Corporate Warriors

I'm not sure how to react to this article. I can't decide whether I like the idea of privatized military forces (PMFs) or if I don't. In situations where conflict escalates and the country can not quell the violence I tend to think that the interference of PMFs is generally a good thing. Like in Sierra Leone where the firm Executive Outcomes stepped in. Had they not assisted the government of Sierra Leone rebel forces could have potentially taken over the entire country and caused a lot more strife.

I begin to lose faith in PMFs however, when they start taking contracts based only on the monetary value. By basing assistance on how much people can pay for their services, morals and ethics seem to fly out the window. Granted, war is never really an ethical solution, I still find it somewhat terrifying that drug cartels and rebel forces can hire these firms to train their forces and fight alongside them.

There are so many complications to the idea of a "corporate warrior" that I can't seem to get my head around it. I seem to be going back and forth between accepting the corporate warriors and being horrified by the implications of privatized military forces.

On another note, Singer mentions the corporation Bechtel. Bechtel played a part in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the mid 90s. I only know something about this corporation because of a research paper for a Latin American politics class. Bechtel was responsible for the privatization of water resources in Bolivia. The company took water resources from the very poor, privatized them, increased the rates and basically cut of the poor citizens of Bolivia from access to water. Knowing this about the company makes me nervous about their involvement in other international problems. They took water, a basic human right, away from a whole group of citizens, so the idea of them rebuilding countries is somewhat scary to me. I'm again struck by the disregard of ethics in search of profit.