Abstract

In this new series of monthly podcasts, Dr Alessandro Arduino and Dr Ameem Lutfi invite eminent speakers to share what they see in the future of warfare, as well as the transformation and transition of security architecture in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. Through these podcasts, we will observe how uniformed soldiers, or boots on the ground, are being replaced by private military companies and automated weapons, and will also notice a shift in the theatres of war, from territorial borderlands to shared oceans, air and cyberspace.

In the third podcast, Mr Doug Brooks, the founder of the International Stability Operations Association (ISOA) elaborates on the role of the US private military sector in the Middle East and beyond.

Listen to the full podcast here:

Full Transcript:

Alex: Welcome to the third episode of the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute’s podcast series “Boots off the Ground: Security in Transition from the Middle East and Beyond”. In this series, we look at the future of warfare which will see uniformed soldiers, or boots on the ground, being replaced by private military companies, autonomous weapon systems and cyberweapons. My name is Alessandro Arduino and I will be the co-host for the series along with my colleague Ameem Lutfi.

Ameem: Alex, we are very glad to have with us today Mr Doug Brooks, the founder and President Emeritus of International Stability Operations Association (ISOA). For those who don’t know, ISOA is the world’s leading trade association in the stability operations space, committed to advancing the global role of the private security industry in supporting international efforts in conflict, post conflict, humanitarian rescue and disaster relief environments.

Mr Brooks is currently an adjunct faculty member at the University of Fiji. Concurrently, he sits on the board of the Afghan American Chamber of Commerce and has been working as a consultant for various stability operations companies. He also happens to be a prolific writer and has extensively covered African security and private military issues. He has written extensively on the constructive utilisation of the private sector for international peacekeeping and humanitarian missions. Thank you, Doug, for being with us today.

Alex: Doug, thank you again for joining us. In our last podcast, we had with us Mr Jamie Williamson from ICoCA. To start off, how would you compare the missions of ISOA and ICoCA. From what I understood, ICoCA is a regulatory body while ISOA primarily represents the industry. Is that correct? If so, would it be fair to say that ISOA believes that self-regulation is the best option to bring order and stability in the industry?

Doug: Sure, ISOA definitely represents the interests of the stability operations industry and I should be clear that it represents more than just security contractors. There are more than 120 companies that are members of this association; only about 15 per cent of the industry are actually security contractors. The biggest companies by far are the logistics and construction companies. They all operate in the same areas: in conflict, post conflict and disaster relief. However, they are very different kinds of companies that make up this association; in many ways, security companies are just like any private company that works in these sorts of areas.

ICoCA is a regulatory body. It is quite different as it was actually set up to regulate the security companies. It’s operated by governments, industries and also NGOs, which makes it very different from ISOA, which is purely run by just the companies.

ISOA predates ICoCA. ISOA used to be IPOA, or the International Peace Operations Association, which was founded in 2001. It was founded around a code of conduct, which is available online to this day. The code of conduct that this industry association uses was originally written by NGOs, humanitarians and academics. It was a very simple two-page document. It basically said: this is what we want companies doing in areas of conflict, here’s what we don’t want them doing. It sets out how companies should operate in areas that essentially don’t have effective legal systems or effective governments in many cases.

Over the years, we have updated the two-page code of conduct and every time we do that, we bring in NGOs, humanitarian organisations and the academics to test it. We have not done it for a while, but we bring everybody in. We would have our standards committee and we bring them various simulated problems. They would discuss these problems, come up with the direction, and then, we go to the NGOs and humanitarian community and say, what did we do right? What did we do wrong? We tried to keep improving our system. ISOA’s accountability mechanism was not perfect. I mean, essentially, it was self-regulation, but it could be utilised by anyone. Literally, anyone could file a complaint against any of our companies, not just the security companies, but all the companies.

The ICoCA, I think, has greater legitimacy because obviously, it represents everybody. It represents governments, NGOs and humanitarian organisations that work in the same area. But it’s also supported by the security companies. Therefore, I think that’s something that we could not do as ISOA, but we did what we could.

