Private Military Companies (PMCs) have the potential to be an effective and logical way to counter an insurgency: certainly more potential to be effective than white, Christian, Western, culturally foreign soldiers occupying a Semitic, Muslim, Middle Eastern country. Is the Bush administration approaching this potential solution in a reasonable manner? Is Congress keeping itself informed? Straus Military Reform Project Adviser David Isenberg has written a report for the British American Security Information Council attempting to answer these important questions.

If locals are recruited for Private Military Companies (PMCs), they can be more culturally sensitive and can know more about the local situation than any occupying American soldier can be by learning over any number of painfully repeated deployments to a country like Iraq. This, of course, assumes a level of competence and an absence of religious, tribal, or ethnic hostility to the local population where a PMC may be operating. It also assumes unpoliticized selection of indigenous PMC contractors and close coordination with the local, regional, and national governments: not quite the approach the Bush administration has been taking so far in Iraq.

Using PMCs in an insurgency that is quickly developing characteristics of a civil war presents more than just a few delicacies and difficulties. The first requirement for addressing these problems would be a clear and unobstructed understanding of the role and nature of PMCs operation in Iraq – such as knowing which companies are operating there and other basics, such as the number of casualties PMCs endure. Unfortunately, Congress has kept itself – and the public – almost completely in the dark. It has uncovered almost nothing about these and other fundamentals.

Straus Military Reform Project Adviser David Isenberg has written a report for the British American Security Information Council that addresses these and other important points. The report can be found at: http://basicint.org/pubs/Papers/pmcs0603.htm.

Winslow T. Wheeler
Director
Straus Military Reform Project
Center for Defense Information
202 797-5271 in DC
301 840-1362 in MD
winslowwheeler@comcast.net