Opportunities & Exposures: Security
Hired Guns
Deborah Avant
01/01/2006

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Blackwater USA, a North Carolina–based private security company (PSC), joined the relief effort on the Gulf Coast, donating the services of an SA-330 Puma helicopter. Other PSCs from the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel sold their law enforcement services to the department of Homeland Security, to oil companies with damaged facilities and even to celebrities who rushed to the region to help. Two weeks later, Blackwater made the news again when two if its employees were killed while working in Iraq.

The growing role of the private sector in security is a dramatic indicator of the shifting relationship between public and private entities in the 21st century. PSCs do scores of jobs that were once done by soldiers, from building and maintaining camps in the field to supporting weapons systems and providing law enforcement and training. They are rapidly becoming indispensable to national militaries, private corporations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and individuals around the world.

The implications of privatizing security are hotly contested and the debate has polarized. Critics claim that PSCs are mercenaries who threaten to undermine state control and democracy. Others believe they offer professional solutions to intractable security problems. This debate misses the obvious point: Privatizing security poses both benefits and risks. Polarized debate also obscures potential solutions that result from neither rejecting nor embracing private security, per se, but from charting strategies that encourage PSCs to serve the public good.

The use of PSCs in both the Gulf Coast and Iraq provides a window into some of their benefits. The PSCs can provide surge capacity to field forces quickly, without the bureaucratic lead time. They can also field specialized forces. Recruiting from databases of retired military and police makes it easier for PSCs to hire people with particular experience—such as retired MPs, civil affairs officers, special forces or even translators—and thus match specific needs better than standing forces. PSCs are flexible. They can provide whatever kind of force is needed. Finally, using PSCs, rather than troops, is seen as less politically costly.

It also diffuses control, leaving no one in charge—or accountable—for wrongdoing.
The challenges that private security introduces, however, are serious. The first is the legal uncertainty. The status of PSC personnel and the appropriate laws and legal system through which to hold them responsible leads to dangers for both PSC personnel and for those operating near them. PSC personnel are generally not subject to military justice systems and, depending on their citizenship status and where they are operating, may not be subject to much of a legal framework at all.

Using private security also reduces transparency in democratic states. In Iraq, the U.S. government does not even keep track of the number of contractors sent there; media coverage of government troops far exceeds that of PSCs; and, while military deaths in Iraq are routinely covered and monitored, private contractor deaths are not. Finally, using PSCs redistributes power over the control of force, either within the government or to people outside the government (the oil companies, NGOs or private individuals that hire PSCs). At the very least this recasts accountability. In some instances, however, it also diffuses control, leaving no one in charge—or accountable—for wrongdoing.

PSCs are eager for continued profit, and this could be a tool for leashing them to the greater good. If consumers insist that PSCs operate according to professional standards, demand transparency and resolve legal confusion, PSCs are more likely to link profit with legitimate behavior. For example, authorities should tell the residents of New Orleans (or Baghdad) who Blackwater personnel are, why they have authority to use force and to whom they are accountable. Locals should also have some voice in this process. Many PSCs endorse setting these kinds of standards.

Because PSCs are transnational companies that work for customers all over the globe, the coordination among consumers is complicated. Resolving disputes about the legal status of personnel and the law by which to hold them responsible, for example, requires cooperation between different states as well as the companies and individuals. Even more problematic is the temptation of governments to keep information about PSCs hidden in order to preserve the political cost savings of using them in the first place.

PSCs respond to market forces. Unless large consumers such as the U.S. government work with other states, companies, NGOs and citizens to create a framework for articulating appropriate PSC behavior and reinforcing the belief that behaving appropriately is a profitable strategy, the critics’ fears may be well founded.

Art by Matt Mahurin.

Deborah Avant is associate professor of political science at George Washington University and author of The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security.