Our goal is to ensure that all ISOA members live up to the code of conduct. Our goal is not to kick companies out. However, if a company has problems with the code of conduct or fails to comply with it, our goal is to get it back into compliance. And almost all the time, that’s exactly what happens. The company would not even know they had a problem or a complaint. However, they would acknowledge it and then we come up with a plan to fix the problem. The goal is to raise the entire industry — I think we were quite successful in that.

As we worked out the complaints that were brought in, we would keep the complainants informed as well until ultimately, the situation was resolved. It’s important to note though that the way that ISOA held itself accountable is not normal for a trade association.

Addressing complaints required a great deal of staff time. Because we had a staff of only three full-time personnel and some interns, we had to drop everything to deal with these complaints, and it worked. We didn’t have the resources, or, as I said, the legitimacy that ICoCA has so yeah, what Jamie’s doing is pretty amazing. I think what ICoCA has is something that I think we would have loved at the time when we started the ISOA code of conduct.

Today, we still have the ISOA code of conduct that companies are required to adhere to and accept verbally when they join the association. It remains a bedrock of the association, but most of the accountability issues, especially those related to security companies, are now handled by ICoCA, which is a much better platform.

Ameem: Doug, just to clarify, you’ve mentioned that accountability and addressing these reports are a very small portion of what ISOA does, but you have had to drop your other work to pick these up. So, on a day-to-day basis, what is it that occupies ISOA the most? What is its main duty?

Doug: It is like a regular trade association and a lot of what it does is to address and help with business development. It helps companies find partners within the industry or outside the industry and help them to become better companies. It sets many of the standards in terms of how companies should operate in the field. It also works on regulatory issues. Most of the companies are US companies, and about 40 per cent are foreign companies. No matter their nationality, the members are tied together by the unique situations of conflict and disaster in which they operate.

A lot of regulatory issues can be addressed better as an industry than as an individual company, so we do a lot of that. Technically, we do lobbying though we’ve never really done much lobbying and most of the lobbying we did was more of just addressing wordage and making things so that the right hand and left hand of governments are in concert. But yeah, so we help companies that way.

We have conferences, for example on international arms regulations, on basically anything: from working with the UN to working with the NGO sector. We have a lot of conferences or roundtables based on legal issues that are arising. How do you treat your employees with Covid-19 for example? I mean, there are legal issues about doing that and you have foreign companies, foreign personnel working in say Afghanistan or Iraq. What do you do with them when you have a pandemic like this and how do you treat the local nationals? So a lot of those issues are how you deal with that legally, ethically, professionally, all that sort of stuff are addressed by the association.

Ameem: To come back to something you mentioned in your earlier response, that only 15 per cent of the companies in ISOA are actually private security companies; most of them are logistic companies but you use this common category of stability operations company. And from the basis of this term, I want to get on to this debate that we’ve been having across the two podcasts between Jamie and before Jamie, we had Sean McFate, whom I’m guessing you’re familiar with.

There was a debate between the two — Sean argued that whatever one calls them, if you have somebody with a gun in a conflict zone and they’re not state actors, then they’re mercenaries. And Sean said that any other label, be it private military, private security, security contractor, or stability operations experts, are all neologism and are basically distractions. But Jamie felt that this was unhelpful. He felt that if you have to regulate the situation on the ground, you actually need very precise definitions.

So, where do you stand on this debate: more towards Sean or more towards Jamie? In other words, what do you think are the terms of different categories of people in these complex zones that are helpful for us to understand them, to parse them out and to differentiate between them?

Doug: Sure. Right off the bat, I love Sean. I’ve known him for a long, long time. I wrote a review of his book when it first came out. But Sean’s wrong. Jamie knows what he’s talking about here. The term “mercenary”, there’s sort of a legal definition which somebody at the UN Working Group on Mercenaries once said that by that definition, there may be three mercenaries in the whole world. And that may be accurate. It’s a loosey-goosey term and The New York Times, you know, covered all the private security companies operating in Iraq and Afghanistan and so on and you see it throwing around this “mercenary” term; it’s really just a derogatory term. We finally decided that The New York Times definition of “mercenary” is “a foreigner or a businessperson that the US does not like”.

