Dr. Robert Hickson
29 June 2006
Saint Peter and Saint Paul
The Phenomenon
of the Privatization of Warfare and “Security Services”:
New Oligarchic
Feudalities and Mercenaries in a Time of
“Borderless
Economies and Finance”
This essay on the further privatization of
“military and security services” constitutes a brief sequel to
the earlier strategic essay, entitled “Setting Just Limits to
New Methods of Warfare.”
This sequel might also be entitled “Setting Just Limits to Old
Methods of Warfare under New Conditions of Technology and
Mammon.”
Surprisingly, even a cautious professor from
Duke University, Peter Feaver, who now serves on the staff of
the National Security Council in Washington D.C., candidly
admitted at an October 2004 Conference on “The Privatization of
American National Security”:
In fact what we’re seing is a return to
neo-feudalism. If you think about how the [British] East India
Company played a role in the rise of the British Empire, there
are similar parallels to the rise of the American Quasi-Empire.
This grand-strategic matter of the
“military-merchant banker” East India Company was not only
important historically. It will likely be strategically very
important also in the near future, especially in its new
embodiments under the current conditions of finance and
technology. Scientific and technological elites – also in the
financial world – are prepared to help “the Military-Industrial
Complex” in new ways, and maybe also for the sake of a seemingly
advancing Empire.
In President Eisenhower's once-famous
Farewell Address (January 1961), he warned his audience of two
special and growing dangers: not only what he called “the
Military-Industrial Complex,” but also what he designated as
“the Scientific and Technological Elite.” Although the former
formulation, “the M.I.C.,” became more widely used and
understood in later years, President Eisenhower himself never
elaborated upon what he had in mind concerning this more
specific danger of the Scientific and Technological Elite. It
certainly included the then-growing fields of Cybernetics and
the Information Sciences and their applications in human
psychology, semiotics, and finance, to include the growth of
encryption systems and the consequent scope they gave for
secrecy, deceptive manipulation, and “money-laundering.”
The phenomenon of Mercenaries or Soldiers of
Fortune is an immemorial practice to be seen in various cultures
down the course of history, whether as individual soldiers “for
hire” or as larger “free companies” and even “secret armies.”
Greek mercenaries in Persia, for example, and as they were also
later used by Philip of Macedon and his son, Alexander the
Great, are well known to students of Greco-Roman history. But,
we may recall the famous Swiss mercenaries; the Irish “Wild
Geese” in seventeenth-century Spain; the English and American
“privateers” and Italian “maritime mercenaries” (or “mercenaries
of the sea”); the “condottieri” of Italy; the Hessians; the
French Foreign Legion; the British use of the Gurkhas from
Nepal; various military secret societies of China and Japan (to
include the Chinese “Triads” – or “Tongs,” like the “Boxers” –
and the Japanese and Korean “Yakusa”); all the way up to Private
Military Companies of more recent times, like Executive
Outcomes, Sandline International, Military Professional
Resources Incorporated (MPRI), and Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR),
a subsidiary of Halliburton.
To quote the summary, introductory words of
Michael Lee Lanning's recent book on the concept and reality of
“mercenaries”:
They go by many names – mercenaries, soldiers
of fortune, wild geese, hired guns, legionnaires, contract
killers, hirelings, condottieri, contractors, and corporate
warriors – these men who have fought for money and plunder [or
other perquisites] rather than for cause or patriotism. Soldiers
of fortune have always played significant roles in warfare, they
are present on the battlefields of today, and they certainly
will be a part of whatever combat occurs in the future.
The sophisticated incorporation of
mercenaries into what has been called “the Military-Industrial
Complex” is a troubling development. In the rather cynical,
though “progressivist,” view of Lanning:
From huge, publicly owned firms to small
independent companies [i.e., “military companies”], the
corporate world has learned that war is indeed good business,
and business is good and getting better.
To what extent does a well-paid
“all-voluntary force” itself represent and promote (or at least
conduce to) the broader “mercenary phenomenon”?
For, the concept of the “all-volunteer”
military – which was first re-established in the U.S. – during
the final years of the Vietnam War, in 1973, just after the
United States had ended the military draft itself, inherently
promotes a structure of incentives which often enough suggests
an elite “mercenary force” to be used “on call” in readiness for
many rapid “expeditionary missions” or other “special
operations.” Such a volunteer force easily becomes more separate
from the common citizens and their own sense of duties and
sacrificial commitments which are necessary for the true defense
of the nation: an integrated “defense-in-depth” of the home
“base” and its essential “communications.”
