Most assuredly, the world has a private military contractor (PMC) problem. For some reason though, the problem only gets national headlines when a group of young, heavily-armed men get hung from a bridge in Iraq or when Rambo-like commandos (such as in this recent Silvercorp USA news) get captured in fishing boats by foreign governments and embarrass our country. We’ve all heard about Blackwater (now Academi) and other PMCs both in the US and abroad. Some of us may have even watched movies or played video games that sanitize and what they actually do. There’s this manufactured facade created by the military industrial complex that depicts PMCs as just a bunch of chiseled, honorable men who were poor in the military and now get paid to fight for a cause they care about. The actual reality of what they do is much bleaker and quite frankly disgusting. It’s far from honorable.
Last January, five American mercenaries were caught in Haiti trying to move $80 million dollars for corrupt American-controlled and embattled Haitian president, Jovenel Moise. A Haitian security detail sent by Moise, met them at the airport and the scheme began. The plan was to escort the president’s aide to the central bank where he would electronically transfer $80 million from a secure government oil fund to to a second account controlled solely by the president. Sadly for them, the plan was ruined when they would be arrested en route to the bank by Haitian police. This was an interesting time to try this, considering there was political unrest at the time. This was due to Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro telling Moise to step down because of his corruption and cooperation with the US authorities against the Petrocaribe deal. This oil alliance started by Venezuela was made with Haiti and other Caribbean states in 2005 during the early days of the “Pink Tide” movement in order to offer oil at fair prices based on a binding financial agreement. Moise was robbing the fund at the expense of his own people. The US knew it and tried to help him. Many of these events have to do with sanctions put on Venezuela by the Bush administration all the way through Obama. Now the Trump administration has taken the torch by attempting to not just starve the Haitian people but make oil unaffordable for anyone in the region who goes against US interests on the international market. The US got boxed out by OPEC in the 1970’s and they saw Petrocaribe as a similarly dangerous alliance between lesser states.
This story, as crazy as it seems, is mainly the kind of activity that PMCs get tasked with now. Gone are the days of Blackwater (now Academi) having massive no bid contracts in Iraq and a whole country to play with. Even Erik Prince himself has been unable to convince Donald trump to allow Academi free rein in Afghanistan and to take over the control of operations from NATO forces who would prefer to leave. But while the functions in which they serve may be more limited in terms of their scope, the sheer existence of these huge firms is troublesome. Furthermore, over the last half century, they’ve exploded onto the scene with a 15% increase in just the last ten years.
The number of PMCs that operate globally is an astounding figure. There are 31 registered PMCs with 16 of them just in the US. South Africa used a few of them in the Rhodesian Bush War and continued to use them in cross border operations in Southwest Africa up until the early 1990’s. The UK used them in operations all throughout Africa during the end of the post-colonial era. The US has used them the most over the years and scattered them all over Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen. What was once a cottage industry nestled within the military industrial complex, has now blossomed into a massive industry with contracts all over the world defending all sorts of politicians, businessmen and expensive items like gold reserves or oil platforms. The problem with PMCs now is that in a globalized world where more state services are being privatized, what would the world look like with them assigned to civilian populations? These scenarios may seem dystopian in effect but this is what the future would look like without severe international cooperation and legislation that extends their criminal liability and forces them to bid hard on contracts. If you don’t legislate and control this runaway industry, you will open the door to a monopolization of deadly international force. That’s not ideal for humankind.
In the immediate future we need to understand how we got to this point. At the end of the Cold War, South Africa, the UK and the US were operating PMCs around the world. There wasn’t many of them but their core function was important. It was to serve as a minor auxiliary extension to military operations in Cold War locations. So for instance, Rhodesia served as the birthplace of PMCs in the 1970’s. During the war, they were used against Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) forces. Ian Smith, the prime minister of Rhodesia, continued to rely on them all the way up until independence. By the time of independence in 1980, there were still about 15,000 of them stationed around the country and controlling various border posts. In the now independent and newly named Zimbabwe, Mugabe wanted them out immediately. That wasn’t surprising given their limited legal liability, lack of centralization and private, foreign ownership. But on the most basic level, they were just intimidating to locals who were mostly unarmed poor farmers and nomads. As the Cold War slowly came to an end, we saw not only an increase in newly established PMCs but their core functions started shifting and becoming more intrusive, more covert and more violent.