In fact, yes, when you look at this entire industry, as I said, maybe only about 15 per cent are security companies. You also have the logistics and construction companies. Basically, we include the stability operations companies in complex zones that do stuff that is normal anywhere else in the world.

You have a construction company working across the street from me building a house. That’s just normal. Doing that in the war zone makes it a stability operations company. You know, doing the plumbing here or being a plumber in the stability operations industry doesn’t make you a mercenary because you’re working in a conflict area.  In fact, most of our employees are local nationals. So, if you’re an Afghan working for a US company in Afghanistan and doing plumbing, you’re certainly not a mercenary. I don’t think even by Sean’s standards, you can’t call him that. So, the numbers kind of get thrown around and the name is kind of weird.

Therefore, I think Jamie’s approach is much more methodical, it makes a lot more sense. Honestly, you know, whether you are a plumber or a security guy, if you murder somebody, it’s still murder, right? It doesn’t make you a mercenary one way or the other but it does make you a murderer. So, let us just be clear that essentially the whole terminology that’s thrown around, I understand that it’s really helpful for academics and for journalists to get their articles printed, you know, talking about spicy mercenary stories, but the reality is that it is just a derogatory term.

We actually went to the UN Working Group on Mercenaries, we objected to the name of that working group because they want to regulate everybody exactly to the name and I said, okay, if you have a UN working group on lawyers, will you call it the UN working group on ambulance chasers? Or if you have a UN working group on psychiatrists, would you call it the UN working group on head shrinks? It’s just a derogatory term.

Alex: Thank you Doug. Again, you just mentioned the stability operations industry and you mentioned the plumber, they cost a fortune normally. I can’t imagine the price of a plumber in Iraq or Afghanistan in a war. So…

Doug: This is why they use local people to do most of the work, right. If you can find an Afghan plumber, why the hell are you going to fly one from the United States, pay them US wages plus 10 per cent danger pay or whatever to do that when you know, basically, you can pay somebody US$500 a month, whatever the going wage is in Afghanistan, to do the plumbing. That’s what you do. So again, for most of our industry, you’re using local nationals whenever you can. In many cases, like we saw in Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, in Iraq, the companies will train local nationals to do the work. And the more local nationals they have, the cheaper your costs are, and the more competitive your company is, and you win the contract.

Alex: So back to the stability operations industry, I know that you have been working in this field from the 1990s. Can you tell me more about your experience, especially in Africa, in European Union? How do you think that the industry has grown or changed since then?

Doug: Sure, I got involved in this as an academic, originally working on my PhD. I was looking at the role that the private sector plays in conflict or post conflict environments just from an academic perspective. I had an academic fellowship at SAIIA (or the South African Institute of International Affairs) — this was in 1999, 2000 — and part of that fellowship sent me to Sierra Leone a couple of times. I was out in the middle of the UN peacekeeping mission and civil war in Sierra Leone. I actually stayed with the contractors while I was up there. I flew around in the helicopters with both the Mi-24 gunship (large Soviet gunship helicopter) and also the HIPs (Russian multipurpose helicopter), the MI-8MTV running supplies to the UN and so on. It was fascinating.

I got to interview UN leaders and I got to interview the Sierra Leoneans as part of this, and it gave me a really interesting perspective. While the academic belief was that these companies were either mercenaries or war profiteers or whatever, the reality on the ground was far different.

The UN was a mess. They were having all sorts of problems. Everything that got moved, fixed or done essentially was being done by contractors. So they were kind of holding the whole mission together. And what really surprised me was the level that the contractors were using local nationals. PAE (Pacific Architects and Engineers) was a big contractor; the Sierra Leoneans loved working for PAE. I think it’s still there to this day running the depot. Also ICI (International Charter Incorporated) of Oregon had local nationals helping to do maintenance. And it was pretty interesting to see all this.

As an academic, you know when you come from this academic community that is   condemning the whole idea of any sort of privatisation in conflict or in peacekeeping missions or something, it was quite startling. And this was where I sat down with the NGOs and humanitarian organisations and we put together a letter with the Sierra Leoneans and some other internationals basically saying: look, we’re fine with private companies working in these area of conflict, they are doing a great job, we don’t want them involved with this stuff but we want them doing that sort of things to make sure they are operating professionally.

