Privatising war: assessing the decision to hire private military contractors

Abstract

There has been a huge growth in the size and number of Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) in the last decade or so. In this context, the question of when, if ever, states should hire PMSCs to carry out military operations has gained particular urgency. In this paper, I defend the answer that states should do so whenever PMSCs will be the most effective agents available against a number of recent objections. All of these objections claim that considerations aside from the relative effectiveness of PMSCs should bear on the question. Some argue that there is something inherently morally problematic with hiring PMSCs, and thus infer that they should sometimes not be hired even when they are the most effective agents available. Others point to undesirable side-effects that hiring PMSCs is thought to cause, and claim that these should be taken into account when deciding whether to hire them. I argue, however, that all of these further considerations are either irrelevant to the decision or reducible to effectiveness.

Keywords:

• Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs)
• privatisation
• effectiveness
• countenancing wrongdoing
• externalities

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments on previous versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The UK’s NHS has used the concept of a quality-adjusted life year as a way to trade off both of these concerns (NICE 2013, pp. 62–75).

2. On an influential account, a necessary condition for holding legitimate authority is holding de facto authority – that is, the claiming of authority that is recognised as such by others (Raz 1986, p. 56).

3. Note that we can agree with this part of Harel’s argument without coming to his conclusion that I rejected in the last subsection. This is what Pattison (2014, pp. 34–35) does.

4. Jeff McMahan thinks that they will be ‘easily outweighed’ (McMahan 2010, p. 60).

5. Fabre (2012, pp. 219–220) contends that regular soldiers may equally have financial motivations and PMSC employees may have motivations other than money. But, as Pattison (2010, pp. 434–435) notes, it is at least plausible to think that mercenaries are more likely to have financial motives to a greater extent. So the objection can be modified to say that a state will act wrongly in hiring mercenaries because it is more likely to employ more people with more financial motives.

6. Machairas (2014, p. 57) recognises this objection, but suggests that, on the whole, PMSCs will be detrimental to communal autonomy, since they will enable greater unjust aggression. This, though, is a point about the undesirable side effects of there being a market for force in general, and not about its use on particular occasions. I will discuss this point in the following section.

7. An anonymous reviewer suggested this objection.