Private Security Firms

A global market for military and security services emerged in the 1990s and with it a new set of [Page 1380]transnational actors: private military and security companies. These companies have been referred to by a variety of titles and acronyms—private military company (PMC), private security company (PSC), privatized military firm (PMF), or in the United States, contractors. Increasingly the term of use is private military and security contractors (PMSCs). All of these refer to entities that sell services relating to force.

Force, and protection against it, entails many different tasks, and so what these firms offer is varied: logistics (food, fuel, and transportation), advice and training, intelligence, protecting people or property, and more. Some firms specialize in one or another job, while others provide a broad array of these services. Although PMSCs vary in size, most have large databases or recruitment mechanisms through which they can mobilize personnel for particular contracts. Companies increasingly recruit from a range of different countries.

The growth of private security firms in the 1990s can be traced to supply and demand. Both local changes (such as the end of apartheid in South Africa) and international changes (such as the end of the Cold War) caused militaries to be downsized in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Military downsizing led to a flood of experienced personnel available for contracting. Simultaneous with the increase in supply was an increase in the demand for military skills—from Western states that had downsized their militaries, from countries seeking to upgrade and westernize their militaries as a way of demonstrating credentials for entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), from rulers of weak or failed states no longer propped up by superpower patrons, and from nonstate actors such as private firms, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and groups of citizens in the territories of weak or failed states.

Some might find this demand to be puzzling. Why would states downsize their militaries and then look for military services from the market? Globalization provides the answer. In a globalizing world, market pressures, technology, and social change created new demands that states had difficulty supplying with conventional forces. Countries such as the United States downsized their militaries in the 1990s because they no longer faced the large threats from other states needed to justify such forces. A rash of smaller scale conflicts, though, unleashed disorder and, given the increasingly connected world, demands for intervention. The private sector provided a stop-gap tool for meeting new demands for intervention that were not always tied to the national security interests of states, per se, but to broader claims by the international community. PMSCs not only provided personnel that the newly downsized militaries could not provide, but they could also provide different capacities and skills—such as a deployable civilian police force—than were available in traditional militaries.

The Cold War's end had a different impact in the former Eastern bloc, where it led defunct government structures to face a sudden opening to global flows of licit and illicit goods. In the developing world, it abruptly ended superpower patronage—revealing corruption, poor standards and management, rivalries, and other issues. In both areas, the potential for violence increased. Weak governments paved the way for ethnic mobilization, transnational criminal activity, warlords, rebels and paramilitaries, and the result ravaged civilians, enslaved children, destroyed the environment, and otherwise disrupted order and violated global norms. PMSCs provided tools for weak governments in the Eastern bloc and the developing world to shore up their capabilities.

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