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Comment by calgoo | Hacker News Reader

A really hope Karma / Murphy deals this guy what he deserves for the crimes that his company has done. Private militarizes armies should NEVER be allowed to exist. These people should never have the right to fight for governments, and should all be put in jail, especially Erik Prince. Also, the government officials that gave them the contracts should also be jailed as traitors to their countries. They are handing over military power to non-government actors to commit crimes without punishment. This needs to be stopped, right now.

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Although I believe that you are right, you are jumping here from "this particular mercenaries are criminals" to "the use of mercenaries is treason and should never be allowed", an that is a big jump.

In my opinion, if there are adequate mechanisms for the control of mercenaries (such as not allowing them to have more power than the public army, or the restriction to / of particular capabilities), having mercenaries in particular situations (such as people with a high degree of specialization) could be feasible.

The problem here is that they were given ample independent power with adequate supervision, again imho.

If you need an army of supervisors to oversee your mercenaries, you might as well just train more troops.

The efforts might not be the same.

Yeah, but considering your core competency is "kill the bad guys" rather than "manage and police subcontractors", you're more likely to get good results by sticking to what you know.

I'm not sure I understand you correctly. Neither a government in general nor particularly its army have only one core competency, and surely it's not "kill the bad guys". I'd actually say management is closer to their core competency. Which percentage of the army's personnel is shooting bullets, and which percentage of them are managing putting the bullets (and the troops) on the ground, analyzing where to put them, policing that they comply with what the government wants, recruiting, overseeing, intelligence, managing subcontractors and providers (gasoline, tanks, fences, uniforms, building construction, IT equipment, etc.)?

These ancillary skills in management are developed in order to achieve well-defined objectives: overpower (i.e. shoot) the bad guys and conclusively win conflicts. You cannot apply them to mercenaries; even if you replicate the chain of command down to sergeant level or whatever, their incentives are fundamentally different: mercenaries have a fundamental interest in keeping the fighting going as long as possible, because they are paid to fight.

A regular army is supposed to go out, win a conflict ("shoot the bad guys"), go home, get decorated, enjoy pensions and glory; that's the core mission, and its core competency is (or rather should be) to get that done in the shortest possible amount of time (or even not getting engaged in the first place). A mercenary only gets paid as long as there is an ongoing conflict involving a wealthy-enough client. He's not interested in ending the conflict; thinking you can police him in seeing it some other way is just deluded.

I agree with you on the conflict of interest that the mercenaries have, but I think that it extends to regular armies also.

An army that doesn't fight is a budget that is claiming to be cut, and you can see that discussion taking place in several european countries. In the United States, however, they have wars to fight, and so the army and its space is a huge industry, with one client, the US government; and if there are no wars to fight, it will quickly collapse.

There are in fact a lot of accusations that the military industry in the United States instigates action for that specific purpose. So they don't only keep alive the fire, as the mercenaries - they also push to start new ones! And I can tell you, the Army has more political force than mercenaries to do this.

I'm not disagreeing, but at least with regular armies those problems are indeed identified as problems. With mercenaries, it's just what they do.

Merceneries aren't bound by the same rules. If they want a specific weapon, they don't follow government procurement rules, you think black water/xe reaches out to minority and women owned businesses first? They don't have a VA. They don't don't have public pensions. They don't have congressional oversight.

It's a gimmick to create "littler government" and circumvent the incredible beaurocracy that the military itself has helped create. It's also a jobs program and wealth distribution channel for a very specific class of people. At the end of it all, it also serves some specific military needs, in Iraq black water didn't follow the same rules of engagement that the military did and military leadership wanted that.

While i do agree that they could exist, is that its really hard to control. Who polices the police? Of course this happens in the government controlled armies as well. However, in small private firms, at least to me it feels like it would be a lot harder to report something, or to refuse something.

So if there is a need for these forces, they need to be a lot more open about their operations with the government. With more oversight then even the regular troops and accountability up to CEO level of the company for actions performed by their armies.

Well actually that's a good point. Who polices the police? It's the other forces of the government, which ultimately rely on the army forces. If you get a rogue police department that revolts, you need the army. If you get a rogue mercenary that needs to be controlled, you will need the army. And even if you get a section of the army revolting, you will of course need the rest of the army.

