How private companies recruit former child soldiers for military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

01 May 2017 15:52 GMT

From opportunistic guns for hire on the fringe of domestic conflicts to a global force operating within a multibillion-dollar industry – the private military sector seems to be flourishing.

When we think of war and the warrior who fights it, we have this image in our mind of a man in uniform. And uniform means they are fighting as part of a military, serving a nation. The cause that they fight for therefore is political, patriotism. And yet, when you look at the wars of the 21st century, they don’t match those assumptions any more.
Peter Singer, author of Corporate Warriors

As armies and war increasingly become ‘outsourced’, private military companies have taken on a wider increasing range of responsibilities, from security and intelligence analysis to training and combat roles.

“The private military industry is a part of how the countries fight wars today … The US government doesn’t track the number of contractors used in places like Iraq or Afghanistan. We know it’s a lot, we don’t know exactly how many,” says Sean McFate, a professor at Georgetown University who used to work for a private military company.

The employees of these contractors can come from anywhere, and sometimes those leading the missions don’t know exactly who is working for them.

“They [the companies] hire and they sometimes create what they call ‘subs’, subcontractors. There’s been commanders in Afghanistan who just simply say, ‘We don’t know who the subs of the subs of the subs are.’ So you’ve all these, like, layers of a contract.

“It’s the complete opposite of the private military world. You look at the budget first,” says McFate. “Company self-interest is different than national self-interest. Companies are profit-maximisers, that’s what they do, that’s natural.”

As the military trade grows and private military companies try to find the cheapest available soldiers around the world, who are the mercenaries? And what are the consequences of the privatisation of war?

Child Soldiers Reloaded looks at the changing nature of war, the business of warfare and the issues behind it.

http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/Images/2017/4/25/ec9bf9e244944ffa904821fcaa27ca79_18.jpg
Private military companies have become significant players in conflicts around the world [Al Jazeera]

The business of warfare: Aegis Defence Services

In 2004, the US Department of Defense signed a deal estimated at $293m with the private military company Aegis to execute operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So in the early days of Iraq, it was a gold rush. You had companies coming out of nowhere … It was really like a cowboy wild, wild west, where nobody had any control. Anybody doing anything with firearms in this country could say they’re a private military company. It was an ATM for these companies.
Professor Sean McFate, Georgetown University

Aegis Defence Services is a British private military company founded in 2002 by former British Army officer Tim Spicer. Spicer was involved in the 1998 “arms to Africa” scandal, in which his previous company, Sandline International, was found to be breaching UN sanctions by importing weapons to Sierra Leone.

But according to journalist and author Stephen Armstrong, “He’s a dashing and charming, public school-educated guards’ officer. And that really wasn’t massively a feature of the industry before then. It changed the global agenda of what a private military company was.”

During the US invasion of Iraq, Aegis was contracted to oversee the communication and coordination for all the private security companies on the ground providing guards to protect US military bases.

“In effect, it meant that they were the general in charge of all of the private contractors. Now, at that point, the US military was the largest military presence in Iraq. But if you added together all of the private military contractors, Spicer was effectively in charge of the second-largest armed force in Iraq,” says Armstrong.

However, when the US decided to end its military mission in Iraq, budgets decreased and the private military industry had to start offering different types of deals. As a result, they started to hire cheaper soldiers, many of them from the developing world.

Aegis employed many mercenaries from Sierra Leone and Uganda to work in Iraq because they were cheaper than other options.

“The Sierra Leonean war has been fought mainly by young combatants. If you’re looking for young men to perform military jobs, the chances are quite good that they have also been child soldiers,” says Maya Mynster Christensen, anthropologist, Royal Danish Defence College.

She explains that “from a Sierra Leone government perspective, the Iraq recruitment was considered a quite good deal, in the sense that they could actually take local troublemakers, sending them away to Iraq for a couple of years, and then returning them after two years with money earned from their overseas deployment. This could serve to stabilise security in Sierra Leone.”

In 2010, the US Congress appointed a commission to investigate outsourcing to private military companies, but the recruitment of former child soldiers was not part of the investigation.

