Mercenarizing the US Government: Boon for Private Military Companies but Bane for National Security

Abstract

The use of mercenaries to fight wars is an age-old tradition. Military outsourcing of research and development (R and D), hardware production and support services to private companies like Boeing and Halliburton is also not a new concept. What is a fundamentally new trend, however, is the evolution of the mercenary into the modern-day Private Military Company (PMC) which now provides not only peacetime-focused hardware and support services, but also wartime-focused combat training and lethal combat services. Currently, the biggest employer of PMCs is the US government (USG) and the resultant phenomenon where PMCs are increasingly relied on in scale (i.e. value/number of resources), scope (i.e. range/type of services) and for their lethal combat services is what this paper terms the mercenarizing of the USG.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Apr 01, 2010
Accession Number
AD1019262

Entities

People

  • Kelvin S. Fan

Organizations

  • Air Command and Staff College

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Asymmetric Warfare
  • Contingency Operations (Military)
  • Counterterrorism
  • Department Of Defense
  • Employment
  • Governments
  • International Security
  • Iraqi-War
  • National Security
  • Personnel Management
  • Private Military Companies
  • Terrorism
  • Terrorists
  • United States
  • War Colleges
  • Warfare

Readers

  • Economics
  • Military History / Militaries and War Studies
  • Personnel Management and Statistics in the Military and Department of Defense