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Editor’s Introduction

The fundamental understanding underlying the international order requires that states take responsibility for violence emanating from their borders in exchange for recognition as the sole legitimate wielders of force within their borders. However, the rise of private militaries has made the chain of responsibility for violence harder to trace, leaving the international system on shaky ground. Instead of deploying recognisable uniformed soldiers abroad, states can now hide behind layers of subcontracts with private military and security companies (PMSCs). Compounding the problem is the increasing use of modern autonomous weapons and cyberwarfare. Autonomous weapons such as loitering munitions and drones can be operated from small covert bases and offer public deniability to their users. Also, cyber warfare provides state and non-state actors the opportunity to operate from the shadows, disappearing across multiple servers. The rise of such technologies is not just the result of scientific development; instead, as in the case of PMSCs, their growing use is due to shifts in international politics.

For much of the 20th century, states’ responsibility for external violence was hinged on their monopoly over the means of force internally through large standing citizen armies. In their quest to establish spheres of influence, the two warring Cold War powers offered generous military assistance to resource-poor third countries to enable them to train, equip and sustain bloated peacetime armies. However, as foreign military aid started to dry up in the early 1990s with the Cold War having ended, these countries began downsizing their armies. This trend was noticeable among major powers and developing states alike. Downsizing efforts led armies to outsource some of their essential functions to private companies on the one hand, while on the other hand, they pushed laid-off soldiers to ply their skills in the marketplace for violence. Together, these developments laid the seeds for a private military and security sector.

In the initial decades, the private military industry was still a niche one, focused primarily on protecting Western mining companies in sub-Saharan Africa. The privatisation of the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2010s opened the floodgates of private military contracting. Caught in these prolonged and unpopular wars, the United States contracted essential base services in both countries to private companies. At the peak of privatisation, private contractors outnumbered US soldiers by a ratio of 1.1:1 in Iraq and 1.5:1 in Afghanistan. With the influx of capital from US government contracts, private security suddenly became a multi-billion-dollar industry, employing more than a quarter-million people.[1]

One could argue that the United States, during that period, was what economists would call a “super consumer”, i.e., a consumer whose consumption constitutes more than 50% of total profits. Theoretically, the United States could have used this privileged position to demand from the producers a certain level of transparency and commitment to ethical practices[2]. Unfortunately, the United States never pushed its contractors to implement monitoring and reporting systems. Preferring short-term economic gains over long-term international stability, it left the industry mainly unchecked.

Today, PMSCs have become a global industry: the legitimacy afforded to the private security industry by US contracts emboldened other countries to follow suit. Moscow, for example, mobilised the quasi-legal Wagner Group to support its proxy in Syria without implicating Russia directly.[3] Similarly, Turkey channelled combatants from Syria to Libya through a private security firm, SADAT, even as it denied involvement outright.[4]

Beyond the issue of PMSCs, countries around the world also are investing heavily in autonomous weapons, particularly drones. The UAE, for example, is said to be building a covert drone base in Yemen while calling for an end to the proxy war in that country.[5] Furthermore, with cyberwarfare, the lines of responsibility become almost impossible to trace, as we saw in the case of the April 2021 attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities that was widely attributed to Israel.[6]

To trace the rise of the private military and security industry as well as discuss its deleterious impact on the international order as its global footprint grows, this volume of Insights brings together a diverse set of scholars and practitioners from across the world. The volume discusses how the international system can design laws and regulatory structures to make states responsible for violence across borders. Structurally, the volume is divided into two parts. The first section takes on the question of regulation and offers possible approaches to increasing transparency and accountability in the industry. The second section offers three different case studies of private security, offering us a panoramic view of the diversity within this booming industry.

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The volume begins with an article by Doug Brooks (page 11), arguing that the first step towards regulation of the private military and security industry is recognition. Brooks, the founder of the International Stability Operations Association, the foremost representative body for the private military and security sector, notes that PMSCs are often written off as inherently bad “mercenaries” and “merchants of death”. Such a view orients the international system towards the impossible goal of eliminating private security and military actors rather than regulating them with fine-tooth instruments. Blanket attempts at outlawing the privatisation of military functions miss the fact that the industry behaves like any other economic sector; it exists only because the demand exists.

