The good business of war

Threats, every good businessman knows, can be turned into opportunities. It is grotesque that war should provide a prime example. Yet, so it has always been, and so it continues to be. If one was left with a shred of doubt about it, what is going on in Iraq provides fresh, disquieting examples of an ancient practice.

As a superpower the United States is always in a state of preparedness. The size and preparation of its military forces are breathtaking. Its space programme is related to it. Such preparations and programmes inevitably involve the private sector. Opportunity beckons early and a host of firms prepare themselves for it well in advance.

They do so by undertaking research and development, such as with regard to arms, aircraft and transport development. They also invest a great deal in human capital, ensuring that they hire the best technical brains. They take on their board of directors, or get to act as hugely paid consultants, high-profile individuals with a political or administrative background, people who know the way into and through the labyrinths of power.

There is a clearly visible yet also very mysterious network always in place, one that has the determination and ability to generate itself through the years, no matter who is elected democratically to run the country.

General Dwight Eisenhower, war hero and later a successful US President, cast some light on the network. He described it as a political-military complex and warned against it in his farewell address. He could only speak on what had become apparent to him, both in his military as well as in his political and administrative functions.

He may have suspected how much else there was in the vast background yet, he implied, not even he as President could cut through the dark shadows to get to the core of the system.

One other President who might have been determined to try was John F. Kennedy. Along with his fine rhetoric and human weaknesses, he carried a deep zeal, an unmistakable conviction that it was his mission to change America, including identification and overhaul of the mysterious and undefined private-public partnership represented by the system that remained tenaciously in place.

Kennedy - in the glib jargon of both criminals as well as military tacticians - was 'taken out' before he could put into place the means to drive relentlessly towards his objectives, particularly by winning - as he surely would have done - a decisive second term, which is when reforming Presidents can truly leave their mark.

He was murdered in a manner that shocked Americans and others who actually saw it happen live on television, saw him topple onto his wife as his brain was blasted off his body along with his soul.

Forty years after the coldly planned, efficiently executed assassination, the vast resources of the American government have not produced a definitive account of how and why it really happened, much less of who masterminded it.

There is now no doubt that it was not the act of one, single, deluded individual; that there definitely was a conspiracy. But it is not known, nor will it probably ever be known, who the conspirators were. Some suggest but cannot prove that their masked faces reflected the long hand and calculating deadly mind of the heaving system always groaning to be fed. With power and contracts. With money.

Such thoughts may seem to be inseparable from fantasy. Yet, allowing Kennedy to rest in peace, ongoing reality demonstrates that war is, indeed, good business for those who position themselves to profit from it. The research and development that go into it do provide what is called 'economic fall-out', knowledge and technological innovation of good use to humanity. Profits from the business of war have a much wider base.

Ensuring a state of preparedness, both as a deterrent to attack, as well as to include the necessary capabilities to respond with swift counter-military action if attacked, apart from maintaining the capability to initiate attack when the political machinery decrees it is an ongoing huge source of work and gain.

The end of the Cold War has diminished those sources, but that has not translated into a peace surplus to the good citizenry at the cost of profits to the canny and well-connected part of the business sector which thrives off the means of preventing or waging war. Or of both.

For the Cold War may be over yet, aside from what is involved to keep US forces always on the ready, that does not mean to say that the dogs of war have been permanently leashed. They continue to be unleashed in local wars, between antagonistic countries or bloody factions within them. They continue to be unleashed by the US and its shifting alliances, whether in the name of enforcing peace, or ending tyranny, or of controlling and eradicating terrorism. There may have been an uneasy end to the threat of a global Apocalypse, but that has not given peace a universal chance.

What it has done in one particular area, according to Peter Singer, a security analyst with the Brooking Institution in Washington, who wrote a book called Corporate Warriors, is to transfer some six million ex-servicemen into the job market with little to offer besides their fighting and military skills.

The US military, Singer reported, is now six per cent the size of a decade ago, the Soviet collapse wrecked the colossal Red Army, the East German military melted away, and reduced the British armed forces to their smallest level since the Napoleonic wars. Practically concurrently, the end of apartheid destroyed the white officer class in South Africa.

