The rise of the mercenary soldier for hire

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Typhoon
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The rise of the mercenary soldier for hire

Post by Typhoon »

Economist | Bullets for hire
OVER the past decade the business of renting out private soldiers has grown from a specialised niche into a global trade, worth as much as $100 billion, according to the United Nations. When the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was torched in September, locals hired by Blue Mountain, a British firm, were on guard. When a few weeks later African Union forces kicked the Shabab, a terrorist group, out of Kismayo, Somalia, South African private soldiers gave them training and support. In Iraq and Afghanistan more than 20,000 private guards are employed by the American government.

The industry’s growth has been paid for by Western governments, keen to limit the political cost of military boots on the ground. Supply has also come mostly from the West: 70% of firms are British or American. As the big conflicts of the past decade come to an end, however, private armies are beginning to chase new business, according to Sean McFate of America’s National Defence University. Industrial firms, which are increasingly setting up shop in unstable places, are expected to be a growing chunk of the customer base.
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Enki
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Re: The rise of the mercenary soldier for hire

Post by Enki »

The beginning of the end of the state's monopoly on violence.
Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.
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Juggernaut Nihilism
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Re: The rise of the mercenary soldier for hire

Post by Juggernaut Nihilism »

No one wants to listen, but Oswald Spengler predicted all this line by line. And it is not the end of the state's monopoly on violence. It is the beginning of Caesarism.
"The fundamental rule of political analysis from the point of psychology is, follow the sacredness, and around it is a ring of motivated ignorance."
Ibrahim
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Re: The rise of the mercenary soldier for hire

Post by Ibrahim »

The overwhelming majority of military history includes the use of mercenaries, and the brief period of near-total nation state control of armed forces is the exception rather than the rule.

The historical bible for the US implementation of mercenaries, and the personalities involved, remains Jeremy Scahill's exhaustively researched Blackwater:
http://www.amazon.com/Blackwater-Powerf ... ref=sr_1_1
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Alexis
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Re: The rise of the mercenary soldier for hire

Post by Alexis »

The trend is indeed unmistakable.

Mercenaries offer distinct advantages to developed countries:
- Less or no need for accountability when using mercenaries rather than regular soldiers
- Including accountability for lives of the mercenaries: figures about US losses in Iraq e.g. do not include loss of mercenaries
- Extending to accountability for actions of those mercenaries, some of whom will much more readily accept to perform certain particular types of counter-insurgency actions than regular soldiers. Also, they will far less risk to report them to media. Regular soldiers may lose it and usher in sadism or barbary (like Abu Ghraib) who bring nothing positive. On the other hand, if you want controlled, cold and efficient use of special interrogation methods, you're safer asking them from mercenaries

Also check:
The War Nerd take on mercenaries
One thing you notice more and more the longer you hang around this sleazy world is the way mainstream types can’t admit to the obvious. They always have to act shocked. So it’s like, “Bond Mogul Convicted of Fraud”-oh, the shock! Like they didn’t know, like everybody over the age of nine doesn’t know, that insider trading is the whole point of the market.
(...)
The Blackwater defectors have filed a sworn deposition in federal court that Blackwater zapped Iraqis at random, aimed to kill Muslims anywhere and any time they could, paid little Baghdadi girls a dollar a head, so to speak, for sexual services and just generally behaved like cartoon baddies. David Axe at Wired.com’s half-assed Inspector-gadget military blog “Danger Room” yukked it up with a headline calling Erik Prince a “super-villain” and called the defectors’ story “a fantastic litany of crimes, almost too fantastic to be believed.”
This is crap, of course. There’s nothing unbelievable or even unusual about what these Blackwater mercs did in Iraq. It’s what mercs always do, wherever they go.
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Alexis
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Re: The rise of the mercenary soldier for hire

Post by Alexis »

Ibrahim wrote:The overwhelming majority of military history includes the use of mercenaries, and the brief period of near-total nation state control of armed forces is the exception rather than the rule.
True.

And yet, present international right and conventions are compatible with strict punishment for mercenaries, who do not benefit of any protection by Laws of War.