Privatisation, Brooks claims, offers militaries both cost and tactical benefits. It allows professional soldiers to focus on critical military missions, while outsourcing mundane but necessary activities such as construction, transportation, cleaning and guarding to private contractors. Moreover, using private companies, with the flexibility to choose between different subcontractors and low-cost labour pools, allows states to drive down their costs through competitive bidding. Thus, as long as countries remain embroiled in low-intensity and drawn-out conflicts on foreign soil, the private security sector will thrive. Short of solving conflicts worldwide, the only realistic option then for the international system is to recognise private security as a legitimate industry to be closely regulated like other sectors.

Jamie Williamson (page 24), in the second article, delves deeper into the problem of enforcing international regulations in the private security industry. He argues that while the United Nations has shown considerable commitment to regulating the use of private soldiers, its efforts have only brought limited success. One of the major limiting factors is that the UN approach focuses on building consensus among state actors while leaving out the non-state actors running the industry.

A representative of the multilateral International Code of Conduct Association (ICoCA), Williamson goes on to highlight a successful alternative to the international treaty approach to regulation. With the support of the Swiss government, ICoCA in 2013 brought together relevant parties from across the supply and demand chain to design a shared code of conduct based on industry best practices. Instead of policing, ICoCA takes a market-based approach to regulation. On the demand side, it encourages governments and NGOs to reserve lucrative contracts for transparent PMSCs with proven human rights records; on the supply side, ICoCA works with security companies in implementing standardised procedures through staff training and the designing of regulatory mechanisms.

The last article in the first section takes a comparative and historical approach to the problem of regulating the private military and security industry. As a historical-anthropologist, Ameem Lutfi (page 35) reminds us that while the modern private security industry may only be a post-Cold War phenomenon, the international system has been dealing with the similar issue of controlling the private arms industry throughout the 20th century. The successes and failures in the regulation of the private arms industry, Lutfi suggests, offer important lessons for controlling war profiteering broadly and the trade in soldiers specifically.

Drawing on the history of arms regulation efforts, Lutfi warns us that even the best-intentioned regulatory efforts often lead to undesired consequences. Regulations, he suggests, create chokepoints that incentivise the use of hidden capillaries to circumvent these legal roadblocks. They encourage actors to manipulate the legal ambiguities in what can be traded, when, and where, and nourish the grey market. Moreover, Lutfi argues, at the heart of the problem lies the fact that some civilian goods have military applications as well. A commercial drone, for example, can be easily repurposed as a “kamikaze drone”; a soldier asked to do plumbing is hard to distinguish from an armed plumber in a conflict zone.

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Moving away from an abstract discussion of regulation, the second section of this volume explores detailed examples of differently placed actors within the private security and military industry. Starting with the actors on the darker side of the grey market, Alessandro Arduino and Nodirbek Soliev (page 53) highlight how a jihadi group, Malhama Tactical, has adopted corporate practices and modelled itself after the private security industry. The group produces high-quality promotional material, draws on transnational labour pools and funding, specialises in cutting-edge technologies such as drones, offers training to foreign troops and serves as a force multiplier. Much like legal PMSCs, it offers these services to customers around the world without expecting any political space in return.

Arduino and Soliev thus remind us that beyond offering plausible deniability to states, military privatisation also opens the doors for non-state actors to procure the means of violence from the marketplace. If Malhama Tactical trains enough surplus soldiers looking for opportunities elsewhere or catches on as a model for other illicit groups, we may see a heating up of various simmering conflicts. Beyond Islamist groups, separatist and dissident groups around the globe also could draw on these underground private military providers to further their causes. Even legitimate non-state actors such as mining and logistics firms could find in these groups a trained, cheap and disposable labour pool for running opaque operations in weakly regulated regions such as sub-Saharan Africa.

