The following is the final extract from the appendix to Damien Lewis’s book “Operation Certain Death” in which he focuses on the case for the use of PMCs.
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The growing trend in warfare around the globe has shifted radically as we enter the twenty-first century. In the classic military combat of history, two opposing sides fought each other until one side was defeated and the other claimed victory. In its place, modern wars tend to disdain direct combat between opposing forces and concentrate on targeting the civilian populace in order to destroy the ethnic power base and support structure of rival forces. There are often more than two parties to the war, with shifting allegencies. In the fromer Yoguslavia, Rwanda, Sudan, the Congo, Burundi, Algeria, Liberia, Central African Republic, Burma and a host of other countries, this ‘terroristic’ approach to warfare has turned conflict into human tragedies for the civilian population, as opposed to focusing on battlefield victories and military casualties. The end of the Cold War effectively ushered in a new era of ‘Hot Peace’, where in Western powers like the UK have to deploy forces in firefighting operations around the world. Sierra Leone is a prime example of this new-style warfare.
Whereas peacekeeping may have worked in the past – the old UN style of blue helmets keeping two sides apart – it does not necessarily do so now. In the past there were clearly defined sides to a conflict, wars were largely fought between two foreign powers through their military forces. Examples of such ongoing UN peacekeeping initiatives are the Eritrea-Ethiopia conflict, the India-Pakistan conflict and the Cyprus (Turkey versus Greece). In all these cases, the war is defined by being waged between two, easily identifiable sides – the armies of the nations involved. In these cases, ‘old-style’ UN peacekeeping does still seems to fit the bill.
But in the complex mix of civil wars and rebel factions and guerrilla insurgencies, old-style peacekeeping doesn’t always fit the bill. In Sierra Leone, for example, there simply was no peace to keep. This is what the UN failed to realize when it sent 13,000 peacekeeping troops to that country – and it learned its lessons there the hard way. At the time, UNAMSIL was the largest United Nations peacekeeping effort in the world – yet its role in Sierra Leone was to prove an embarrassing debacle.
At worst, the UN should at least have been on a peace-enforcing mandate, as opposed to a peacekeeping one – empowered to use lethal force against recalcitrant rebels. At best, the UN needed an aggressive and professional fighting force to take the war to the rebels and finish them once and for all. This is what Executive Outcomes had achieved with 150-odd mercenaries over nineteen months in 1995-6, at a cost of under $2 million a month. After EO’s intervention, and for the first time that decade, Sierra Leone witnessed an end to the civil war and the rebels were forced to the peace table. Four years later 13,000 UN peacekeepers arrived, at a cost of some $600 million a year. Within months of their arrival the civil war was back on again, and UN forces stood by impotently as the RUF advanced on Freetown, threatening to plunge the country back into a living nightmare. In short, in Sierra Leone the UN lost the peace.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Outcomes
http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/executive_outcomes.htm
As Hugo Young wrote in the Guardian, in May 2000:
The force in Sierra Leone is the largest UN peacekeeping army in the world. Yet it is pathetically failing. It has become hostage to the armed gangs of the rebel forces who are destabilizing the regime it should be defending… If this massive UN presence is incapable of sustaining peace against a disorderly and largely untrained rabble, one must ask what future there can ever be for the entire principle of humanitarian peacekeeping intervention by the UN.
It was in May 2000 that the British took unilateral action and sent its toughest armed forces into the fray. This was no peacekeeping mission and the British government were careful not to get bogged down in the UN operation. This was a separate and complementary force to the chaotic and malfunctioning UNAMSIL, and it did not share the UN’s peacekeeping mandate. The British went to Sierra Leone with a similar set of objectives to Executive Outcomes before them: to go on the offensive and take the war to the rebels. In a matter of weeks, the concerted action of a five-hundred-strong force of Paras rolled the rebels back into the jungle and defeated their offensive.
In Sierra Leone peacekeeping failed on every level and cost a fortune. Peace-enforcement would probably have fared little better. What Sierra Leone needed was a military force capable of waging warfare against rebel forces in order to protect a vulnerable and traumatized civilian population. Sadly, peace just wasn’t in it.
And what of the UN’s own position on its woeful performance in Sierra Leone? In effect, the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, damned the British military role with faint praise. While lauding the ‘big psychological boost’ the arrival of the British Rapid Reaction Force under Operation Palliser gave to the then 13,000 UN forces in country, he went on to say that ‘it would have been preferable if they would have been under the UN.’ That misses the whole point. It goes against the very reasons the British were successful. The soldiers that the British sent in were not UN peacekeeping forces. These were men sent in to wag war on the rebels of Sierra Leone, to take the battle to the jungles and chase the rebels back to their lair.
