Corporate soldiers: privatizing warfare.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Citings

ACCORDING TO AN April 8 report in The Washington Post, private security companies in Iraq--among them Control Risks Group Ltd., Hart Group Ltd., and Triple Canopy--are pooling their resources, organizing "what may effectively be the largest private army in the world." Employees had been losing their lives, particularly after the spring insurgency began, and the firms found they couldn't rely on the armed forces for protection. So instead they turned to each other.

The blurry line between America's official forces and private military companies has concerned Pentagon watchers for years, with critics such as Ken Silverstein, author of Private Warriors (Verso, 2000), arguing that such arrangements allow Washington to intervene abroad without public accountability. Companies such as the Arkansas-based Trojan Securities International and the Oregon-based International Charter Incorporated (slogan: "Anytime, Anywhere") have deployed personnel to conflicts from Haiti to Croatia to Sierra Leone. Others offer military training to such nations as Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. Usually such interventions pass unnoticed in the press, unless a firm gets caught in a scandal. (The most notorious wrongdoers were attached to DynCorp in the former Yugoslavia, where some employees were involved in the coerced sex trade--and...