments were able to provide. What these solutions highlighted was an evolutionary departure from the independent mercenaries where, even though these individuals actively sought to participate in conflict for economic gains, their choice of lifestyle, albeit illegal, did not adversely affect or pose serious and direct challenges to the international system and state-dominated responsibilities.
As private military security companies developed their capabilities and increased their scope of operations, they were simultaneously legitimising the lifestyle that the individual mercenaries had lived before them through their highly corporatised emerging structure. This corporatisation-cum-legitimisation can be viewed as one of the evolutionary tipping points that essentially rebranded an activity that had previously been vilified and outlawed under international law. PMSCs have essentially put a corporate face on one of the world’s oldest professions and ultimately catapulted themselves to unprecedented levels of acceptance and utilisation by governments around the world.
The entrepreneurial ambition of those at the helm of PMSCs can only account for so much growth; the market must reflect a need and respond to the product and/or service that they are offering. The end of the Cold War produced favourable conditions for the growth of the private military industry, and the instability present throughout a number of continents accounted for the unprecedented rise of private military services and firms.
The collapse of the Soviet Union brought with it the elimination of conventional and nuclear war between the two superpowers and instead instilled a newfound political confidence in international relations and diplomacy. This confidence contributed to the significant downsizing of military forces around the world, which left a surplus of trained military personnel who found themselves without employment. This fresh supply of out-of-work soldiers provided a rich source of recruitment for PMSCs, who were more than willing to employ and relocate them to other parts of the globe in order to meet their particular firm’s contractual obligations. These obligations would be fulfilled in a similar manner to the way most multinational corporations operate.
PMSCs will respond to tenders, negotiate contracts and objectives, hire people on the basis of skill and suitability, manage projects, maintain cost-effectiveness, and manage the long-term company reputation and profitability. A PMSC’s focus is ultimately corporate in nature, where profits are the driving force behind their operations. These operations are geared toward “quickly and cheaply orchestrating a successful end to a conflict on behalf of their client.” It is this privatisation of the conduct of military-like services that has landed PMSCs in a somewhat antagonistic position.
The reallocation of the provision of military services from public to private and an increase in regional and ethnic conflicts around the globe have been two of the major drivers that have expedited the growth of private military security companies (PMSCs) into the multi-billion dollar industry it is today. This growth has been facilitated by their widespread engagement by governments around the world, whose policy changes have been focused on privatising their responsibilities for the provision of an array of services such as military advice, logistics, training, policing, close personal protection, technological expertise, asset protection, and intelligence functions.
If Executive Outcomes set the precedent for PMSCs in the 20th century, then Blackwater undoubtedly set the conditions for the 21st century. Blackwater pioneered the industry by cost-effectively filling gaps in military capacity and capability. They revealed the extent that PMSCs were able to contribute to a government’s military operations and policy objectives within an international system. Erik Prince, Blackwater’s founder, has often mentioned how the relationship between his company and the U.S. State Department was not only one of mutual benefit, but quickly developed into one of absolute dependency.
For instance, one of Blackwater’s first assignments in Iraq was arguably one of their most dangerous. They were to protect Paul Bremer, the appointed administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) following the 2003 invasion. At the time, there was no military solution that was readily available to achieve this exceptional task, so the U.S. government contracted Blackwater to fulfill this obligation. Blackwater completed this assignment and achieved their overall objective. The subsequent demand placed on Prince’s firm was unrelenting, extremely dangerous, but absolutely integral to the conduct of the U.S. operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq. This inter-dependent relationship has created an absolute reliance on private soldiers to accomplish tasks that directly affect the tactical and strategic success of a conflict. This reliance encouraged private military security companies to grow at such a remarkable rate that national and international legislation was, and still is, playing catch-up. This has challenged the traditional functions, roles, and responsibilities of states.
The challenge of private military security companies to traditional state functions
The outsourcing of war is presenting unique challenges to international security and to the traditional understanding of state power. One of the main criticisms that has been leveled at private military service providers is that they are diminishing a state’s power by taking certain functions away from the nation-state and public institutions, and bringing them into an era of neo-classicalism where free markets and private entities attempt to minimise state political and military power. This minimisation of state-supplied military services has effectively broken a core function of the Westphalian paradigm by separating the state from its natural entity of control by way of the legal use of lethal military force.
The distinction between public and private forms of authority is an important one to make, as public security authorities retain legislative authorisation and a jurisdiction that no other actor should possess. Private security, on the other hand, usually operates within a stipulated regulatory framework within this legislative authorisation, not parallel to it or above it. This distinction is important because, unlike other public functions which have seen government involvement significantly reduced, such as trade and finance, removing absolute control of the provision of violence from governments will see the state’s role in the security sphere become deprivileged.
The large-scale employment of PMSCs has also been criticised for lacking the level of accountability that using traditional military forces demands. The extensive use of PMSCs allows governments to effectively relieve themselves of the political liability that comes with sending uniformed soldiers to war. This unaccountability has been labelled by some as ‘anti-democratic’ based on PMSCs exerting power and influence on a stage that has previously been reserved for publicly elected officials and political parties.
Even though PMSCs have supported Western democratic governments in a number of conflicts to augment state- and IGO-initiated responses, PMSCs have on occasion also supported illegitimate governments and rebel forces. Thus, PMSCs are viewed as operating in armed conflict purely on the basis of profit, not out of any moral obligation to international security and peace. This ‘for-profit’ drive has seen PMSCs grow to such size and influence that they are able to significantly impact the outcomes of a given conflict to which they are contracted to provide their services. If violence and war are seen as a “tangled and thorny set of human, legal, political, and economic issues,” then introducing PMSCs into the fold exacerbates these issues to a far greater extent.
