European Security and Private Military Companies: The Prospects for Privatized ‘Battlegroups’

Abstract

“Mercenary” remains a pejorative term. It is associated with the hired killers implicated in coup attempts in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, and more recently associated with human rights abuses in post-Cold War conflicts in Eurasia and the Balkans. However, until the nineteenth century a large part of the armed forces of most European nations was supplied by the private sector. It was normal for professional soldiers—especially those with technical expertise, such as artillerymen or siege engineers—to offer their services on the open market. Often contractors organized soldiers into formed units on behalf of paying clients, notably the condottieri that held a monopoly on providing military services to the city-states of fifteenth-century Italy. Later, formed bodies of mercenaries were hired by the emerging nation-states of Western Europe and integrated into their armies. Units of Swiss, Scots, and Irish soldiers served in the armies of France. Great Britain hired nearly 30,000 German mercenaries to help fight the rebellious American colonists. Commercial contractors were also required to equip, feed, and sustain troops in the field, carrying out many tasks that would later be performed by uniformed logisticians in the large standing armies of the twentieth century. But, just as mercenaries supplanted unreliable feudal levees towards the end of the Middle Ages, they began to fall from favor as the scale of warfare increased and mass citizen armies emerged during the French revolutionary wars. For the last two centuries, a state monopoly on armed violence has been an accepted feature of national sovereignty. In the early twenty-first century, political, technological, and societal developments have again combined to change the predominant character of armed conflict. A complex and unpredictable security environment has replaced the threat of large-scale interstate war. Compulsory military service and large standing armies have become anachronisms, while the bonds of national sentiment and identification that helped to sustain these forces are in decline. To the extent that emerging security threats require a military response, the need is for rapidly deployable, expeditionary forces capable of conducting operations in a wide variety of environments. However, most member states of the European Union (EU) appear reluctant to reform and resource their armed forces to provide these capabilities. Given these conditions, this exploratory paper examines whether the states of Europe could once again turn to the modern-day equivalent of the condottieri, private military companies (PMCs), to supplement or even substitute for their national military forces in an expeditionary role. A PMC is defined as an enterprise organized on corporate lines, which is formally contracted to provide