Literature Review

United States military doctrine normally has centered on the use of the capabilities of the U.S. military alone. Mercenary use has traditionally been a doctrinal option. With the rise of the Rumsfeld Doctrine, there has been a heavy increase of the use of private military contractors in U.S military operations. Many problems in military operations have been caused due to the use of outside private actors in U.S military operations. Among these is the issue of oversight. Where a U.S Marine carrying out an inhumane action will be promptly punished for his or her action, a mercenary under private U.S military contract does not necessarily answer to military law.
One of the earliest academics to bring up this issue was from Colonel Bruce Grant of the U.S Army War College. His study examined privatized military assistance as a tool of U.S. foreign policy. He examined a trend at the time of his writing in 1998, where private military firms were allowed to provide military assistance in various ways, be it in direct intervention or via training of foreign armies.
Grant asserts this phenomenon has developed without traditional congressional oversight or public knowledge. He furthers his argument by saying that this removes military expertise from public accountability and corrupts the U.S military. Furthermore, by relying on these private actors who are motivated primarily by profit, major problems can be caused that can detract from U.S foreign policy objectives.
Kenneth B. Moss follows a similar vein of analysis to Grant in his analysis of mercenaries. However, his analysis, unlike Grant’s, does not just cover PMCs alone, but rather blends them together in an extended analysis of the entire Iraq conflict as a reflection of the second Bush administration’s foreign policy. This analysis ties in many macro-scale facets not necessarily explored in PMC-centric works regarding the Iraq and Afghanistan war.
Paul R. Verkuil’s analysis of the privatization of military functions reflects an angle regarding a military’s responsibility to the state. In particular he argues towards an idea of the privatization of government functions such as the military threatening democracy in the United States. For Verkuil, this is mainly due the issue of accountability as a private corporate entity has no accountability to anyone but it’s shareholders.
Peter Singer reflects a similar view to Verkuil’s in his own work Corporate Warriors. However, he stays somewhat more professional and academic in his writing and delves deeper into the functional workings of the relationship between the military and the state. He argues about the oversight issues in light of the U.S. military’s increased reliance on mercenaries. Traditionally, militaries are a government force that are in service of the state, and therefore are accountable to its citizens. By relying on private militaries, the problem of oversight comes into play, as the primary loyalty of the fighting force is to their profit, not to the citizens of a state.
Phillip Gourevitch’s work on the conditions of Iraqi prisons, in particular Abu Grahib reflects a lack of oversight in current overall U.S. military operations in Iraq. While the analysis in this book is more focused on prisons in wartime the analysis of PMCs operating U.S. military prisons, helps illustrate the PMC’s inhumane actions. There are many instances in this book where PMCs not necessarily assigned to the prison stop by to help prison guards in torture of prisoners. On the whole, Gourevitch provides excellent recounting of particular incidents due to his journalistic style. However, there is little in the way of academic distance in his writing. He does illustrate the lack of oversight in an up close manner and analysis however not done by any other writer.
By comparison, Jeremy Scahill is somewhat more removed in his analysis. He covers the negative effects caused by a lack of adequate oversight on PMC operations in Iraq. Problems that have arisen have primarily negatively affected civilians within the mercenaries’ areas of operation. Unnecessary shoot outs and lack of distinguishing of civilians from viable targets have left a lot of civilians dead. Scahill’s analysis ends up being far reaching, but without being too broad.
Scahill delves deeper into the issue of lack of oversight going as far as to point out the unsupervised contracts being made by the mercenary firms and other actors. As profit is the primary motive, often operations given specific stipulations by the U.S military are not met, such as minimum equipment needed as well as recommended manpower for an operation. This can result in undermanned and underequipped operations due to the private mercenary firm wanting to reap the monetary savings for additional profits.
Diana Rasnor and Robert Bauman argue that the profit motive encouraged by mercenary firms overall are making the U.S. military weaker as an organization of the long term. One cited reason is that the higher contractual payoffs offered by a limited term PMC contract offer far more money in the short term than a long-term military salary. As a result, a lot of expertise is leaving the U.S. military and therefore weakening the overall experience structure. As such, future U.S. military operations may well be more reliant on private military firms that have drained the military of its expertise. Another side effect is that U.S. military operations will only get more reliant on PMC firms to get things done. In a sense, the current trend is likened to the Roman Empire’s reliance on mercenaries towards the end of its reign.
The Human Rights First publication on private military actors in the recent Iraq and Afghanistan area of operations lay out primarily statistical data regarding the human cost of using PMCs in such a vast scale. The general consensus is grim. However, this book also gives statistical data for mercenary operations dating back as far as the 1990s, showing a large body of data existed prior to the negative consequences of mercenary use where oversight was lacking.
In a similar vein, the HPG report on PMCs from 2008 narrows its scope on PMC operations, and looks towards their ability to help in humanitarian situations. The focus is less on emphasizing the lack of oversight, but rather showing the use of PMCs in helping keep security in warzones where humanitarian operations are being held. The report provides statistics showing the difference in security and effectiveness in humanitarian operations without PMC help.
Overall, the report seems somewhat more positive on PMCs in this aspect, as this is a specific style of operation PMCs are not really known for operating under. In this case, the oversight measure seems to be based purely on the PMCs having to rely on good public relations during a humanitarian operation in order to keep a good corporate profile. As far as the analysis goes, the humanitarian focus separates this report from other major works in the area of PMC studies.
In a similar vein there is Robert Young Pelton’s personal experiences with mercenaries as recounted in Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror. The engaging of mercenaries on a personal level brings about it a different viewpoint than most other books. Pelton notes the good and the bad that come with mercenary work for the operators he spends time with. In addition, he goes through some analysis of PMC history as far back as the 1990s with Executive Outcomes, and the larger issues that came with lack of oversight of a well financed private army. An example of this is his coverage and in depth investigation of the connections of former Executive Outcomes operators and their attempt to stage a coup in Equatorial Guinea. Pelton’s writing, is similar to Gourevitch’s in the sense that it presents a personal look at an aspect of PMCs. His analysis of Executive Outcomes operations and their broader connections to other events help illustrate the broader narrative of PMC history. However, he does little to bring in the broader scope of PMCs in the Iraq War, where Scahill and the Human Rights report succeed.





Works Cited
Gourevitch, Philip, and Errol Morris. Standard Operating Procedure. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print.
-Grant, Bruce. U.S. Military Expertise for Sale: Private Military Consultants as a Tool of Foreign Policy. Carlisle: U.S. Army War College, 1998. Print.
-Human Rights First. Private Security Contractors at War: Ending the Culture of Impunity. New York: Human Rights First, 2008. Print.
-Moss, Kenneth B. Undeclared War and the Future of U.S. Foreign Policy. Washington D.C: Woodrow Wilson Center, 2008. Print.
-Pelton, Robert Young. Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror. 1st ed. New York: Three Rivers, 2007. Print.
-Rasor, Dina, and Robert Bauman. Betraying Our Troops. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.
-Scahill, Jeremy. Blackwater The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. New York: Nation, 2007. Print.
-Singer, Peter W. Corporate Warriors : The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry. New York: Cornell UP, 2008. Print.
-Stoddard, Abby, Adele Harmer, and Victoria DiDomenico. The Use of Private Security Providers and Services in Humanitarian Operations. Publication no. 27. London: HPG, 2008. Print.
-Verkuil, Paul R. Outsourcing Sovreignty: Why Privatization of Government Functions Threatens Democracy and What We Can Do About It. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.