The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (18 page)

Just as the Swiss companies perfected pike warfare and Wallenstein developed unique methods to rapidly generate regiments, PMCs today also innovate in the realm of war. Such ingenuity was all the more important in Liberia, because when DynCorp was hired to rebuild the AFL in 2004, there were no scholarly books, field manuals, or expert practitioners to draw on; DynCorp had to create a safe way to demobilize and rebuild a military in a country recovering from years of war. Some of its innovations yielded more success than similar efforts by the United Nations or the United States; two such examples are examined below.

The first example is human rights vetting of new recruits, which the International Crisis Group, a large NGO, says is “a notable success—the best, several experts said, they had witnessed anywhere in the world.”
²³
Owing to the AFL’s troubled legacy during the civil war, it was agreed that the old AFL should be completely demobilized and rebuilt to ensure systematic human rights vetting of new recruits and also to assure the population that this really was a new AFL. But neither the United Nations nor the United States has developed a systematic method for vetting military recruits in fragile states such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Afghanistan, where there are few, if any, public records to check, such as criminal, commercial, governmental, financial, and educational registers. Even verifying a person’s identity is difficult in postconflict areas.

Because of this, the United Nations and the United States do not rigorously vet new recruits entering the security forces, despite the fact that, for example, the US Army would never enlist a person into its own ranks without a background check. Yet the United Nations conducted almost no background checks of Liberians entering the police force, nor did the United States conduct significant checks of Iraqis or Afghans joining the military or the police. Consequently, criminals and insurgents have “infiltrated” these forces and corrupted them, ruinously delegitimizing them in the public’s eyes. In 2012, one in seven of all NATO deaths in Afghanistan were at the hands of the very Afghan troops the coalition was training.
²⁴

Presaging this in 2004, DynCorp created a new approach to human rights vetting in postconflict countries that combined common investigative techniques, international best practices, and human rights norms to judge a candidate’s character and capacity for a position of trust and to identify potential risks for security reasons. Vetting was embedded within the overall recruitment program for the military, which the company also designed and ran (see
figure 10.1
). The vetting process utilized three methods: background checks, records checks, and public vetting.

Figure 10.1
DynCorp International demobilized Liberia’s legacy military and then raised a new one for the country, paid for by the United States government. (Photo: U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Marine Sgt. Lydia M. Davey).

For background checks, DynCorp fielded fact-finding teams, each made up of one Liberian and one international, to interview candidates and their friends, family, associates, and so forth, using a set of standard questions and techniques. The records team collected and analyzed all available public records for veracity and completeness. Candidates’ names were checked against this database for “red flags” such as identity theft or criminal activities. The team found that some of the best records were kept by regional organizations such as the West African Examination Council and other nongovernmental sources, which cooperated with the vetting program.

Public vetting was a direct appeal to the population to solicit local knowledge of candidates’ past wrongdoings. Candidate pictures, names, and hometowns were publicized nationally to afford witnesses and victims an opportunity to identify undesirable candidates anonymously. Candidates were briefed on this procedure during enlistment and signed a release form authorizing DynCorp to broadcast their information. The company used posters, newspaper inserts, radio, and physical facebooks to disseminate the information and invited the public to provide anonymous feedback via telephone hotlines, an e-mail address,
or simply walking into an enlistment center. Not surprisingly, public vetting in Liberia attracted many false leads and fraudulent claims aimed at defaming candidates for unrelated reasons, but in a country with few public records, tapping the collective memory of the populace was an important vetting method.

Should a candidate pass all the recruiting and vetting standards, then DynCorp submitted the application to a board, which decided whether or not to accept the individual. This board consisted of a representative each from the Liberian government, the United Nations, and the United States, all with an equal vote. In the first six months of recruiting and vetting, 1,080 candidates were investigated; of these, 335 were accepted. DynCorp had no vote in who was admitted into the new army that it was contracted to create.

DynCorp’s success at vetting created unintended problems. In 2006, Liberia’s nascent Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) demanded all of the company’s vetting records for public hearings. Such a move would have been disastrous for the recruiting and vetting campaign, since no one would volunteer to join if they thought it would land them in front of the TRC. Worse, if the TRC were to use the vetting records as evidence, making them public in the process or leaking them by accident, it would expose the secret identity of witnesses who helped expose candidates with criminal pasts, inviting reprisals and even revenge killings. Sometimes security and justice agendas work at cross-purposes in postconflict countries.

Owing to this, DynCorp refused to hand over the records. The firm did not face resistance from the United States, which deemed that the immediate needs of security outweighed transitional justice. This is an instance when plausible deniability afforded by private companies may have served the employer’s interests. It was easier for the PMC to disregard the TRC than the US military, had it been charged with conducting this program, because the US government had publicly supported the transitional justice process whereas the company was silent on the matter.

