Guns For Hire (They Could Save the World)
The word mercenary has a long tradition and carries with it a whole host of connotations—corruption, greed, wanton violence and more. More recently the issue has become important due to the US reliance on military contractors in Iraq to continue to fight a war with very low levels of deployed troops. With the recent vote in Senate on this matter, it is clear the use of privately contracted out personnel in a war zone is something that is increasingly weighing in on the collective conscience of Americans.
Enter Michael Walzer, one of the leading (if not the leading) scholars on the issue. He recently wrote a piece in the National Journal more or less (we’ll get to that) calling for an end to the use of military contractors. Unfortunately, Mr. Walzer is very much of the old-guard, and seems to be clinging to a vision of the international order that is neither realistic, nor desirable to maintain in the 21st Century. Let’s take a look. (Thanks to INTELDUMP for the tip-off…)
Walzer’s first problem with “mercenaries”—known from here on out by their more neutral title PMCs or Private Military Corporations—is, perhaps, his weakest. He says (referring to the use of a PMC in Croatia to turn back the Serbian army):
Might it not have been better in the long run–better at deterring future Serb attacks, better at preparing the American people for just interventions (and making unjust interventions harder)–if President Clinton had gone to Congress and laid out the argument for helping the Croats? Using private soldiers makes policy invisible and so reduces (or eliminates entirely) its political costs. But it is a crucial feature of democratic decision-making that politicians should pay the costs of the decisions they make.
Walzer makes quite a leap here—that somehow a public debate would have to occur for troops to be deployed. With all due respect to Mr. Walzer, this is a patently false claim—American troops are deployed on missions the scale of this mission to Yugoslavia (carried out by a PMC instead) without real meaningful public debate. Nicaragua, Guam, Somalia… that is just off the top of my head. It happens more frequently than it should, and the only time debate occurs is after the deployment fails or succeeds. Yet do the costs of that deployment really carry over from one presidency to the next? Probably not, but even if those costs did carry over politically, it is not clear that those political costs are an inherently good thing (more on that later).
Walzer next points out that national armies are subject to accountability standards that PMCs are able to avoid. Walzer again:
And soldiers who get out of hand are accountable in ways that mercenaries are not. At least in the best cases, soldiers are trained to fight in accordance with a code of conduct enforced by military courts, which in turn are overseen by civilian courts. By contrast, though a voluntary code of conduct has been accepted by many of the security companies operating in Iraq, the code doesn’t provide any enforcement mechanism.
Again, Walzer’s argument is lacking in two fundamental ways.
First, his evidence on this is shaky (go read the article). How often are US soldiers prosecuted for war-time transgressions? The answer: not very. Abu-Ghraib brought a minimal amount of punishment for those involved. The culture of the military is one of handling discipline problems “in-house”—i.e. not through courts. The fact that soldiers are wearing a US flag doesn’t change the fact that they are soldiers, and as such there is a unity and group culture that develops, and is necessary, to protect the entire unit. Ask a veteran of Afghanistan or Iraq if their unit adhered to the letter of the law regarding the conduct of soldiers? Or even if their commanders understood the letter of the law? They try, but wartime situations are just not conducive to some rigid code of conduct—generations of soldiers can attest to this.
Why hold PMCs to a higher standard? Just because the Army has the trappings of accountability, does not mean that it is effectively accountable. (How accountable it should be is a subject for another debate… or a post in the comments…)
This brings us to the second point—there is nothing stopping PMCs from becoming more accountable. Absolutely nothing at all. The Army has taken steps in this direction, as Walzer notes:
The new regulations for such contractors adopted by the Pentagon and State Department in early December do little to fix the problem. True, they specify minimal standards for training and set limits on the use of force; but, if one tries to imagine how these standards and limits could be enforced, and how many monitors and military police would be necessary, it gets harder and harder to envision a realistic scenario in which mercenaries are actually held accountable.
This part bothers me. First, Walzer dismisses these progressive attempts to increase accountability off-hand as insufficient. It took hundreds of years to establish and incorporate our military code of conduct and it changes all the time; I would say the army has not failed to address the problem, it just takes time. (And in the meantime where are these transgressions of PMCs that mean we can’t afford to slowly develop these regulations?)