In truth, the arrival of a few hundred British Paras under Operation Palliser prevented the UN forces that outnumbered them some thirty to one from collapsing completely, and at the same time stopped the RUF rebels from taking Freetown. As the Paras flew into Lungi Airport in May 2000, the people of Freetown were poised to turn on the UN blue helmets and literally rip their throats out. As far as they could see, the 13,000 UN ‘peacekeepers’ appeared unable and unwilling to keep the peace, or even to stop the rebels from seizing the nation’s capital city. The murderous rebels were poised to run amok in Freetown once again, and the forces of the United Nations had clearly failed them. When the Operation Barras assault forces hi the West Side Boys three moths later, this sent out yet another powerful message to the rebels in Sierra Leone: the rule of international law was not to be flouted, however absurd and ineffective the UN had proved up until then.
But where the UN fails, are Western armies like Britain’s always going to be wiling to intervene? So many examples – Bosnia, the Congo, Rwanda, to name but a few – suggest otherwise. And one of the unique lessons of Sierra Leone is perhaps that of the role mercenaries can play in such situations – rebranded as Private Military Companies (PMC’s). Not once, but twice, PMCs waged war in Sierra Leone to stop the massacre of the innocents by faceless, soulless, evil killers. Where 13,000 UN peacekeepers with an annual budget of over half a billion dollars failed dismally in 2000, a force of just 150 mercenaries deployed by Executive Outcomes succeeded four years earlier with an annual budget of $20 million.
Yet the international community reacted at the time with outrage that a group of mercenaries could be used in such a way. Why? Does political correctness make it acceptable that countless innocent men, women and children be raped and maimed and abused and murdered by psychopathic killers while the UN stands by and does nothing, but unacceptable for mercenaries to step in and stop the slaughter? Does some refined sense of political correctness somehow make it all right for the slaughter to continue as long as mercenaries are not involved, even when those mercenaries are there by the invitation of the legitimate ruling government?
A year after EO were forced out of the country, Colonel Tim Spicer’s Sandline, a British PMC, stepped in to play a further, key role in vanquishing Sierra Leone’s rebels. But like EO before them, Sandline’s reward was to be vilified in the media and disowned by British politicians. Sandline became embroiled in the so-called ‘Arms-to-Africa’ affair, a sorry scandal of distasteful political expediency and pointless buck-passing that saw the FCO pilloried in the press and Sandline hauled over the coals for the role it played in shipping arms to Sierra Leone – when all Spicer’s men had done was to help reinstate a democratically elected African president to his rightful place as the leader of his country. Again, the question has to be asked, why? Sandline, like EO, helped to drive a bunch of murderous, evil killers out of Freetown and return the President of Sierra Leone to power. And for their efforts they were pilloried. Does this make any sense to anyone, anywhere?
http://www.sandline.com/site/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandline_International
As Andrew Rowbathan MP stated in the House of Commons (around the time of May 2000 launch of Operation Palliser), when commenting on the abject failure of UNAMSIL:
A 150-strong deployment by a private military company [EO] in 1995-6 is widely acknowledged, even among the critics of ‘mercenaries’, as having created the conditions that brought the rebels to the negotiating table and brought about the first democratic elections for many years. The later crisis in Sierra Leone would never have arisen if the contract with Executive Outcomes had not been prematurely terminated in 1996 (contrary to advice given to the Sierra Leone government at the time).
As James R. Davis, a Canadian security consultant, writes of the EO Sierra Leone operations: ‘I have to respect a group of solders who have the courage to put their lives at risk when the rest of the international community just stood by and watched. In Sierra Leone they fulfilled their contracts and won these dirty wars for their paymasters.’ Or Michael Grunberg, an adviser to Sandline: ‘If the indigenous population of a country like Sierra Leone – the very people who will be able to go through life with both hands as opposed to having them chopped off with a blunt axe by the rebels – want a company like Executive Outcomes to maintain the peace, who should blame them in the absence of any other help?’
Or Colonel Tim Spicer, late of Sandline:
Since the end of the Cold War, smoldering ethnic conflicts have broken out all over the globe. In the old days, one or other of the superpowers would have snuffed them out. Now, the forces of the traditional ‘policemen’ are depleted. Most have neither the resources nor the political will to involve themselves in faraway conflicts, particularly if it is not nationally significant. So how can countries create a safe, stable environment for peaceful existence and economic growth? Often they can’t and are left on their own with catastrophic results. That’s where private military companies come in. Could things have been different in Burundi or Rwanda if an effective military force had been deployed quickly? The answer is yes. Thousands of lives could have been saved, but nobody went.
