Neoliberalism and the Rise of the Private Military Industry

Abstract

In the early 20th century, Georges Clemenceau remarked that war was much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military. In the early 21st century, it is much too profitable. This turn of history is brought into sharp relief by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where US -led military operations are the first in history to be dependent upon private military contractors. In these conflicts, private military firms deliver a wide profile of services ranging from the relatively banal to armed security, tasks previously and nearly exclusively carried out by state militaries. Many in the popular media have seized upon the term mercenary to describe the for-profit activities of private military firms, but the designation is a misnomer. Today, private military firms are integrated into the operations of the world's most powerful militaries and normalized through their transactions on the free market. The market for private military services is considerable and the degree to which the US military has been privatized is so extensive that the viability of US foreign engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan is contingent upon the availability of contracted labour. But it is not for lack of technical capability or uniformed personnel. Rather, private sources of military labour permit US leaders to sell a politically viable war policy to domestic audiences by maintaining low levels of uniformed troop levels.Military privatization in the first decade of the 21st century has elicited pressing new questions and a growing body of academic literature has emerged to address its historical, conceptual, institutional, ideational, and social dimensions.1 Making sense of a booming industry is a challenge and the pace of private military expansion has outpaced scholarly inquiry, leaving a number of issues unexplored. One such area is the relationship between military privatization and broader ideational patterns informing public policy, specifically, economic neoliberalism. This article aims to correct this deficit by exploring the transformative interactions of US military policy and economic neoliberalism. Indeed, inquiries into private military firms in the 1990s address the privatization question, but privatization and neoliberalism are not interchangeable concepts. Privatization is a single institutional strategy in a broader syndrome of policies that constitute economic neoliberalism. This is an important distinction that has gone unnoticed in much of the literature on military privatization and the rise of the private military industry.In the United States, the effects of military neoliberalism run deep, as the figures below will attest. However, the US did not arrive at this state overnight. Military neoliberalism (or neoliberalization, as will be seen) has been an uneven and improvised process, reflecting the real-world limitations of applied neoliberalism and the evolution of the neoliberal ideational framework itself. As will be discussed, the privatization and reregulation of military contracting did not occur in neat and ordered sequences. Different approaches to privatization coexist in uneven and contradictory ways across the US private military industry. More broadly though, military neoliberalism cuts to the core of the Westphalian state itself, revealing fundamental transformations to the indispensable unit of analysis in the academic field of international relations. By situating evolving US military privatization practices within evolving ideational processes, this article aims to explain the relationship between US military policy and neoliberal economic ideology.The article begins with an overview of the scale and cost of contracting in the two major theatres of the war on terrorism, followed by a brief discussion about the limitations of problem-solving approaches to scholarship on the private military industry. This leads to a discussion about theories from the critical international political economy literature that better explain the transformations wrought by military privatization, specifically the theories of the competition state and especially rollback and rollout neoliberalism. …