The UN eventually did solve Sierra Leone, with the help of the British who essentially provided the very robust military aspect of the mission. Obviously, there were some very well known incidents in the military where the British had to use their very professional troops to ensure that the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), the rebels (who really were street gangs), didn’t sort of upset everything. The UK military held things together until the UN, essentially, could solve Sierra Leone. It is a democracy now and doing quite well, despite these pandemics and everything that that brings.

But the big takeaway from Sierra Leone, I think, and other situations, is that the private sector does bring enormous cost-effective capabilities to international peace operations. Sometimes, the international community, especially at the academic level, is kind of skittish about private companies, especially the private military companies that we talked about a little.

However, I think we’re beginning to see them being much more comfortable with private companies being much more involved in supporting these missions. And they understand that there is accountability that you can have with companies that you can’t have with the military.

Now, you can’t fire the Nigerian military if they have a problem, but you can fire a company. And they have been fired in the past.  It’s much easier to control companies just by the contracts that you’re putting together. If they’re going to take a contract, they’ll to have to agree with the guidelines that you set. So I think it was, you know, from Africa, from the sort of early conflicts since the 1990s; it’s been just interesting to see how things have evolved. ICoCA is really a sort of pinnacle where we’ve gotten to the point where we have international community saying, okay, we’re going to have the security companies operating in areas of conflict, let’s make sure they do it the right way.

Ameem: Just to push you a little bit more since you’re already on the theme: you’ve seen up close how UN peacekeeping forces and other international peace forces work. I’ve been reading some of your work and I see that you’ve been advocating an expanded role for private military in peacekeeping as well. Now this, for most people, would be a hard sell. Because when you think of mercenaries, you think of “merchants of death”, or as you said, war profiteers. But you are saying they can actually be agents of peace. And if I’m right, in one place, you mentioned that private military can maybe do the same job but for a smaller pay cheque. Now I would like to push you a little to tell us in more detail why you think that the private military can do a better job than international peacekeeping forces.

Doug: So, anybody who’s been to an international peacekeeping operation, whether it’s run by the UN or a regional organisation, they’re really, really ugly, bringing in thousands of young men into war situations and bad things are happening. There are various crimes going on, sex crimes as well as mafia sorts of things. It’s ugly. I think there’s been a big improvement, a long-term improvement in how the UN does these things and how the international community does these missions but there are still a lot of problems with peacekeeping in general.

The reason that we use private companies to support these kinds of missions is because they are either faster or they’re cheaper, or they’re better or some combination of that is better than using the military forces that are offered by different countries. For example, if you need to build a refugee camp or something, you can do that with military engineers, but it’s probably going to be a lot cheaper and it’s probably going to employ more locals if you hire a private company to do it. It will almost always be cheaper than flying in people from elsewhere in the world to do that sort of thing.

As I said, it’s easier to make rules for the private companies; you can ask them to wear the pink paisley pyjamas as part of their military outfit if you want, and if they want the contract, by God, they’re going to be wearing pink paisley pyjamas if that’s part of the agreement. You get to set those rules. I think a lot of the problems we’ve seen with Iraq and Afghanistan and so on was because the rule makers weren’t making good rules, or they were not making sure the companies were following the rules they created.

As I said, it’s easier to hold these private companies accountable. You can fire them if they’re not doing the job you want. You can’t do that with the military suddenly in the middle of a peacekeeping mission, you know, you can’t tell one of the largest troop-contributing countries in the mission to go home, we’ll find somebody else because a lot of times, there aren’t any other militaries who are willing to do that sort of thing.

I think when you get to the idea that the private military companies operating in these areas, again military companies, different from the security companies, actually are working for a country’s military doing offensive combat operations, that is different from the security companies which are hired to protect a noun — person, place, or thing.