Speaking of Rwanda, Paul Williams makes the following point:
PMCs can deploy rapidly, can risk the lives of their soldiers more readily than states, and can avoid the political entanglements that tend to haunt complex UN operations. After exploring whether it had the capacity to react to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Executive Outcomes concluded that not only did it have the capacity to rapidly deploy 1,500 soldiers with air support within six weeks, but it could have done so for $150 million for a six-month operation. Compare this to the UN operation [UNAMIR II], which deployed after the genocide and ended up costing $3 million a day (or $547 million for a six-month period). Executive Outcomes were welcomed in Freetown and would no doubt have been lauded in Rwanda, had the $150 million been found to pay for them to halt the genocide.
With US forces loath to intervene in Africa and British forces overstretched, PMCs may remain the most attractive option. But there is still the question of who would pay for them to intervene in a crisis like Sierra Leone. The soldiers who populate PMCs are professionals and they work for money. In fact, most soldiers, most peacekeepers – most aid workers and human-rights monitors for that matter – work for money and have to be paid. If the money can be found to pay for the inflated budgets of disastrous UN ‘peacekeeping’ efforts, then the international community can afford the more reasonable budgets of the PMCs. At present there are only two options open to world leaders, other than sending in a PMC. The first is the UN, which as the case of Sierra Leone shows (along with many other examples) is prohibitively expensive and tragically ineffective. The second is the army of an effective military power, but political will and public inertia often go against such unilateral military interventions in far-distant conflicts.
If a mechanism can be found to fund the PMCs, there are significant advantages to their role in spearheading any international intervention. PMCs are not better than professional national armies, but they do risk less of the unpalatable spin-offs that make military interventions difficult for Western governments. Most importantly, casualties are a fact of life among the men who work for PMCs, and they do not have the same emotive impact or media interest as do those from national forces. And PMCs can move quickly. While presidents and world leaders vacillate, PMCs can get men and equipment in-country efficiently and rapidly to intervene where needed.
These PMCs are not old ‘dogs of war’. These are no casual mercenaries. In Sierra Leone, Executive Outcomes had its own air force for international medical flights and logistics, its own training teams to drill some fighting discipline into the SLA, its own intelligence-gathering and operational planning facilities, its own attack and transport helicopters. EO’s operatives briefed international governments and led national armies of sever countries in the war against the rebels. If PMCs are to take on some of this international conflict-termination role, that will be because they are uniquely placed to deploy a large number of highly trained and disciplined former army personnel more quickly and more cheaply and with none of the associated PR risks of either the United Nations or national governments.
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Equipped with several different and incompatible radio communications systems, the various UN contingents were often unable to even communicate with each other. They were hardly the best-quality, most highly motivated soldiers in the first place. But parachuted into Sierra Leone’s civil war with an inadequate mandate (they had to have really, really good reasons to shoot any of the rebels), incompatible comms equipment and a defunct command-and-control structure, is it any wonder the UN mission imploded? The UN is not to blame – its member governments are. The UN invariably ends up being provided the world’s least competent soldiers to carry out the world’s most difficult peace missions, a guaranteed recipe for failure.
Following the near collapse of the UNAMSIL in May 2000, the army chiefs of staff from the nine different countries providing troops met in New York to discuss a change in their mandate from ‘peacekeeping’ to ‘peace enforcement’. Yet they refused to endorse this – arguing that it would be tantamount to a declaration of war against the RUF, which was not what their forces had originally signed up for.
Brigadier General Douglas, an adviser on UN peacekeeping operations, is not alone in being an advocate for PMCs to be given a greater role around the world. He recently briefed UN officials on the role PMCs can play, and the argument is achieving increased currency in international peacekeeping and political circles. There are many detractors still, but the Brigadier General believes it is only a matter of time before PMCs are widely used with UN operations. In perhaps the first case of its kind, Brigadier General Douglas helped organize an $8 million UN contract to hire 1,500 troops in Zaire to provide security for the UN refugee camps. It would have cost the UN $80 million to have paid traditional peacekeeping troops to have done the same job.
Dr Kevin A. O’Brien, an expert on international security issues, argues that the twenty-first century may witness the rise of a new type of PMC, one that overturns the stereotypes of old-style ‘mercenaries.’ In fact, he argues that the new model PMC had already begun to emerge out of the last decade of the twentieth century.
http://www.fco.gov.uk/Files/KFile/pmcobrien.pdf
Of course, there are caveats to the use of PMCs. First, PMCs would need to adhere to the laws of war and deliver on a specific contract and mandate as agreed with their paymaster (the UN or other world body). To help ensure this, their operations would be placed under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, as part of the terms of their employment. Second, as Paul Williams points out, there is a danger that in privatizing peacekeeping, states may turn their backs on their responsibility to maintain international peace and security in general. The divide between rich-world peacekeeping and poor-world peacekeeping could become even more stark – there being a willingness to intervene in our own backyard and a lack of will to do so elsewhere. But as the lessons from Rwanda and Balkans (to name but two examples) amply demonstrate, that international will to intervene is all too often lacking.
