The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (19 page)

As a private sector actor, DynCorp was not beholden to any country’s military doctrine or textbook solutions, and could freely mold existing protocols without fear of institutional reprisal. Substantially modifying orthodox approaches, such as basic training, to fit the needs of a host nation is a departure from the United States’ own practice, which, as recent experience suggests, tends to transpose—wholesale—its own military models onto foreign forces without consideration of whether they are appropriate.
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Not surprisingly, these efforts meet with limited success; US solutions to Iraqi or Afghan problems have made for a poor fit. By contrast, in Liberia, DynCorp used US military concepts as a baseline for innovation rather than as an outright solution.

Additionally, DynCorp’s outsider status allowed it to support Liberia’s interests in the back offices of the Pentagon and the State Department in Washington, where Liberians could seldom venture. Critics suggest that DynCorp did little or no outreach to Liberians to establish local ownership, but this is untrue: DynCorp’s chief interlocutor with Liberian civil society was appropriately the minister of defense, Daniel Chea and later Brownie Samuki.

It became evident during the consultations that Liberians strongly advocated gender equality in the ranks, while the US government did not. Before the civil war, the AFL had an all-female unit called the Women’s Auxiliary Corps, which was well respected even in 2005, and during the civil war some of the warlords, such as Black Diamond, were women. Liberians understood that women could be effective warriors. However, the US military holds that women are not fit for combat and therefore should not serve in front-line units, and it initially opposed including women in AFL infantry units.

DynCorp thus became an unwitting arbitrator in a debate between the defense establishments in Washington and Monrovia. As a nominal outsider in the process, DynCorp could credibly present ideas and recommendations to entrenched bureaucracies on both sides of the Atlantic without the burdens of institutional loyalty or prejudice. This helped drive the argument for gender parity, since key managers in DynCorp were persuaded by the Liberians’ case. Because the State Department managed the contract, it had the final vote on the matter and opted for gender parity, overruling the Pentagon’s desire to impose its own customs on the AFL and a strong bias against women in infantry units. Consequently, in 2005 Liberian women enjoyed greater equality in the ranks than their American counterparts.

For all the success of the program, few things went as planned. This was partly owing to the complexity of the task and the difficulty of the postwar environment but also to the unique nature of the private military industry. Using private means to achieve public ends can sometimes pit profit motive against policy goals, and this created problems in the public-private partnership among the United States, DynCorp, and Liberia.

In the Middle Ages, free companies hired by the same employer did not always work well together, and the same is true today. The State Department awarded the remaking of the Liberian military to two companies, DynCorp and PA&E, and despite the importance of their shared task, they rarely coordinated. The idea of integrated operations is so critical to success in warfare that the US military even has a word for it—
jointness
—which refers to the ability of separate services, such as the US Army and Marines, to work closely together. The US government has devoted considerable energy to this challenge since the 1980 failed rescue attempt of American hostages in Iran and the subsequent Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 to remedy interoperability issues between military services. It is assumed in public sector militaries that different services ought to work well together.

No such assumption exists in the private military sector; PMCs are incentivized
not
to work closely together for a single yet powerful reason—proprietary knowledge—which is not a complication for public armies. Companies do not wish to share trade secrets about how they operate or other sensitive information with their competitors, even when they jointly win a contract, as occurred
in rebuilding the AFL. Instead, both firms focused on their discrete tasks, and each assumed the other was competent. DynCorp’s job was demobilizing the old force and building a new one; PA&E’s assignment was providing newly formed units with logistical and technical life support until they were functionally autonomous (or until the contract expired). This was a flawed solution for a dynamic environment.

