Articles: Outsourcing/Privatization

The contract ran eighty-three pages. Buried on page forty-six, in the particular gray prose that law firms reserve for their most dangerous sentences, sat the clause that mattered more than all the others combined: all intelligence products are advisory in nature; final operational decisions rest exclusively with the client. Simon Chesterman has written about the accountability gaps this kind of drafting creates — gaps wide enough, in practice, to lose a body count inside. Continue reading →

Danie Vermaak was seventy-one years old and had not worn a suit voluntarily in a decade. He wore one now, badly, the way a man wears a uniform he’s proud of but no longer fits into. He had founded Sable Dynamics in Pretoria in the dying light of apartheid, staffed it with men who’d fought a bush war nobody in this room had bothered to understand, and used it to turn the tide of two African civil wars in under eighteen months each. He had been called a mercenary, a war criminal, a stabilizing force, and a cautionary tale, sometimes by the same journalist in the same article. He had outlived most of his detractors and all of his imitators, and he had been invited here, he suspected, because the organizers wanted a photograph of the industry’s founding father shaking hands with its current billionaires. Continue reading →