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2010
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361
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2010
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Publié par
Date de parution
15 décembre 2010
Nombre de lectures
1
EAN13
9780801459894
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
Some have claimed that "War is too important to be left to the generals," but P. W. Singer asks "What about the business executives?" Breaking out of the guns-for-hire mold of traditional mercenaries, corporations now sell skills and services that until recently only state militaries possessed. Their products range from trained commando teams to strategic advice from generals. This new "Privatized Military Industry" encompasses hundreds of companies, thousands of employees, and billions of dollars in revenue. Whether as proxies or suppliers, such firms have participated in wars in Africa, Asia, the Balkans, and Latin America. More recently, they have become a key element in U.S. military operations. Private corporations working for profit now sway the course of national and international conflict, but the consequences have been little explored. In this book, Singer provides the first account of the military services industry and its broader implications. Corporate Warriors includes a description of how the business works, as well as portraits of each of the basic types of companies: military providers that offer troops for tactical operations; military consultants that supply expert advice and training; and military support companies that sell logistics, intelligence, and engineering. In an updated edition of P. W. Singer's classic account of the military services industry and its broader implications, the author describes the continuing importance of that industry in the Iraq War. This conflict has amply borne out Singer's argument that the privatization of warfare allows startling new capabilities and efficiencies in the ways that war is carried out. At the same time, however, Singer finds that the introduction of the profit motive onto the battlefield raises troubling questions-for democracy, for ethics, for management, for human rights, and for national security.
Voir
Publié par
Date de parution
15 décembre 2010
Nombre de lectures
1
EAN13
9780801459894
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
Corporate Warriors
A volume in the series cornell studies in security affairs edited by Robert J. Art, Robert Jervis, Stephen M. Walt
A full list of titles in the series appears at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.
Corporate Warriors The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry
UPDATED EDITION
P. W. Singer
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Ithaca and London
Copyright ©2003by Cornell University Postscript copyright ©2008by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form with-out permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House,512East State Street, Ithaca, New York14850.
First published2003by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell paperbacks,2004 First printing, updated paperback edition,2008
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Singer, P. W. (Peter Warren) Corporate warriors : the rise of the privatized military industry / P. W. Singer. p. cm. — (Cornell studies in security affairs) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN-13:978-0-8014-7436-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Defense industries.2. Military-industrial complex. 3. Privatization.4industries—United States.. Defense 5complex—United States.. Military-industrial 6. Privatization— United States.7. United States—Military policy. I. Title. II. Series. HD9743.A2S56 2003 338.47355—dc21 2003000456
Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publish-ing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Paperback printing10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Preface
Contents
PART I. THE RISE 1. An Era of Corporate Warriors? 2. Privatized Military History 3Privatized Military Industry Distinguished. The 4Security Has Been Privatized. Why
PART II. ORGANIZATION AND OPERATION 5Global Industry of Military Services. The 6Privatized Military Industry Classified. The 7Military Provider Firm: Executive Outcomes. The 8Military Consultant Firm: MPRI. The 9. The Military Support Firm: Brown & Root
PART III. IMPLICATIONS 10. Contractual Dilemmas 11. Market Dynamism and Global Disruptions 12Firms and the Civil-Military Balance. Private 13Ends, Private Military Means?. Public 14and the Privatized Military Firm. Morality 15. Conclusions
POSTSCRIPT The Lessons of Iraq Appendix1. PMFs on the Web Appendix2. PMF Contract
Notes Bibliography Index
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3 19 40 49
73 88 101 119 136
151 169 191 206 216 230
243 261 263 273 321 345
Preface
t was only indirectly that I first stumbled across the phenomenon of pri-vate companies offering military services for hire. I had never heard of Ithe postwar situation in Bosnia. As we interviewed regional specialists, such a thing, until I joined a U.N.-supported project in1996, research-ing government officials, local military analysts, and peacekeepers in the field, it soon became evident that the entire military balance in the Balkans had become dependent on the activities of one small company based in Virginia, (Military Professional Resources Incorporated)—MPRI. I visited the firm’s regional offices, located in a nondescript building along the Sarajevo river-front, where the firm coordinated the arming and training of the Bosnian military. The members of the firm were polite and generally helpful, but the am-biguity between who they were and what they were doing always hung in the air. They were employees of a private company, but were performing tasks inherently military. It just did not settle with the way we tended to under-stand either business or warfare. However, there they were, simply doing their jobs, but in the process altering the entire security balance in the re-gion. I was struck by this seeming disconnect, between the way we normally view the world of military affairs and the way it actually is, and wanted to learn more. I spent the next years following just that path, interviewing hun-dreds who either work in the industry or are close observers of it and even spent a period working at the Pentagon, helping to oversee one of the firm’s contracts. In the time since, both the industry and the firm I visited have certainly grown up. MPRI was recently bought by a Fortune-500firm, while other companies offering military services have been discussed in many of the 1 world’s most prominent newspapers, radio, and TV outlets. Beyond the gen-eral media, the idea of private businesses as viable and legitimate military ac-tors has also begun to gain credence among a growing number of political 2 analysts and officials, from all over the political spectrum. Their activities have caught the attention of legislative officials in a number of countries and 3 led to the submission of several bills covering their actions. An interna-tional forum of African heads of states advised their use in certain situations, 4 as did the commander of the U.N. operation in Sierra Leone. Even Sir
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Brian Urquart, considered the founding father of U.N. peacekeeping, ad-5 vocated the hire of such firms. Another sign of emerging market maturity is that a new industry trade association, International Peace Operations As-6 sociation (IPOA), recently formed to lobby on behalf of military firms. The essential point is, that in the time since my first encounter with what I began to think of as “Corporate Warriors,” this private military industry is no longer so small or obscure. However, for all its growth, our understand-ing of it still remains greatly limited.
