Abstract
The rise of private security companies is the direct and logical consequence of factors that have gradually contributed to the post-Cold War demise of national armies. While Western national armed forces are likely to retain their advantage over private competitors in terms of available resources, they are increasingly facing a deployability-crisis. This means they are experiencing difficulty recruiting, deploying and retaining the personnel required for military operations. The citizen soldier of modern Western societies generally seems less willing and capable of being the primary actor in the future projection of state power. At the same time, senior military officers in Australia, New Zealand, Britain and the United States are expressing concern about losing their most experienced professionals to private military firms (PMFs) (Singer 2005a: 129). This paper will advance the hypothesis that the demise of national armies plays a major role in the privatization of war and that this development is the product of a number of global and societal factors. These include the receding power of the nation-state, the changing status and role of the military, as well as a continued process of civilianization. All of these factors are increasingly eroding the war-fighting capabilities of Western armed forces.
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The financial burden of maintaining social systems has taken on proportions last seen, as Martin van Creveld (1999: 361) points out, in times of total war.
Robert Kaplan (2005: 7) makes the point that even prior to 11 September 2001 US Special Forces were operating in 170 countries per year.
Swain (2003: 10–18) elaborates on the experiences made in Bosnia in this regard.
His view is shared by Anita Blair, Chairman of the Congressional Commission on Military Training and Gender-Related Issues in 1994 when she concluded: “As a result of my work on the commission, I became convinced that the objective for many who advocate greater female influence in the armed services is not so much to conquer the military as conquer manhood: They aim to make the most quintessentialyl masculine of our institutions more feminine.” (Gutmann 2000: 152)
The large-scale inclusion of women in the Red Army during World War 2 resulted in what recent research suggests, could be called massive sexual abuse. Max Hastings (2004: 146) cites numerous accounts by men and women who confirm that abortions and deliberate pregnancies were equally widespread, with a former Red Army doctor concluding: “Whole trainloads of girls were sent home pregnant.” Even four decades later, in Afghanistan during that country’s civil war, officers and NCO’s of the Red Army duelled with handgrenades and pistols over the few women attached to combat units as medical assistants and signals personnel (Navroz 1995:11). In Guerilla organizations, women have been able to compensate for the above mentioned differences by the nature of this type of warfare, changing into their feminine civilian roles at will and consequently often avoiding detection through being regarded as non-combatants unless discovered with weapons in their possession. In conventional warfare this advantage is lost, while men have also been inclined to eventually leave those arms of service where women are introduced into what was previously regarded to be a “man’s domain” (Creveld 1991:121).
The reasons for this are found in both the morale and disciplinary problems associated with outbursts of irrational violence among male comrades of women that have been killed or wounded in combat, as well as the reluctance of their Arab opponents to surrender to women, which in turn can raise casualties as the enemy now tended to fight with greater resolve (Creveld 1991: 184).
After a ten year effort in the US military to ignore these differences, it was found that of the 65,000 army women assigned to tasks requiring considerable physical strength, only 3% performed adequately. It requires ten women to handle stretchers which are usually carried by six enlisted men (Freedmann 1985:77). Repeated studies in several countries, many commissions of inquiry, research of every kind have confirmed the physical limitations of women in military environments. Women are generally unable to even change the tires of the very supply trucks they drive. (Gutmann 2000: 244–260)
George Kennan (cited in Glennon 2003: 31) also points out that the international concept of sovereign equality is a myth and that the United Nations are thus based on wrong assumptions from the onset.
This approach is based on a deep trust of Western European societies in rule-based systems in the form of a relatively reliable bureaucracy, as opposed to the far more relationship-based systems of their adversaries. As Robert Kaplan (2000: 179) writes, this is based on the Northern European experience with bureaucracies that functioned well due to the ethnic homogeneity ensuring that the bureaucrats themselves were “the man next door” who broadly shared the same value-system.
In fact, the recruitment realities and the idea of having a lean but mobile force, is exacerbating the problem in the sense that the need for more operational brigades is not to be met by new recruitment. Instead, 30,000 men and women, rather than the 100,000 that some contend are required, are to be reassigned in such a way that a further ten brigades are formed (Boot 2005: 108).
This is the term used to refer to special forces operatives (Kaplan 2005: 17).
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© 2007 VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften | GWV Fachverlage GmbH, Wiesbaden
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Maninger, S. (2007). Soldiers of Misfortune: Is the Demise of National Armed Forces a Core Contributing Factor in the Rise of Private Security Companies?. In: Jäger, T., Kümmel, G. (eds) Private Military and Security Companies. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-90313-2_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-90313-2_5
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