Peter W Singer Part 2

The privatization of security, you argue, falls into a juridical gap or loophole: international law does not anticipate private military actors and few are the countries that have adopted domestic legislation. Is this a structural problem, or do you foresee a gradual abolishment of private actors, in the line of the anti-Blackwater legislation in Iraq and Afghanistan?

First comes awareness – and that’s being built up – and then comes responses. Now, so far, responses have been ad hoc, coming at PMCs from the sides so to speak. We’re still in the phase in which a multiplicity of actors is slowly recognizing first the existence and second the importance of PMCs, and the fact that law seems to lag behind on their existence.

A more important question, which basically puts your question in a wider way, is whether they are legitimate or not? It’s not about their action, or if they commit a crime (many companies or peoples commit crimes, including in the military field of course), but it’s literally: are they legitimate or not? And a related question would be: when do you hire them, and when do you not? It’s not a question anymore “can contractors can do it?” It’s rather: “should they?” We’ve been focused on the can part, and we should shift our attention to the should, which is a more fundamental question. Now, you see this sort of patchwork of regulation being built and expanding in different areas, from the US to Iraq, and that is how international law ultimately gets built. But we know there’s an extreme lag-time.

In 1961, Eisenhower external pagewarned uscall_made for the pervasive influence of what he then famously dubbed the ‘military industrial complex’, referring to an essentially American dynamic. Is the private military industry essentially an American product?

This question is put from a very 20th-century mindset: we live in a global world, and industry is not structured along predominantly national lines. Executive Outcomes, a now defunct but heavily controversial company, came out of South Africa, so the industry does not only come out of the US or have a American only dynamic. Because of our size and military spending, the US is definitively an 800-pound gorilla in the market, but it is by no means a monopoly.

But interestingly, one can ask what Eisenhower would think about current developments. He only referred to defense manufacturing, and we have now moved into defense services as well. I think he would probably be rolling over in his grave if he saw that essentially military tasks have been handed over to civilians without any structures, regulation or planning in place.

In your latest book, Wired for War, you explain how technological change is transforming warfare, and how this ‘impersonal’ form of warfare is spreading throughout the world. How pervasive is this tendency? Is technological innovation the new ‘race to the bottom’ which will replace nuclear buildup as the primary source of competition and thus tension between conflicting actors?

I think one tendency which we are observing is the ‘open source phenomenon’. This tendency is not just limited to the software industry – we are increasingly using military technologies that are commercial and off the shelf, do it yourself. For example, the external pageRaven dronecall_made is a drone US soldiers use in Iraq and Afghanistan; however, for about 1.000 US dollars you can build your own version of this drone.

Now whether you talk about this machine or some other low-cost weapon system like the AK47, the general tendency is towards flattening of the marketplace of war and the technologies used in it: not only because of low costs but also because of the (black) market as the prime forum of exchange of these items, the state no longer has exclusive access to the tools to effectively wage a war. In the past, due to the huge investments required to produce war machines, only strong states were able to show preponderance. During the 20th century, the industry changed dramatically, producing on the one hand highly capital and technology intensive systems like nuclear arms, but on the other very cheap and relatively simple weapons like the AK47 and some chemical weapons. If you wonder how so much civil conflict is possible, or why warlords and rogue states seem to proliferate, one question to ask would be: can it be that they endure simply because the weapons are so easy to make or to get by? Take a situation like that of the Lebanon war a few years ago, where Israel, the state with probably the most powerful army in the Middle East, is fighting a non-state actor, Hezbollah, a weird amalgam of a terrorist group, a political party and a social services organization with its own hospitals and schools. It may not be a state or formal military, but Hezbollah was able to fly four unmanned drones back and forth over Israel.

Another example would be a radical internet site that allowed you to detonate a roadside bomb in Iraq from your home computer in the US.

In order to understand what has happened, you can look at the software industry: it started with a couple of huge players, which increasingly faced competition from smart copycats and competitors improving on services or offering them for less. The landscape is flattening.

Both corporate security actors and high-tech or unarmed weapons are only available for those who can pay for them. Does this mean the prevalence of the market-logic over state control over violence, and if so, do you consider that something bad?

Just in order to show you how our world diverges from theory, in the book I tell the story of a group of college kids from Swartmore who fundraised money to do something about the genocide in Darfur. They then entered into negotiations with a private military company about the hire of robotic drones to deploy to Sudan. It does sound like a Hollywood movie, but it has become the world we live in. But I don’t think that anyone planned this outcome, either of drones or of private military contractors. People take decisions within the constraints of the contexts and focused on resolving an issue in their own limited agenda. And increasingly, it becomes more difficult for us as individuals to oversee the outcomes of our actions and choices, and so has it for states.

Existing theories we have do not appropriately deal with this randomness or unpredictability if you will. Theory and understanding generally lags behind on actual change ‘out there.’ An example is current thinking on civil-military relations, which is still largely based on Sam Huntington’s ’59 book The Soldier and the State. I think that we don’t need an entirely new theory but rather an updating of existing work. It’s no longer just the soldier and the state, as Huntington put it, but now it’s also the market, which profoundly affects the relationship between soldier and states.

Last question. You’ve written on child soldiers, private soldiers, and robot soldiers. Why soldiers, and what’s your next project going to be on?

First of all, the thread that connects all of those is that we have these assumptions about war and the warrior that no longer hold in their monopolies. When I say the word ‘war’ an image probably comes to your mind. It is probably a male soldier wearing a uniform. If the man is wearing a uniform, this means, of course, he is representing a nation-state military. That will inspire us to assume that this soldier will probably be inspired by patriotism, that he goes to war because of politics.

But that monopoly no longer holds true. War is fought by men, women, children (one out of every combatants today in the world is a child), and increasingly we see the human monopoly on war breaking and being supplemented by robots. The organizations these actors are fighting in are no longer just militaries, they are terrorist groups, insurgents, warlords, pirates, private military corporations, and mafias. And the motivating factors are not just politics: if your readers can find me one war that’s exclusively driven by politics… That’s the same for individual players in them. Granted, for some soldiers it’s patriotism, for others it’s private profit; for others it’s religion – you name it. When we “assume,” our assumptions set us up to fail, to make an “ass” out of “u” and “me.”

Secondly, I’m actually doing a book right now that looks at another big change we’re wising up to: the millennial generation. The Millennials are the ones born between 1980 and 2005; in raw numbers, they’re about 1,25 the size of the baby boomers and 3 times the size of generation X. Just like the Baby Boomers had a huge impact on the world and on everything from politics to economics and society by their sheer weight of numbers, so this millennial generation, I argue, is already leaving its imprints upon our world. You can’t write a history of the 1960s without writing about the baby boomers, and you won’t be able to write about the present and future without mentioning the Millennials.

Peter W Singer is the director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative and a senior fellow in Foreign Policy at Brookings. Singer’s research focuses on three core issues: the future of war, current US defense needs and future priorities, and the future of the US defense system. Singer lectures frequently to US military audiences and is the author of several books and articles, including Corporate Warriors (2004) and Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century (2009).