Executive Outcomes (EO) was perhaps the most famous of the private military companies and they’ve been in Sierra Leone, Angola, quite successfully both cases. They were contacted by the UN during the Rwandan genocide to intervene there. Kofi Anan was the head of UN peacekeeping at that time and he’d been trying to find any country at all to go in and help address the genocide that was going on. Nobody was interested and so kind of unsurprisingly, the UN in New York called Executive Outcomes to see if they would be willing to go in and try and stop the genocide in Rwanda.

The EO’s executives sort of did a back of the cocktail napkin calculation and said, sure, you know, we can do this. We’ll be on the ground in two weeks. We’ll hand it over to the UN in six weeks. That was their plan. Subsequently as an academic, I met one of the EO executives and got them to flesh out their plan, write it up and even published it on my email list to share around. The reality was that there’s almost no country in the world that could have been on the ground in Rwanda in two weeks as effectively as Executive Outcomes. Maybe three or four: United States, maybe the UK and France and maybe Russia. Expeditionary missions are really difficult for militaries to do and it is much easier for a private company that’s essentially using international resources to do that sort of thing.

So, the other things we have to consider are: is that where we want to go? Do we want to do humanitarian rescue on that kind of scale, using private companies to do this sort of thing? From my experience, when you talk to the governmental sector, nobody’s ready to do that. Nobody wants Executive Outcomes to go and do that. But just keep this in mind, in general, we have no problem with private security companies being hired to protect mines, to protect factories. Everybody’s fine with that, right? But if you hire the same private security company to protect the village next to the mine, you know, or the township where factories are located, all of a sudden, they’re mercenaries! And that’s wrong? Even though they’re really good at what they do? You know, we have to come to some sort of ethical compromise to figure this out.

Alex: I like what you just mentioned as ethical compromise. I think we need to get back to our previous guests and ask the same question or maybe we will have a podcast with all the three of you at the same time. Moving from Africa to the other areas where you have been involved with such as Afghanistan, can you give us an account of the different roles that the private military is playing there right now? And do you think the country that is widely known as the graveyard of empires might turn out to be a success story for private military? To narrow down the question further, what do you think about Mr Erik Princes’ proposal for ISOA to appoint private military to bring order to a war-torn country?

Doug: So, yeah, I know Eric well. Blackwater was a member of IPOA when I was running the association so I got to know him. I always thought his heart was in the right place. We are on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but he’s come up with some good ideas, and some of them have been quite successful. Some, I would say, were a bit less successful. But turning our attention a little to the terminology, when you start talking about private military companies in Afghanistan, I would say there aren’t any. Because a private military company, of course, by my definition or some academic definition of private military companies, is a company that’s willing to do offensive operations on behalf of clients. That’s kind of what Prince has been at advocating for in Afghanistan.

Mostly, what we have entirely at this point are private security companies operating in Afghanistan, which again, are defensive and protective in nature. They are hired to defend a person, place or thing and so on. I think we have a lot of companies supporting the Afghan army and Afghan police. They’re maintaining the armoured vehicles and other vehicles. They’re doing a lot of logistics for those things. So, we have a lot of companies doing something which is not really security or not even private military operations. What we’re not seeing though is that the private companies are going into combat with the military or police, or even what might be known as mentoring.

Prince’s idea is really based on the idea of the Green Beret model. The Green Berets when they were first put together in Vietnam, you would have a base that would have one team of maybe 20 Green Berets and several hundred local military people that were militias that they would advise. But the Green Berets would go into the field with them and work as advisors in the field and do a lot of the technical communications work, for example, calling in airstrikes, things like that, because they had that skill set. And it made the much larger, local force far more effective. And this is kind of the model that I think Prince has been advocating for Afghanistan.

It’s not something that’s unique to the private sector. Certainly, Executive Outcomes, when they operated in Sierra Leone, they operated with the Sierra Leone military, with the Angola military. The end goal is to get a small number of contractors to essentially work with a much larger military as mentors, going in the field, getting shot at but also providing a lot of the skill sets that are necessary to make them far more effective. This is something in Afghanistan that could be done by the US military or another Nato military. You can do exactly the same thing as what Prince is advocating for but with military people.

