Private Military Government Pros And Cons

Over the last two decades, the use of private military and security companies (PMSC’s) has widely increases. They are the modern reincarnation of a long lineage of private providers of physical force: corsairs, privateers and mercenariesThese companies are hired to operate in volatile locating such as Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf of Aiden, and Pakistan to name a few. Western governments such as the US government have recently been increasingly hiring private contractors for domestic purposes. Even the United Nations has increased the rate in which they have used PMSC’s for a wide array of security services. Unfortunately, PMSC personnel have been involved with numbers scandals that only highlight the risks and misconduct that exist within the …show more content…
The UN Human Rights Council has entrusted the UN Working Group on the employing of mercenaries with the mandate: “To monitor and study the effects of the activities of private companies offering military assistance, consultancy and security services on the international market on the enjoyment of human Rights (…) and to prepare draft international basic principles that encourage respect for human rights on the part of those companies in their activities”. PMSC’s generally refer to their line of work as the “private military industry. The hiring of mercenaries has been in common practice through history in armed conflicts but is specifically prohibited by the United Nations Mercenary Convention. It is interesting to know however that the United States and the United Kingdom are not among the list of nations who have signed the convention and that the US rejects the UN’s classification of PMSC’s as being …show more content…
While it can be argued the use on PMSC’s have been integral to the US global War on Terror, many of the operations conducted by them are of a clandestine nature with little to no oversight or accountability to the general US public, unlike the US military. This can be viewed as a double-edged sworn or even a necessary evil however, as the US public as a whole stands tired of being in a continual state of global war, the unpopular clandestine operations conducted by the PMSC’s can stay behind closed doors so the general public doesn’t have to know about them. Sometimes the dirty work has to get done, people just would rather not know about it. Not all remains behind closed doors however and some oversight is needed, as shown by multiple reports coming from Iraq and Afghanistan about private security contractors killing individuals without authorization. Questions are also raised about PMSC’s operating in countries which the US is not officially at war with or having any conflict with such as Pakistan. The use of deadly force in many situations by these companies seems to be alarmingly high and often unjustified. This can been seen with the well publicized massacre conducted by the private security firm Blackwater in September of 2007 at Nisour Square and Baghdad while escorting a US embassy convoy in which 17 civilians were killed and more than 20 other persons were wounded including women and

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