Second, Walzer seems to say that because it is too difficult to innovate ways of regulating PMCs we should just do away with them. Here are a few quick ways to regulate PMCs I have just brainstormed, courtesy of my brain at 2:00 AM after a full day of classes:
- Set up an organization to implement industry-wide standards and let the firms police themselves. Oh wait, they do this now. (This works in many other industries just fine)
- Set up an international body to oversee the certification, deployment and monitoring of PMCs in humanitarian zones (UN Peacekeepers could play this role, they don’t have a good track record of actually conducting operations themselves…)
- Set up a branch of the military charged with overseeing these organizations, mandating minimal levels of equipment and training, and then deploying a much reduced force alongside these troops to ensure accountability (This would also increase the political accountability even more, see we are finding solutions already…)
- This is my favorite… All of the Above
Obviously each of these propositions is debatable on its own merits, but why not have that debate? Why not consider discussing ways of regulating private contractors? I would welcome a discussion with Walzer, or adherents of his just-war philosophy, that addresses just such a point. In fact, I think it is the debate our society needs to be having.
To be fair Walzer backs off of his black-and-white stance later on, and also puts his ideological allegiances on his sleeve in the interest of being forthright with us:
If we want to maintain accountability in war, then, we had best take a statist view of military activity. I don’t want to argue that private armies run by commercial companies, political parties, religious organizations, or governmentson-the-sly are everywhere and always a bad idea; but they are mostly a bad idea.
Walzer is taking a statist stance. Unfortunately, the sovereignty of the state is rapidly declining, thus making the statist view less and less relevant.
Now here is where Walzer loses me completely. In discussing the possibility of deploying Blackwater troops to Darfur to stop the ongoing genocide there, Walzer states
I won’t join the “moral giants” who would rather do nothing at all than send mercenaries to Darfur… But we should acknowledge that making this exception would also be a radical indictment of the states that could do what has to be done and, instead, do nothing at all.
It seems to me that he wants to have his cake and eat it too. PMCs are too terrible to be used by states to augment their forces in “just conflicts” and they may even lead us to unjust conflicts because they circumvent public debate, but here the humanitarian crisis is so great that we should lay all of those concerns aside and send the troops in anyway? Is genocide the requirement for the legitimate use of PMCs then? And should we leave it at that?
This is a terrible proposition for both the restriction of PMCs and the aiding of humanitarian missions. If we set the precedent that a “Darfur” is an acceptable scenario for sending in PMCs, then just as Walzer predicts, we will never have a discussion about the justice of sending troops in to stop ongoing genocides. Instead, nothing will be done because we will constantly (just as today) find ourselves quibbling about body counts to determine if this new humanitarian crisis really is a “Darfur”, and if we really do need to send in a PMC (and all of the other details: who will pay, which country’s PMC, how long of a contract?… these are all political questions that will hinder the deployment). T
This means that PMCs won’t really solve “Darfur” like problems, but they will still exist unregulated, because we legitimated their use in a moment of state weakness.
On the other hand, we will have missed a historical opportunity to fundamentally alter the way we look at the deployment of force around the world. The post-Westphalian state simply doesn’t exist anymore. Many states do not hold sway over a monopoly of force, and probably never will. Failed states will always exist, so long as tyrants are enabled to rise and fall. This means that our ideas about the use of force need to change as well. Even established nation-states are finding that the concept of sovereignty is a fluid and dynamic entity in today’s globalized world—the use of military force is no exception. The change is here—cyber-warfare is just the tip of the iceberg.
Instead of clinging to some nostalgic notion of the nation-state, why shouldn’t we adapt our current conception of international norms to provide accountability mechanisms for private armies? Why not institutionalize and standardize them so that there are rules governing their use, just as we have ‘rules’ governing the use of public armies?
I welcome any responses to these questions. Walzer’s point may well be valid, but it certainly needs some further explanation.
Update: Here is an interesting and innovative solution, courtesy of Raj Purohit over at PSAOnline. I don’t think he’s got it 100%, but at least the discussion is moving forward.
Sphere: Related ContentTags: just war, military contractors, peacekeeping, PMC, private military firms