None of that precludes that some parts of that structure to be private. You just need to have a structure that is resilient to non-compliance.

So I actually agree with you: if the United States want to use mercenaries, they should improve how they do it. But then again, there might be a way to do it that works.

The concepts of police, laws, courts are concepts that make sense within a country. There seems to be a drive toward treating the world as a sort of country where universals laws, courts and police have some authority globally, usually dictated and controlled by the permanent members of the UN security council.

I do not think this is practical or even desirable.

When people in Germany get their bank accounts seized by the FBI because they bought Cuban Cigars from a shop in Denmark, and it's justified with "US Embargo of Cuba", it becomes easily noticeable that it's not the laws of the UN governing the world.

Instead, more and more, the US is trying to become a world government, with 6.7 billion people affected by their choices, indirectly taxed by their choices (US corps replacing local companies and transporting the profit out of the country), without any representation.

This is a very unbalanced situation, and is just asking for a revolution. Which will end up making life worse for almost everyone.

We need a fair world government if we want to do these things, and that means representation of all people.

Obviously, the US, which would lose the most from this, objects.

That's actually I meant by permanent member of the UN security council. A club of 5 members which list will never be revised and who aspire to rule the world.

> A club of 5 members which list will never be revised and who aspire to rule the world.

Until next war.

Cockroaches will rule the world after the next world war...

Or apes ;-)

> When people in Germany get their bank accounts seized by the FBI because they bought Cuban Cigars from a shop in Denmark, and it's justified with "US Embargo of Cuba", it becomes easily noticeable that it's not the laws of the UN governing the world.

Or the weakness of those countries towards US that can be explained by recent history.

In war everything goes. So if you introduce people like these into war, expect them to be put in situations sooner or later where they can do anything any other soldier can do with a similar if not greater level of impunity. It's naive to think you can control the social and business aspect of these sorts of things with just a bit of policy.

That's a very nationalistic position. You are basically saying that every soldier should have the nationality of the army he fights for. Mercenaries are a very old tradition and I don't see what is intrinsically wrong with it, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_mercenaries.

And what about the European and American nationals who joined the kurds to fight ISIS in Syria? Are they traitors and should be jailed because they fight for a foreign army?

And their are Uk nationals who join the US armed forces

Not to mention the French Foreign Legion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Foreign_Legion or the UK's use of Nepalese Ghurkas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurkha

Foreign Legion and The Gurkhas are not private mercenary units.

These are regular army units where the enlisted are not native nationals.

The first sentence from linked article about French Foreign Legion says that The French Foreign Legion is a military service branch of the French Army established in 1831, unique because it was created for foreign nationals willing to serve in the French Armed Forces.

I repeat if it did not sink in: Foreign Legion and The Gurkhas are not private mercenary units, they are not private armies.

The main argument of calgoo was that "Private militarizes armies should NEVER be allowed to exist.".

This is very far from being "a very nationalistic position". He did not say that foreign nationals should not be enlisted into national armies.

So please, could we stop this bullshit now?

I didn't mean to imply that they're mercenaries, merely that they are fighting for a "foreign" army.

Yes, I understand your position, and I hope that you now understand the difference between calgoo and cm2187 claims and understand the context in what you made your comment.

I think that there is a difference between an individual who volunteers in a foreign army and a company of paid professionals outside of army formation.

I do not have definitive answer (opinion) for your last question.

>They are handing over military power to non-government actors to commit crimes without punishment.

Perhaps the issue is that this power to commit crimes without punishment exists in the first place. Doesn't matter whether the government does it themselves or they delegate.

... as opposed to the unpunished crimes acknowledged to have been committed by State actors?

I really don't see why you draw a distinction. War crimes are war crimes, and should be punished regardless of the perpetrators.

Of course they should, and I dont argue against that. However, I see private actors such as Blackwater (or whatever he calls it today), that directly make money of the war, and are not held accountable at all are a huge problem that needs to be dealt with.