Ambiguities exist even on the other side of the legal-illegal spectrum. As Gyorgy Busztin (page 70) points out, despite having outlawed the use of mercenaries, the United Nations heavily relies on private contractors for a range of tasks, including security services. Officially, all UN missions are supposed to be protected by the host government. However, in conflict zones, where the state may not be fully functional, such protection cannot be guaranteed. The traditional solution to this problem is for the United Nations either to recruit locals independently or deploy peacekeeping troops. However, both options come with their own sets of problems. Hiring locals in a conflict zone where clan, tribal or ethnic divisions are rife may inadvertently skew the delicate balance in the country in question. Meanwhile, turning to peacekeeping troops, drawn largely from small developing countries such as Nepal and Fiji, is not ideal as these forces tend to receive poor compensation packages and terms of employment from their respective governments. Private contracting thus offers an alternative to dependence on host governments, local labour or foreign peacekeeping troops. Echoing the argument by Doug Brooks, Busztin suggests that privatisation provides the most cost-effective solution that helps reduce overheads and allows for the bulk of the UN budget to be spent on the humanitarian work it is intended for.

The last article in this volume, by Qing Liu and Simon Williams (page 83), explores the challenges and potentials within the Chinese private security sector. The authors begin by debunking allegations by the international media that Chinese PMSCs are merely the deniable arm of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). They point out that the PLA is in fact forbidden from contracting Chinese private security companies. They also note that while there is some space for Chinese state-owned enterprises to hire Chinese private security companies, these enterprises have by and large turned to Western security companies.

Liu and Williams argue that the main problem with the Chinese private security sector is that the various players are currently locked in a race to the bottom. Recent years have seen a number of new companies entering the industry. To compete with each other, these recent entrants have been undercutting each other on price point instead of investing in improving standards, equipment and practices. That only a few Chinese companies are ICoCA members is hence an indication of the industry’s focus on cost over building brand value.

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Together, the articles in this volume provide a glimpse into the erosion of the state’s monopoly on the means of violence and what this trend will mean for the future of warfare. If uniformed soldiers continue to be increasingly replaced by PMSCs operating in a legal grey area, the security architecture of the African continent, the Middle East and West Asia could be significantly transformed.

 

*Dr Alessandro Arduino is Principal Research Fellow at the Middle East Institute, NUS.

Dr Ameem Lutfi was a Research Fellow at the Middle East Institute, NUS, at the time this editorial was written. He is now a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan.

 

Image caption: A member of the close protection unit for the president of the Central African Republic (right), seen here on 4 August 2018. The unit comprises Russian private security company operatives from Sewa Security. Florent Vergnes / AFP.

 

End Notes

[1] US Congressional Budget Office, “Contractors’ Support of US Operations in Iraq”, August 2008, https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/110th-congress-2007-2008/reports/08-12-iraqcontractors.pdf; US Senate Committee on Armed Services, “Inquiry into the Role and Oversight of Private Security Contractors in Afghanistan”, 111th Congress, 2nd session, 28 September 2010, available via The Free Library by Farlex, https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Department+of+Defense+contractors+in+Iraq+and+Afghanistan%3A+background…-a0238094656

[2] For a similar argument, see Sean McFate, The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 162-167.

[3] Bellingcat, “Inside Wagnergate: Ukraine’s Brazen Sting Operation to Snare Russian Mercenaries”, 17 November 2021, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2021/11/17/inside-wagnergate-ukraines-brazen-sting-operation-to-snare-russian-mercenaries/.

[4] Matt Powers, “Making Sense Of Sadat, Turkey’s Private Military Company”, Warontherocks.com, 8 October 2021, https://warontherocks.com/2021/10/making-sense-of-sadat-turkeys-private-military-company/.

[5] Jon Gambrell, “Mysterious air base being built on volcanic island off Yemen, AP News, 25 May 2021, https://apnews.com/article/mysterious-air-base-volcanic-island-yemen-c8cb2018c07bb5b63e1a43ff706b007b.

[6] Martin Chulov, “Israel appears to confirm it carried out cyberattack on Iran nuclear facility, The Guardian, 12 May 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/11/israel-appears-confirm-cyberattack-iran-nuclear-facility.