1-17-08, 11:30 am
What are the implications of recent increased use of mercenaries and private armies for the analysis of imperialism, forms of resistances and the alternatives for a transition to socialism under the extremely difficult conditions of the 21st century? The main question is to understand why, if it is a “public good” even from the point of view of the dominant theory, defense is privatized to the extent that imperialist war turns out to be partly carried out by privatization of defense goods and services.
In dominant neoclassical economic theory, the technical characteristics of defense make it a public good. Therefore, neoclassical theory admits that defense can only be undertaken by the state, and not for political reasons but for economic ones. Then, in such a framework, only the state is able to ensure the optimality of the so-called “market equilibrium.”
Such are the terms of the mainstream academic consensus existing today on this question. This means obviously that there is some problems in the neoclassical literature dealing with defense, especially concerning the theoretical and empirical effects of military spending on the economy. One of the difficulties of applying neoclassical theory is the monopoly on information and control the state has over military questions. In neoclassical theory, even as imperfect as it is, the market is always preferable to state interventions. Thus a publicly controlled military is at odds with free-market economic theory.
Starting from a radical anti-state position and with a vision of the consumer-taxpayer as the sole decision maker, however, many libertarian economists are recommending the privatization of national defense. According to them (for example, David Freidman, Milton Friedman’s son), defense should be subjected to competition, like any other private good, in a new market where security companies would offer goods and services previously provided by the state. This analysis, which is in the minority in the current theoretical debates in capitalist circles, and which is quite provocative, has ended up winning in practice.
Neoliberal policies tend to operate by the marketization of public goods, or privatization. The thinking is that public goods and services can be privatively appropriated and remunerated categories of capital and that public services should be regulated for the purpose of the accumulation of profit and capital. For a long time now, a majority of companies belonging to the military-industrial complex are private firms, producing military goods on behalf of armed forces. As early as the US aggression against Vietnam, the private sector was being integrated into the war effort: Lockheed and General Dynamics for weapon productions, Halliburton and Vinnell for the logistic support, DynCorp for freight transports, Pacific Architects & Engineers for infrastructures, and so on. Additionally, there was a collusion of interests among military leaders, political leaders and corporate heads in the process of getting contracts.
To go deeper, let us pass to the political level. In the United States, the end of the draft and the decision to professionalize the military can be explained by reasons linked to the division of labor and advances in military technology but also by a relative loss of political control over the military after the defeat in Vietnam. Professionalization creates its own problems, including with recruitment and growing costs. As a consequence, the state was forced to privatize military activities with mercenaries.
The contemporary history of the private military companies may have begun with the creation of military consulting and training companies like WatchGuard in 1967 by former officers of the British SAS and the Control Risks Group in the 1970’s. The first private US military company to have sold a service to a foreign state (Saudi Arabia) was Vinnell in 1975. After the first Gulf War, the firm Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), until recently a subsidiary of Halliburton and at the present time a key military contractor with the US in Iraq (managing and building bases in Iraq and training troops), thanks to Richard Cheney, then Secretary for Defense, obtained a contract with the Pentagon to organize the integration of private military corporations into the US war scheme. General Carl E. Vuono, a top commander in the first Gulf War, became the chair of a major private firm of this sector, MPRI. From 1994 to 2002, more than $300 billion worth of defense contracts, representing a figure exceeding 3,000 contracts, were signed with US companies: Halliburton, Blackwater USA, Vinnell, MPRI, KBR, DynCorp, SAIC, CACI, Control Risks Group, Custer & Battle, ArmorGroup and many more.
In the 1990’s, the externalization of defense services under neoliberal pressure was accelerated after the cutbacks in military spending at the end of the Cold War put thousands of officers and soldiers on the market. The sphere of activities of the private military corporations widened again with the dismemberment of the Yugoslav Federation. MPRI, for example, sent 7,000 mercenaries, supporting the Croatian army against the Serb forces of Krajina, training the Bosnian army, organizing the Macedonian army – until conflicts of interests with the United States itself, since US veterans employed by MPRI for the UÇK ended up threatening Skopje in 2001.
The “war on terror” after September 11, 2001 gave a new impulse to the private military corporations. The US military is their first customer, including for the training of anti-terrorist techniques, a specialty of Blackwater USA in Moyock, Virginia, the biggest private military training center in the US, near Norfolk, the largest naval base in the world with more than 110,000 sailors and marines. Today, Iraq has become the privileged ground for private armies. Hundreds of firms carry on business worth more than $100 billion per year – more than half coming from Pentagon contracts. The private mercenaries fighting in combat operations could be between 20,000 and 50,000 – that would be the second largest contingent involved in the conflict, more than the total number of the troops from other countries in Iraq.
The exact number of foreigners under private contract in Iraq for functions previously provided by the military is unknown. The Pentagon admitted in the spring of 2007 to the presence of 130,000 employees of more than 300 private military companies from all nationalities, or nearly as many people as the US contingent at the end of 2007. The military authorities justify the assistance of these private firms by their flexibility to do what the armed forces cannot do, the support of experienced mercenaries economic advantages (lower costs), and by the nonofficial nature of this armed involvement into the conflict – not to mention the improved public relations image thanks to reduced numbers of highly publicized and unpopular military casualties.