Moreover, it is all too easy to employ an
all-volunteer force without the deeper engagement of the whole
nation. Thus, the citizens – given the propensities of human
selfishness – may all to easily say: “Well, they volunteered for
these hazardous duties; it’s not really our special concern.”
Such an attitude certainly does not appear to be an adequate or
even responsibly attentive orientation to meet the
Constitution’s requirement “to provide for the common defense,”
unto the greater common good! Such an orientation tends towards
a fragmentation or segmentation of society, even to the
tripartite “Neo-Gnostic” division between “the brain lords,”
“the upper servers (or the Praetorians),” and “the masses” (or
“the Lost”). What is the concept of citizenship in such an
“over-specialized” and “compartmented” society? What is the
likely common participation in the common good, not just
the “public interest”?
Lanning himself makes a pertinent observation
in this context of an all-voluntary military, especially in the
matter of financial bonuses to both citizens and
non-citizens, men and women, who are now active members of
the U.S. Armed Forces “in units rotating in and out of
Afghanistan and Iraq”:
It would be unfair to the many brave men and
women [who were, already in early 2002, 15% of the overall
Army!], both citizen and noncitizen, who accept the [larger
military] bonuses [for “volunteering to extend their tours”
overseas] to question their patriotism or their commitment to
their country. However, it would not be unfair to note
that increased pay, citizenship [granted to non-citizens in the
military, after a certain period of “service”], and other
benefits in exchange for enlistment [or voluntary
extensions of duty] are not all that different from the
reasons [the motives, the incentives for which]
soldiers of fortune have fought since the beginnings of
time.”
The all-volunteer military was itself, it
seems, also an effective psychological and cultural
preparation for the further strategic and tactical
recourse to military privatization and to those
commercial and financial incentives which this more organized,
new, corporate phenomenon has so generously and profitably
provided!
When most people recall the discussion over
the last ten or fifteen years about “privatization” in the
military, they probably think of the phenomenon of
“outsourcing.” This proposed and soon expanding “outsourcing”
first meant the “contracting out” to civilian contractors of
certain traditional military functions such as “recruiting,”
“food preparation,” “clean up,” “personnel services,” and
certain kinds of logistical functions of “supply, maintenance,
and transport.” It was thought (or euphemistically
“propagandized”) to be an enhancement of “cost effectiveness”
and “efficiency,” so that the military could purportedly
concentrate on its more essential missions of “training,
readiness, operations, and combat.”
Initially these new “managerial” proposals
seemed plausible and even attractive, though some people, more
historically informed and far-sighted, wisely saw that the
long-standing and much-tested tradition of a “self-policing
military” capable of operating as an independent and
self-reliant and coherent entity abroad, especially in “denial
areas,” was being subtly undermined. And, from the outset,
certain perspicacious questions were raised.
For example, would such civilian contractors,
after “releasing a soldier for combat,” also still deploy
with the military into combat zones? Would they also easily and
willingly go to various remote and dangerous areas overseas, and
then persevere? And then, what would be their status, according
to the laws and conventions of land warfare, especially if they
were to be captured? Would the U.S. Military also, for reasons
of purported “expedience,” come to hire “foreign nationals” to
help their military operations and support missions overseas?
Moreover, would our covert (“black”) Special Operations Forces,
for example, have foreign “food providers” even in their Forward
Operating Bases – such as, hypothetically, at a covert base in
Qatar? And what about the consequent security problems, to
include the matters of both Operational Security and
Communications Security? Or would we preferably ship American
civilian-contractors to these overseas locations – such as
“vehicle mechanics,” “construction engineers,” “mess hall”
cooks and stewards, and even female barbers and nurses,
especially from our domestic U.S. military bases, who were, as
is commonly known, already being sent in 2002 to Uzbekistan and
other nearby areas?
However, these discerning questions are only
a beginning to a deeper examination, and even still somewhat “on
the surface,” when we consider, in the longer light of history,
the special dangers and “lessons that are to be learned” from
the earlier “strategic, para-military, merchant-banker joint
stock companies,” such as the British East India Company, as
well as their Dutch and French counterparts.
