Truths about PMC's
John Robb has a blurb up about a few inconvenient truths about Private Military Contractors. The most important one is the quote he has on the top from an Iraqi government spokesperson saying that if they drove Blackwater out of the country, there would be a security vacuum. The Iraqi mission is dependent upon PMC's, in large part because the US continues to try and fight the war with its military still on a peacetime footing and manpower level. It also fits in nicely with his second point.
Scalable. There are currently 20,000 PMC trigger pullers in Iraq. These men are guarding facilities and key people across the country. This is likely nearly the same number of trigger pullers (as opposed to support personnel) as the entire US military currently has in the country. Without these men, the US military would barely be able to field a force large enough to patrol Baghdad.
As for Robb's other points, they are good in general terms, but I don't think they apply all that well to the Iraq conflict specifically.
Efficient. If you count the costs of 8 to 9 support personnel (in the DoD's extremely long bureaucratic "tail") needed to field every US soldier in the field and state-side rotations, the high pay for individual private military employees is a bargain (certainly less than half the cost for a government soldier, not even counting the savings associated with medical care/retirements).
Ordinarily this might be true, but two things regarding Iraq make this less true. For one, the PMC's are supplied and otherwise looked after much like the regular military troops are, and thanks to the lovely "cost-plus" contracts most of these companies have, it has encouraged them to create as many layers of bureaucracy as they can.
What it does allow the US to do, is hide the cost in casualties. While the number of US military dead is widely kept track of, the number of contractors killed is far less clear. Even the best numbers are estimates based on insurance claims and other sources. The last such number I had seen listed the death toll at over a thousand, but those are a thousand deaths you won't see in any official tally.
Contingent. Unlike the hordes of bureaucratic Defense contractors that will permanently infest the halls of the DoD, private military companies field mission specific employees. IF there is a withdrawal from Iraq, there will be bust in the PMC industry as firms quickly shed employees.
This is the point that has always worried me. While I think Robb may be too optimistic about some of the PMC's not becoming permanent fixtures within the DOD, there should certainly be less demand for their services by the US government. What worries me, of course, is that companies faced with a slow-down in one market usually look to expand their operations to off-set that slow-down.
However you slice it, the prospect of tens of thousands of unemployed mercenaries experienced in counterinsurgency operations against a civilian population in urban settings should cause some concern. Blackwater has already shown up on America's streets, providing security in New Orleans after Katrina, and there are likely to be other cases where the hiring of politically-connected contractors will appeal to certain US leaders.
Outside the US, there are more than a few countries and corporations who could make use of such individuals to help "pacify" unruly populations standing in the way of resource exploitation.
And the one that has always given me pause for thought; what if some of these enterprising and looking at the unemployment line mercenaries take Robb's Global Guerillas lessons to heart and set themselves up as both problem and cure? The oil disruptions in Iraq and Nigeria have shown that GG's can make a state pay a hefty price if their demands are not met.
Oil bunkering and protection money are just other types of mercenary activity. Once your loyalty and mission are no longer attached to the state, the legal constraints on your behaviour are also lifted. My guess is that more than a few of these PMC employees, if not the companies themselves, will join in the global bazaar of violence that Robb has been tracking.
By massively increasing their use of mercenary forces to help fight their little war in Iraq, the US has helped sow the seeds of its, and other states, destruction, by giving away its monopoly on violence into private hands with their own agendas.