Regarding state actors, I am 100% for punishing them, but see this as a bigger issue of corruption of morals and ethics in general. In the military i see the issue as a failure in the oversight processes and support frameworks. Military has always been secretive about their mistakes etc, which in my mind is understandable (not excusable). However, it seams like the compartmentalizing of the different areas of operations have completely sealed off the solders from any kind of support framework. Which means that anything that should be reported, never gets to the people who needs to see it.

This last part applies to the Blackwater types as well, with probably even more pressure to not do anything and look the other way etc.

Sure. But you seemed to be implying that just being a mercenary - regardless of whether you committed any war crimes - ought to be in and of itself a crime. Perhaps I misunderstood.

I still don't see the difference. Maybe state-military generals don't stand to profit directly, but they have plenty to gain from war - promotion, influence, status - money is attractive not for itself but for what it represents. So I don't think there's any inherent problem with one that doesn't occur with the other - either way you need to beware of principal-agent problems and ensure that your actions are actually working towards your goals.

The U.S government is his biggest customer since the Iraq war in 2003.

The Iraq war was a turning point in this area, actually. Stretched between two active conflicts far from each other, and having re-structured the US military as a smaller army of highly-specialised troops, there were not enough boots on the ground to maintain security across the whole country. Enter unregulated mercenary armies.

Sure enough, the US is re-learning why mercenary armies have always been a bad idea throughout history.

Hardly surprising, given the size and propensity of the US to engage in armed conflict with organized fighting forces. (Who else on the planet could possibly be a bigger customer than the US?)

What is the difference between government fighting wars and PMCs fighting wars? Military power is military power, and government leaders are no more anointed and divine than PMCs leaders.

The age of kings is long gone.

The difference is a guy becoming a billionaire fighting a war, and then facilitating / fomenting more wars to make more money.

Governments have quite a history of doing the same.

That's one reason democracy is a good thing ... the people getting sent to fight and die have a say, less moral hazard, since most people don't benefit from war. If a king or a billionaire can get rich fighting a war and has the power to make it happen, you're going to have more wars.

It's probably better for civilization if a democratic government has a monopoly on extreme force like bombers, WMDs. War is sufficiently stupid, it's probably better if entrepreneurs don't disrupt it, and the military remains the one 100% socialist enterprise in America.

Why? Its not like PMC's have ever done anything that is exceptionally more cruel than any state armed force. It's not like they're going to be much worse at preventing civilian casualties.

When the United States left Iraq it left a huge security void which has allowed ISIS to thrive. Why would it be immoral for Baghdad to have hired a PMC to help defend against ISIS? It's not like Iraqi troops were somehow magically killing less civilians. When these cases happen they are written off as casualties and no one is ever punished.

The utter cowardice and incompetence of the Iraqi army has helped for 8 Million to live under the control of ISIS. Do you think these people would care if it was an Iraqi or Syrian who may accidentally kill them instead of a well paid mercenary? Do you think that it is more moral to allow these people to live under the constant threat of rampant murder or rape than it would be to allow for private militarizes to exist?

It seems to me that western soldiers aren't really supposed to die anymore. Every single lost American solider somehow matters 1000x more than some Iraqi, Syrian, or Ukrainian. Despite the US easily having the ability to eliminate the ISIS threat it does not. There just isn't the political will to send Americans into harms way. Meanwhile many security forces lack the capability of actually handling the threats they are encountering.

PMC's could possibly solve this. No one cares if a mercenary dies. I don't see a well paid mercenary abandoning their post, tanks, equipment, along with a city of a million without having fired a shot. You can't say the same about the Iraqi army. Even should PMC's have somehow a double or triple civilian casualty rate it would still be more moral for those civilians to die than allow millions of people to fall into the murderous regime of ISIS. Of course it will always be preferable for state forces to be able to handle the threats they encounter. But given the reality that many cannot and will not receive the boots on the ground assistance to win their respective conflicts and protect their citizenry, would it really be immoral for a private force to pick up the slack?

It's not like this man was trying to see fighter to ISIS or North Korea. He was trying to create services that would assist state actors against terrorists. Given that no one else is wiling to provide assistance with this, I cannot help but feel that the ends justify the means here.

Both France and the UK effectively employ Mercenarys the Foreign Legion and The Gurkhas. And arguably the Swiss Guard are as well.

Foreign Legion, The Gurkhas and Swiss Guard are not private mercenary units.

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