But the reality is, I think we’ve seen that the Nato, especially the US nowadays, is pretty skittish about losing people in Afghanistan, even if they’re doing what we want them to do as policy. Even if a 20-year-old policy is at risk, they’re not going to put the military at that level of operation and that’s a shame. So, Prince is basically just saying, look, use the technique that you should be doing, we can do it with private guys. They don’t even have to be Americans, I think, as long as they have the right kind of training and so on to actually go in the field with the Afghan military, the Afghan units and police and provide that extra expertise.

I think one thing we have seen of Afghan military and police is that they’re not bad. And in fact, in many cases, their bravery borders on foolhardy. They’re willing to fight, but they need the means to fight and they need the expertise and skill sets which take generations to develop. Some of which they have, but they can use a lot more. I think for Afghanistan, Prince’s idea is not a terrible idea, but the way he rolled it out using the term viceroy and things like that, that is not a good idea. The basic concept of putting a Nato-class professional out with the Afghan military and providing those necessary skill sets, I think that makes sense.

Ameem: Since we’re on this issue of Blackwater, currently known as Academi , you would probably agree with me that there’s an image problem for private security, private military. And given I think, just last week or this week, this issue of former Green Berets from the Silvercorp caught in Venezuela trying to stage a coup. You mentioned it briefly earlier about how you address these kinds of concerns. Maybe getting back to it now, what would you do when such issues appear? How do you solve this image problem? Do you address it through restructuring companies or admonishing them? Or do you go to the media and you set the image right? And I want to see if you can answer this question in light of the evolving situation in the Middle East, if there is an image change, do you see an expanding role for private security and private military in the Middle East? Beyond maybe, let’s say Afghanistan and Iraq, which are two places that we kind of know that there has been some involvement of private security?

Doug: Well, good question. I don’t know if we have enough days to provide the right answer for that one. Let me say this: when you look at Silvercorp or whatever it was in Florida, and even if you want to bring up Wagner group in Russia, you’ll notice that those organisations are not part of part of ICoCA, they’re not part of ISOA. They’re operating at a different level. In the case of Wagner group, they’re pretty much an arm of the Russian government. We’ll see about Silvercorp; that’s a very, very bizarre situation. Both of those cases and also, I think we need to keep in mind when we think of this whole mercenary terminology and stuff, if you’re murdering somebody if you’re a civilian, and you’re killing another civilian as Silvercorp was in Venezuela, that’s still murder, right? You’re not operating as military; you’re not doing legal security work. That still is an issue as an industry.

One reason that IPOA/ ISOA was set up was to address exactly this issue of how does this industry proceed? Nobody’s going to hire these companies, much less the UN, unless they feel that these companies are operating professionally, are doing things the way they should be done. And I think if you’ve talked to Colonel Chris Mayer, if you’re going to be talking to Chris Mayer, he always makes the point that the industry really needs to separate itself from these bad actors or these dark companies. And he’s right about that.

From the very beginning, IPOA, ISOA, we reached out to the media, to the journalists, to the policymakers, and we gave them information and we were always honest about it. We’re not going to lie about something. If there’s a problem in the industry, we have to admit there’s a problem, we have to have a plan to solve that problem.

From the very beginning, we worked with journalists. For 10 years, we had our annual summit at the National Press Club here in Washington, DC. It was literally that open. And that was a good thing. We wanted the press people to see what we’re doing. Our annual conference would bore them to tears because we’re addressing, you know, legal issues, financial issues, things like that and not talking about whether private military are mercenaries, because you know, that would be pointless at this time.

To create an industry that’s going to last, you really had to address an issue and be ready when something like Venezuela happens to say that’s not us. That is crazy stuff that’s going on there. But it’s definitely not the companies that are part of us. It’s a peer review thing. So one of the reasons that a lot of those security companies, especially, joined IPOA in the early days was because they wanted to say, look, here we are now in Iraq, and it was sort of a wild west, there was a bunch of companies that said we want to do this professionally, we’re not going to do this under the table or whatever. So, it is industry coming together and saying, these are good guys and if you as a client, whether you’re a government or an extractive company, oil company, something like that, if you want to hire the right people, then hire them from ICoCA or ISOA.  I think that’s really important.

