Why is this Important?
To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, this site is dedicated to the proposition that the growth of the Private Military and Security Company (PMSC) industry since the 1980s, along with its growing power and influence, and use by all sorts of clients, from governments to corporations, makes it an increasingly important geopolitical actor in the realm of international security issues. Thus, it is a strategic issue.
Given the numerous claims, some, but not all, of which are true, made by both PMSC advocates and critics, it is also frequently a source of many flamboyant claims deserving critical scrutiny and satire. Hence the IISS motto: Let’s stop war by making fun of it.
Over the past decades, the growth of the PMSC sector has been driven by the idea that the private sector can do many of the same things that regular governmental forces can do, only more quickly, cheaply and efficiently. This is what the academics call neoliberalism, or military outsourcing and privatization, and what others call free-market capitalism gone wild. It’s the real-life equivalent of what the fictional character Milo Minderbinder called for in Joseph Heller’s classic novel, Catch-22:
“Frankly, I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.”
Privatization might make sense for picking up your trash. Whether it works in a war zone is still, at a minimum, a question unanswered, and, at maximum, a huge self-serving conceit. Let’s just say that there hasn’t been a lot of empirical evidence backing up many of the claims of PMSC advocates.
The Past
The first post on this blog was made on March 1, 2012. Since then, over 20,000 full text articles—ranging from current news to academic papers and dissertations, court filings, corporate earnings, United Nations documentations, human rights and investigative reports, to name a few—have been posted in an effort to give you up-to-date news and research on and about the PMSC world.
The Present
It may not seem like it, but staying current involves a lot of work; from searching to categorization and uploading. In fact, it takes a considerable amount of time and effort to get this done. Especially when you do it every weekday.
In the past I was willing to do all this for free. Sadly, experience has shown that as long as access is free nobody will contribute anything to keep it going.
So, reluctantly, this blog runs on a subscription basis. That means you have to pay an annual fee to access the blog. The good news is that it is only $25 a year. Once you subscribe you will NOT, unlike virtually every blog and Substack site, get continual pleas asking you to chip in money for support. Once and done, as the saying goes. Bear in mind that this is a one-man site; the fee you pay goes only to help defray some of the costs of maintaining this blog.
So why subscribe?
- Unmatched Experience: I have been following the world of Private Military and Security Contracting (PMSC) dating back to the late 1980s; when the only PMSC companies anybody knew anything about were Executive Outcomes from South Africa and MPRI from the USA. There are few people out there who have been following it as long and as consistently as I have. I was writing about it in its earliest years, reporting on the likes of Executive Outcomes operating in Angola and Sierra Leone, and MPRI in Croatia. I wrote a well-received book on the subject, wrote a weekly column for United Press International, blogged for years about it at the Huffington Post, worked at the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction which conducted oversight on the use of contractors in Iraq (the most massive use of contractors in American history) and still write about it for various publications. (See past press and media coverage).
- Exclusive, Curated Information: You will find information here you simply won’t find elsewhere. This a curated site, meaning I spend a great deal of time searching databases you don’t have access to. I do not just type “security contractors” or “private military companies” into a search engine and paste the first ten results. You are getting the benefit of deep information gathering dives, as well as the results of decades of experience in knowing where to look. In short, I know where the PMSC bones are buried. You can search elsewhere but you won’t find in one place all the information that is here.
- Incredible Value: As noted above, the subscription fee is only $25.00. Why is this a bargain? For that amount you get thousands of articles per year, plus access to all the other articles in the archives, which are continually being updated. If that is not value for your money there is no such thing.
If you really want to know what is going on, you need a source of unimpeachably credible information that goes back to the beginning. This is that one-stop source. Period. Full stop.
Nobody else has all the information gathered here from a myriad of sources in one place. Nobody else posts as much on a continuing basis. If you want to be PMSC informed, this is the site for you.