This background of ongoing preparedness for war as well as actual warfare, albeit not on a 'world' basis as in first half of the 20th century, and of redundant military personnel in search of a new paid role, has led the UK liberal newspaper The Guardian to investigate what has been taking place. Its summary, carried in mid-week, centres on what it terms the privatisation of war.

It makes frightening reading. What follows is a severe condensation, with considerable loss of detail and effect....

Private corporations have penetrated western warfare, becoming the second biggest contributor to coalition forces in Iraq after the Pentagon. Some 10,000 private military contractors slightly outnumber the British contingent, the second largest in the coalition. The proportion of contracted security personnel is 10 times greater than during the first Gulf War (1991).

The private sector is so firmly embedded in combat, occupation and peacekeeping duties that the US military would struggle to wage war without it. The US army estimates that of the $87 billion earmarked this year for the broader Iraqi campaign, including central Asia and Afghanistan, a third will be spent on contracts to private military and security companies in a 'partial privitisation of war'.

When the US launched its invasion of Iraq in March, US Navy personnel manned the battleships. But alongside them sat civilians from four companies operating some of the world's most sophisticated weapons systems. Non-military personnel working for private companies operated and maintained the unmanned Predator drones, the Global Hawks and the B-2 Stealth bombers.

The private sector is even more deeply involved in the war's aftermath, through a dozen or so firms, nearly half of which come from Britain. A US company has the contracts to train the new Iraqi army; another to recruit and train an Iraqi police force. This is part of a worldwide trend since the end of the Cold War. The booming business it provides entails replacing soldiers wherever possible with highly paid civilians and hired guns not subject to standard military disciplinary procedures.

The biggest US military base built since Vietnam, Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, was constructed and continues to be serviced by private contractors. At Tuzla in northern Bosnia, headquarters for US peacekeepers, everything that can be farmed out to private businesses has been.

The bill so far runs to more than $5 billion. The contracts include those to the US company ITT, which supplies the armed guards, overwhelmingly US private citizens, at US installations. Further examples in other countries abound.

The Guardian says that the surge in the use of private companies should not be confused with the traditional use of mercenaries in armed conflicts. The use of mercenaries is outlawed by the Geneva conventions, but no one is accusing the Pentagon, while awarding more than 3,000 contracts to private companies over the past decade, of violating the laws of war.

The Pentagon will "pursue additional opportunities to outsource and privatise", the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, pledged last year and military analysts expect him to try to cut a further 200,000 jobs in the armed forces.

Such "downsizing" feeds the growth of the military private sector. It also enables the Americans, in particular, to wage wars by proxy and without the kind of congressional and media oversight to which conventional deployments are subject. This creates problems. Soldiers are subject to military discipline, even when off duty. Private paramilitary individuals answer only to local law in what are often termed "failed states", where national law is often notional. The risk, say analysts, is the employees can literally get away with murder.

The Guardian describes other crimes. Dyncorp, for example, a Pentagon favourite, has the contract worth tens of millions of dollars to train an Iraqi police force. It also won the contracts to train the Bosnian police and was implicated in a grim sex slavery scandal, with its employees accused of rape and the buying and selling of girls as young as 12. A number of employees were fired, but never prosecuted. The only court cases to result involved the two whistleblowers who exposed the episode and were sacked. "Dyncorp should never have been awarded the Iraqi police contract," the chief UN human rights officer in Sarajevo said.

The problems that are surfacing include issues of loyalty, accountability, ideology and national interest. By definition, a private military company is in Iraq or Bosnia not to pursue US, UN or EU policy, but to make money.

The growing clout of the military services corporations raises questions about the longer-term impact on governments' planning, strategy and decision taking. For the first time in the history of the modern nation state, says Mr Singer, governments are surrendering one of the essential and defining attributes of statehood, the state's monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

Such surrender is fresh manna to those who profit from the business of war in the paramilitary area. Like war-oriented firms in other areas they lick their ghoulish lips as they try to work out where the next opportunity will come from.

Their plans to allocate profit do not include those who survive war and conflict, only to battle with the losses they have suffered, with maimed bodies, seared souls and the rotten systems put in place or that spring up in the aftermath, which is supposed to be all about reforming and rebuilding for better times. Iraq is merely the latest example. It will not be the last.