Warfare as Enterprise: Peter W. Singer, Corporate Warriors

Even the most casual observer of the American intervention in Iraq will have noted the role played there by private military firms, or PMFs. Peter W. Singer's timely, accessible, well-constructed, and readable new book, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003) seeks to get inside the growing worldwide phenomenon of PMFs, to tell us who they are, what they do, where they do it, and what the implications are for future military operations. It is no small aim, considering the secretive nature of the business. Neither PMFs nor their clients are forthcoming with regard to the services they provide, although some are more open than others. Then too, as Singer notes, some observers contend that PMFs are little more than fronts for the covert operations of intelligence agencies, adding a screen of conspiracy theory to the obscurity in which this industry operates. Corporate Warriors is the first book-length analysis of PMFs, and with it Singer has set a high standard for scholarship on the subject.

For some, Singer's title will conjure up images of modern-day condottieri and start Warren Zevon's "Roland, the Headless Thompson Gunner" playing on the mental soundtrack. But the days of ad hoc soldier-of-fortune outfits run out of Third World P.O. boxes by infamous pseudo-celebrities like Mad Mike Hoare are gone. The privatized military industry is a complex beast providing myriad services, from fire for hire to general security, maintenance, logistics and support, and strategic planning. To conceive of the industry according to old stereotypes, Singer emphasizes, is to underestimate it badly.

Singer devotes a chapter to the history of private military units, primarily from a Western perspective. For-profit military operations have been the historical rule, not the exception. Only in the past two centuries, with the rise of the European nation-state, did government forces come to dominate the military landscape. But Singer's review misses a large chunk of the globe; it is not clear that the same truth holds for East Asia, say. He argues that private military firms have historically been most robust during transitional periods—in politically unsettled times, or in the aftermath of drawn-out conflicts, such as the Hundred Years' War.

Does the recent growth of PMFs signal a return to an old pattern, then? Singer thinks not. The new firms "represent the next evolution in the provision of military services by private actors," he writes, "parallel to the development of the modern business organization" (p. 45). It is, in Singer's estimation, the corporatization of military services that distinguishes the new PMF from 1960s Congo mercenaries and fifteenth-century Swiss pikemen. "The newest wave of private military agents are commercial enterprises, first and foremost, . . . [with] a tested, efficient, and more permanent structure that can compete and survive in the global market place" (p. 45). Of course, it is in the best interests of PMFs to present themselves in this light, as Singer notes, and many in the industry do not meet such high standards of professionalism.

While PMFs may mirror the complex business practices of our time, none can compare in scale or influence to the fourteenth-century protection ring known as the Great Company, some ten thousand strong, or the condottieri of Renaissance Italy, or the vast operation of Count Wallenstein of Bohemia during the Thirty Years' War (1618-48), who became not only the greatest military entrepreneur of his generation but also the wealthiest man in all of Europe. At the height of his power Wallenstein controlled an area approaching two thousand square miles, in which he produced vast amounts of armaments and supplies. As Charles Tilly has noted, "the great seventeenth-century organizers of war involved themselves in supply as much as in battle. That made their big business even bigger" (Capital, Coercion, and European States, A.D. 990-1992 [Blackwell, 1994], 81).

Even if no PMF chief executive comes close to matching Wallenstein, nevertheless the global role of PMFs is substantial, and the United States might well be driving their growth...