For, when we even briefly examine how earlier
Empires promiscuously (and seductively) resorted to such
military-commercial-naval instrumentalities to enhance their
wealth and power: namely, their overseas colonization, their
access to raw materials (including gold), and their prosperous
trade in special commodities, and even their inherently corrupt
and nation-destroying involvement in the “drug trade” (as in the
corrupting British Opium shipments from India into China, which
caused the protracted “Opium Wars”), we should have great pause
at our own incipiently analogous developments. We may thereby
come to understand how and why these earlier and current “Arcana
Imperii” worked (i.e., the more secret doctrines and
methods of imperium or exploitative hegemonic rule), so that we
may then intelligently and persistently resist them and
all of their metastasizing corruptions and treacheries. The
military has always been an instrumental subsidiary of these
larger schemes of dominance, and they are still so utilized
today, though now under newer forms of “privatization” and aided
by some new kinds of special weapons that are rooted in very
advanced, new technologies, thereby enabling them to conduct
“special technical operations” with great subtlety and secrecy –
and even with long-range environmental and genetic effects.
The newer forms of military “privatization”
imply much more than just the traditional phenomenon of
“soldiers of fortune,” “mercenaries,” or “privateers” with
“letters of marque” – something known also as “pirates” or
“buccaneers”! The scientific and technological elite may now
more easily make and sustain “strategic combinations” with the
sophisticated corporations of “the Military-Industrial Complex,”
in order more deftly to employ “private military companies” over
a wide spectrum of overt – and also covert – operations.
By way of preparation for a deeper
understanding of these new “combinations,” some considerations
of earlier military history will first help us better to
understand – in order to resist – these troubling developments,
not only in their historical origins, but also in the current
privatization of warfare and its related “security services.”
For, police and military realms are now increasingly
intermingled, and there is also a growing “seam” between war and
criminality – part of the growth of unlimited irregular warfare,
or what the Chinese have called “unrestricted warfare.”
The “Emerging American Imperium” seems more
and more prone, it would seem, under current conditions of
technology and encrypted information, to resort to methods and
organizations which were once analogously used by the
Emerging British Imperium, such as the British East India
Company, especially under the eighteenth-century military
leadership of Robert Clive, and as aided by its long-standing,
resourceful association with the Bank of England itself (which
was founded only in 1694).
Two finely connected sets of insights from
General J.F.C. Fuller will, at the outset, help illuminate the
current developments in military privatization and its likely
formation of new loyalties and a new ethos and culture:
namely a “monetary” and “mercantile ethos” of “the cash
connection,” in increasing subordination to the new Lords of
Mammon. The public good of a particular historical nation, for
example, may come to be subordinated more and more to the
service of new Masters of Trade, or to the Global and
Quasi-Feudal Lords of High Finance. This new Mercantile Order,
which includes the influential continuity of certain families
and financial Dynasties, will themselves likely require more and
more military protection, both in defense and offense; as well
as variously versatile and secret “security services.”
In the strategic conclusion of his chapter on
the Battle of Blenheim (1704) and its momentous consequences,
General Fuller says the following, concerning the War of the
Spanish Succession, from his Military History of the Western
World:
It decided the fate of Europe, and as Mr.
Churchill writes, “it changed the political axis of the
world....” For England, Blenheim was the greatest battle won on
foreign soil since Agincourt [1415]. It broke the prestige of
the French armies and plunged them into disgrace and ridicule
.... and at Utrecht a series of peace treaties was signed on
April 11, 1713.... Further, he [Louis XIV] recognized the
Protestant succession in England [against the political
legitimacy of the Catholic Stuart kings] .... Of all the
booty hunters, England obtained what was the lion's share:
... and [hence] from Spain, Gibraltar and Minorca, which
guaranteed her naval power in the Western Mediterranean.
Further, an advantageous commercial treaty was signed
between England and Spain, in which the most profitable
clause was the grant to the former [i.e., England] of
the sole right to import negro-slaves into Spanish
America for 30 years.
General Fuller, before moving on to even more
consequential matters, adds an important footnote about this
corrupt network of manifold smuggling, which included the
inhuman slave trade:
The Asiento or “Contract” for
supplying Spanish America with African slaves, ... permitted
the slave traders to carry on the smuggling of other
goods. “This Asiento contract was one of the most
coveted things that England won for herself and
pocketed at the Peace of Utrecht.” (Blenheim, G.M.