A second example of innovation is basic training. DynCorp built, staffed, and equipped a military base in Monrovia to train the new army (see
figures 10.2
,
10.3
, and
10.4
). After fourteen years of civil war, most Liberians knew how to fire an AK-47 but did not know when or at what. Thus, the original basic training curriculum and first iteration significantly reduced the number of hours AFL recruits spent on the rifle range and added three weeks’ worth of civics classes, which taught the laws of war, ethics, Liberian history and the like. It also addressed the problem of low literacy in the ranks by embedding a reading program into the training regime for any recruit needing or wanting it. Finally, it helped overcome neomedievalism, since Liberians often identified first with their tribe and second with their state. DynCorp deliberately recruited an ethnically balanced force and then strove to construct a national identity in basic training and beyond with classes on Liberian history, loyalty to the constitution, rule of law, and related topics that imbued a national consciousness and duty to state above all else.

Figure 10.2
Liberian soldiers on the rifle range at a base constructed, staffed and equipped by corporations. (Photo: U.S. Department of Defense, Cpl. Cullen Tiernan).

This nontraditional “civics” curriculum was designed in partnership with Liberian lawyers, historians, and educators, in addition to DynCorp staff with backgrounds in international public law and military training. The 120 hours of civics instruction dwarfed all other training, with basic rifle marksmanship coming in a distant second at less than 50 hours. The firm also partnered with international NGOs such as the International Committee of the Red Cross to deliver eight hours of instruction on international humanitarian law and human rights.

This stands in stark contrast to US programs in Iraq and Afghanistan, which essentially clone US Army basic training. Some at the Pentagon were uncomfortable with DynCorp’s unorthodox approach to basic training and recommended that the three weeks of civics be dropped, which the State Department did. Owing to this, it is difficult to assess the efficacy of DynCorp’s civics program. The US military’s reluctance to abandon its doctrine demonstrates that, like the
condottieri
of the Middle Ages, the contractor is only as innovative as the client.

In industry parlance, a PMC’s ability to rapidly marshal personnel and material resources to a needed location is called surge capacity, and it is a significant private sector advantage over bureaucratically bulky public sector militaries. After the contract was awarded, the DynCorp team went from a skeleton staff to demobilizing an army in three months—fast, compared with the public sector. It can take the US military up to six months or a year to deploy a typical unit, and generating a new unit would take far longer. Smaller and more agile than the US government, DynCorp established a working staff of seventy-three contractors within three weeks of the order.

Further aiding the velocity of hires is the private military sector’s ability to hire types of individuals that its public sector counterparts cannot: foreigners. Like all multinational corporations, DynCorp could recruit personnel from around the planet—Canada, Mexico, Australia, Ghana, Germany, the United States, and, of course, Liberia—to create a bespoke staff customized for the mission, something the US military cannot do. Several members had in-depth knowledge of African affairs, having lived, worked, and studied on the continent. Others had expertise in security sector reform. This stands in contrast to public armies that can only recruit citizens from their own country, resulting in ethnocentric approaches and expertise gaps. For example, US troops are not trained in demobilizing foreign forces or human rights vetting; there are no field manuals, training doctrine, or “standard operating procedures” for such tasks in the US military. Furthermore, DynCorp had the flexibility to hire specialists from around the world on short-term contracts to achieve discrete tasks, such as establishing the legal thresholds for vetting or construction-site surveys. Government bureaucracies are far less pliable.

Keeping rapid pace with these hires, logistics experts at DynCorp’s headquarters in (at that time) Texas ordered equipment for the program—from pens to trucks to compounds—inexpensively by relying on economies of scale, the global supply chain, and technical expertise in conflict-zone logistics rivaling anything in the Pentagon. In fact, contractors currently handle much, if not most, of the US military’s logistical requirements, indicating that its supply chain is already highly privatized.

In the Middle Ages, the mercenary Varangian Guard was fiercely loyal to the Byzantine emperor and devoted to protecting him. Such fidelity was crucial in a court so insidiously convoluted and treacherous that the word
Byzantine
is used today to describe intractable bureaucratic politics. The secret of the Guard’s success was its relative isolation from the intrigues of the court. All its warriors were drawn from the rugged Norse tribes of the north, whom most courtiers
and officials perceived as barbarians. As such, Guard members were outsiders rather than stakeholders in the schemes of the court, making them ideal bodyguards. Additionally, as outsiders, they were not beholden to the vested interests of factions within the court and were free to perform their one task with single-minded efficiency and effectiveness.

Like the Varangian Guard, DynCorp was only a stakeholder in its contract and was uninterested in the factionalism within the US government, UN bureaucracy, or Liberian ministries, enabling it to conduct its mission with concentrated effectiveness and avoid becoming entangled in the bureaucratic turf wars and budget battles that can sabotage operational efficacy. Contractors have no long-term interests in their client’s organization and can freely make choices that support the program rather than equities back home. This does not suggest that DynCorp could act autonomously in Washington or Monrovia; it could not. But DynCorp managers did enjoy significantly more bureaucratic latitude than their US government counterparts, especially along interagency fault lines of defense, development, and diplomacy. As an institutional outsider, DynCorp could be a free agent for effectiveness in a seemingly Byzantine bureaucracy.