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The secret world of corporate mercenaries
(David Isenberg, Asia Times, December 20, 2003)
Although the use of private sector firms involved in military affairs is not new, their role and impact is commanding increased attention and scrutiny . . . Currently, PMC (private military company) personnel are working, and dying, in places like Iraq, helping to provide security for its oil fields, provide training to the army's new Stryker brigade which has just been deployed there, and train Iraqi police and prison guards. They are recruited as operatives for the Central Intelligence Agency's paramilitary division. They are piloting drug fumigation planes in Colombia, where they have been killed and captured by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. They are training the Saudi National Guard, serving as bodyguards to interim President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, and providing security to US diplomats (where three of them, working for the firm Dyncorp, died in a bomb blast in October). They are recruited from big states like the US and Great Britain and microstates like Fiji. There are probably 10,000 to 20,000 private contractors working overseas just for the US Defense and State departments alone. . . . PMCs are no longer occupying just a small market niche out on the fringes of the developing world. They are now very big business and major corporations have sat up and taken notice. Firms like L-3 have acquired MPRI, ArmorGroup bought up Defense Systems Ltd, Computer Sciences Corporation bought DynCorp. . . . they "have become active on every continent but Antarctica, including in relative backwaters and key strategic zones where the superpowers once vied for influence". . . . Second, they are now indispensable to Washington. The US may be the world's only military superpower, but thanks to the wave of privatization and outsourcing, which has been sweeping the US for the past 20 years, the Pentagon finds itself in the somewhat disturbing position of not being able to deploy overseas without their assistance. Much like the American Express credit card motto, the Defense Department finds it can't leave home without them. Singer notes that from 1994 to 2002, the US Defense Department entered into more than 3,000 contracts with US based firms estimated at a contract value of more than US$300 billion. The areas being outsourced are not just minor ones but include a number of areas critical to the US military's core missions. . . . Singer worries that PMCs may engage in human rights abuses, for which they will not be held unaccountable. He cites secondhand reports about alleged napalm use by Executive Outcomes.

posted by Lorenzo 5:23 PM