Private military companies

The legal and economic status of private military companies (PMCs) became an area of intense debate during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the early twenty-first century, as thousands of private security personnel were hired by the US government to provide supplementary security and assistance. Due to the detailed media coverage of the conflict in Iraq, a number of prominent researchers studied the relationship between military resources and the use of PMC forces to supplement military operations. In subsequent years other groups, including PMC Wagner, a company funded by the Russian government, also attracted public scrutiny.

Growth of PMCs

While mercenary activity has existed throughout the history of civilization, modern private military companies (PMCs) originated in the second half of the twentieth century. Particularly since the outbreak of the Cold War in the 1940s, the United States has employed PMCs through various government branches. Though the United Nations (UN) bans the use of mercenaries, the United States and several other major powers, including Russia, China, and Great Britain, never signed onto the relevant convention. This opened the door to the use of PMCs in notable twenty-first century conflicts, bringing such organizations to public attention. Notable examples of PMC use during the twenty-first century included the US use of private contractors during the War on Terror and the Russian government's use of soldiers employed by the Wagner Group during its interventions in African conflicts and 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The US-led occupation of Iraq began in March 2003 and lasted until December 2011. In the aftermath of the occupation, the US Department of Defense (DOD) began hiring private military contractors to provide additional security and supplementary services. The Iraq War led to the largest proliferation of PMCs in history, and by the middle of the decade, the number of private military contractors active in Iraq rivaled the number of soldiers and military personnel in the region. Among the most prominent PMCs operating in Iraq were Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR Inc); Blackwater USA (Academi, later Constellis); DynCorp International; AQMI Strategy Corp; CACI International; and Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI).

PMCs in Iraq were tasked with providing private security for nonmilitary officials, installations, and convoys, as well as aiding in the training of civilian militia. They also provided linguistic aides and translators and supplemented construction personnel for military and nonmilitary construction projects. According to official military policy, PMC employees were allowed to respond to attacks with proportionate force but were prohibited from offensive action by United Nations restrictions.

During the Gulf War conflict of the early 1990s, estimates released by the US State Department indicated that there was one PMC employee for every fifty members of the US Armed Forces. In 2004, there was one PMC for every ten soldiers active in Iraq.

In 2006, census figures of military and security personnel in Iraq indicated that there were more than one hundred thousand PMC employees of various nationalities operating in Iraq. An article published by the New York Times in August 2008 estimated the number of active PMC employees at 180,000. This caused controversy in the media, as estimates released by the Pentagon had indicated that no more than 25,000 PMC employees were active. A 2008 report from the Congressional Budget Office revealed that the US State Department spent more than $100,000 billion in fees to private contractors between 2003 and 2009, representing more than 20 percent of the cost of the Iraqi conflict. Some experts contended that the Congressional Budget Office estimate may be far less than the actual cost of PMC operations in Iraq and elsewhere during the period.

Many of the most prominent PMCs were involved in significant controversies during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. Representatives of CACI International were accused of taking part in the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. While a number of US Army servicemen were prosecuted for their role in the torture of Iraqi prisoners, army service investigations found that private security employees were involved in as many as half of the proven cases of abuse and torture, and many were not prosecuted for their role in perpetrating these crimes.

According to the United Nations Mercenary Convention, which went into effect in 2001, member nations are prohibited from recruiting, training, or financing "mercenaries" for use in military operations. The use of PMC employees is controversial because some opponents argue that PMCs are synonymous with mercenary organizations. Supporters of PMC activities argue that mercenaries are recruited specifically to fight in armed conflicts, while PMC employees are prohibited from engaging in conflict directly unless attacked and are officially employed to serve as security and assistants to military forces.

In addition to controversies surrounding the conduct of PMC employees, some critics have argued that the expansion of PMC forces has been economically damaging to the Department of Defense. Employees of private military companies are paid substantially higher rates for their services than active military personnel. For instance, Scott Helvenston, one of four Blackwater employees who were killed in an attack in 2004 by dissidents in Fallujah, Iraq, was earning approximately $600 per day, which is significantly higher than the pay offered to low-level soldiers fighting in the conflict.

Another controversial issue was the potential for PMC contractors to exert political influence. For instance, in 2001, the top ten PMCs spent more than $32 million in lobbying and more than $12 million in donations to political organizations. Throughout the decade, political analysts and media organization expressed concern that PMC political donations might lead to political corruption. By 2021 as much of half of the $14 billion the US had spent on national defense since 2001 had gone to private contractors, including PMCs, which continued to extensively lobby on behalf of their industry.

The US continued to use PMC contractors for the entirety of the Iraq War (2003–11) and the War in Afghanistan (2001–21). In 2020, the year before the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, 22,562 PMC contractors were operating in the country, twice the number of US military troops at that time. From October 2001 and August 2021, 2,402 US soldiers had died fighting for the United States in Afghanistan compared to at least 3,500 PMC contractors. Other US military efforts considered part of the country's War on Terror, including US intervention in the Syrian Civil War, led to other PMC contractor deaths.

