Private Security Contractors and New Wars: Risk, Law, and Ethics by Kateri Carmola

Author:Kateri Carmola
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Sciences
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-02-04T16:00:00+00:00

General Zinni noted that in these “messy” conflicts, the ability to compel risk diminishes even as the demand for the complex set of skills to negotiate these situations increases. But their deaths, when they happen, still suffer from a perceived lack of justification, and “too much [emotional and political] baggage.”

There are three forms of combat casualty that I think play a large role in the concern with force protection. Battlefield deaths are of course the hardest to bear. However, other types of casualties are included in the risk calculus, and are often harder for a society to deal with: these casualties are the bodies of the wounded and maimed, the physically present but bodily scarred victims of a war, and the bodies of those captured, missing, and in need of rescue. Each of these types of casualties, the not-yet-dead, is included in the justifiable and widespread fear of the captured and tortured soldier, which, interestingly enough, has not occurred much in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the dead can be hidden from view by being dubbed heroes and buried in state, the wounded, maimed, and disabled veterans live on to remind those at home of just those aspects of war they’d rather forget: the “body horror” of it all (Taylor 1998). Those who are captured or held hostage, those tortured or missing in action, inflict a rare sense of impotence and pain; the increasing awareness of the psychological “cost” of battle makes it hard to push soldiers, especially professional soldiers of an all-volunteer force, into direct combat.

The second source of casualties that I argue the military is trying to avoid through outsourcing is what could be termed the “psychological casualty” of warfare. The history of the relationship of psychology to war is a rich and long one, and those in the military, as the wealth of websites on Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome indicate, are all too aware, as Lt. Col. Dave Grossman puts it, “of the psychological cost of learning to kill” (Grossman 1995).

The final element of casualty aversion that plays a significant element in military thinking is another more direct economic cost: soldiers, especially those of an all-volunteer professional military, are “too valuable” to lose in combat. Members of the “Army of One,” trained and cross-trained in the highly technical skills of the modern battlefield, and even more, Special Operations Forces with their years of training, scarce skills, relative maturity, constitute valuable assets (even referred to as “inventory”) that should not be expended (USSOCOM 2000). Acceptable levels of risks nowadays take into account the cost of loss in human, economic, and even psychological terms. Highly trained professional soldiers are an “asset” that should not be squandered, not only in wars that are not seen as just or have a low probability of success, but in individual tactics that expose soldiers to risk.

In the background, amplifying these effects, is the subtle presence of the risk society, wherein we are more and more risk-averse in general, and death and bodily disfigurement seem simultaneously distant and incomprehensible.

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