Trevelyan, p. 139)
Moreover, says General Fuller:
With the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht,
England was left supreme at sea and in the markets of the
world, and as Admiral Mahan says, “not only in fact, but
also in her own consciousness [an unmistakably prideful
imperial consciousness!].” “This great but noiseless
revolution in sea-power,” writes Professor Trevelyan,
“was accomplished by the victories of Marlborough's arms and
diplomacy on land [i.e., by John Churchill, the first Duke of
Marlborough (1650-1722), victor at Blenheim] ... it was because
Marlborough regarded the naval war as an integral part
of the whole allied effort against Louis [King Louis XIV of
France], that English sea power was fixed between 1702
and 1712 on a basis whence [as of 1955] no enemy has
since been able to dislodge it.”
Later, he adds: “Sea power was, therefore,
the key to the colonial problem.”
For example, “in the struggle for trade supremacy in India,” the
“command of the sea” was decisive, for, under the geographical
and technological conditions of that age, “whoever commanded the
sea could in time control the land.”
Concluding his important strategic analysis,
not only of British sea-power's “noiseless revolution,” but of
something of even greater moment, Fuller says:
But the revolution went deeper still;
for it was the machinery of the Bank of England
[founded on 27 July 1694] and the National Debt [which
significantly began only in January 1693] which enabled
England to fight wars with gold as well as iron.
William's war [King William of Orange's War] had lasted for nine
years and had cost over £ 30,000,000, and the War of the Spanish
Succession [concluded by the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht] dragged on
for 12 years and cost about £ 50,000,000. Only half this
vast sum of £ 80,000,000 was met out of taxation, the
remainder was borrowed [from the High Financiers who had
leverage over the Bank of England and thus held the
Sovereign at risk] and added to the National Debt. Thus a
system was devised [sometimes called “Sovereign Risk” and its
accompanying “Fractional-Reserve Banking”] whereby the
prosperity of the future was underwritten [or
mortgaged!] in order to ease the poverty of the present, and
war was henceforth founded on unrepayable debt. The
banker merchants of London steadily gained in political
power [“le pouvoir sur le pouvoir” - Jacques Attali]
over the landed interests, and, therefore,
increasingly [as is still the case today] into their hands
went the destinies of the nation and the Empire,
whose frontiers had become the oceans of the seas.
Naval power and the power of High Finance and
the Manipulation of National and Foreign Debt was a very
powerful combination indeed! Military and naval leaders allied
themselves with “the Banker Merchants” – perhaps also as it is
the case today, more and more.
After 1713 – and especially after Clive's
decisive Battle of Plassey in 1757 – Britain expanded the use of
its other strategic instrumentalities, such as the earler-founded
“private” military-merchant joint-stock company in India, which
was also known as the British East India Company.
General Fuller will again help us consider
the long-range implications of the East India Company's quite
momentously decisive battle in 1757, the Battle of Plassey, in
northeast India on the “shifting banks” of the Bhagirathi River
– only some 44 years after the Treaty of Utrecht:
What did this small battle, little more than
a skirmish accomplish [a battle which was led by Robert Clive
(1725-1774)]? A world change in a way unparalleled
since on October 31, 331 B.C., Alexander the Great overthrew
Darius [the Persian] on the field of Arbela. Colonel Malleson, a
sober writer, says: “There never was a battle in which the
consequences were so vast, so immediate, and so permanent.” And
in his Lord Clive he writes: “The work of Clive [who
later took his own life in England at only 50 years of age] was,
all things considered, as great as that of Alexander.” This
is true; for Clive realized that the path of dominion
lay open. “It is scarcely hyperbole to say,” he wrote, “that
tomorrow the whole Moghul empire is in our power.”
Recalling what General Fuller has already
said about the Bank of England and the manipulation of the
National Debt, we may now further appreciate what he says about
the growing claims of Mammon and the progress of a Mammonite
Colonial Empire:
Yet this victory [at the 1757 Battle
of Plassey], on the shifting banks of the Bhagirathi,
produced deeper changes still. From the opening of the
eighteenth century, the western world had been big with ideas,
and the most world-changing was the use of steam as
power [also to enhance British sea-power]. Savery, Papin and
Newcomen all struggled with the embryo of this monster,
which one day was to breathe power over the entire world [which
now has also other advanced technologies to deal with]. All that
was lacking was gold to fertilize it [like
the old alchemist's dream and delusion of the “maturing of
metals”!], and it was Clive who undammed the yellow
stream.
“Howso?”, we may ask.