The commission concluded that the US government has been too dependent on private military companies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that between $30bn and $60bn disappeared to waste and fraud.

The number of former child soldiers recruited by private companies to take part in active combat is unknown, as is the total number of employees from the developing world is also unknown.

“On the one hand, Western countries have pumped large sums of money into the reintegration of former child soldiers, but now we have governments like the US supporting these so-called security companies that recruit people and continue their exposure to violence and cement their identities as perpetrators of violence as soldiers, that make it impossible to ever reintegrate into civilian life,” says Michael Wessels, a psychologist and adviser to the UN and NGOs.

“We pride ourselves on being a moral people, trying to do the right thing. What we’re doing is, we’re exploiting people, using young people who’ve been child soldiers, deliberately sinking them into the jaws of combat and further violence. Nothing could be worse for these young people, nothing could be worse for security.”

http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/Images/2017/4/25/553a526c7c2240c5833de06e7a7246bf_18.jpg
The number of former child soldiers recruited by private companies for war zone is unknown [Al Jazeera]
Source: Al Jazeera News

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/specialseries/2017/04/child-soldiers-reloaded-privatisation-war-170424204852514.html

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soldier (n.) Look up soldier at Dictionary.com
c. 1300, souder, from Old French soudier, soldier "one who serves in the army for pay," from Medieval Latin soldarius "a soldier" (source also of Spanish soldado, Italian soldato), literally "one having pay," from Late Latin soldum, extended sense of accusative of Latin solidus, name of a Roman gold coin (see solidus).

While not exclusively a phenomena of capitalism, Greek and other mercenaries were a standard feature in the Classical period, in it's modern manifestation the mercenary was closely associated with the nascent bourgeois and capitalism. It became the primary form of military service around the mid 15th century and was largely abandoned by Europe and it's settlers by the early 18th century as Royal Absolutism and then the Nation State, both also strongly associated with the rise of capital, displaced the practice with national regiments, then armies. While royal control of the army was undoubtedly the main reason this surely lifted a financial burden off the booj, spreading the cost of a government theoretically responsive to their needs across society, like today.(and when it didn't dovetail you got booj revolutions.)

The Thirty Years War 1618-1648, was fought almost entirely with mercenaries. Leading generals like Wallenstein were entrepreneurs, they'd raise a few regiments on their own or borrowed money to show what they could do then 'pitch' the relevant monarch/collation and negotiate price for full blown army. The utter devastation of Germany was greatly aggravated by this practice as no one was responsible for the land or society. As the coffers of the antagonists dried up quickly these vultures had leave to 'tax' or resort to pillage to maintain their armies. A striking anomaly of this conflict was that the proportion of infantry to cavalry reversed over the decades. At the beginning it was one horseman to two foot soldiers but by the last decade it was the opposite. This is unexpected because cavalry is more expensive to raise and maintain than foot and you'd expect a resort to cheaper troops in such a drawn out conflict. The answer is that horsemen have much greater range of forage, and many an infantry formation starved to death in the wasteland that Germany had become.

We should examine as to why the practice is resurgent. There should be 'structural' reason(s) beyond the mindless rhetoric of libertarians.

The soldier, as he evolved from town militia to wage slave might be considered a proto-proletariat. While there were band of crossbowmen from northern Italian towns for hire pretty early on the vast majority in the early days were armed with polearms, pike, halberd. A great degree of proficiency is required of all these weapons which faced down the aristocratic cavalry, much drill and strength. These were skill positions and demanded skill wages, like the guilds. As military technology advanced, particularly individual firearms, the numbers of polearms were partially replaced by men carrying the arbusquer, a primitive musket which did not require near as much training. But the masters of war still needed those expensive pikes to ward off enemy horse. Their problem was solved with the invention of the socket bayonet. While not as efficient a horse stopper it was good enough, the pike entirely disappeared in a flash. The cost of an army got cheaper, you could hire more soldiers for your money. A scenario the Luddites could thoroughly understand.