The Mercenary Debate Three Views
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NATION-BUILDING IN AMERICA The Mercenary Debate Three Views Deborah Avant, Max Boot, and Jörg Friedrichs & Cornelius Friesendorf Deborah Avant: Others claim that democracies, once engaged in a fight, are more likely to win since they Private security contracting more carefully calculate the benefits and costs undermines democratic control of military action. Perhaps most prominently, of U.S. foreign policy. democratic peace theory is taken virtually as a "law" throughout both government and the n September 2007, armed guards assigned academy. to protect U.S. diplomats and employed These arguments all assume that states fight I by the private security company Blackwa- with militaries made up of theit own citizenry. ter USA opened fire in crowded Nisour Square The past two decades, however, have seen the in central Baghdad. The incident wounded 24 rise of a robust market for private security and left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, including an forces, which can now provide virtually any infant. In the wake ofthe shooting, the press military or security service. Contract personnel erupted with stories about how dependent make up at least half of those deployed to Iraq the U.S. military had become on "mercenar- on behalf of the United States—about 190,000 ies", particularly in Iraq. Some of the cover- people as of an August 2008 Congressional age focused on the contractors' aggressive tac- Budget Office (CBO) report. These contrac- tics and how they threaten to undermine the tors provide everything from logistics support campaign to win "hearts and minds" in Iraq. to training for the Iraqi army and police, from Other articles concentrated on the lack of ef- guarding buildings and people to conducting fective oversight and legal accountability of interrogations and providing translation, and private security forces. Still others focused on on and on—all duties formerly provided by Blackwater's political connections and practic- uniformed soldiers. The number of contractors es. But very few examined the larger question performing duties once provided by the U.S. of what hired guns might do to democratic military is greater than the number of U.S. governance in the United States. troops in Iraq. In recent years, scholars and policymakers The vast majority of these contractors (or have converged on the view that democracy private soldiers) are retired military or police is a key variable for predicting both the in- personnel. Roughly 10 percent are Americans; ternal and external behavior of states. Many the United Kingdom, South Africa, Fiji, El argue that political norms favoring non- Salvador and Nepal account for 20 percent, violent solutions and citizen participation in and Iraq itself for roughly 70 percent. They governance make it harder for leaders in de- are employed by some 632 private secu- mocracies to steer the ship of state into war. rity companies (PSCs) from many different 32 THE AMERICAN INTEREST AFP/Getty Image A Fijian security contractor patrolling a Baghdad street countries that bid on contracts and hire from cy and public sensitivity to the human costs of databases or through recruiting to fill them. war. When conscription was a feature of U.S. When the contract ends, the personnel move wartime mobilization, constituents were more on to work tor different PSCs fulfilling other likely to pressure their Congressmen to justify contracts. PSCs are more like body shops than wars. The public demanded accountability as private armies. They have no standing force the human costs—lives of friends and fam- but recruit once they acquire contracts, act- ily members interrupted or lost—were more ing as matchmakers between personnel with widely distributed. particular skills and contracting governments, By contrast, PSCs recruit people to "do a corporations, non-governmental groups or job" rather than "provide military service." other organizations. Those deployed this way can walk away at any time. As noted, they need not be U.S. citizens. efore European states toyed with ideas of They are not organized within congressional Bdemocracy, mercenary armies were com- constituencies and, given that they are often mon. But Enlightenment ideas about the so- not even American citizens or residents, they cial contract, so fundamental to democratic may have little connection to individual Amer- principles, fostered the idea that citizenship icans. So, in theory at least, this arrangement should be connected with military service. weakens congressional incentives to check the Even though different countries have adopted Executive Branch and masks the human costs different levels of obligation, the principle that of war. military service should be performed by citi- This conclusion applies equally to those zens has been almost universal among demo- who provide logistics, training, guard duty or cratic nations. Indeed, this principle upholds any other service that would otherwise be pro- such key features of democracy