Quoting the Liberal-Whig historian, Lord
Macaulay, General Fuller says:
“As to Clive,” writes Macaulay, “there was
no limit to his acquisition but his own moderation.
The treasury of Bengal was thrown open to him.... Clive
walked between heaps of gold and silver, crowned with rubies and
diamonds, and was at liberty to help himself.” India,
that great reservoir and sink of precious metals, was
thus opened, and from 1757 enormous fortunes were made in
the East, to be brought home to England to finance the
rising industrial age [and Whig Aristocracy-Oligarchy], and
through it to create a new and Titanic world.
Such was the swollen and swelling “Globalism”
of the Eighteenth Century.
As was the case with earlier plunderers –
Alexander, Roman Proconsuls, and Spanish Conquistadores – the
candid Fuller then adds:
So now did the English nabobs, merchant
princes and adventurers [and their own “Feudalities” of the
time] ... unthaw the frozen treasure of Hindustan
and pour it into England. “It is not too much to say,”
writes Brooks Adams, “that the destiny of Europe [sic]
hinged upon the conquest of Bengal.” The effect was
immediate and miraculous [sic] .... Suddenly all changed [with
the rapid development of “machines”] .... “In themselves
inventions are passive ... waiting for a sufficient store of
force to have accumulated to set them working. That
store must always take the shape of money, not hoarded,
but, in motion.” Further, after 1760, “a complex
system of credit sprang up, based on a metallic treasure
[which was largely now “pouring” in from India].”
As another example how a seeming prosperity,
as well as a war, was “henceforth founded on unrepayable debt,”
General Fuller goes on to say:
So the story lengthens out, profit heaped
upon profit. “Possibly since the world began,” writes Brooks
Adams, “no investment has ever yielded the
profit reaped from the Indian plunder [as the New
Reformation English Oligarchy in the Sixteenth Century and
afterwards was based on “the Great Pillage” of the Monasteries,
and of the Church in general], because for nearly fifty years
[until the Early Nineteenth Century] Great Britain stood without
competitor.” Thus it came about that out of the field of Plassey
[1757] and the victors’ 18 dead there sprouted forth the
power of the nineteenth century. Mammon now strode into
supremacy to become the unchallenged god of the western world.
Such was the idol of the increasingly
de-Christianized West.
With a portion of bitter cynicism – or hard,
cold realism – General Fuller concludes with the following
words, which should also provoke our further reflectiveness:
Once in the lands of the rising sun western
man had sought the Holy Sepulchre. That sun had long set, and
now in those spiritually arid regions he found the
almighty sovereign. What the Cross had failed to achieve,
in a few blood-red years, the trinity of piston, sword, and coin
accomplished: the subjection of the East and for a span
of nearly 200 years [as of 1955] the economic serfdom of
the Oriental world.
Will such institutions as Halliburton and its
own military subsidiary, Kellog, Brown, and Root, also be
able to do such things today in Iraq or Afghanistan? And
should this be permitted? Ought they be allowed – with their
own private military or security forces – to expand their
networks into a comparable system of corruption?
It is now widely known that, down the years,
the Central Intelligence Agency of the U.S. has had its own
“contractors,” to include various “front companies” at home and
abroad, which are sometimes called “proprietaries” or
“asteroids.” Even in their “covert” or “clandestine” activities,
however, they had developed a system of regulation and control
and accountability. “Black operations” – which deceptively
purport to be someone or something other than who or what they
truly are – always require even greater supervision and
accountability – perhaps, most especially in “black” financial
operations! Multiple, insufficiently controlled and disciplined
“black” or “false flag” operations can very easily get out of
control, and can often be self-sabotaging or mutually
destructive.
Standards of moral responsibility and
accountability must therefore remain high, given the weaknesses
and vulnerabilities of human nature, and C.I.A. has various
levels of oversight, to include Congressional Oversight. No one
should expect that these forms of moral supervision and control
are sufficient, but the culture and traditions of the civilian
intelligence community do have ways of honorably “policing”
themselves.
However, there is today even less oversight
of the “special activities” of the Department of Defense, and,
therefore, C.I.A. has been tempted, at times, to “fold itself
under” the more spacious and protecting wings of the Military.
And the Military has had its own special temptations to evade
certain kinds of accountability concerning the nature and scope
of its own “special activities.” But, once again, there is still
a military culture of “duty, honor, country” to set just moral
limits to warfare.