Nevertheless, the situation sees new problems for imperialism. First of all, outside the military, torture at Abu Graib by CACI, assassinations of civilians by Blackwater USA, scandals of corruption by Halliburton or KBR and cost-plus contracts, and especially with the inability to win the war, more than 1,000 mercenaries have died in Iraq since the beginning of the war – compared to more than 3,500 US soldiers killed. Furthermore, the situation creates new problems inside the military. US regular soldiers seem delighted by the death of mercenaries, who are far better paid, without hierarchy and who go unpunished for atrocities. But problems with getting the job done are so severe that the US military is often forced to take up jobs that private companies were paid to accomplish, such as the failure of the private contractors in 2003 to effectively train and equip the new Iraqi army, which deserted in waves within six months of being recruited.
It is necessary for us to reflect theoretically in order to understand the functioning of the capitalist state today, especially its repressive apparatuses, whose social and ethnic composition has changed and which are also crossed by the class struggle – just like the ideological apparatuses of the state are, but in another, indeed much more violent manner. Born in 1967, during the Vietnam War, the movement Resistance Inside the Army (RITA) had a real impact on young draftees in the US. The relative loss of control by the military leadership over parts of the military partly explains the end of the draft and the professionalization of the armed forces. This is a quite global phenomenon, which can be observed with some differences from one country to another in all the capitalist states.
We need to think deeply about the history of the popular resistances, including inside militaries. However, this reflection must also concern the fundamental current role of the armed forces within the revolutionary processes, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean, from Venezuela to Bolivia, for a better definition of how to appeal to progressive soldiers and officers in their crucial alliance with the people, in order to consolidate these revolutionary advances on the whole continent – and beyond this continent, for the long transition to world socialism.
Apart from oil – and Iraq has enormous reserves – what makes these wars necessary for the US ruling classes is the hegemonic leadership by US financial capital over the collective imperialism of the triad of the US, Europe and Japan. It is not only Bush and Big Oil, but finance capital considered as a class, with its dominant global system that can only be maintained today by violence.
Nevertheless, US imperialism will not be able to renew itself through war. The destruction of capital caused by these wars is considerable for the countries of the South in which they are fought, but insufficient to create a new long-run cycle of capital expansion, in terms of technological impacts – positive only for the military-industrial complex – as well as of effects of effective demand – observed only in the short run.
The United States lacks the resources to finance new wars. The military burden (approximately four percent of the GDP) is not absolutely unbearable – it is lower than during the Vietnam war, and much lower than during World War II. But the public deficits and debts are huge and amplified by the neoliberal management of the capitalist structural crisis. Over-indebted, the US economy is at the edge of a major financial collapse. It depends too much on the exterior, grows at low intensity, and is plundered by its own high finance, which submits it to a logic of perpetual wars – at the detriment of all the peoples of the world as well as the US working classes.
In general, as the state externalizes the logistical support of defense, more and more private military companies fall under the control of high finance. DynCorp was bought out by Veritas Capital, MPRI by L-3, Vinnell by the financial group Carlyle, then by Frank Carlucci, former vice-director of the CIA and Secretary for Defense for Ronald Reagan. And when this control includes pension funds, honest US citizens take part without knowledge.
The economic and military dimensions of the crisis – profit and war – are narrowly dependent. Finance capital repatriates more and more benefits from the whole world that the US military bombards or threatens to bombard. But the world system will not be able to continue to function like this: it will have to change.
For the US, the next target is Iran – one of the rare states in the South to keep a national bourgeois project (by the way, compatible with the capitalist system). We know that the key of the conflict concentrates on the nuclear problem. However, the US government refuses the general prohibition of the use of nuclear weapons. Will the “great democracies” never make use of such weapons? Did not the most perfect among them, the US, already use them? Are not the “most civilized” among these democracies – including Europe and Japan – responsible for genocides (colonization, slavery, Shoah and imperialist wars)? The question of the nature of the régime in Iran and of its eventual democratization must be dissociated from the threat of war directed against the Iranian people – which is absolutely unacceptable. Just like the recognition of Saddam Hussein’s crimes (those against our Iraqi communist comrades, among others) will never legitimate the aggressive war that imperialism makes suffer to the martyred, heroic and probably soon victorious Iraqi people.
Following its defeat in Vietnam, US imperialism turned against the Latin American peoples, by imposing neo-fascist dictatorships on almost the whole continent. Thus, it would be useful to anticipate, right now, that its next targets could be – not only China, but also – the revolutionary advances realized by the people in Latin America and the Caribbean, after the defeat of imperialism – which comes, ineluctably, in Iraq. Consequently, without pessimism, let us be lucid, organized and above all united in our struggle against imperialism and for socialism.
--Rémy Herrera is a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research and teaches at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne. Send your comments to
