private military company Concepts

The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West

by Shaun Walker · 15 Apr 2025 · 465pp · 155,902 words

win lucrative state contracts. Much later, he acquired a taste for the spotlight, enjoying infamy as the founder and backer of the Wagner Group, a private military company, and cultivating the image of a malevolent maverick who reveled in violence and atrocity. But in 2015 Prigozhin was just one of many of Putin

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire

by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson · 14 Apr 2020 · 491pp · 141,690 words

like the country squandered the goodwill that it had throughout the world by starting indiscriminate wars, illegally detaining people without trials, bombing villages, bringing in private military contractors that murdered civilians without just cause, torturing suspected terrorists in offshore penal colonies, using depleted uranium and white phosphorus, and acting like maniacs all over

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restriction of the press, the arresting of the press, cell phone confiscation, the use of Stingray devices to intercept phone calls, and the importation of private military contractors paid for by the banks. It looked like the aftermath of the Boston non-Bombing event where cops in black military-style gear, black masks

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex

by Yasha Levine · 6 Feb 2018 · 474pp · 130,575 words

. Citizens,” New York Times, September 28, 2013. Actually, the NSA mostly sticks to planning and funding, while much of the actual building is done by private military contractors and Silicon Valley itself. Tim Shorrock, “How Private Contractors Have Created a Shadow NSA,” The Nation, May 27, 2015. 21. David Burnham, “The Silent Power

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a Pentagon contractor to escape scrutiny by framing critical investigative journalism as if it was nothing but personal harassment and stalking. Imagine if other powerful private military contractors like Blackwater or Booz Allen made similar claims against reporters? The situation worried Paul Carr, my editor at Pando, who grew concerned for my safety

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry

by Peter Warren Singer · 1 Jan 2003 · 482pp · 161,169 words

the first step without considering the last." As the military and the Bush Administration wrestled with the policy dilemmas caused by this lack of planning, private military contractors seemed to provide an attractive answer to many of their problems. The key difference from prior wars in the modern era is that previously this

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alternative had not existed. It is sometimes easier to understand how the use of private military contractors came about by looking at the issue in reverse. A core problem that U.S. forces faced was insufficient troops, and there were several potential

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for civilian leaders) that the military either did not want to divert limited forces to satisfy or could not meet with the troops on hand. Private military contractors then were hired, and, as the discussion in the book of Sav*s Law fore- told, once one service had been carried out in one

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, and then shot him dead with ten bullets.10 In none of these cases was anyone charged, prosecuted, or punished. Indeed, more than 100,000 private military contractors have been deployed in Iraq for almost five years, and not one has been prosecuted or punished for any crime of conduct on the battlefield

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: the lfssons of iraq 255 were banned from the compound. As a newspaper article about the episode jokingly described, "The divide between uniformed soldiers and private military contractors is about to get wider.""I9 Corporate Warriors also foretold how the private military market has grown in global size and operations but remains effectively

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criminal actions. Finally, the bill begins the process of setting clear legal status of contractor personnel with respect to investigations and prosecution of abuses by private military contractors. Webb, a veteran himself, has sought to create a Commission on Wartime Contracting, which would investigate how the contracts in support of military operations in

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Contractors on the Battlefield, Regulation 715-XX, January 31, 1999. 7. Donahue, Privatization Decision. 218. 8. Doug Brooks, "Write a Cheque, End a War: Using Private Military Companies to End African Conflicts," Conflict Trends, no. (3 (July 2000); Spicer, 1999. goo notes to pages 153—157 . 9. David Shichor. Punishment for Profit: Private

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, November 17, 2006: A20. 11. For further on this, please see P. W. Singer. "Frequently Asked Questions on the UCMJ Change and Its Applicability to Private Military Contractors," Januar)" 12, 2007, available at http://pwsingcr.com/commcntary__070112.html; Congressional Research Service, "Private Security Contractors in Iraq: Background, Legal Status, and Other Issues

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. As quoted in "Contractors in Spotlight as Shootings Add Up." Charlotte Observer. September 11, 2005, p. 6a. 19. Bill Si/emore, "Escort Offers 'Services' to Private Military Contractors in Iraq," V7;- ginian-PiloL August 3, 2007. 20. Major General George Fay and Lieutenant General Anthony Jones, U.S. Army "Investigation of Intelligence Activities

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State

by Barton Gellman · 20 May 2020 · 562pp · 153,825 words

. The Aspen Security Forum relied on the goodwill of speakers and funding from contractors who sought government business. Academi, the latest rebranding of the Blackwater private military company, was a principal sponsor of the forum that year. (In an off-the-record lunch, the company introduced Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA operations chief

Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible

by Stephen Braun and Douglas Farah · 1 Apr 2008 · 459pp · 109,490 words

, in the early 1990s, negotiated to obtain control of diamond mining rights in Sierra Leone. According to a UN investigation, the company also introduced a private military company, Executive Outcomes (EO), to the Sierra Leone government in 1995.12 EO was largely made up of white, former Special Forces troops from South Africa

The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security

by Deborah D. Avant · 17 Oct 2010 · 872pp · 135,196 words

York: W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 40. There is a debate over how to identify companies that provide violent services. David Shearer coined the term private military company and the acronym, PMC, which has become a common descriptor of these firms. Some argue that there is a clear distinction between PMCs and private

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

by Thomas E. Ricks · 30 Jul 2007 · 516pp · 1,220 words

.). Some of the information on Vinnell's contract and performance is in David Isenberg, "A Fistful of Contractors: The Case for a Pragmatic Assessment of Private Military Companies in Iraq" (British American Security Information Council, September 2004). CHAPTER 17: THE CORRECTIONS 377 "A year has passed": Riggs's article, "Where Are the Weapons

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution

by Pieter Hintjens · 11 Mar 2013 · 349pp · 114,038 words

, and so on. It is only logical that military planners stock up on their paramilitary investments over long periods. Official budgets can be used for private military contractors when there is an active conflict. In other cases, the money has to be untraceable, otherwise it would leave a chain of evidence. One source

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dies, and the program shifts to another agency, under another name. Battlefield Earth Since 2001, the mercenaries have their own formal businesses and are called "private military contractors," or PMCs. One of the most infamous in the second Iraq war was Blackwater, which renamed itself "Academi" after much bad publicity. Andrew Marshall reports

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century

by P. W. Singer · 1 Jan 2010 · 797pp · 227,399 words

underside of war in the twenty-first century has since been the thread running through my writing. During that same trip, I met my first private military contractors, a set of former U.S. Army officers, who were working in Sarajevo for a private company. Their firm wasn’t selling widgets or even

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waste his time on such a fiction as companies providing soldiers for hire. I still wonder how he squares this worldview with the 180,000 private military contractors now deployed in Iraq. A similar thing happened when I first presented my early research on the problem of child soldiers. A professor at Harvard

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were lowered. Getting tired of some dictator massacring his people? Send in the bots and sit back and watch his troops get taken down. One private military company executive even slickly pitched a quick and easy technologic solution to the genocide in Darfur as a simple matter of “Janjaweed be gone!,” as if

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. 4 (2002): 100. 322 “feel good for a time” Ibid. 322 “The military thinks” Daniel Wilson, interview, Peter W. Singer, October 19, 2006. 323 One private military company executive Robert Young Pelton, “Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror,” presentation, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, October 5, 2006. 323 Instead of