The privatisation of war

By Paul Tate

The abuse of prisoners that took place at Abu Ghraib was shocking. But equally as shocking was the revelation that the interrogation of prisoners had been outsourced to private contractors. The creeping privatisation of this conflict is only just coming to light.
It is estimated that there are now 20,000 plus private ‘enterprise soldiers’ in Iraq – one for every 10 soldiers. Indeed, there are more private military employees on the ground than troops from any one ally, including Britain. Private Military Firms (PMFs) are big business in the new Iraq. According to US army estimates, out of the $87bn that will be spent on US troops, a third of that, nearly $30bn, will be paid to PMFs, which carry out military roles from logistics and local army training to guarding installations and convoys, and as demonstrated by the incidents in Abu Ghraib - interrogating prisoners. Peter Singer, a Brookings Institute scholar and author of Corporate Warrior, aptly refers to the situation in Iraq more as, ‘the coalition of the billing, rather than willing”.
A number of factors have led to the growth of PMFs. The downsizing of the US military in the post cold war world has lead to an urgent need for hired guns for the overstretched US military in the post 9/11 world. Ex-military personnel now find they can earn $100,000 a year doing the same job they once did for peanuts. But the growth of private contractors has also been encouraged at the highest levels of the US administration. Back in 1991, when Vice President Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defence for George Bush Sr., he gave Kellogg Brown and Root (a Halliburton subsidiary) a contract to advise the US military on how to privatise the army. Since that time there has been a 10-fold increase in the number of private personnel working for the US military and the industry has recorded a staggering $100bn in revenue. The result is that a huge ‘conflict industry’ has grown up around the Pentagon. The proponents of ‘privatised warfare’, including Rumsfeld and Cheney, defend the increased use of PMFs on the grounds that they reduce overheads and therefore save the US government (taxpayer) money – given the number of private contractors now active and the vast sums involved, this argument is extremely debatable. It is true however, that short term contracts mean that mercenaries can be hired and fired at will. They can also be sent to conflict zones around the world at a moments notice and are currently active on all fronts in the ‘war on terror’ including: the hunt for Ben Laden on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border; the Philippines, Central Asia and what those on the industry now refer to as, ‘the goldmine’ of Iraq.
The use of “hired guns” clearly has many advantages. Private security contractors are not accountable to either military or Iraqi law for their actions. Although one US soldier has been given the maximum one year sentence and another six are facing court-martial for their role in the abuses at Abu Ghraib, employees of CACI International, harshly criticised by Major General Taguba in the military investigation, will face no such fate. This is due to the fact that ‘civilian contractors’ cannot be court-martialled under the military code of conduct. In addition, in June 2003, Paul Bremer issued a decree which specifically excluded PMFs from Iraqi law. Neither are they subject to US law given that criminal acts such as those witnessed in Abu Ghraib were committed abroad and in some cases by contractors working for the US military, but not US citizens. Examples of other criminal acts such as the human trafficking and prostitution rackets in Bosnia committed by DynCorp, another security contractor active in Iraq, highlight the dangers. In this case, as in the case of Abu Ghraib, the ‘civilian’ personnel responsible were simply ‘relieved of their duties’ and no criminal charges have been brought.
One can’t help thinking that the increased use of private contractors is rather convenient for US military chiefs attempting to cut corners in the ‘war on terror.’ As Phillip Carter, an ex-military US army officer now at the University of California (UCLA) notes, “the situation is analogues to that other legal grey zone in Guantanamo Bay”. Therefore, the more cynical among us may draw the conclusion that the very fact that these companies are operating in a legal loophole is what makes them such an attractive proposition to strategists in the Pentagon. They can be used to do the dirty work of the military and CIA, while still maintaining relative immunity. This makes them a very useful tool in the ‘war on terror’. The privatisation of US forces not only enables the US to wage wars by proxy using private militias recruited from around the globe, it also, as Peter Singer points out, “allows them to wage these wars without the hindrance of congressional or media oversight”.
Another interesting point is that the pentagon keeps no record concerning the amount of private mercenaries killed in Iraq. According to Singer, It is estimated that 350 mercenaries have been killed in Iraq since the start of the conflict and hundreds more injured. These figures are not included in the regular body count put out by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). This is very convenient for a White House increasingly concerned with US body bags in the run up to the elections. In addition, it is no coincidence that by the CPA’s own estimations, the number of private contractors will increase to 30,000 after the ‘handover of sovereignty’ on June 30, largely due to the fact that the Green Zone itself will then be privatised.
As Karim al-Gawahry of al-Akram newspaper has pointed out, “the Bush administration desperately wants to bring at least some of the boys back home during the forthcoming election campaign, hence the increase in private companies”. This will allow the White House to claim that US troops are being pulled out and thus divert media attention from the conflict. The body bags will still be arriving in the middle of the night but the cameras will be focused on the ‘grand homecoming.’
So here we have it, neo-liberal capitalism taken to extremes. What we now have in Iraq is a situation where private companies are operating with impunity – outside the scope of international law. Not only that, these companies are making billions of dollars, are not subject to any chain of command and as long as the money keeps rolling in have little incentive to leave. On the contrary, they have a vested interest in stretching out the conflict as evident by their ‘political activities’ in Washington. In 2002, $32m was spent by these firms on political lobbying and $12m was donated to political parties, with the George Bush’s Republican Party taking the lion’s share of the cake. And guess what? Among the largest donators was Dick Cheney’s old firm – Halliburton.