According to Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts, (Protocol I), 8 June 1977:
Art 47. Mercenaries
1. A mercenary shall not have the right to be a combatant or a prisoner of war.
Consequence being that:
If, after a regular trial, a captured soldier is found to be a mercenary, then he can expect treatment as a common criminal and may face execution. As mercenary soldiers may not qualify as PoWs, they cannot expect repatriation at war's end.
During the 1976 Luanda Trial, three British nationals & one American national were sentenced to death by firing squad for crime of being mercenaries. They were executed by firing squad. This execution was obviously perfectly lawful and legitimate.
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Torchwood
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Re: The rise of the mercenary soldier for hire

Post by Torchwood »

Juggernaut Nihilism wrote:No one wants to listen, but Oswald Spengler predicted all this line by line. And it is not the end of the state's monopoly on violence. It is the beginning of Caesarism.
Caesarism actually predated the extensive use of mercenaries by Rome, it happened when conscript Romans transferred their allegiance from the constitutionally elected leaders to their generals, and it predates Caesar by some 50 years to the time of Marius and Sulla. The dependence on hired Barbarians (modern speech "poor third worlders") is from the decline of empire, coinciding with a bankrupt state, uncontrolled immigration, crushing taxation, loss of personal liberty, demographic decline ... oh wait, no parallels there, are there :twisted: ?

Actually historical parallels are misleading. In the modern era mass conscript armies span the period 1789-1952, and are no longer appropriate to modern warfare - Vietnam showed that, and they have not been used by the winning side in any subsequent conflict. Before the French leveé en masse at the Revolution, European armies were a rag tag of different nationalities.

I have always thought that America should have created a Foreign Legion, whose loyalty to the state has been more French than the French (who do, after all, have a tendency to revolution).
Ibrahim
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Re: The rise of the mercenary soldier for hire

Post by Ibrahim »

Alexis wrote:The trend is indeed unmistakable.

Mercenaries offer distinct advantages to developed countries:
- Less or no need for accountability when using mercenaries rather than regular soldiers
- Including accountability for lives of the mercenaries: figures about US losses in Iraq e.g. do not include loss of mercenaries
- Extending to accountability for actions of those mercenaries, some of whom will much more readily accept to perform certain particular types of counter-insurgency actions than regular soldiers. Also, they will far less risk to report them to media. Regular soldiers may lose it and usher in sadism or barbary (like Abu Ghraib) who bring nothing positive. On the other hand, if you want controlled, cold and efficient use of special interrogation methods, you're safer asking them from mercenaries

Also check:
The War Nerd take on mercenaries
One thing you notice more and more the longer you hang around this sleazy world is the way mainstream types can’t admit to the obvious. They always have to act shocked. So it’s like, “Bond Mogul Convicted of Fraud”-oh, the shock! Like they didn’t know, like everybody over the age of nine doesn’t know, that insider trading is the whole point of the market.
(...)
The Blackwater defectors have filed a sworn deposition in federal court that Blackwater zapped Iraqis at random, aimed to kill Muslims anywhere and any time they could, paid little Baghdadi girls a dollar a head, so to speak, for sexual services and just generally behaved like cartoon baddies. David Axe at Wired.com’s half-assed Inspector-gadget military blog “Danger Room” yukked it up with a headline calling Erik Prince a “super-villain” and called the defectors’ story “a fantastic litany of crimes, almost too fantastic to be believed.”
This is crap, of course. There’s nothing unbelievable or even unusual about what these Blackwater mercs did in Iraq. It’s what mercs always do, wherever they go.

The one mistake the "War Nerd" is making here, and its the mistake that military enthusiasts often make, is that this is how soldiers behave, period. Mercenaries are a little worse on average, but the real problem is that they have less accountability and oversight, which is something of a chicken/egg problem. Would the average USMC unit behave any better if they knew, as Blackwater knew, they they were immune to both Iraqi and US military law?

Given as we are unlikely to solve the problem of soldiers anytime soon, it would be good to create legal mechanisms to oversee and punish mercenaries as closely as we do regular soldiers, and to increase our oversight of both. When the paid armed men acting in our name are actually behaving worse than the Taliban then there is a problem that needs correction. They set a low bar, we should be able to sail over it.
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