With the growth of special technologies and
“space assets,” however, and especially in the undefined and
growing “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT) and against “Tyranny,”
the temptation to use “irregular” methods and more “unrestricted
warfare” is greater.
A fortiori
is this the case with the even less accountable networks of
Private Military Companies, which also create a
“command-and-control” nightmare for a uniformed Military
Commander in his own assigned Area of Responsibility (AOR),
especially in a Combat Zone, where he already has, in addition
to “the enemy,” the difficulty of dealing with many
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)!
When the United States as a purported nation
essentially wants to have – and to sustain – a Global Hegemony
and thus a new kind of Imperium, or Quasi-Empire, then these
already existing dangers will increase, not only for foreigners,
but for U.S. Citizens themselves and their already weakened
Constitutional Order.
In areas of “ambiguity” – in the
“interstices” of law and conflicting jurisdictions – great
discipline and self-limitation are required – hence a high
standard and intimate culture of honorable accountability. The
greater the ambiguity and “gray areas,” the greater the virtue
needed!
Such an ethos is against a deceitful “system”
of anonymity and impersonality and unaccountability.
But, when war is made much more “profitable”
and when more and more people develop “vested interests” and
“lusts” for such “profits” and for “influence without
accountability,” then war will become – in the words of Marine
General Smedley Butler – even more of a “Racket”! And this must
be persistently resisted. Otherwise, there will not just be a
growing “seam” between war and criminality; there will grow an
increasing “overlap” – indeed, a very ugly “convergence” or
“congruence.” Unrestricted war will become unrestricted
criminality.
Unable now to deal more extensively with such
a large and growing phenomenon of “private military and security
services” in this limited essay, I propose, therefore, to
conclude briefly with only two further suggestions for deeper
inquiry; and then consider one example of the manifold missions
of one U.S. “private military company” in the Balkans. This
final example is intended to be a parable, of sorts, for our
deeper reflections upon this whole matter of Mercenaries and
Finance and the Empire. These matters must be stripped of all
obscuring and deceitful euphemisms and be seen “whole and
entire,” as they truly are!
The two suggestions:
1. Look more deeply at the growing
“militarization” of both “police forces” and “secret societies,”
both at home and abroad – in light of various nations’ own
historical practices and cultural traditions of Statecraft and
Strategic Intelligence. (China, Great Britain, and Israel are
particularly good examples.)
More specifically, look at NORDEX, the former
“KGB Trans-National Corporation” and its current
“re-structuring” and mutations and “deployments” in Europe and
elsewhere. Look at how the British made use of “Military Masonic
Lodges” in their earlier revolution-fomenting penetration of
Latin America, after the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. Look at the
Triad Operations and the Yakusa Apparatus in the longer light of
Oriental Secret Societies, especially military secret societies.
2. Look at various modern examples of
“private military companies” or “networks of multicultural
mercenaries” – like Executive Outcomes or Sandline International
– and whom they serve (e.g. the oligarchs of strategic
minerals and key strategic resources); and how they are related
to and funded by – even indirectly – various foreign
governments, financiers, and intelligence agencies, as well as
being involved in the widening covert institutionalization of
“Special Operations Forces” (SOF), also in Israel. Look at how
official SOF organizations, in Britain and the U.S., for
example, allow (without penalty) their “active duty” members to
serve for some years with contractors or “mercenaries,” and then
return to their former positions in uniform, along with a fund
of “wider experience.”
The case of Military Professional Resources
Incorporated (MPRI) in Bosnia is, as follows – and we must
remember that MPRI itself helped to write the two main Army
Field Manuals concerning “Contractors” and “Contracting Support
on the Battlefield”:
In 1997 [after MPRI “successes” in Croatia
and Bosnia] the Army determined that it needed guidance on
the conduct and regulation of private military companies and
directed its Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) to prepare
the regulations. So what did TRADOC do? It hired MPRI to develop
and write the regulations, of course. The results, approved by
TRADOC and the Department of the Army, produced Field Manual
(FM) 100-10-2, Contracting Support on the Battlefield,
released in April 1999, and FM 100-121, Contractors on the
Battlefield, the following September [1999].
In the further words of Lanning,
Whereas it was said in the nineteenth century
that the sun never set on the British Empire, it may be stated
that in the twenty-first, the sun never sets on employers of
MPRI [established in 1987, in Alexandria, Virginia]. Today, MPRI
contractors [also less politely known as “mercenaries”] can be
found in every continent of the world with the exception of
Antarctica, and that frozen land may very well be a future
source of contracts.