Blackwater doesn’t exist anymore after what happened in Nisour Square, and other incidents involved with Blackwater, it couldn’t attract contracts. Iraq, first of all, said you can’t operate in this country. And, you know, if you had to hire a company, why would you want a security company having those kinds of problems working for you? So, Blackwater was having problem getting contracts; it had to change. They changed the name initially, but then it was sold, and it’s been sold and blended in with a number of companies. I don’t know if anybody who ever worked at Blackwater is still with Constellis [formed through a merger between Triple Canopy and Academi]. The reality was that the whole Blackwater idea and running a company that way with that kind of attitude just wasn’t going to work. And so, it self-imploded. If you want to run a professional company, you got to be professional or you’ll never get a contract.

What Blackwater gave you, beyond the human cost, was terrible for the industry. It was a disaster for the company obviously. But again, ISOA and ICoCA reinforce the importance of accountability and how the industry benefits from accountability and responsibility. Nobody’s going to hire companies if they don’t think they can hold them accountable or if they don’t operate professionally. And you need associations like this to essentially say, here’s the standards, here’s our bottom line.

If we’re going to be in this industry, we’re going to have to operate at these levels. There are always going to be problems and that’s why you have accountability mechanisms, why we have ours and why ICoCA has theirs. We need to be able to make sure that those are addressed and not swept under the carpet. And I think even with the best companies, bad thing will happen. The difference appears in how a good company handles that problem versus a bad company. Nine out of ten times, the difference is if they hide the problem or not. If they hide it, that’s clearly a sign of a company that has some issues. If the company is very open and it addresses the problem and says that here is how it’s not going to happen again in the future, that’s what you want to see. And that’s why you have a professional association like ICoCA and ISOA.

Alex: As you mentioned, accountability is a term that is quite recurrent in our podcasts. And it’s very important that these companies are accountable in whatever they perform in terms of security service. But looking at the perspective, from our part of the world here in Singapore, there is a common perception and that private military looks like a Pandora’s box. Once you open it, it will invite all sorts of unsavoury characters and the state will stop taking responsibility, especially for violence emanating from within their borders. Does Singapore have anything to gain from encouraging privatisation of the security industry, especially in South-east Asia?

Doug: So, I don’t know if this is a good example, but Singapore, of course, used to have a riot squad. I don’t know if they still do but that was made up of former British Gurkhas. They worked for the government, but they were not related to any ethnic groups in Singapore and they were used to basically make sure that whoever got out of hand, you had a neutral party that would come in and make sure that that it gets sorted out in a neutral way. In some cases, when you look at a private company, you’re kind of getting the same sort of package.

But smaller countries, as they become more involved in international stability operations, especially regionally, they are going to need the expeditionary capabilities that the stability operations industry offers. And that’s beyond security, obviously. Just simply getting from point A to point B, having a base built for you, having all your vehicles maintained, all that sort of stuff is really expensive, and it’s easier to outsource that stuff and that makes a small  military far more cost effective.

Ultimately, even for the United States, which I argue is the most capable military in the world, the private sector allows it to focus more on its core capabilities. And this is true of any military, the smaller military, probably even more so. You want your military doing military stuff, not peeling potatoes or you know, fixing diesel engines. So, small military means that more people can be concentrating on the mission, not worrying about where the rations are coming from, not doing the power, not doing the internet. Well, that stuff can be provided for them and having the private sector lets them do that.

On the security company thing, we do see small militaries hiring security companies, like inside the United States, many US  military bases are protected by private security companies . It just makes sense. You know, you’re training military guys to do military things, not be gate guards or mall cops. It’s kind of a waste of trained military personnel. And, you know, since the US military forces went all volunteers since back in the late 1970s, there is a realisation that people aren’t joining the army to peel potatoes, they are joining to be in military and serve their country. And peeling potatoes is a really crappy way to do it — that can be outsourced.

