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PMCs in the arsenal
By Philip Gold/Erin
Solaro
War has a way of turning the
tangential and the ill-regarded into the vital and successful.
Submarines, aircraft, tanks — all endured decades of derision and
dismissal before proving their worth.
The reason they were able to prove their
worth is that, when the moment came, serious military thinkers had
already created effective "concepts of operation" and great leaders
knew how to adapt concepts to situations.
Today, the United States possesses a
little-known military asset that could prove enormously valuable,
but has no clear operational concept.
It's time to develop one.
PMCs are "Professional Military
Corporations," sometimes also known as "Private Military Companies."
In centuries past, they were known as mercenaries, hired guns, and
worse. It's hard to define them exactly. The term may accommodate
everything from war surplus outfits that offer basic training
courses as a sales gimmick to high-tech private mini-armies.
Some have questionable pedigrees and
track records. Others are, or are owned by, respected corporations
and operate according to high ethical standards. Many, and some of
the best, are run by retired senior officers and hire veterans with
proven skills and integrity.
In recent
years, the United States has used PMCs in a variety of ways. The
most visible has been for training police and military forces in
newly-formed and/or liberated states. PMCs have been active in the
former Yugoslavia for years, and now in Iraq.
PMCs as trainers lessen the burden on
our hideously overstretched uniformed forces. They're also beginning
to make sense as peacekeepers and peace enforcers, especially in
places such as Africa, where neither the United States nor the
United Nations seems willing to commit serious forces long-term.
Last month, an Anglo-American PMC, Northbridge Services, offered to
send up to 2,000 armed men to Liberia.
PMCs as peacekeepers and enforcers for
hire — a good idea, provided a myriad of legal questions and a
certain understandable reticence about "privatizing war" can be
resolved.
Still, these two functions do
not constitute an operational concept. They don't take advantage of
a capability that, to the best of our knowledge, no one has
investigated seriously: Using PMCs to change tormented societies for
the better.
Consider much of Africa.
Without a minimum of civil order, there is no way to attract major
foreign investment, or to build the civil society that could support
such investment and empower other endeavors.
PMCs could play a vital role in training
local self-defense militias, and for more than physical defense.
From Plato and Aristotle to the American Founders, militia service
was a vital component of citizenship. In this tradition, a proper
citizen was economically self-supporting, educated and armed. The
Western world has spent trillions on encouraging literacy and
economic development, but has utterly neglected the vital third part
of the ancient "civic triad."
And what
might happen, we wonder, if these PMCs also armed and trained women?
The low status of African women means they often must resort to
prostitution to feed themselves and their children. Women are
physically vulnerable: to genital mutilation as a precondition for
marriage; to rape from clients and by husbands whom they have been
forced to marry, either as children or as widows; and to relatives
after their husbands die.
Then there is
mass rape as a weapon of war. Indeed, it can be argued that the
physical, social and economic vulnerability and desperation of
African women are the real reasons for the HIV pandemic.
PMC-trained militias as a "school of
citizenship," including men and women, in societies where women
citizens — armed women citizens — might someday break the tragic
cycles of violence and desperation: It's worth a try.
In sum, a serious PMC operational
concept would involve, not just doing the work we can't or won't,
but creating more secure, more just and more equal societies. A
recent Bruce Willis movie, "Tears of the Sun," showed a Navy SEAL
team on an African mission, limited by orders and law to rescuing
one American citizen, then slowly refusing to countenance the
carnage, then fighting it, en passant teaching the locals a few
things about the dignity of resistance. Perhaps a few hundred — or a
few thousand — PMC teams could teach the same lessons. This time,
for real.
Philip Gold and Erin Solaro are
president and executive director of Aretea, a Seattle-based public
and cultural affairs center.
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