After training “the Croatian National Army”
(starting in September 1994), they moved from being “a
moderately successful private military firm into a worldwide
influence on modern soldiers of fortune.”
In May 1996, the government of Bosnia hired
MPRI “to reorganize, arm, and train its armed forces” and “the
contract differed from that with Croatia in that this one [of
1996] specifically contained provisions for MPRI to provide
combat training.”
Now, we shall see how a “private” U.S.-based
Military Company helped establish and fortify an Islamic
Republic in the heart of Europe:
MPRI and Bosnian officials agreed to a
contract amounting to $50 million for the first year with
provisions for annual renewals. Another $100 to $300 million was
authorized [by whom?] for the purchase of arms and equipment.
Although the U.S. State Department had to approve the
MPRI portions of the contract and maintain some oversight
of the entire operation, the U.S. government did not
finance the program. Instead, the money came from a coalition
of moderate [sic] Islamic countries, including Saudi Arabia,
the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Brunei, and Malaysia, which
hoped that the improved Bosnian army could protect
the country's Muslim majority from its non-Mulsim
neighbors .... To introduce the weapons into the Bosnian Army
and to train the force, MPRI sent retired U.S. Army Major
General William Boice, recently commander of the U.S. 1st
Armored Division, and a team of 163 veteran U.S. military
personnel.
U.S. Government-approved, retired U.S.
military-mercenaries help establish a better-armed and
better-trained, militarized Islamic Republic in the heart of
Europe – a Muslim Republic funded by a Coalition of Muslim
Countries from afar. What’s wrong with this picture?
How should the Europeans, not only the
Americans, respond to such a strategically subversive travesty:
a penetration not only of the strategic threshold of
Europe, but a further Islamic penetration of the historical
heartland of Christendom?
The answer to this question – and our active
response – will have great consequence upon the larger flow of
migrations, and also upon the larger cultural and religious
struggles we are unmistakably in!
Moreover, with reference to Private Military
Companies and their expanding missions:
During the Gulf War in 1991 there was only
one contract employee for every hundred uniformed military
personnel supporting the conflict. In Operation Iraqi Freedom
[which began in March of 2003], the number of contractors has
increased to one per every ten soldiers. By mid-2004 the best
estimate on the number of private military companies
providing direct combat services [sic] to various
governments and causes is more than two hundred. There
are a dozen or more PMCs [Private Military Companies] in Africa
that filled the vacancy left by Executive Outcomes. Several more
are based in western European countries. Many more, and some of
the most secretive, are based in Russia and other countries once
part of the Soviet Union [as well as in Israel and China?]. The
vast majority of the private military companies, however, are in
the United Kingdom and the United States.
In the longer light of history, especially of
the military-merchant British East India Company – with its
oligarchic “banker merchants” and “merchant princes and
adventurers” and their exercize of increasing “political power”
– we may now better understand the likely effects on the conduct
of war of the modern “Private Military Companies,” as a new
institution of Mercenaries with a “global reach.” American
private military contractors may have even more “reach” (but at
what long-range cost?), if they are permitted to have
“sub-contractors” from foreign countries like Israel. For,
unlike the United States, the Israelis have at their disposal
deep knowledge of numerous foreign languages and cultures, and
many “linguistic skills,” as well as “interrogation skills.”
But, if Israelis are even suspected of being the interrogators
of Iraqi Muslims, as at Abu Ghraib prison, for example, the
consequences or “blowback” would be very grave for the United
States.
The conduct of war will be greatly affected
by the combination of “Special Operations Forces” (SOF) and
“Special Technical Operations” (STO) under a variety of new
forms of “privatization” or “non-official cover.” These
well-financed and “globalized” Private Military Companies will
likely have access to advanced and “breakthrough” technologies,
and will be more readily disposed than conventional forces “to
exercize them in innovative ways.”
Given the earlier precedents in England –
because of the established institutions of the National Debt and
the Bank of England and “a complex system of credit” – “war [has
been] henceforth founded on unrepayable debt.” The “destinies of
nations” and “the frontiers of Empire” are still gravely
affected – especially the destinies of dependent “little
nations” – by the strategic manipulation of National Debt and of
the Debt Bondage of those economically weaker nations or
“failing states.”