Halliburton and KBR Controversies

Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR), which was owned by Halliburton until April 2007, was one of the most controversial PMCs because of the extensive links between the company and the George W. Bush administration. Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, was the CEO of Halliburton prior to running for office. Halliburton was awarded several lucrative no-bid contracts for providing security services in Iraq, and some accused the Bush administration of favoring KBR because of the company’s connections with Cheney. Halliburton donated more than $700,000 to the Republican Party between 1999 and 2002.

Another KBR controversy occurred in 2008 when former Defense Department civilian official Charles M. Smith told the media that he had been ousted from his position in 2004 when he refused to pay $1 billion in questionable expenses to KBR contractors. Smith’s decision to refuse payment came after US Army auditors had determined that KBR had failed to properly account for the compensation they were seeking. Following Smith’s dismissal, Halliburton received payment from the Defense Department after hiring an independent auditor to review the charges. In 2010, it was announced that the US Justice Department was filing suit against KBR for improper costs associated with the company’s activities in Iraq.

Also in 2008, it was revealed that KBR had avoided paying hundreds of millions in Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring employees through shell corporations in the Cayman Islands. According to a March 2008 article published in the Boston Globe, more than 21,000 KBR employees were listed as employees of two subordinate corporations located outside of the US tax jurisdiction. The Defense Department had been aware of Halliburton’s tax loophole since 2004 but claimed that this tax maneuver allowed KBR to charge less for services and thereby resulted in Defense Department savings. Media and political advocates criticized KBR and the Defense Department for favoring immediate budget concerns while costing the United States millions of dollars in potential tax revenues.

In 2009 KBR pleaded guilty to violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) of 1977 and paid $402 million in fines for using independent agents to distribute $180 million in bribes to Nigerian officials while trying to win lucrative construction contracts. KBR argued that being forced to comply with US laws placed the company at a competitive disadvantage and could prevent it from winning contracts against non-US-based competitors.

Blackwater Controversies

North Carolina–based Blackwater USA, founded in the 1990s by former naval officer Erik Prince, became one of the world’s most prominent PMCs after the company won substantial Defense Department contracts to provide personal security in Iraq from 2003 to 2011. Blackwater’s first contract, awarded in 2003, was for providing protection for Ambassador L. Paul Bremer at a cost of $21 million for an eleven-month period. From 2004 to 2008, Blackwater earned $320 million in Defense Department contracts for services in Iraq.

The military conflicts won by Blackwater attracted media scrutiny because of the close ties between Blackwater employees and representatives of the Bush administration. Prince was a White House intern under the first Bush administration, and his family were longtime and substantial contributors to the Republican Party. In addition, Prince’s sister was a former chair of the Republican Party, and members of the Blackwater staff served in high-ranking government positions. Cofer Black, one of Blackwater’s chief officers, was a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) head of counterterrorism operations.

Between 2004 and 2010, representatives of Blackwater were involved in a number of high-profile controversies, primarily regarding the behavior of Blackwater employees. There were numerous instances of Blackwater employees being accused of assaulting or mistreating civilians and taking an aggressive or active role in minor conflicts. The 2004 death of four Blackwater employees operating as guards for a supply convoy in Fallujah was also controversial; some in the media speculated that the incident was indicative of the problems inherent in allowing civilian security to operate in unstable areas.

In September 2007, four guards employed by Blackwater Worldwide were involved in a shooting incident in a Baghdad public square that resulted in the death of seventeen Iraqi civilians and the wounding of more than twenty others. The incident, known as the Nisour Square massacre, was one of the most controversial events of the Iraqi conflict, outside of the Abu Ghraib prison incident. The four guards involved in the incident were accused of manslaughter, but the case was dismissed in 2009 when a federal judge claimed that the Department of Defense had used tainted evidence in their case. In April 2011, an appeals panel found that there was insufficient reason for dismissal of the case and ordered the case to be reopened, leading to the eventual convictions of all four men in October 2014. One man was sentenced to life in prison while three others received thirty-year sentences.

As Blackwater became the subject of increased scrutiny by the media and political analysts, Prince split the company into at least thirty shell corporations in an effort to continue bidding for contracts while reducing the company’s public scrutiny. According to an article published in the New York Times in April 2011, since 2001, corporations owned wholly or in part by Prince had won more than $600 million in classified contracts from either the Department of Defense or the CIA. Though Blackwater received significant support from the Bush administration, companies owned by Prince continued to enjoy significant support under the administration of Barack Obama, in part because the Obama administration wanted to avoid the cost of hiring new companies to take over operations handled by existing companies in Iraq.

In December 2020 US president Donald Trump pardoned four former Blackwater contractors convicted of murder and other charges; this pardon caused significant controversy in the US as well as widespread condemnation in Iraq. By that point the company, which had been renamed Academi in 2011, had merged with Triple Canopy to form Constellis Holdings, Inc.

