Q & A

“The Market for Force” by Deborah Avant

The flourishing role of the private sector in security management over the last twenty years has challenged state control of the legitimate use of force. Deborah Avant examines the privatization of security and its impact on the control of force. She describes the growth of private security companies, explains how the industry works, and describes its range of customers--including states, non-government organizations and commercial transnational corporations. Avant also charts the inevitable trade-offs that the market for force imposes on the states, firms and people wishing to control it, and suggests a new way to think about the control of force.

Q: Does the Defense Department, which is outsourcing many of its responsibilities to private security companies, undermine the military by doing this? Have private security companies changed roles within the DoD or weakened our national security?

Avant: The use of PSCs often increases military capacities in the short run – by using PSCs to train the Iraqi military immediately after the invasion, for example, the U.S. military and coalition forces could focus on other tasks. Often PSCs are not closely integrated with military forces, though – in ways that may undermine the effectiveness of individual operations or overall US goals. For instance, PSCs in charge of personal security for important individuals were not always coordinated with military personnel operating in urban settings. This led soldiers to complain that they did not understand the rules for PSCs and wanted to be nowhere near them. These same personal security details were often charged with making decisions (like racing through a crowded intersection – hitting civilians) that may have made sense for their mission of keeping one person alive but undermined larger U.S. counterinsurgency goals.

In the longer run, every time PSCs are used for a task that the military also performs it undermines the uniquely military – and public – nature of job. And when people serving in the military see opportunities to make more money working for PSCs, some are bound to take advantage of those opportunities. Unless there are clear distinctions between what the military does and what PSCs do, using PSCs may undermine the very idea of service in the military as public service.

Q: There are private security companies that provide services like food and shelter, and others, that actually provide soldiers. Can you explain their different roles and do the hired forces work alongside with U.S. and other national armies?

A: PSCs are service companies. Rather than having a whole set of employees ready to go, they have databases of people with particular skills. They can thus mobilize quickly to provide a wide array of services. Though some do specialize in one kind of service rather than another, they all respond to demands from the market and often shift their capacities to meet those demands.

That said, the people that provide food and shelter generally operate quite differently vis-à-vis soldiers than the people that are armed and pose different risks. Using PSCs to provide food and shelter may allow militaries to redeploy people to other jobs and sometimes lowers the cost or improves the quality. The greatest risk is reliability. Armed PSC personnel have operated in a wide variety of ways around military forces – some have been integrated into the forces and others have provided different kinds of jobs like the personal security for individuals I mentioned above or international civilian police. Using armed PSC personnel can also allow the military to redeploy personnel but risks coordination breakdowns that could be deadly.

Q: Do you think the private security companies that are working in Iraq right now are properly utilized? Could they be more effective in helping to establish stability and infrastructure in the country?

A: It is hard to make such a general judgment – there are many different arrangements in Iraq some more, some less effective. There also have been changes in the U.S. rules for deploying and managing PSCs even since the conflict began. There are still some general issues that need to be addressed, though, such as the legal framework for PSCs – particularly when employees come from many different countries. Also, whether PSCs work for long term stability or not depends on whether they centralize or diffuse power in the emerging state. Few U.S. policy makers are paying attention to this in Iraq.