The underlying causes of military outsourcing in the USA and UK: bridging the persistent gap between ends, ways and means since the beginning of the Cold War

Abstract

This article reappraises the two most-studied country cases of military outsourcing: the USA and the UK. It argues that the contemporary wave of military contracting stretches back to the beginning of the cold war and not only to the demobilisation of armies in the 1990s or the neoliberal reforms introduced since the 1980s. It traces the political, technological and ideational developments that laid the groundwork for these reforms and practices since the early cold war and account for its endurance today. Importantly, it argues that a persistent gap between strategic objectives and resources, i.e. the challenge to reconcile ends and means, is an underlying driver of military contracting in both countries. Contemporary contracting is thus most closely tied to military support functions in support of wider foreign and defence political objectives. Security services in either state may not have been outsourced so swiftly, if at all, without decades of experience in outsourcing military logistics functions and the resultant vehicles, processes and familiarities with public-private partnerships. The article thus provides a wider and deeper understanding of the drivers of contractualisation, thereby improving our understanding of both its historical trajectory and the determinants of its present and potential futures.

Keywords:

• Foreign policy
• defence policy
• grand strategy
• private military and security companies
• USA
• UK
• defence acquisition

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the anonymous referees for their insightful, constructive, and helpful comments. He also thanks Christopher Kinsey and Malte Riemann for comments on an earlier draft of this article. The usual disclaimers apply.

Notes

1. On the politics and decision-making around military outsourcing, see Erbel (2016).

2. These factors can be general or situational, i.e. they either affect networks continuously or they operate suddenly, potentially acting as “shocks” that unsettle the usually settled process; Adam and Kriesi (2007, pp. 136–142).

3. It is beyond the remit of this article to explore the causes of strategic longevity and its trajectory in depth. It should however be noted that, in addition to the “imperial” grand strategy, the reticence to substantially alter course is also grounded in the political incentive structure of both states that is geared towards continuity, not change. This is examined in detail in Erbel (2014, pp. 72–89).

4. Gansler is, among others, former Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition.

5. See the eponymous chapter in Bobbitt (2003, pp. 213–242), for the possibly first academic use of the term “market-state”.

6. Camm is a Senior Economist at the RAND Corporation and was involved in the wider CORM process.

7. These are the Joint Logistics Enterprise in the USA and the Total Support Force in the UK, see U.S. Department of Defense (2010c) and UK Ministry of Defence (2010).

8. For more on such use of military contractors, see Mohlin (2012). While bearing some similarities with the use of mercenaries and combat-prone “advisors” during the cold war, especially the circumvention of political opposition to interference in civil wars as well as ensuring “plausible deniability” of any involvement, companies such as MPRI and the training and advisory services they provide fall into a significantly different category than the mercenarism of the past, not least their legal status and contractual relationships, but also the nature of their employees and their non-participation in offensive combat operations. On the use of mercenaries and “advisors” during the cold war, see Voß (2016).

9. The resort to security contractors elsewhere is less clear cut as it spans the range from quasi-mercenarism to the neoliberal purchase of capability on the more regulated, international market. See Dunigan and Petersohn (2015) for a systematic breakdown of the emergence and typology of markets for force in the world.