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Abstract
This paper attempts to present an examination of the ethical/normative ramifications involved with the growing use of private military and security companies, provide some original insight, and probe the question of the degree to which potential regulatory efforts can effectively address the nature of the moral concerns thereby raised. The implications examined focus mainly on relevant principles and concepts of the just war tradition and how they relate to the issue of state control over military action, as well as the ethical/political consequences of public accountability and democratic control over force. The paper concludes that the use of private military force is currently still inconsistent with well-established ethical norms to a significant degree, perhaps one that cannot be easily overcome through legal instruments without a corresponding shift in the ethics of warfare itself.
Notes
1. As the authors point out, this definition bypasses the ambiguity of the terms ‘defensive/offensive’ and ‘passive/active’ – which are often invoked by PMCs in the defence of their legitimacy – and offers a more precise reflection of the kind of services that matter the most from an ethical and legal perspective, by focusing on firms that provide their services in the context of an armed conflict, as opposed to those operating in a stable environment. See also the related analysis by David Barnes (2013) in this journal, which is especially concerned with the use of private security companies in counter-insurgency contexts.
2. As Pattison explains, the financial motive is generally considered problematic because it is individualistic and may in extreme cases be reflecting a complete lack of moral inhibitions in one's conduct. He brings the example of private military contractors who provide their services to drug cartels, terrorists or war criminal dictators. It is worth pointing out that Uwe Steinhoff (Citation2014) discusses the relationship between cause and intention in another article in this same issue of Journal of Military Ethics.
3. Avant (Citation2006: 336) cites difficulties even with logistics in Iraq when supply companies occasionally failed to show up due to a reluctance to expose themselves to danger.
4. ‘Natural’ here refers to the natural state of human existence, as opposed to human organisation in civil societies.
5. Thomson (Citation1994: 84–88) explains that concern that the actions of individual or groups of citizens could draw states into war prompted rulers to promote the principle of state control over violence and outlaw the use of mercenaries.
6. Tesón (Citation2005: 17–18) argues that the moral legitimacy of UN organs and the Security Council is seriously undermined by the fact that some of its members are actually illegitimate by common democratic standards. In any case, the war in Iraq demonstrated that (1) a war may be declared by a legitimate state authority, but still lack international legitimacy, which raises the question of which of these two levels of political organisation the principle of legitimate authority should primarily apply to, and (2) there may be two facets of the concept of legitimacy: one that refers to its legal aspect in the context of state and international law, and one that involves purely moral considerations, which ultimately manifest themselves in the form of general public opinion; these two aspects may be mutually conflicting, as in the case, for instance, where a person's individual disapproval of the war in Iraq as inherently immoral would most likely persist even if there had been a Security Council authorisation. If we also consider the examples of Rwanda and Kosovo, it appears that the use of military force may be widely considered morally justified in terms of public approval and humanitarian principles long before it becomes lawful by the approval of legal or political authorities. These cases highlight the complexity of the question of the moral significance of the principle of legitimate authority.
7. A study examining the New York Times’ news coverage of the US military versus private contractors stated that ‘the only times when private security personnel amounted to more than a blip on the media's radar screen were when sensational events occurred that involved PSC [private security company] employees’, and overall revealed an ‘overwhelming lack of coverage for private security forces in Iraq’ (Avant & Sigelman Citation2008: 25, 27).
8. Quote on p. 39; also see note no. 7.
9. The study was obtained by The Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act. Note that the phrase ‘own forces’ used by the study's authors perhaps hints at the increasing recruitment of third-country nationals by PMCs, and sheds an interesting light on the question of whether the military sees contractors in general as truly part of the war effort in terms of emotional inclusion and identification.
10. A similar argument is also in Percy (2007b: 20).
11. Pattison (2010: 438) raises this question to assert that the moral concern regarding the effect of PMCs on communal identity remains valid even if we assume that the latter has only some, not an absolute, moral value, but stops short of explaining why this is the case.
12. It is perhaps ludicrous that some commanders do not actually possess copies of all the contracts in effect on their base (US General Accounting Office Citation2003: 34), which in a way mirrors the overall inability of US Congress and relevant state agencies to track contracts and contractor personnel, at the height of the country's entanglement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of its reliance on the use of private contractors (US Government Accountability Office Citation2009: 1, 26).
13. The immunity granted by Order 17 was revoked in late 2008.
14. See Kant (Citation1983: 113) on the importance of public consent; see Benoit (Citation1996: 654–655) for the claim that democracies are less likely to go to war; see Lipson (Citation2003: 75–82) on constitutionalism and the claim that democracies will rarely fight each other.
15. The authors’ claim refers to the case of the USA, but this logically applies to any democratic country.
16. See also Risen and Mazzetti (Citation2009a) for Blackwater-CIA ties.
17. See also O'Brien (1998: 91) regarding the danger of the ‘proxyization’ (sic) of US foreign policy.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Dimitrios Machairas
Dimitrios Machairas is an independent researcher and writer in the field of international affairs, defence and security. He holds an MA in War Studies from King's College London, and a BA in International Relations. His main areas of interest include the use of private military force, cyber warfare, nuclear proliferation and other geopolitical, geostrategic, ethical and philosophical aspects of international security.