This approach became a problem where their mutual roles and competing interests intersected, to the detriment of the AFL. At the end of the contract, the client judged the quality of the new AFL through a grueling multiday field training exercise modeled on the US Army Training and Evaluation Program (ARTEP). Not surprisingly, the client also used the ARTEP to evaluate DynCorp and PA&E, since the AFL’s performance reflected on the companies and would affect future contract opportunities with the State Department. This was a frustrating situation for both firms. PA&E had almost no input in the training or force structure of the AFL, yet it was expected to finish what DynCorp started. From DynCorp’s perspective, PA&E modified and administered the ARTEP, which allowed its competitor to act as a peer reviewer of DynCorp’s work. This created a dysfunctional working relationship that probably detracted from overall contract achievement. Worse, each was likely to blame the other if the State Department complained about the quality of training.

Another deleterious effect of free market competition between firms is leadership selection and training. Today the AFL remains a mostly leaderless army made up of two thousand privates. This is partly because neither firm had full responsibility for leadership selection and training, and it was ultimately neglected in a “tragedy of the commons” dilemma. DynCorp was responsible for the initial training of officers and NCOs, while PA&E would mentor them once they arrived at their home unit. To be fair, developing “instant” senior leadership is extremely difficult and a fundamental challenge of raising armies. In most modern militaries, it takes twenty years to create a colonel and much longer to generate a general. Liberia could not wait that long.

DynCorp’s initial plan called for the Liberian government to select leadership through a quarterly or monthly promotion board from among recruits who demonstrated leadership potential in basic training or applicants with relevant experience, such as Liberians serving in the US military or UN peacekeeping missions. Then it was assumed that PA&E would mentor those leaders in the next phase of the program. However, this process yielded few qualified leaders. An alternative was to have a foreigner lead the AFL, which is what the Liberian government chose: the AFL chief of staff was a Nigerian general. However, there was also a third option, not considered by DynCorp, that was very neomedieval: the PMC would lead the army and train Liberian counterparts until they could take control. This might seem outrageous to some, but there is already precedent
for it, as Executive Outcomes led client forces into battle during the 1990s. More likely than not, we shall see this again in the future.

In the time of the
condottieri
, mercenaries were not the only ones who acted faithlessly, causing catastrophe. During the War of the Eight Saints (1375–1378), for example, a company of Breton mercenaries working for the pope split apart for lack of payment. One faction went north to fight for Pisa, a papal competitor, another stayed with the pope, and a third remained in the local area to loot and pillage.

Sporadic payment remains a problem today for PSCs and PMCs. During the Liberia program, the State Department sporadically paid DynCorp and PA&E, placing the program and indeed the country at risk, as having no army is preferable to having a half-formed one bearing a grudge. At the time, much of the State Department’s funding was diverted to help stem the genocide in Darfur. This meant that once the AFL program began, there was no guarantee that it would continue. For example, money for the demobilization of 13,770 legacy soldiers was scarce, delaying their demobilization and placing the entire AFL program in peril. In late April 2006, four hundred to five hundred former AFL soldiers violently protested outside the Ministry of Defense, claiming nonpayment of salary arrears and retirement benefits, and clashed with UNMIL peacekeepers sent to quell the unrest.
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Erratic funding to other parts of the program had messy results. The Ministry of Defense reform program was prematurely terminated after the completion of a seventeen-week civil servant training course but before the implementation of a planned five-month mentoring and on-the-job training phase. Consequently, new civil servants went untrained and assumed their official duties in the new ministry without knowing what to do, rendering it incapacitated.
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Lapses in client funding and Liberian capacity also created dangerous situations. Training was halted for months owing to lack of payment by the State Department, leaving new soldiers to sit idle while they waited for follow-on recruits to fill out their unit. Making matters worse, in 2006, the new Ministry of Finance still did not have the capacity to pay soldiers, demonstrating that in recovering failed states, all institutions must rise together. This created the dangerous situation of unpaid and disgruntled soldiers that the PMC sought to avoid from the outset.

Meanwhile, those ready to report to basic training were told, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” by frustrated program staff. The program then consisted of nearly one hundred international (US and third-country national personnel combined) and several hundred local national staff. Sending the international staff
home and furloughing the local staff to save money would cause resentment among the locals, given Liberia’s 75 percent unemployment rate, and many of the international staff were specialists who were difficult to replace.

