MERCENARIES - GLOBAL MARKET- NEW IMAGE

MERCENARIES – GLOBAL MARKET
NEW IMAGE


They are no longer called soldiers of fortune or mercenaries because the Pentagon has rebranded them Private Military Companies and created a global market for their skills. But when all is said and done, they are hired guns not bound by international rules of war, who only answer to a complex web of global corporations.
Private Military Companies, or PMCs as they are known in the war trade, are capable of putting a small army on the ground anywhere in the world with the most modern equipment and highly trained soldiers of all nationalities. They will also provide jet fighter training, cyber warfare capabilities, diplomatic protection units, port protection and specialist assassination teams, or as some in that business like to call them “specific targeting mission units.” Just as they have done in Iraq and Afghanistan, PMCs have teams of interrogators for hire, with expertise in in-depth interrogations techniques. In effect, they can do everything a small nation might require of its military, intelligence agencies, Special Forces, air force and navy. While it is difficult to assess the numbers of mercenaries across the globe, it would not be unreasonable to conclude from available data there are at least 1.5 million, with 500,000 fully employed.
Killing for profit has become a lucrative business and to put it any other way would be to ignore the fact mercenaries are, as a rule, soldiers who have been trained to kill in regular armies and Special Forces. They have skills to sell, which are in high demand in a global recession. For America, which has been fighting two wars and running special counter-insurgency operations far and wide, it has been cheaper to hire mercenaries, who are not paid pensions or guaranteed long term medical care. The new reality is America, with support from Britain, has formalized the privatization of modern conflicts, small and large, as well as the security industry internationally.
The Pentagon and State Department have never produced exact figures for the numbers of mercenaries they have employed, though most estimates put the figure at over 150,000, and possibly as high as 250,000 during the height of the Iraq War. Without those boots on the ground, fulfilling a wide range of functions, America would not have been able to conduct two wars simultaneously and also undertake military and classified Special Forces ops in countries like Algeria, Yemen, Somalia and Iran, not to mention traditional commitments in S. Korea, Japan and Taiwan.
The role of mercenaries was back in the news recently with claims Blackwater Worldwide, also known as Xe, a major PMC that has earned close to $1 billion from Pentagon, CIA and State Department, was being funded by Middle East “interests” to train an anti-piracy army in Somalia. The region mentioned was Puntland, an independent part of Somalia, from where the country’s pirates operate. It was reported Xe, whose founder, former SEAL Erik Prince is now living in Abu Dhabi, had linked up with Saracen International, another big PMC registered in Beirut, to handle the Somali contract. Saracen was formerly Executive Outcomes, one of the most notorious mercenary outfits to emerge from the post Apartheid era in South Africa. One of its founders, who helped create Saracen, is Lafras Luitingh, whose military career included a long stint as a major in South Africa’s Civil Cooperation Bureau – CCB – an arm of the country’s Special Forces during Apartheid. The CCB was later shown to have carried out many authorized assassinations though the exact figure was never known. Saracen and XE function through a web of companies worldwide, making it difficult to know who owns and controls them.
Both Xe and Saracen have been reluctant to concede any involvement in Somalia but even if they are it is just one contract. The fact is they have plenty of countries, companies and corporations vying for their skills. Erik Prince was alleged to have offered the CIA the use of an antipiracy vessel he had designed with a drone capability, high-powered weapons and the speed to out-run anything the pirates possessed. These companies are innovative and are in competitive markets. Across Eastern Europe, from Yugoslavia to Bulgaria former soldiers are applying to join PMCs.
After 2001, British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s foreign secretary, Jack Straw helped the Bush-Cheney strategy of rebranding mercenaries, first as military contractors and finally PMCs. Straw even suggested in a policy paper to parliament that the U.N. could save a lot of money by using PMCs rather than soldiers from national armies. The rebranding has been so-successful since 2001 that Obama has been able to spend heavily employing mercenaries. The tragedy is American taxpayers are funding private armies controlled by corporations, many of them not even registered in the United States.