The integration of private militaries into the operations of, and outcomes sought by, the most powerful militaries in the world means that they are now a permanent feature of these states’ order of battle (ORBAT). The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have all but cemented the necessity of PMSCs in 21st-century conflict; U.S.-led military operations in both of these wars were the first in history to be dependent upon the services provided by private contractors. PMSCs are gearing up for another structural change in which private military firms distance themselves from the kinetic and offensive functions that have dominated the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, moving instead into a fundamentally more acceptable space. The following article segment in this series will detail how PMSCs are again rebranding themselves, trying to undo the stigmas that more recent wars have brought.
PMSCs have transformed from “historically ubiquitous mercenaries” to highly corporatised firms that have dominated the conduct of every major American military operation in the post-Cold War era, and they appear to be making yet another professional evolution. PMSCs have drawn a considerable amount of criticism in recent times and as such have been labelled by some as a negative phenomenon that has eroded political accountability and democracy, as well as states’ control over violence and other traditionally held responsibilities.
The contracting of PMSCs and other military service providers by different states has also been seen as a deliberate attempt to circumvent the responsibilities to human rights that most are obliged to uphold as signatories to the Geneva Convention. PMSCs, as non-state actors, are not impelled to abide by these regulations, and are criticised for being able to operate outside of these moral boundaries. This was seen on a number of occasions throughout the Iraq War where PMSCs such as Blackwater, Titan Corp., KBR, DynCorp, CACI, and Aegis Defence Services acted at times with impunity and a complete disregard for the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC). In the same way that mercenaries of the 20th century earned themselves a complete distrust based on their professional and personal conduct, history appears to have repeated itself with PMSC involvement in events such as the Nisour Square massacre and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
With their reputation and perceived trustworthiness steadily on the decline, PMSCs have focused their efforts on branding and carefully selecting the types of operations they are conducting in order to reverse the ever-growing public scrutiny. As with any business, corporation, firm, or publicly traded company that operates on a ‘for-profit’ basis, negative public perception can adversely affect their reputation and, ultimately, their profits. PMSCs have reverted to again filling capability gaps, but this time they are applying a humanitarian approach to the services they are providing. Private military firms are forging very close alliances with more traditional humanitarian actors and non-government organisations in order to soften their image and to distance themselves from the damaging reputation that contemporary PMSCs earned during the height of the Iraq War.
PMSCs framing their operations in the most positive light possible and working with NGOs has been seen by some as an attempt to present themselves as the “new humanitarians.” Adding another complex layer to the international security landscape, PMSCs are now combining the military, business, and humanitarian worlds in new and unfamiliar ways, sometimes “presenting themselves according to their clients’ needs, sometimes as force-multipliers…other times as genuine firms that follow a client-focused approach, and occasionally as humanitarians interested in saving the world.”
This tactic is being used extensively by some PMSCs in order to differentiate themselves from the ‘bad-eggs’ and increase their pool of clients, market share, and overall profitability. There is a growing body of research that clearly identifies how a number of PMSCs are appropriating the humanitarian frame through a number of their marketing and advertising applications, from the designs of their websites, their company overviews, services, mission statements, as well as through multiple trade association memberships such as the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers (ICoC), International Stability Operations Association (ISOA), and the British Association of Private Security Companies (BAPSC).
Despite this attempt by PMSCs to distance themselves from their traditional functions, the shift to adopt a humanitarian identity by engaging in altruistic discourse is still driven by factors that primarily serve the business interests of these firms. As private entities, these interests invariably revolve around the sustainability and profitability of the company. It is always going to be a delicate subject when combat-related services are performed by private companies and driven by money rather than by the moral obligations such as those championed by the international community. Although the humanitarian approach may not be the silver-bullet solution for PMSCs, it certainly is a step in the right direction to consciously apply self-driven regulatory procedures, even if profit is still the underlying driving force.
Contemporary PMSCs have evolved into one of the most powerful non-state actors that currently operate within the international security and political landscapes. This unprecedented influence is the direct result of their extraordinary and unchecked growth since the end of the Cold War, and this growth has generally been attributed to large-scale military reductions, the push to privatise government services, and an increase in regional conflicts around the globe. Military overstretch and operational failure of inter-governmental organisations such as the United Nations created solution gaps that needed additional support to effectively mitigate them.
State- and inter-governmental-supplied force contingents were not able to quell the long-suppressed ethnic and regional rivalries erupting throughout different continents. What emerged were practical and efficient remedies in the form of the private military security company. These firms were contracted to fulfill a variety of roles that had traditionally been the responsibilities of states and IGOs. This has led to some significant issues and challenges to traditional understandings of power. The growth of this industry and the subsequent reliance on their services by even the most powerful countries drove PMSCs to amass so much influence that they are now considered to be threatening the traditional Westphalian paradigms of the state.
One of the main criticisms that has been leveled at PMSCs is that they are eroding the monopoly that states should ostensibly have over the implementation of violence. Unlike finance and trade, two fields in which governments have grown to minimise their involvement, the consequences of privatising war and conflict may not yet be fully realised. This new and unfamiliar dynamic is highlighting the very real dilemma that questions state relevance. The trend toward privatisation of services relevant to the conduct of war may unfortunately set an irreversible precedence. If PMSCs are to distance themselves from criticism, they must minimise their offensive and kinetic focus and reframe their services in a humanitarian and altruistic light.
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