Paul Williams also notes that private military forces are one of the major causes of the dilemmas now affecting continents like Africa – where wayward mercenaries will work for the highest bidder, regardless of their legitimacy. And he point that the EO are largely the exception, rather than the rule. Few other PMCs have organized and run combat missions on a level that EO did in first Angola then Sierra Leone.
Williams cautions that peacekeeping operations of whatever nature out to aim to encourage non-violent forms of conflict resolution. ‘Dispersing military force to a greater number of actors only complicates already complex emergencies. Privatized peacekeeping may lead to less regulation and less democratic scrutiny.’ Other risks include the fact that PMCs could withdraw from an operation if the factors changed on the ground and it became unprofitable for them. And that PMCs recruit effective solders first and foremost, whose experience of peace operations and respect for human rights may leave something to be desired. There is also the issue of who should have the power to hire the private peacekeepers. But the answers to such questions surely lie in proper regulations, control and accountability. As Paul Williams points out: ‘Ultimately, those hiring PMCs must be morally responsible for their actions.’
US academic Doug Brooks has recently carried out a study to ascertain how much it would cost the UN to contract PMCs to end all of Africa’s internecine civil wars. He asked Sandline to come up with an informal tender bid for the task. The price tag? Just $750 million, or only a little over the cost of one year’s disastrous ‘peacekeeping’ efforts of the UNAMSIL in Sierra Leone. Brooks, a specialist on African security issues, argues that PMCs would do the work far more effectively. He believes that it is time the UN contracted out its peacekeeping, peace-enforcement and humanitarian efforts in Africa, because no one else is willing to do the job properly.
http://www.raceandhistory.com/cgi-bin/forum/webbbs_config.pl/noframes/read/493
Recently, a consortium of PMCs calling themselves the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA) has proposed that it be hired to work on behalf of the largely ineffectual UN peacekeeping operations in eastern Congo.
http://ipoaonline.org/php/
In the USA, the use of PMCs is already becoming very much of a reality: Dynacorp are training the police force in Iraq; Vinnell have for many years trained the National Guard in Saudi Arabia; Kellog Brown and Root are involved with security in Iraq for Halliburton.
http://dyn-intl.com/
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=672
http://www.vinnell.com/
http://www.halliburton.com/
http://www.answers.com/topic/kellogg-brown-and-root
http://www.blackwaterusa.com/
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I guess my research into the topic of PMCs leads me to a very cautious conclusion. Clearly there are times when the only solution to a just cause (such as many of the troubles in Africa) require military force to give peace and freedom a chance. Just as clear is (a) the inability of the UN to be reliably effective in dealing with these situations; (b) the unwillingness of the major super powers to intervene and (c) the enormous cost of traditional peacekeeping efforts.
On one that the purely theoretical argument that all of Africa’s major conflicts could be resolved of at least managed for under $800 million when peacekeeping efforts in a single one of Africa’s conflicts was costing (and failing) nearly that amount demands further investigation.
I think the issues of UN conflict intelligence, combined with the relatively low quality of expertise and intelligence that traditional peacekeeping contributing nations are likely to have when being placed into such conflict zones combined with their residence to be an effective fighting force ensure the failure of such peace keeping missions.
Clearly, both the body of intelligence needs to be put in place and access to a fighting force that is both competent and willing is essential for the UN moving forward.
However, just as critical is an understanding of the implications of using these forces. Clearly even the worlds most powerful armed forces (the US army) and debatably the worlds greatest intelligence agency (the CIA) have clearly misjudged both the tactical execution (Somalia, Iraq, Vietnam etc) and the long-term (CIA involvement in Afghanistan) effects of their policies. As equally disturbing is the human rights violations of the US army AND the UN peacekeeping behavior of the Jordanian peacekeepers themselves in Sierra Leone (they sold ammo and intelligence to the West Side Boys to enable them to attack the Nigerian UN peacekeeping force in return for conflict diamonds) and these are national armies who are supposed to exemplify standards of decency and respect. Layer onto this the lack of trust the general population has to big business and its executives and you have a potential recipe for disaster.
I doubt I would trust the UN and its policy makers with the detailed understanding of the generally confusing alliances that occur in internal civil wars to be able to always make wise decisions on the deployment of lethal force. The exact same pressure that keeps the superpowers from intervening (shying away from losses and fearing public opinion) seems to be the missing element that would help to keep PMCs in check.
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© Copyright 2010, Jesse Keane and David Cook
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