Frustrated and fearing that it might have to leave Liberia for lack of payment, DynCorp urged its client to stabilize the funding stream. The high cost of paying expensive international employees to sit idle in a country where the average person subsisted on $1.25 a day sent a cynical message to the population, already somewhat doubtful about the new AFL. Also, it created a hazardous situation in an unstable state, as DynCorp was unable to store weapons and ammunition safely without an armory, which PA&E was scheduled to build but could not because of lack of payment. Worse, soldiers who completed training would have no military base to report to, as PA&E had yet to complete bases, which could prove a perilous situation for Liberian society and discredit the new military. Weak and erratic funding from the client rather than PMC performance was the main cause of the AFL’s slow development. Moreover, this unfortunate situation would seem unlikely had the US Army rather than PMCs run the program, since the US government would be less inclined to default on the US Army.

Just as clients in the Middle Ages sent
provveditori
to watch over
condottieri
in the field, the United States sends contracting officers’ technical representatives (COTRs) to oversee contractors, and, as with the
provveditori
before them, the COTR system is plagued with problems. In Liberia, the State Department officials in charge of the program resided in Washington, DC, and not in Africa. Their acting COTR was a lone military officer who worked in the US Embassy’s Office of Defense Cooperation (ODC). This individual was responsible for overseeing the entire program and its hundreds of contractors, in addition to other embassy duties.

Several ODC chiefs rotated through the embassy, but few, if any, had significant experience managing multimillion-dollar contracts, handling multibillion-dollar companies, or building militaries wholesale in conflict-affected countries. One ODC chief was a Navy officer with no real experience serving in armies, much less raising them. The lack of qualification was the fault not of the ODC chiefs but of their government: the United States routinely deploys COTRs without adequate training and resources to do their job, as the Gansler report confirms.
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The COTR’s lack of expertise created asymmetries of information that PMCs can exploit for profit, just as the
condottieri
did with the
provveditori
. Because COTRs are normally less expert than the contractors they oversee, they must rely on the contractors’ expert opinions and access to information to make important business decisions on behalf of the government. This encourages moral hazard for contractors, who are incentivized to stall, elongate, or expand their contracts for profit, and they do so by finding additional, billable tasks to accomplish.
Accordingly, they are motivated to steer government officials’ decisions toward this goal, influencing foreign policy implementation and outcomes.

Conditions for moral hazard existed in Liberia. An internal State Department investigation revealed weak oversight of DynCorp and other contractors, creating circumstances amenable to exploitation, although the report did not cite any contractor wrongdoing. The inspector general found that embassy personnel who were involved in the program “received no training in managing or evaluating” such contracts. Worse, they discovered that the COTR occasionally “received invoices with vague descriptions, which covered work prior to his arrival in Liberia, or with questionable work descriptions.” The investigators also found that the State Department staff responsible for the program in Washington rarely visited Liberia. The report concluded that it “does not believe that such irregular visits assure adequate project oversight for this substantial program which spent $127 million through [fiscal year] 2007.”
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Outside observers agree. The International Crisis Group found that in Liberia, “oversight structures employed by the US State Department have been shoddy” and recommended that “the State Department, therefore, should radically revamp its oversight system.”
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To be clear, weak oversight conditions do not infer exploitation by DynCorp. But they do demonstrate that such concerns exist when contracting, and this is an important distinction between private and public armies, since the former has a profit motive and the latter does not. This example is representative of a larger problem echoed by many industry critics. The United States has limited regulation of and oversight over the private military industry despite employing it widely. This creates opportunities for abuse by contractors as firms subtly steer client decisions in favor of profit over policy goals, altering strategic outcomes in the process. The objectives of PMCs and their clients will differ, just as those of the
condottieri
and the
provveditori
did in the Middle Ages.