The combination of modern “banker merchants”
and “military adventurer-hucksters” is “a terrible thing to
think upon” (in the cheerful words of François Rabelais).
What will be the ultimate loyalties
and guiding ethos of such Private Military-Merchant
Companies and their foreign “Sub-Contractors” – whether in Iraq
or Indonesia or in the restive Southern Hemisphere of Latin
America?
In a time of “borderless economies and
finance,” how are these new martial-mercantile
Feudalities likely to affect the common good of vulnerable
societies, who are especially in need of a well-rooted, humane
scale of life – not a restless and roaming uprootedness?
And, as always, how does a humane political
order regulate and control “the Money Power” and disallow it
from being “le pouvoir sur le pouvoir” (“the power above
the power”), i.e., from being only superordinate, instead
of always subordinate?
The financial and credit question is
additionally complicated today by the reality of electronics
(“Virtual Money”) and the reality of drugs. Drugs
themselves indeed often constitute, not only a currency,
but also an access to liquidity – and hence a source of
strategic manipulation and “money-laundering,” especially for
covert intelligence and military operations.
The spreading phenomenon of the privatization
of warfare and “security services” must be understood – and
often, not only strictly regulated, but altogether and
persistently resisted – especially in light of the
lessons that should be learned from earlier Imperial Histories
and Economic Colonizations; and also in light of current
strategic realities, to include the seemingly reckless,
diplomatic and military conduct of the United States. Its
foreign “Nation-Breaking” is much more evident than its foreign
“Nation-Building,” and not only in Iraq! As distinct from an “Emerging
American Imperium,” we may be witnessing, instead, a
Submerging American Imperium now making further use of
“Private Military Companies” and their “New Feudalities,” both
as an imperial “weapon of weakness” and in an act of provocative
desperation. For the United States, now often perceived as a
“Rogue Superpower,” does increasingly seem to be out of
control.
CODA
The Dangerous Moral Aftermath of
Promiscuously Applied Irregular Warfare
Almost forty years ago B.H. Liddell Hart,
General J.F.C. Fuller's British colleague, published a second
revised edition of his book, Strategy, wherein he had
added an entirely new chapter, entitled “Guerrilla War” (Chapter
XXIII).
He sought to understand “particularly the guerrilla and
subversive forms of war” and thereby to enhance our “deterrence
of subtle forms of aggression,” or “camouflaged war,” which he
also called “forms of aggression by erosion.”
Alluding to Winston Churchill's short-sighted
and promiscuous promotion of irregular warfare behind enemy
lines in War War II, and also to “the material damage
that the guerrillas produced directly, and indirectly in the
course of [enemy] reprisals,” Liddell Hart speaks of how all of
this often-provoked (yet always consequential) suffering became,
indeed, “a handicap to recovery after liberation.”
Then, even more profoundly, he adds:
But the heaviest handicap of all, and
the most lasting one, was of a moral kind. The
armed resistance movement attracted many “bad hats” [i.e.,
rogues, knaves, dupes, and criminals]. It gave them license
to indulge their vices and work off [i.e.,
avenge] their grudges under the cloak of patriotism....
Worse still was its wider effect on the younger
generation as a whole. It taught them to defy authority
and break the rules [in their “black operations” or
“unrestricted warfare”] of civic morality in the fight against
the occupying forces [whether German, Japanese, or, today,
Israeli occupation forces]. This left a disrespect for
“law and order” that inevitably continued after the invaders had
gone. Violence [to include vandalism and terrorism] takes
much deeper root in irregular warfare than it does in
regular warfare. In the latter it is counteracted by obedience
to constituted authority, whereas the former [more lawless,
irregular warfare] makes a virtue of defying authority and
violating rules [hence “limits”]. It becomes very difficult to
rebuild a country, and a stable state, on a foundation
undermined by such experience.
Even moreso is this the case today when “new
feudalisms,” mercenary warfare and strategically-organized
“private military companies” are promiscuously set loose to
fight an increasingly undefined “global war on terrorism.” For,
it unmistakably fosters “the privatization of lawlessness” and
soon gets further out of control.
Moreover, these new indirect forms of warfare
– and the asymmetrical (irregular) cultural and strategic
resistance against them – often have, despite the secular
appearances, very deep and very tenacious religious roots,
to include Hebraic-Islamic roots.
--FINIS--
© 2006 Robert Hickson
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