A Blackwater World Order

[jakeXT]

After more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s most profound legacy could be that it set the world order back to the Middle Ages.

While this is a slight exaggeration, a recent examination by Sean McFate, a former Army paratrooper who later served in Africa working for Dyncorp International and is now an associate professor at the National Defense University, suggests that the Pentagon’s dependence on contractors to help wage its wars has unleashed a new era of warfare in which a multitude of freshly founded private military companies are meeting the demand of an exploding global market for conflict.

“Now that the United States has opened the Pandora’s Box of mercenarianism,” McFate writes in The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What they Mean for World Order, “private warriors of all stripes are coming out of the shadows to engage in for-profit warfare.”

It is a menacing thought. McFate said this coincides with what he and others have called a current shift from global dominance by nation-state power to a “polycentric” environment in which state authority competes with transnational corporations, global governing bodies, non-governmental organizations (NGO’s), regional and ethnic interests, and terror organizations in the chess game of international relations. New access to professional private arms, McFate further argues, has cut into the traditional states’ monopoly on force, and hastened the dawn of this new era.

McFate calls it neomedievalism, the “non-state-centric and multipolar world order characterized by overlapping authorities and allegiances.” States will not disappear, “but they will matter less than they did a century ago.” He compares this coming environment to the order that prevailed in Europe before the domination of nation-states with their requisite standing armies.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-blackwater-world-order/

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. We are going back to the middle ages in more than one way, too.

I have been concerned about mercenaries since day 1 of Blackwater's rise.
Not only are hundreds of time more expensive, they have proven to be much less accountable, plus have shown up in American cities..
witness the reports from New Orleans after Katrina, plus there were rumors of mercenaries after Ferguson.

The other aspects of neo-feudalism is the disappearing middle class, and return to economic serfdom, not to mention of growing pattern of under educating students who cannot afford to attend private schools.

[yurbud]

2. McFate? That's a name or what we're all headed for?

[Blue_Tires]

3. I thought conservatives *loved* private, for-hire armies??

[swilton]

4. Neo-feudalism

is how I refer to it.....

I've been reading Ernest Gellner's theory of nationalism -nationalism defined is the notion that the ethnic/cultural and political entities are congruous.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Gellner

For Gellner, summarized in my own words, nationalism is a function of industrialization....As pre-agrarian societies were exposed to industrialization, they more and more required, language, literacy which gave political entities their linguistic -ethnic character....which in turn contributed to national armies, and stronger states with bureaucratic apparatus.

But I've long thought about this - and have yet to find it expressed...Societies are now in a sense de-industrializing and losing their factory based systems of organization as more and more jobs are exported overseas, unemployment, income inequality prevails.....I'm wondering if the process of 'nationalization' therefore reverses itself. One could certainly argue that mercenary armies are a function of that process.

[jakeXT]

5. And now corporations want to sue governments

Above the law and without borders

Plans to create an EU-US single market will allow corporations to sue governments using secretive panels, bypassing courts and parliaments

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/02/transatlantic-free-trade-deal-regulation-by-lawyers-eu-us

[dogknob]

7. Living so close to Camp Pendleton, I get to chat with lotsa marines...

Generally, becoming a contractor is looked upon as douchey, but many of the spouses consider their own time married to an active marine as "paying their dues" until that (relatively) big contractor money starts coming in, so there's pressure at home to grab post-duty brass ring.

One guy told me about an incident in which American mercs actually engaged some marines... well, they were American mercs; they're all dead now. I would guess that it didn't make the news.

[jakeXT]

8. It's probably hard to get numbers, but the labor department cites 3000 deaths in Iraq / Afghanistan

http://www.dol.gov/owcp/dlhwc/dbaallnation.htm