Abstract
Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry By P. W. Singer, Cornell University Press, 2003, 330 pages; $39.95
P. W. Singer's Corporate warriors, an analysis of the rise of privatized military companies, is one of those rare books that is even more timely now than it was when it was being written.
If you hadn't already noticed the phenomenon of private companies taking over military functions, the war and occupation in Iraq have probably brought it to your attention. Singer notes that during the 1991 Gulf War, roughly one in 100 people deployed to the theater of conflict were corporate personnel, but in the 2003 conflict, the ratio was one corporate employee for every 10 military personnel.
The ratio during the occupation of Iraq may rise even higher. Halliburton, Bechtel, Dyncorp, Parsons International, the Research Triangle Institute, and other U.S. firms are busily carving up the $87 billion that has been set aside for everything from training new Iraqi police and security forces, to repairing Iraq's oil infrastructure and electrical grid, to reforming its justice system, to rebuilding schools and reforming curriculum. Some of these nation-building functions straddle the line between civilian and security operations. But given the fact that many contractors are being asked to provide their own security–and that the Pentagon, not the Agency for International Development, is heading up the overall rebuilding effort–the line between civilian and military work is being blurred.
The only thing new about Iraq is not privatization itself, but the sheer amount of money involved. Singer makes it clear that neither the Bush administration's aggressive “war without end” approach to fighting terrorism, nor the more nuanced, humanitarian interventionist policy of the Clinton administration, could have been carried out without access to logistics, training, intelligence, and combat support services supplied by private companies. As David Isenberg of the British American Security Information Council has put it, for the contemporary U.S. military, private companies are like the American Express card–it can't leave home without them.
No company means more to the U.S. military at the moment than Halliburton's Brown & Root Services subsidiary, which gets its own chapter in Singer's book as the quintessential “military support firm.” Halliburton's privileged position in Iraq has as much or more to do with the U.S. Army's dependence on the firm to deploy overseas as it does with the fact that its former CEO, Dick Cheney, is the most powerful vice president in recent history.
It was Cheney's idea, back when he was defense secretary under George Herbert Walker Bush, to explore the idea of privatizing “the logistical side of contingency operations.” This was “the first time the U.S. military had contracted such global planning to a private organization,” according to Singer. As all too often happens, Halliburton was first asked to do a study of whether logistics planning for the overseas deployment of U.S. troops could be privatized, and then received a major contract to carry out just such a job, in support of the U.S. intervention in Somalia from December 1992 through March 1993. Halliburton soon became the biggest private employer in Somalia, with 2,500 people doing everything from laundry, to serving meals, to building temporary housing and bases, to maintaining military vehicles.
Somalia was just a test run for Halliburton's role in the Balkans, where it earned more than $1 billion as chief cook, bottle washer, base-builder, vehicle-maintainer, and jack-of-all trades in support of U.S. interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo. What Halliburton did in Kosovo, it is now attempting to do in much more challenging circumstances in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention Uzbekistan, Georgia, Qatar, Guantá-namo Bay in Cuba, and virtually anywhere else that U.S. troops have to set up shop on short notice as part of the Bush administration's amply defined, militarized approach to combating terrorism. Given that the army has privatized vital functions to companies like Halliburton that it literally cannot do without if it wants to deploy to key conflict zones, one wonders how tough it can really afford to be when the company turns around and overcharges for bringing fuel into Iraq, as happened in the winter of 2003.
This is one of the many important points Singer raises in his comprehensive analyses of the origins, strengths, and weaknesses of the privatized military firm. He takes a long hard look at “military provider” firms like Executive Outcomes, a band of ex-South African military personnel that at one point stepped in with direct military operations to stop the killing in Sierra Leone, acting far more decisively than either the United Nations or regional peacekeepers had been able to do. This same firm even had a package put together to bid on stopping the genocide in Rwanda. Singer also casts a cold eye on “military consultant” firms like Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI), whose training of Croatian forces in the Bosnian wars appears to have dramatically improved their combat skills, to the point that they were able to ethnically “cleanse” the Krajina region of ethnic Serbs in the runup to the Dayton Peace Accords.
There are multiple bottom lines here, and Singer does a good job of sorting them out. How does one balance the potential improvements in military efficiency offered by a firm like Executive Outcomes or MPRI against the possible loss of democratic accountability? Once a company has its “nose under the tent” by getting its first private contract to carry out a public service, how does the government keep it from price gouging on subsequent contracts? Does the use of private firms for quasi-covert operations amount to a short-circuiting of democracy?
The looming question is whether it is appropriate for governments to yield their monopoly on the use of organized violence to private companies. It is this government monopoly on organized violence that distinguishes our modern era from the Roman Empire, the mercantile era, and other periods of human history where hiring mercenaries to do one's dirty work was considered the norm rather than the exception. The problem, as Singer points out, is that the monopoly is already giving way, in some cases due to conscious choices made by governments, in other cases due to changes in the international economy and global politics that governments have not been able to keep up with.
Privatized military firms are not only being hired by governments, they are also being hired by nonstate actors–warlords, thugs, and rebel groups–to help them do battle with established states or with local and regional rivals. Singer cites the recent civil wars in Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) as places where both sides (or in the case of the DRC, many sides) hired private firms to help with logistics, training, and combat operations. The implications of “privatized war” for traditional notions of the balance of power, threat assessment, intelligence gathering, sovereignty, and morality in foreign policy have only begun to be thought through. Singer asks the right questions and puts forward some good ideas for how to think about a framework for global regulation of these firms.
The time for hand-wringing about whether the use of privatized military firms is right or wrong is long past. While people were busy debating what policies this or that nation-state should adopt, the firms quietly made themselves integral to the waging of modern warfare. The only real question now is how best to monitor and control them. Efforts can and should be made at the national level, to do things like prevent war profiteering by Halliburton in Iraq or to force the Pentagon to provide information on the role played by contractor personnel in Colombia.
Ultimately, as Singer suggests, these are global firms that will require global regulation. His final chapter lays out the foundations of an elementary regulatory scheme that involves the development of an internationally sanctioned list of “approved” firms, tied to a system of independent monitoring of their conduct and greater transparency regarding their operations. Singer acknowledges that any workable system will take “time and political will” to pull together, but his thoughts on how to begin the process merit consideration. As he suggests in his conclusion, “War is far too important to be left to private industry.”