How private armies will remake modern warfare
economist.com
economist.com
I've seen a narrative in few places, often from libertarians who don't embrace the state but also don't believe that people would live peacefully without it. They posit some variation of: the wealthy don't gain on the net from the security provided by the state, because they could provide their own private security more cheaply. Of course, anyone powerful enough to protect you in the absence of the state has no reason to work for you rather than enslave you. John Galt, the engineer, isn't a free man without the state. He's a slave to a warlord, one who puts his talents to work amassing wealth for himself.
That's what makes the possibility raised by the author terrifying. Because in the long run, when private armies take over for states, the "wealthy groups or individuals" aren't Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. They're feudal lords--people who earn their position in society by being skilled in war.
I think the libertarian point is that this same logic applies to states themselves.
Note how recently polities have taken away the freedom of restaurants to choose to allow smoking, selling certain sizes of drinks; the freedom of parents to choose their children's education and so forth.
Any policy related to the things you've mentioned were or were not enacted by popular support, on those issues in particular. Brutal slaver warlord can take away restaurants, high fructose corn syrup, and your children with a single vote.
Nice try, but no dice.
Most of those things weren't voted on. Most of them were decided by fiat of the slaver warlord (a mayor) and couple of his family members (some board or commission).
Who decided more democracy creates the best government?
Terrifying. And it has been going on for a long while. Remember when shops in the US had the right to sell their wares to whoever they wanted, back in the good old days before the Civil Rights movements? Those were the days. </sarcasm>
More seriously, regulation takes some freedom away, but you have to look at the big picture. Smoking is harmful, even second-hand smoking, and public health efforts to reduce its effects should be applauded and not lamented.
Oh great, then just ban it completely. And ban alcohol and sugar, and all sorts of other things that are "bad" for us.
And it's silly to try and convince someone to applaud vs lament. Do you seriously think you're going to change anyone's opinion?
Some people just hate individual responsibility. You would think that on HN, it would be different, but even this place has been infected with destructive, freedom-hating statist thinking. What a shame.
2. Eventually conflicts between warlords lead to increased inequality between various private 'states' and thus consolidation - and from this monopoly of private armies a state emerges. To maintain this monopoly and to maintain stability and create a sense of legitimacy (and thus preventing new competing warlords from arising) it introduces policies like public bureaucrats only indirectly controlled by the individuals who have actual power, who act for the benefit of the public; and depending on the era, an emperor that governs for all, or allow the public to elect some officials, - the economy prospers and generate more taxes for the rulers.
3. This morphs into a more or less fair and democratic and equal society that may last for several decades or even centuries, as the economy booms, inequality is introduced. More affluent individuals are able to afford better education and better connections to their children, who are more able to compete for positions of power. The state slowly becomes encumbered by politicians who are controlled by a tiny minority of individuals who control key sectors of the economy. Go to 1.
"The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been" - Romance of the three kingdoms
With a couple of exceptions, I have thus described the revolving history of China from the Zhou to modern times.
Alternatively, would nuclear weapons not make conflicts between warlords either token or devastating?
Does the reliance on extremely high-cost support and weapon systems (satellites, aircraft carriers) not make the barrier to entry for warlords impossibly high?
While the idea of history always repeating itself is appealing, I fail to see how this example can apply in a modern world. Too much has changed, and short of a "mad max" regression, I don't see how feudal China can repeat itself here.
US interference (incompetent due to corruption and graft?) in Middle Eastern politics allowed ISIS, a warlord-like state, to capture high-cost support and weapons systems and used them successfully against the Iraqi government, a government whose army was less than competent due to the corruption within. The Iraqi government is backed by a country with nuclear weapons and missiles and drones and fighter jets, and yet ISIS persists.
Many US departments are being militarised, from the police to the IRS[1] to the Department of Education[2] to the Environmental Protection Agency[3] and the USDA[4]. I wonder if it's because many in the government itself see militarisation as a necessary reaction to the threat of private weapons, which as you can read in the article is an re-emerging trend. If nuclear weapons and missiles and carriers and drone strikes are sufficient to prevent the US government from being ousted, why is it busy acquiring conventional weapons? If the US government is relying on conventional weapons to hold off the tide of the privately armed, can mere conventional weapons be enough to cause it's --censored--?
1. http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/jeff-duncan-irs-rifle-...
2. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/18/us-school-distr...
3. http://www.thearkansasproject.com/no-federal-bureaucrats-don...
The DoD has been the only major department with the budget, the expert personnel, the logistics, and the organizational will to tackle what should be civilian nation building exercises. It's a poor plan to put a 21 year old marine in charge of securing and rebuilding a village. An armies job is to "go places, kill people, and break their stuff." But for the last few decades the choice for the US has been to send our DoD personnel, or noone.
Because we've increasingly leaned on the DoD for these actions that's bled over to other organizations. A prime example there is the transfer of absurd materials to LEO under the LESO and Excess Property Programs. See also the budget of DHS/ICE/CBP which simply exploded in the last decade by following the militarization path.
If we want to stop the militarization of our society we need to fix our civilian agencies and stop relying on the martial.