Wagner Group

By the late 2010s global conversations about PMCs began to focus on PMC Wagner, often referred to as the Wagner Group, a Russian PMC formally established in 2014 by Russian businessman Yevgeny Prighozin, whose restaurant and catering businesses had helped him establish a close relationship with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Former Russian army officer Dmitry Utkin was also allegedly involved in helping found the group. One of the group's first high-profile actions was helping with the illegal Russian annexation of Crimea, a Ukrainian territory, in February 2014; many observers speculated that using Wagner PMC contractors helped Putin deny direct responsibility for the annexation.

Wagner continued to enjoy a close relationship with the Russian government throughout the 2010s and received extensive funding from the Russian government for its involvement in the Russian intervention in the Syrian Civil War and other conflicts. In addition to the funding it received from the Russian government Wagner also enriched itself through its work in Africa, particularly in Mali and the Central African Republic; in exchange for providing military support to the countries' embattled central governments, Wagner was allowed to take over gold mines and other natural resources in these nations by the late 2010s. These mines and other resources were a valuable source of income for Wagner into the 2020s; meanwhile, the group remained the subject of intense international speculation due to the lack of verifiable information publicly available at that time.

The group's profile grew significantly after it assisted the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022 and initially failed to capture the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and a number of other key objectives. As the Russian war effort stalled throughout 2022 and into 2023 Putin, who at that time still enjoyed a close relationship with Wagner leader Prigozhin, allowed the PMC to recruit directly from Russian prisons. Many of these new Wagner recruits were allegedly sent to the frontlines with little training, a sharp contrast from the seasoned military veterans who made up the majority of Wagner's contractors before the invasion began and who tend to make up the majority of contractors at normal PMCs. By May 2023 the US government estimated that 50,000 Wagner soldiers were fighting in Ukraine, making Wagner one of the largest PMCs in the world at that time. Meanwhile, Prigozhin became a public figure as he openly acknowledged his leadership of Wagner and publicly criticized the leadership of a number of Russian military officials.

Wagner soldiers were accused of a number of war crimes in Ukraine, including the murder and rape of Ukrainian civilians, leading to international sanctions; the group also played a key role in some of the conflict's bloodiest battles, including the battle of Bakhmut, sustaining an estimated 22,000 soldiers killed in action by May 2023, according to the group's own estimates. Putin's increasing reliance on Wagner in Ukraine gave the group a level of power and influence unusual for PMCs and turned Prigozhin into one of the most powerful figures in Russia; his criticism of the Russian military intensified as the Russian war effort struggled throughout 2023, although he initially sought to maintain his close relationship with Putin.

Prigozhin's criticism escalated into open conflict in June 2023 when he led an attempted armed coup against the Russian government, which many observers considered the most serious challenge to Putin's leadership in decades. Wagner's forces ultimately stood down before reaching the Russian capital of Moscow and Wagner fighters were given permission to relocate to neighboring Belarus, a key Russian ally; Prigozhin was also given amnesty. However, in subsequent weeks, the status of the peace deal and fate of Wagner soldiers appeared uncertain and Prigozhin continued to appear publicly in Russia. In late August Prigozhin and ten others, including Utkin, died in a plane crash which the US and many other countries considered suspicious and possibly carried out on Putin's orders. After the deaths of Prigozhin and Utkin Putin instituted a new requirement that contractors employed by Wagner and other PMCs swear an oath of allegiance to the Russian government, although the future of the group's relationship with Putin and the rest of the Russian government remained uncertain. By that point a number of foreign governments, including the United Kingdom, had designated the Wagner Group as a terrorist organization.

Impact

The proliferation of private military companies during the Iraq War and in subsequent military conflicts such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine represented, to some analysts, a fundamental alteration of warfare strategy. This proliferation resulted in record US military spending, a significant portion of which was due to the growing reliance on nonmilitary contractors for security, transport, and technical aid. The Defense Department defended the use of PMCs for a variety of reasons, including insufficient manpower and the need for supplementary personnel who are able to respond under attack. However, some analysts questioned the financial justification of PMC operations, claiming that the Department of Defense was wasting significant resources that could have been better distributed among servicemen and -women. In addition, contracts won by companies such as Blackwater and KBR raised accusations of government corruption extending to the executive branch.

In other cases, government use of PMCs raised concerns that these groups could function as private military forces operating outside the normal controls of elected or appointed government officials, or serve as proxies to allow governments to deny responsibility for certain actions. This concern grew significantly during the first year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when the Wagner Group played a major role in the conflict. The group's alleged involvement in a number of suspected war crimes also highlighted the potential for PMCs to engage in misconduct.

Some analysts have speculated that the use of PMCs will remain an important part of future military operations, because PMC employees represent a necessary supplement to existing military manpower. However, some raised concerns that the proliferation of PMCs could threaten the integrity of the US military, as many former special-forces operatives chose to leave the military during this time in favor of PMC employment, where they were often able to earn higher salaries for their services. Given the higher profits offered by the private sector, some analysts speculated that the armed forces would experience additional difficulty maintaining necessary manpower for future operations.

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