as constitu- vided by the military. When a soldier dies, we tional checks and balances, policy transparen- do not ask whether he was a supply sergeant or SUMMER (MAY/JUNE) 2009 33 NATION-BUILDING IN AMERICA an infantryman. Both are crucial to the war Once contractors are deployed, it is harder effort, both have died in service to the coun- for Congress to monitor what they actually do. try's goals, and both exact costs from the pub- Many reporting mechanisms to Congress pro- lic treasury. Though we might agree that an vide no data about individual contracts, indi- armed guard faces greater risks than a cook, vidual companies or even whether a particular there is no reason why privatizing one job mission involves troops alongside contractors. rather than the other matters to these demo- Without this information, it is very difficult, cratic processes in a wartime setting. Insofar sometimes impossible, for Congress to assess as privatization limits congressional input and the performance of different companies or the reduces the information available to the pub- policy ends they serve. lic, it diminishes democratic controls over for- Congress may be reluctant to assume con- eign policy. trol over contractors in any event. With little constituent knowledge about the role of PSCs hat's the theory. But how does the use of in Iraq, many in Congress have feh little need Tprivate security conttactors undermine to address the issue. Note that no one in the government checks and balances in practice? debate over bringing "our troops" home has As expected, it empowers the Executive Branch mentioned a word about what to do with the and significantly erodes the power ofthe Con- nearly equal number of private security contrac- gress. Though Congress must authorize the tors. The budgetary and policy implications of deployment of uniformed troops, it need not "gettmg our troops out of Iraq", however, will authorize—or even know about—the de- depend on whether private security forces em- ployment of private contractors, no matter ployed by the United States remain. A decrease what kind of service they provide. Congres- in military force levels might actually mean a sional involvement is important. Think of greater need for private contractors. the debate about President George W. Bush's Congress has taken some steps to gain 20,000-troop surge in early 2007. Contrast greater control over contractors in Iraq in that with the politically invisible mobilization response to the outcry over several egregious of a much larger surge of private soldiers as the events. For instance, after four Blackwater insurgency heated up in the spring of 2004. personnel were killed and mutilated in Fal- That the number of contractors deployed by lujah in March 2004, and after the contrac- the United States in Iraq rivals the number of tors CACI and Titan were implicated in the troops has come to pass without any congres- abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, Congress re- sional authorization or input. quired that the Pentagon find a way to keep If Congress puts a ceiling on the number count of the number of private personnel in of troops, the Executive Branch can use con- Iraq, plugged one obvious legal loophole that tractors to exceed it. When Congress caps the prevented the prosecution of contractors al- number of contractors, PSCs can use more leged to have committed abuses at the prison, third-party nationals—just as they did to skirt and issued several other instructions to bring congressional restrictions on the number of contractors under tighter control. Thus far, military advisers and military contractors au- however, these reforms have fallen short of thorized under Plan Colombia in 2001. PSCs their goal—as we saw in the aftermath ofthe can also facilitate "foreign policy by proxy", in Nisour Square incident. Individual members which the United States merely licenses a com- of Congress—such as then-Senator Barack mercial exchange between a foreign country Obama (D-IL), Senator Jim Webb (D-VA), and a private security company, providing for and Representatives David E. Price (D-NC), military training without official U.S. involve- Jan Schakowski (D-IL) and Henry Waxman ment. Over the past 15 years, such contracts (D-CA) —have responded with proposals have become common. Private trainers have for additional legislation aimed to increase gone to Croatia, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, the transparency and accountability of con- Poland and Uzbekistan, among many other tractors. But even if each of these bills were countries. passed, congressional control over private 34 THE AMERICAN INTEREST THE MERCENARY DEBATE security would still be minimal relative to its they did at those of U.S. military personnel. If control over U.S. military forces. Americans knew more about the use of private Private security operations are much less security contractors in American wars, they transparent than the use of U.S. troops not would likely demand greater accountability only for Congress, but also for the public.