I suspect you may mean the Balkans? And the Balkans have actually been a pretty successful outcome.
In Afghanistan and especially Iraq the State department was not allowed to do their job. See [1] where:
Secretary of State [Colin] Powell recently wrote to Defense Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld, urging that State oversee humanitarian assistance, an outcome that would help internationalize the effort. The United Nations and others, like the European Union, have experiences in the past relating to state-building. On the other hand, there are other elements in the administration, notably in the Department of Defense, which are beginning to try to invent a blueprint and map out the capacities in order to have the United States undertake this task alone.
As you note, the DoD took over this role. But it wasn't because of lack of interest of State.
[1] http://www.cfr.org/iraq/council-expert-says-state-department...
Yes, some businesses have more money than entire countries. Because we allow it.
It was the King who decided who was a Baron, an Earl or a Lord, and it was on the King's grace that they kept that position. Piss him off, act disloyal and you'll be stripped of your rank. If your subjects stay loyal... well then you get things like The Harrowing of the North.
The US Congress has 535 members, and we're not talking about individuals we're talking about corporations, which themselves are made up of shareholders. There's no formal loyalty structure.
Your feudal Lord granted you land so you could provide for your family, and in return pay rent to him. When your kid went missing in the woods, it was the reeve and the Lord's men who helped search. When your barn roof collapsed, it was the reeve and the Lord's men who helped dig out your animals, and it was your Lord who stabled your animals. It might have been mutually beneficial, but it was still at his will.
A shareholder is invested in a company because they think it will be profitable, but most large shareholders are more invested in the industry than the individual. So if they think something might jeopardize their investment, they'll jump and go invest in another company. The managers and employees? To them it's just a job, if they think their company is going to go up against the US Government they'll be out the door and pretend they've never even heard of the Globex Corporation, even if they're wearing a company emblazoned jacket.
I see no loyalty structure that would be capable of supporting anyone trying to be a neolord. When the US government decides your company has gotten too big, it'll just nationalize it or split it.
Edit: Nice HN, act like reddit. You can't come up with a valid argument against my post so you downvote it.
Yes we get it this is some distopian idea, but it'll never happen. The closest we've ever come to an organization like this was the White Company, and they--like these private contractors will--stayed on the good side of the super power of the time, the Papacy, because their existence was entirely predicated on the grace of being allowed to exist.
And sometimes the Baron raised an army, killed the King, and took the throne for himself.
This dramatically understates the dependency a King had upon his Lords. Yes, a King could strip someone of his rank, but if he did it too often or too capriciously and he'd soon been replaced.
You see this in democracies too: interest groups (whether they be companies or other groups) are quite happy to remove their support for a member if their interests no longer align and if another credible candidate appears that is more aligned with their interests.
In between those you have individuals that are active. Just consider the jockeying between Dell and Icahn when Dell announced plans to take the namesake company private.
Instead, these private mercenaries raise the possibility that non-state actors of great means could accomplish minor military objectives using small amounts of conventional force. And I doubt very seriously that American private military firms can take action without the tacit approval of the someone in the United States government.
I'm much more worried about the possibility that these firms are being paid with laundered tax dollars to accomplish objectives that I don't know about or wouldn't approve of. See the Iran-Contra affair.
"In the end, though, Mr McFate tends to overstate his case. Private armies may indeed play a role in failed and failing states, but it is unlikely that modern mercenaries will become more important than the standing armies of NATO or China soon."
Also, most of the people being labeled mercenaries these days aren't mercenaries. There's a big difference between people you hire to fight a battle and people you hire for base or convoy security.
The weapons acquisition program strategy of the US is defined as much by the defence industry as by the needs in the wars the US is actually involved in. You see US soldiers buying their own weapons, and even on a larger scale you have things like the US buying Toyotas off show-room floors to take to to Iraq[3].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_(vehicle)
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_War
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_(vehicle)#Iraq_War
The reason that "real wars" aren't fought any more is the weapons we have (nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, ships, planes, etc.) and the weapons our potential opponents have as well as experiences in the world wars together convince everyone that open war is absolutely undesirable. We build and maintain advanced weapons for the explicit purpose of not needing to use them.
The weapons accession strategy has much to do with maintaining the ability to manufacture advanced weapons to use against an advanced enemy so that we can continue to prevent such a war.
That's exactly the point. Proxy wars are how things have worked since WW2, and now they are getting even more complicated because they often involve non-state actors. This is what modern wars are.
To claim they aren't really wars is ignorant and kind of insulting to the people that fight in them.
No one is claiming that private armies will take over the anti-state deterrence.
Carriers are being challenged by hypersonic missiles that keep them offshore. Those billion dollar bombers have incredible capability, but advances in things like drone technology threaten their ability to operate in the long term. I think we've already reached the point where there aren't any credible opponents to have a big tank battle with.
Technology may be a great equalizer. Between nuclear proliferation and the advent of lots of tiny sensors and computers for low cost, operating a standing army will get difficult.
It was this practice that kept ordinary people in abject poverty in middle ages and kept economic growth down for hundreds of years.
