Contractors in Iraq: Exploited Class or Exclusive Club?

• Author: Ori Swed,Daniel Burland
• DOI: 10.1177/0095327X20927471
• Published date: 01 January 2022
• Date: 01 January 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

2022, Vol. 48(1) 3 –24

Article

Contractors in Iraq:

Exploited Class or

Exclusive Club?

Ori Swed

1

and Daniel Burland

2

Abstract

Corporate privatization of security has generated a neoliberal iteration of an old

profession: the private military contractor. This development has revolutionized

security policies across the globe while reviving old patterns of inequality. Following

neoliberal logic, outsourcing fosters two types of employment: the exploitative and

the exclusive. The first refers to low-status individuals hired en masse to perform

menial labor; the second refers to experts who perform functions central to the

employer’s mission. We contribute to this discussion by focusing on the qualifica-

tions of a different subsample of this industry: American contractors who died while

performing military and security functions in Iraq. We assert that such American

employees directly engaged in mission-essential combat and security functions

better fit the employment category of an exclusive, expert sector at the core of the

private military industry.

Keywords

private military and security contractors, privatization, veterans, precarious employ-

ment, expert workforce, civil–military relations, post-Fordist

1

Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA

2

Behavioral Sciences Department, University of Saint Mary, Leavenworth, KS, USA

Corresponding Author:

Ori Swed, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, Texas Tech University, Holden Hall

158, 2500 Broadway, Lubbock, TX 79409, USA.

Email: ori.swed@ttu.edu

Armed Forces & Society

ªThe Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0095327X20927471

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4 Armed Forces & Society 48(1)

Introduction: Exploitative or Exclusive Profession?

As previous scholarship has amply documented, the emergence of the profession of

private military and security contractor (PMSC

1

) in recent decades has altered the

way states project power and execute security policies (Avant, 2005; Leander, 2005;

Singer, 2005) while recalibrating our understanding of the state’s legitimate mono-

poly on the means of violence (Avant, 2006; Verkuil, 2007). It presents new forms of

civil–military relations that challenge the modern state’s ability to monitor them

(McCoy, 2010) and as such perpetuate inequality (Eichler, 2015; Kanemasu &

Molnar, 2017; Schulz & Yeung, 2008). This focus on inequality in the industry can

suggest that this profession is a new form of exploitation governed by neoliberal

principles, similar to other types of exploitative employment prevalent in the con-

temporary economy (Eichler, 2014; Francis, 1999; Lair, 2012; Li, 2015). In this

market, such exploitation takes a fatal turn when the rich hire the poor to fight and

die in battles on foreign soil (Eichler, 2014; Taussig-Rubbo, 2009). Scholarsh ip

focusing on such exploitation within the industry offers a typical profil e of the

private military contractor as an uneducated, unskilled, and impoverished young

man from a region with few career opportunities, someone who was pushed toward

this type of employment because other options were lacking (Whyte, 2007). We

assert that this supposedly typical profile in the literature fits only for a portion of the

industry, and our view is supported by others in military sociology and security

studies whose work emphasizes, instead, the professionalization and specialization

of this sector (Berndtsson, 2012; Higate, 2012; Joachim & Schneiker, 2012; Lean-

der, 2005; Schaub & Franke, 2009). Focusing on the American workforce, specif-

ically those working as combat and security specialists, we provide further evidence

that this subsector consists of highly skilled, educated, and experienced veterans.

Since they are employed by private companies in a competitive industry, their

professional status is analogous to that of other highly skilled contract workers such

as lawyers or computer programmers; while they may not be long-term employees,

they are still highly compensated for the period of their employment. Exploitation

can be part of the reality encountered by this group, but we assert that this subgroup

of contractors are better understood as an exclusive club of well-trained experts in

the “management of violence” (Huntington, 1957) than as an exploited workforce.

Their primary function for the corporations who employ them is to contribute their

expertise to combat missions, rather than merely to replace more costly workers, as

is the case for the large pool of menial laborers employed by the industry.

In this article, we examine the demographic characteristics and professional

qualifications of PMSCs from a data set of American security contractors who died

in Iraq (Swed et al., 2018). While professionalism and exploitation are not mutually

exclusive, nonetheless, they both constitute distinct and opposing aspects of the

contemporary neoliberal labor market. In today’s economy, both a cleaning person

and a lawyer may be employed by the same company as contract workers, but their

salaries and working conditions remain very different, despite that one similarity in

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