WHAT IS MISSING?
Part of why the military industry remains an enigma is that although nu-merous newspaper and magazine articles have been written on the activities of such firms, most have been long on jingoistic headlines and short on earnest examination. Within academia, there have been a few articles and reports that have introduced and described some of the firms, but the 7 broader field remains largely uninformed. Most studies of the firms have been generally descriptive rather than integrative. None have addressed the industry broadly or comparatively and our knowledge of the industry still 8 has not been advanced in any systematic manner. The reason is that the limited research done so far on military firms has focused on case studies of individual companies or of single conflicts where they were present, most often in Africa where they made their first appear-ance. Analysts have also tended to treat the more “mercenary” type as minia-ture armies in isolation. They have not placed them in a context with either similar companies that offer other types of military services or with general business models. A typical description is the erroneous statement that the 9 client list of these firms is “limited to weak states with corrupt leaders.” The result is a vacuum of established facts and a lack of understanding of this industry or the firms within it. “There are no universally accepted defi-10 nitions of even the most widely used terms.” No framework of analysis of the industry exists, no elucidation of the variation in the private military firm’s activities and impact, no attempts at examining the industry as a whole, and no comparative analyses. Equally dangerous is that much of what has been written about these firms is noncritical, with very little examination of the industry from an in-dependent perspective. The topic is exceptionally controversial, with peo-ple’s livelihoods, reputations, and even perhaps the industry’s ultimate legality dependent on how academia and policymakers meld to understand it. Unfortunately, the small amount of qualitative analysis that has been done is often highly polarized from the start, aimed at either extolling the firms to the extent of even comparing them to “messiahs,” or condemning their 11 mere existence. In turn, these biased findings are often misused by the 12 firms or by their opponents in pushing their own agendas.
preface
Thus, years after my first contact with the industry, the entire topic still remains murky to the general public, not only in the arena of known facts about the firms and their operations, but also in the lack of explanatory and predictive concepts and independently assessed policy options. This book is intended to resolve these issues, both the growing vacuum in theoretical and policy analysis of the industry, and the limitations of prior approaches.
THE STRATEGY OF ATTACK
The objective of this work is not simply to create a compilation of facts about individual firms operating in the military field. As significant as it would be finally to collect the often incongruent information about the industry into one place, the creation and implementation of an overall analytic architec-ture is more important. This book organizes and integrates what we know about the firms in a systematic manner, allowing for the development of un-derlying theories that can guide us in the future. To build an objective system of understanding of this industry and its place in world affairs, my plan has been to leverage lessons from fields as dis-parate as international relations theory, security studies, political economy, comparative politics, industrial analysis, and organizational behavior. In ad-dition to focused examination on the firms themselves, the study also draws from corollaries both within the military arena and from parallels in indus-tries with similar structures, and similar privatization experiences. My aim thus has been to establish an understanding of the private military industry and its implications that has both depth and breadth, to find generalizations that can be fleshed out and corroborated with historical reference. A brief word about data availability is necessary. The topic of privatized military firms remains largely unexplored for a variety of reasons: the rela-tive newness of the phenomenon, its failure to fall neatly into existing the-oretic frameworks, and, most important, the character of the business itself. Because these firms’ operations are almost always controversial and secrecy is often the norm, research is difficult. Although many are seemingly quite open about their operations (when it is in their best interests to present a positive public image), many others try their utmost to cover up the scope of their activities or try to intimidate those seeking to write about them. For this reason the reader will notice the copious footnotes to demonstrate where each bit of information came from. A number of these firms walk a fine line of legality, with potentially illegitimate clients, business practices, and employees with dark pasts. Some firms are also often at the center of dangerous covert or semicovert operations that many clients, including the 13 U.S. government, would rather not have discussed. Combined with the lambasting some firms have received in the press, many in the industry re-main suspicious of outside writers and are usually only willing to speak off 14 the record. Likewise, although government activities are open to exami-
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