By the 1994, Papua New Guinea was in the midst of a multi-layered armed conflict that was primarily centered on the island of Bougainville in the east. Some historians have characterized the conflict as a civil war but it lacked the intensity and wide scale spread you would normally see in one. In any event, this conflict was the first test run into the effectiveness of PMCs in the post-Cold War era. It shows not only the more globalized nature of war fighting that emerged in the 1990’s but the ease in which it took a poorer government to hire a PMC to defend itself. This was shocking for a place like Papua New Guinea, barely known throughout the world. The Sandline affair (as it became known in the UK) began when the prime minister of the country, Sir Julius Chan tried several diplomatic means to end the conflict before ultimately resorting to hiring Sandline International out of the UK. Chan’s defense minister made many attempts to contact some firms in the UK and Australia before landing on Sandline. Overseas contacts put his defense minister in touch with Tim Spicer, who was a former member of the Scots Guards that just recently founded Sandline. After multiple talks and several attempts to bring in hardware over the following two years, by January 1997, Spicer told Chan he could retake the island before the upcoming elections. The agreement was for 44 special forces operatives, and $36 million was to be paid to Sandline. However, they needed to do subcontracting though a South African firm, Executive Outcomes, in order to fill the need for personnel. The deal became even muddier and by the summer, the media got wind of it. It ultimately blew up in the face of Chan who didn’t expect it. It ultimately couldn‘t go through and Tim Spicer would face questions in front of parliament back in the UK. At the time, this was a major international story that was even frowned upon amongst some in the US State Department. The thought of a mercenary firm fighting for a government in order to oppress poor islanders, left a bad taste in the mouths of politicians. This kind of thing just wasn’t done so nakedly out in the open. Today, we barely blink an eye when countries deploy firms into war zones all over the world.
The logical progression we can see developing here would ultimately lead to Blackwater and the power they were granted in Iraq. It only makes sense that in a highly lucrative, but monopolized industry, more firms would be looking for governments to use them in low-scale conflicts as opposed to overextending militaries. At least this was the argument given by Erik Prince and many of his colleagues in the field by the early 2000’s. It was clear that a new kind of warfare was coming to the globe. One in which you could get paid handsomely up front to “bring Democracy” and if you accidentally shoot civilians, it’s ok, they have no liability. In fact, civilian deaths in Iraq became known as “collateral damage” specifically due to the volume of accidental civilian murders by US contractors. The Bush administration would turn this process into an art form from the years 2003-2006. Consistently rewarding no bid contracts to not only PMCs like Blackwater but civilian contractors like KBR, Halliburton and Honeywell. Why start a war if you can’t get in line and get paid? Eisenhower would be turning over in his grave if he saw how the United States in particular was outsourcing up to 10% of operations to PMCs by the middle of the Iraq War in 2006. This was a very high figure and it went even further. Blackwater was handed the contract to provide security detail for Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) following the 2003 invasion. As their mercenaries became more visible throughout the country, insurgent groups began targeting them publicly and through ad campaigns. This led to the infamous 2004 Fallujah ambush which resulted in four Blackwater mercenaries being charred and hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River in downtown Fallujah. This would circulate in the world news for weeks and only strengthen the resolve of Rumsfeld and Cheney to use more PMCs in the region. The bloody history of Iraq is known worldwide now a full decade later, but it’s the logical progression we need to follow that takes us into this past decade and a new intra-state role for PMCs.