If this practice is revived, there will be a lot of suffering.
This is yet another one of the screw-ups of George Bush. He recruited tens of thousands of mercenaries (hundreds of thousands by some counts) at a great cost for his Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and now these people are all over the world's problem areas looking for work.
The article mentions the possibility of mercenaries doing humanitarian work, but this is not very likely. The world's poor and weak are the ones least likely to be able to afford mercenaries.
Military training is tough and if the only thing you're fighting for is a paycheck, then you won't hang in there when it counts the most and hence are worth jackshit as a mercenary.
Most private armies worth anything consist of ex-soldiers of a republic. In essence these companies are subsidized by a/the republic's taxpayers.
So they are not a major threat to established governments, but still constitute a worrying trend. For if the world becomes sufficiently fucked, these will be the only dignified jobs left.
Hence, need to be regulated and monitored heavily by established governments. In no way should these emerge as alternates to democratic state power. As is modern democracies face an onslaught of challenges-look at freedom of expression. And I can only laugh at the ludicrousness of this term 'freedom of expression' if these private armies metastasize into something powerful.
Completely wrong. From what I heard from spec ops, professional soldiers are way better in fight. The main point, he said, is that outside people think that war needs courage, while really it's experience that matters. And proper supplies.
So what drives these professional soldiers is not the paycheck, its the idea of patriotism or that they are upholding some set of values for their country, or the idea that they are protecting their country. That is what allows them to hang in there when it goes well beyond limits of human endurance.
Refer the marine campaign of Iwo Jima 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Iwo_Jima', where soldiers went for 3-4 months without adequate food, rest or even barely human conditions against a fanatical enemy. Or for that matter any campaign during the world war. Or any other war worth something for the parties involved.
And my point is you can't get such kind of men or women to fight for money as mercenaries. And if I'm paying for mercenaries I want people like the ones who fought Iwo Jima.
So, if you look at the recruiting for the private armies most of them are ex-soldiers of a nation-state's army.
After a while some guys come to view it as any other profession. And then probably start working for a private army.
But even then I'd be surprised if private armies would be able to hold up their own against national armies or even if their members expect to.
I haven't read _The Modern Mercenary_, but it sounds a bit myopic. For example, calling out potential actions in africa ignores 50 years of PMC work there. As far as proliferation in the last 25 years ... I suppose we've seen in increase in "market share" of defense dollars spent. Off hand I'd have to say mid century african bush wars and the 1990's "executive outcomes" era were notable for having tangible results. Most of the 2000s mid east work seemed like cash grabs shrouded in "outsourced logistics" work.
I'd definitely recommend PW Singers _Corporate Warriors_ for a thorough history of private force. http://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Warriors-Privatized-Military...
I've thought a bit about whether it would be technically feasible to air-drop a tele-operated fortress seed into denied territory. This could form a kernel around which to build a safe zone.
The problem I keep running up against is that it's not a technical problem. All you need is a few infiltrators to make life unbearable in a refugee camp. The security forces are likely to turn against the civilians, leading to massacres, as we've seen whenever the line between combatants and non-combatants is blurred.
Not sure I like it when reality mimics fiction like this.
Rational people, however, may choose to die for a paycheck if said paycheck would help feed their children, parents, friends, and/or significant other. Assuming, of course, that the employer has a reputation for honoring their contract even after you're dead.
Needless to say, people who live in societies with a robust social safety net will be less motivated to fight for a paycheck. In most parts of Africa, on the other hand...
I sometimes feel like I missed my era. Not so good at going in to the office, but might have been a decent warlord. Then I wake up and realize I'd probably just be hung from a tree in any era except this one.
See: pretty much all of history. Generals routinely promised wealth from invasion of neighboring places. In fact, rare is the case where the promise for fighting in a large scale war was not one of wealth, but of some derivative resource ( freedom, religious reasons, pride ). That is a relatively recent construct (maybe last 200 years).
Many UN peacekeeping operations are carried out by nations which are reimbursed by the UN at $1,028 USD per solider per month. If the nation chooses to pay its soldiers less than that it can turn a tidy profit.
For instance UNAMID in the Sudan has the largest troop contingent from Rwanda which pays its privates $40 a month. I'd wager that the UN gets $40 worth of effort from that soldier, not $1000.
(I can't believe someone describes "murder is wrong" as "whiteknighting")
I'm not trying to defend anything other than the status quo, in which unaccountable private paramilitaries are fairly rare and frowned on.
I agree, people thinking other thoughts and drawing different conclusions can be unsettling.
The article also touches on the idea of efficiency, which you will see is the point of my top post - before you somehow linked assassination markets to Islamic terrorism. While I welcome a debate on the merit and feasibility of assassination markets, I don't think it would be a very productive conversation to have with you - as you've already expressed your interest in simply defending the status quo. Also, PMCs are not rare or frowned on - so your situation awareness is off as well (lets not get into a redefinition of "rare" or "frowned on" either).
Seems the Economist is about 30 years late to the game.
Otherwise, who decides when it's ok to physically assault someone, and how are they accountable to citizens?