Again, for a small military, Singapore has a very professional, well equipped military, I’d love to see them more involved in peacekeeping operations and so on, but I’m guaranteeing that when they do go on these things, in any scale, they’re going to bring private companies with them, or they’re going to hire private companies to provide those services and really enable the military do what they need to do. So, I think there’s a lot that can be done. I think Singapore is more sophisticated than most small countries. I think, you know, when it comes to writing the contracts and writing the rules, how these companies work, they could probably do a better job than most. But nevertheless, I think any small country that wants to really get involved in these international operations, it makes sense to work with the private sector. There’s a lot of guidelines that they can get from other countries on how to do this, and what mistakes not to make.

Ameem: Doug, to end the interview, I want to ask you a question that we plan on asking all of our guests and it’s this: what will the future of warfare and security management in a complex environment look like in the coming 30 years?

Doug: Your best examples: look at the Pentagon and how it’s evolved, especially since 2001. Again, within the Pentagon, within the US government, they’re trying to figure out how comfortable they are with the private sector taking over many of the tasks. It’s interesting to me to see some of the red lines, for example aerial refuelling, can sometimes be outsourced. There are actually private companies that will refuel aircraft in the air. It’s not really a dangerous job, but it’s one that you need a certain kind of expertise in and they are starting to do that. The Pentagon is buying a gazillion Boeings to do this now. As a taxpayer, I think that’s a waste of money, but there are other reasons, political reasons, perhaps for doing that. Nevertheless, there are a lot of other things they’ve been outsourcing quite successfully. And so, I think the US military is a really good model to look at.

A lot of their decisions have been made not because they had to, I mean, the US military has an insane budge, where they can pretty much do whatever they want. But the reality is that it makes sense for them to outsource certain skill sets, say running the drone surveillance firms, the unarmed drones. Again, does that have to be a military operation or the military maintaining it, things like that. And they found no, it doesn’t have to be military. There’s no real reason. So, I think it’s a good model to look at.

The United Nations, the African Union are going the same direction. I think the efficiencies that you get from the private sector are indisputable if you need to do things on a large scale. Building a massive refugee camp or conducting a large medical operation and stuff, it just makes sense to go to the private sector and you get a company that’s able to tap into the world market for whatever skill sets you need, or whatever equipment you need, or whatever else just makes a lot of sense.

The UN has always had problems getting enough troops to do these missions. A lot of that was because those troops were doing a lot of support work that they don’t need to do anymore. So when you get private companies supporting, the troops are able to really focus on their mission. They don’t have to worry about taking care of things at the base, and so on. And so that just makes a lot of sense. I think one thing to keep in mind, the US military is now pivoting towards the big wars, large power confrontation. So when you talk about a big war, if you go back to the Cold War, the Soviet versus US and what could have happened in a war, they’re probably not going to have a whole lot of private contractors involved.

But 99.9 per cent of the conflicts in the world have been low intensity conflict, where there is manageable risk and there is a huge role for the private companies in that and for countries are that are trying to do something. A mission that lasts for 20 years like in Afghanistan, it makes a lot of sense to keep your military to a minimal size and a minimal risk. Just outsource a lot of that stuff to the private sector, which is far, far less risky, which is not a target, and saves you a ton of money and allows you to carry out a 20-year policy. Now, whether you want to do a 20-year policy is another story, but it’s going to happen. And involving the private sector will save you a lot money and probably improve the way you do things.

Alex: Doug, thank you very much for joining us today; it has been great listening to your insight. Please allow me to thank our BOTG group at MEI without whom this podcast could never be possible, namely Eugene Lim, Lim Wei Chean, Alastair Loh from the Events and Communications Team and MEI Associate Director Carl Skadian. Also special thanks to all our listeners. Please follow us on the various social media platform and send us your comments and feedback. We would love to hear from you.

In closing, I want to plug our next podcast with Mr Raffaello Pantucci. Mr Pantucci is a senior associate fellow at Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies and now a visiting senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies. He has written extensively on terrorism and counterterrorism as well as China’s relations with its western neighbours.

In our upcoming podcast, we will shift the focus to less formalised men with arms — namely non-state militias. In particular, we will talk about what happens when foreign fighters in Afghanistan and Syria start to head back home.

And that’s all for today. Thank you.

This transcript was prepared by Alastair Low, Intern, Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore.