Dr. Robert Hickson
29 October 2006
Festum Christi Regis
The Crescent
Phenomenon of the Privatization of Warfare and
Security-Services:
New Oligarchic
Feudalities, Special-Operations Networks, and Ambiguous
Mercenaries in a Time of Borderless Economies and Finance
This essay on the arguably grand-strategic –
but unmistakably permeating – privatization of “military and
security services” constitutes a short sequel to an earlier
strategic essay, entitled “Setting Just Limits to New Methods of
Warfare.”
This aggressive sequel might also be entitled “Setting Just
Limits to Old Methods of Warfare under New Conditions of
Technology and Mammon.”
It proposes to be especially attentive to the
Corporate Governing Class and their “Managerial Elites” (in the
discerning wise words of the late James Burnham). Indeed, these
new luring conditions of technology and wealth are to be found,
as it is herein tenaciously affirmed, conducing especially to
the monetary advantage and added perquisites of the Corporate,
often Trans-National, Nomenklatura and their mobile, often
unaccountable, Managerial Elites. This lure of new advantages
and influence (with little accountability) will also likely
attract the closer inextricable involvment of the tax-exempt,
strategic-cultural Foundations and their own Governing Elites,
not only in the United States, but also in other areas of
“Mandarin” or “Democratic Centralism.” To what extent, we may
well ask, are we witnessing the formation of New Feudalities
with their own special Patronage System – and with new
possibilities of collaboration between the “Overworld” (or the
“Overlords”) and the “Underworld”?
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 (not just
“military-strategic”) matter of the “military-merchant banker”
apparatus of the East India Company was not only important
historically. It will also likely be very important
strategically in the near future, especially in its new
embodiments under the current conditions of finance and
technology. Scientific and technological elites – also the
Managerial and Higher Elites in the financial world – are
prepared to help “the Military-Industrial Complex” in new ways,
and maybe also for the sake of our seemingly advancing
American-Anglo-Israeli Empire, proposing, as well, the advance
of a “New Mercantile Order” (in the approving words of Jacques
Attali, the French Socialist, in his admiring biography of the
“super-capitalist,” Max Warburg).
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, known also as “the M.I.C.,” became more widely used
and better understood in later years (and not just in Left-Wing
Circles), President Eisenhower himself never elaborated upon
what he really had in mind concerning this more specific danger
of the Scientific and Technological Elite. Given the modern
propensity for “social (and psychological) engineering,” it
certainly included the then-growing fields of Mass-Media
Studies, Cybernetics and the Information Sciences; and their
applications in human psychology, commercial-political
advertisements, 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 as “secret armies.”
Carthaginian mercenaries from Spain and Sardinia, or Greek
mercenaries in Persia, for example – and as they were also later
used by the conquering Philip of Macedon and his son, Alexander
the Great – are well known to students of Greco-Roman history.
Mindful of the recent book, America's
Inadvertent Empire (2004),
we may comparably recall the Carthaginians and their inattentive
(and inordinately complacent) resort to mercenary forces:
Meanwhile Carthage grew pre-eminent, and as
she grew, manifested to the full the spirit which had made her
.... And everywhere they [i.e., these questing
Carthaginians under sail] sought eagerly and obtained the two
objects of their desire: metals and negotiation. In this quest,
in spite of themselves, these merchants, who could see nothing
glorious in either the plough or the sword, stumbled upon an
empire. Their constitution and their religion are enough to
explain the fate which befell it. They were governed, as all
such states have been, by the wealthiest of their citizens. It
was an oligarchy which its enemies might have thought a mere
plutocracy .... To such a people the furious valour of the Roman
and Greek disturbance must have seemed a vulgar anarchy .... It
was characteristic of the Carthaginians that they depended upon
a profound sense of security and that they based it upon a
complete command of the sea .... The whole Maghreb, and, later,
Spain as well; the islands, notably the Balearics and Sardinia,
were for them mere sources of wealth and of those mercenary
troops which, in the moment of her fall, betrayed the town
.... The army which Hannibal [i.e., “Baal's Grace”] led
recognised the voice of a Carthaginian genius, but it was not
Carthaginian .... The policy which directed the whole from the
centre in Africa [i.e., from Carthage] was a trading
policy. Rome “interfered with business” .... The very Gauls
in Hannibal's army, for all their barbaric anger against Rome,
were [justly] suspected by their Carthaginian
employers.
This Mammonite Maritime-Merchant Empire truly
paid for its mercenaries – who were contumaciously troublous and
finally perfidious, multicultural mercenaries, indeed.
But, we may also recall the famous Swiss
mercenaries, at least until the 1513 Battle of Marignano; the
Irish “Wild Geese” in seventeenth-century Spain and elsewhere;
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 1900-era “Boxers” – and the current Japanese and Korean
“Yakusa”); all the way up to Private Military Companies of more
recent times, like Executive Outcomes, Sandline International,
Blackwater, Triple Canopy, 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 – and morally should be for us – a troubling
development, especially with their new access to and elusive
application of “Special Technical Operations” (“STO”), which
often involve the unique and sometimes unrepeatable use of a
particular nation's “Technological Crown Jewels”. However, in
the rather cynical, but thoroughly “progressivist,” view of
Michael Lee 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.
Nonetheless, this is a phenomenon which often
must be strongly, but yet discerningly, resisted – and not
fatalistically or lethargically accepted as irresistible and as
already overwhelming and “beyond control.” Moreover, it is often
the case that “organised crime is protected crime,” that is,
protected by certain political and financial elites.
Furthermore, to what extent does a well-paid
“all-voluntary force” itself represent and promote (or at least
conduce to) the broader “mercenary phenomenon” of which we
speak?
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, and just after the
United States had itself ended the military draft – inherently
promotes, it would seem, 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
worldwide “special operations.” Such a volunteer force easily
becomes more separated from the common citizenry and their own
proper sense of duties and those selflessly sacrificial
commitments which are so necessary for the true common defense
of the nation: i.e., an integrated strategic
“defense-in-depth” of the Homeland – i.e., of the home
“base” and of its manifold essential “communications,” to
include our “sea lines of communication” and important “undersea
cables and nodes.”
Moreover, it is all too easy to employ an
all-volunteer force without the deeper moral engagement of the
whole nation. Thus, the citizens – given the propensities of our
human selfishness – may all to easily say: “Well, they
volunteered for these hazardous duties; it’s not really our
special concern.” Such an insouciant attitude certainly does not
appear to be an adequate, or even a responsibly attentive,
orientation to meet the Constitution’s specific requirement: “to
provide for the common defense,” and unto the greater common
good. Such an indifferent orientation tends towards a
fragmentation or segmentation of the larger society, and even
into the tripartite “Neo-Gnostic” division (in the “Information
Age” words of Michael Vlahos), a division between “the Brain
Lords,” “the Upper Servers” (or the new Praetorians), and “the
Lost” (or “the Masses”). What, for example, is the concept of
citizenship in such an “over-specialized” and “compartmented”
society? What is the likely sacrifice for and common
participation in the common good, and not just in defense
of the Elites or of the elusive “public interest,” which
is already vague enough?
Lanning himself makes a pertinent observation
in this context of an all-voluntary military, and considers
further its long-range implications, especially in the matter of
the financial bonuses currently given to both citizens
and non-citizens, both men and women, who are now active
members of the U.S. Armed Forces and serve “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
would seem, also an effective psychological and cultural
preparation – “a psychological preparation of the
battlefield” – for the further strategic and tactical
recourse to military privatization and to those
commercial and financial incentives which this now more
organized, new, corporate phenomenon has so generously and
profitably provided! And which seems especially remunerative
and risk-free for the corporate elites themselves, and not so
much for the short-term, high-paid “young adventurers abroad.”
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,” sometimes called “farming out.” 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 “denied
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, even after combat and in the graver times of
instability and uncertainty and insufficiency? 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” or “gray”) Special Operations Forces, for example, have
foreign “food providers” even in their Forward Operating Bases –
such as (hypothetically) cooks 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 overseas in 2002 to
Uzbekistan and other nearby areas?
However, these discerning questions
constitute only a beginning to a fittingly deeper examination;
for, these initial concerns were even still somewhat “on the
surface,” especially when we consider, in the longer light of
history, the special dangers and “lessons that are to be
learned” from those 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 some
earlier Empires all too promiscuously (but quite 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 criminal
involvement in the “drug trade” (as in the corrupting British
Opium shipments from India into China, which caused the
protracted “Opium Wars,” which the Chinese have never forgotten,
nor seemingly forgiven) – we should have great pause, indeed, at
our own incipiently analogous developments.
By such an historical-strategic inquiry we
may thereby come to understand how and why these earlier and
also current “Arcana Imperii” worked (i.e., their
more secret doctrines and methods of imperium or exploitative
hegemonic rule), so that we may then intelligently and
persistently resist them today 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
“plausible deniability” – 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 also more pejoratively and
bluntly known 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 further preparation for our deeper
grasp of these new “combinations,” some considerations of that
earlier military history will first help us better to understand
– especially in order to differentiate and then to resist –
these troubling developments: not only what is still continuous
from these well-established historical origins, but also what is
new in the current analogous 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.” It is also part of the competition and
strategic initiative “to set the rules” – to set and control the
new and operative “conceptual terms and legal rules of
engagement” in the wider spectrum of “future forms of warfare.”
The “Emerging American Imperium” seems more
and more prone, it would appear, 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 colonial
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, in this important context, help
illuminate the current developments in military privatization
and its likely formation of new loyalties, new
feudalities, 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 New
Grand-Strategic Overlords. The public good of a particular
historical nation, for example, may come thereby 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 well-connected families and financial
Dynasties, will themselves likely require more and more military
protection, both in defense and for the offense; as well as
variously versatile, investigative 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, and from his own 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,
conducted in northeast India on the “shifting banks” of the
Bhagirathi River – only some forty-four 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”
or Cosmopolitanism 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. Today the apostasy from historic
Christianity has gone, unmistakably, even further.
With a portion of bitter cynicism – or at
least 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?
To what extent will they have, and maybe even
continue to have, “influence without accountability”? And, if
not, where are the effective sanctions: clear and enforceable
sanctions?
It is now widely known that, down the years,
the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States 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 gradually 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 in such matters must therefore remain high, given
the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of human nature, and C.I.A.
has itself 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. The self-policing of
professionals is one of their distinguishing marks.
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 traditional military culture of “duty, honor, country” that
continues (without romantic sentimentalism) to set just moral
limits to warfare.
With the growth of special technologies and
“space assets,” however, to include “cyberspace,” and especially
so in the undefined and growing “Global War on Terrorism” (“the
GWOT”), and in the newly added “War against Tyranny,” the
temptation to use “irregular” methods and more “unrestricted
warfare” is greater. (And a temptation wouldn't be a temptation
if it weren't attractive.) Likewise greater is an ingrained
inattentiveness and ignorance of consequence – especially
the decisive and long-range consequences.
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 dubious
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) – to include groups of
Journalists and Lawyers (and other “self-nominating targets”)!
When the United States as a purported and
increasingly multicultural 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 resistent foreigners, but for U.S.
Citizens themselves and their already weakened Constitutional
Order. In order to be prudent about the nature and consequences
of increasingly incommensurate, cultural waves of
non-Western and other kinds of immigration, the United States
must not inadvertently – much less deliberately – create a
“Surveillance, Counter-Intelligence Police State” in its
anxious, sometimes delusive, pursuit of “sufficient security.”
In areas of “ambiguity” – in the
“interstices” of law and conflicting jurisdictions – great
discipline and self-limitation are required – hence a high
standard and an intimate moral 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. (And
morality is not reducible to legality.)
But, when war and comprehensive “security”
are 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 and
“security services” 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” of war, security, and criminality. And unrestricted
war will become unrestricted criminality.
Unable now to deal more extensively, or
intensively, with such a large and growing phenomenon of
“private military and security services” in this limited essay,
I propose, therefore, to conclude with only two further sets of
suggestions for our deeper inquiry; and then to consider one
revealing example of the manifold missions of one U.S. “private
military company,” in the Balkans. This final example is also
intended to be a parable, of sorts, for our deeper reflections
upon this whole matter of Mercenaries and Finance and the Empire
– or Quasi-Empire. These matters must be stripped of all
obscuring and deceitful euphemisms and be seen “whole and
entire,” as they truly are! No Bullshitsky!
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.) Adda Bozeman's Strategic
Intelligence and Statecraft: Selected Essays contains
several historical-strategic cultural studies of great worth.
More specifically, look at NORDEX, the former
“KGB Trans-National Corporation” and its current
“re-structuring” and evasive mutations and “deployments” in
Europe and elsewhere. Look at how the British made strategic use
of “Military Masonic Lodges” in their earlier
revolution-fomenting penetration of Latin America, especially in
and through Brazil (given its strategic location), soon 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 – or
“overlords” – 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
official positions in uniform, along with a fund of “wider
experience” and “adventure.”
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 and permeation not only of the strategic
threshold of Europe (like the Maghreb), 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 – whether from the Maghreb or from Mexico – 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
the strategic history of the military-merchant-financier British
East India Company – with its oligarchic “banker merchants” and
“merchant princes and adventurers” and their exercise of
increasing “political power” – we may now better understand the
likely effects upon the conduct of war of the modern “Private
Military Companies,” as a new institution of Mercenaries with a
“global reach” and “special technologies” and other “covert
assets.” 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. We must be very attentive to
the “farming out” of such matters. We must not be supine or
fatalistic, and thus surrender to the view that “the process is
irreversible.”
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 our conventional forces
“to exercise 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
arguably “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?
Whom will these new Overlords serve, and to what extent will
these Trans-National Corporate Elites serve the true common good
of the United States and provide for the common defense?
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, even
frantic, 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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