In Venezuela, the US State Department has used PMCs dozens of times to conduct cross border raids and coup attempts from staging areas in US-influenced Colombia. Since 2002 alone, three years after Hugo Chavez came to power in the Bolivarian Revolution, as many as twenty coup attempts are figured to have been attempted by US influenced cells. The US is resolvent in their desire to uproot the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), and privatize Venezuela’s vast offshore oil reserves. But Venezuela is even more resolvent and somehow has resisted every single one of them. Now because Venezuela is much more powerful then Iraq, there are limits to what US-influenced terror cells and PMCs can do on the ground there. The US has stopped short of starting a full scale war with Venezuela and instead has largely opted for consistent waves of economic sanctions and the ability to starve the country en masse. There has been evidence across multiple administrations that makes clear the US intentions in Venezuela, but their pressure campaigns have been outsourced entirely to PMCs during this time. This serves two purposes for the US State Department. First, it saves them money and logistical resources by not involving the military as heavily in the region. Second, it gives them plausible deniability when or if something goes wrong, as in this most recent Silvercorp USA case. Over in Brazil, before they were even known on the world scene, Silvercorp USA had been used by Bolsonaro and his neo-fascist regime to put pressure on the Workers Party (PT) and their coalition of left-wing forces back in 2018. This played a small role if any in taking longtime president Luiz Inacio “Lula” Da Silva off the ballot. Operations they conducted in Brazil have included security detail of officials and security detail at private events organized by Bolsonaro’s Social Liberal Party (PSL). This dark web of globalized military contracting can reach all corners of the earth and we’ve seen no better examples of this, than during this past decade. Additionally, as Africa becomes a contested region often beyond the interest of direct military intervention, PMCs will continue to be used more often. With United States Central Command (CENTCOM) bases scattered throughout Africa, using contractors will give the State Department the ability to keep military spending down in the region and fly under the radar of the public eye and media scrutiny. China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” in Africa is seen as a direct challenge to US hegemonic influence on the continent. China would like to build infrastructure in China and be the major lender for African governments who want to do spending on infrastructure and build up their economies. The US counters that role played by China by adding more PMCs to the region and spreading them throughout much of the Sahel and Central Africa, thus loosely linking them with our global terrorist watch network. A patchwork of poorly run African states are easy staging grounds for forward operating bases (FOBs) that can be used to counteract China’s increasing significance. These are just some of the war games played in backrooms of the Pentagon, where none of us have access to. But it is well documented that these war games involved PMCs and ask them to serve a core function in the future of globalized warfare and hegemonic, tri-polar world order between the US, China and Russia. Alfred McCoy in his book In the Shadows of the American Century, highlights these concerns perfectly when he talks about the Chinese yuan surpassing the US dollar by 2030 and the new era of heightened political tensions that will create.
Understanding the transformation PMCs have undergone over the past few decades is key to understanding the core functions they serve. Creating bad trends is disturbing and are hard to reverse. The convenience of PMCs and the offloading of all liability away from the government is massively convenient for cash-strapped or corrupt administrations. These are only recent entities created by humans within the past forty years. They can just as easily be dismantled as they were assembled but only with global cooperation. The outsourcing of defense was always seen as a bad idea during the Cold War. An era which was full of proxy wars between the USSR and the US, the results of conflicts were too important strategically for them to invest in PMCs or build up that industry. It wasn’t until the 1980’s that a new era was ushered in. An era of privatization of almost every state service or semi-state service one could find. Ex-military servicemen began to figure out that the act of providing “defense” was a service that could and should be commodified globally. Furthermore, after the Iron Curtain fell, the importance on maintaining that same rigid geo-political structure, fell by the wayside. There was no need to keep up that facade anymore for the public. Early 1990’s conflicts like the Battle of Mogadishu and the First Gulf War in Iraq, showed the world that even though the Cold War was ending, global warfare and imperialistic intrusions would not disappear. In fact, arms sales skyrocketed during the 1990’s and new fighting arenas were created. Outsourcing defense became even more en vogue and the modern industry was created. The Sandline affair was just a blip on the radar because it happened to be the first truly international scandal. But to see how far we’ve come, we are getting closer and closer to a world as depicted in dystopian films where private corporations rule us and employ PMCs as their paramilitary wings. We need a cohesive pushback from both the activist and legislative sides against this kind of defense outsourcing. It’s one thing to have a private army of sweatshops in Asia, it’s another to have a private army of well-paid men, immune to legal consequences, in areas of the world that they simply don’t understand.
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