Mercenaries and Civilization

I appreciate international society’s need for mercenary companies. Developing military institutions is difficult and time consuming, and even though mercenaries are expensive, they can provide short term emergency relief. Mercenaries have been a part of the domestic and international scene since time immemorial, and they’ve never really disappeared; they receded a bit during the Golden Age of the Nation-State, but have re-established their importance in the last twenty years. I also appreciate, to some degree, the desire of the US military to outsource some of its responsibilities to mercenary companies. The drive for privatization of government function in the 1990s was absurd and destructive, and cut many capabilities that necessarily should have remained public, but it’s true enough that there are some tasks performed by the military that can be done well enough by private firms. Finally, I think that there’s potentially a role for mercenary companies in shipping protection, anti-piracy, and similar endeavours.

All that said, I wonder if the notion of a “civilized” mercenary company is simply an oxymoron. This is to say that, while we can identify situations in which a mercenary company might be useful, it’s virtually impossible to create a functioning organization that can abide by the rules of the civilized world. As Huntington tells us, military organizations are about managed violence. The professional managers of violence are tempered by their loyalty to nation and state; even when they stray, they tend to do so in the name of the state. Norms of professionalism keep professional military personnel within certain constraints, as do the policy preferences of the state. A organization which replaces loyalty to the state with pursuit of profit may be notionally possible, but I suspect that taking loyalty to the state out of the equation unglues military professionalism. When the military professional has many potential clients, and especially when the military professional is detached from a culture of self-sacrifice (all military professionals understand that they must be willing to accept danger and death as part of their jobs) I think that the professional norms may disintegrate.

The Blackwater Xe experience resulted in an organization that was plainly unfit for operation even in the anarchy of Iraq. I doubt that the allegations listed in the Scahill article will be the last to come to light regarding Blackwater’s operations, and of course Blackwater wasn’t the only mercenary company in Iraq. It may turn out that Blackwater was just uniquely terrible, but I have my doubts.