A flyover of BAE Hawk fighter aircraft. Flickr/PJR. Some rights reserved.After killing fourteen unarmed civilians
in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in September 2007, four ex-Blackwater security guards
were sentenced to lengthy
prison terms on April 13: one to a life sentence, the other three thirty
years. The Nisour Square massacre was one of a long list of
scandals
involving private contractors in Iraq, unique in the sense that there has been
some semblance of accountability and legal process. Blackwater – since re-branded as Academi – has been seen by many as the ultimate
expression of the blurred lines between war and profiteering; of the excesses
of American military power; and the “military-industrial complex” which Dwight
Eisenhower famously warned
against
when departing office in 1960.

In Britain, while we tend to accept our
role as the junior partner in the “special relationship” with the United
States, we frame ourselves as a more mature, less “cowboy-like” international power.
In Iraq, for example, “the British model of counter-insurgency” – allegedly
tried and tested in Northern Ireland – was frequently held up as “best
practice”. A 2007 conference at the Royal
United Services Institute – “‘Hearts and Minds’: British Counter-Insurgency
from Malaya to Iraq” – was attended by academics and generals, where it was
argued that “in Iraq the British Army has used ‘minimum force’ and operated
among the people rather than in armoured vehicles, from direct experience of
urban warfare in Northern Ireland.”

Many of us who are familiar with the
history of British conduct in Northern Ireland or Iraq would no doubt question
this assessment (neither this, nor this seem to fit the
category of “minimum force”), but the promotional image is clear: Britain can
bring its experience and wisdom to complex conflicts, providing a useful
professionalism often lacking in its younger, richer and more powerful partner.

This image has undoubtedly been accepted
by many intellectual authorities in the United States, who have sought to apply the lessons learned by
Britain. And we, too, seem to accept large parts of this narrative: we are, in the oft-quoted
phrase
coined by Douglas Hurd, “punching above our weight”, a declining but still
useful world power, without the baggage of countless military bases worldwide
or an enormous arms industry embedded in the defence establishment.

Privatising
defence

But in many ways, we aren’t too
different from the United States. Although it has become commonplace for
retired UK military personnel to bemoan the
reduction of defence spending in Britain, it is worth remembering that we are
still the world’s sixth-largest military spender, with an annual budget of around £37
billion. We are also one of the world’s leading arms exporters (and not particularly
concerned with how our equipment is used), and our political leaders are far from squeamish about using military force when they deem it necessary – even if a million people march against it. In this sense, for a small island
nation facing no immediate conventional threats, we are indeed “punching above
our weight.”

And, though our defence budget is
miniscule compared to the US, a more forensic assessment reveals a number of
important similarities.

While, according to available figures,
5% of the German defence budget is spent on private services, the figure is
closer to 25% in the UK and 30% in the US (see page 125 of this article). As Professor
Elke Krahmann documents, the extent of
private involvement in British defence is widespread: all three UK naval bases
are operated by private contractors; multiple training programs have been
outsourced; and after the introduction of “public-private” competition under
John Major’s government, the “public-private partnership” became the preferred
choice under New Labour. “The ideal”, she writes, “has been to convert the
state from a provider to a manager of defence” – a trend that shows no sign of
receding.

Private control can be instinctively
concerning: for instance, the fact that “Britain no longer has any stake in
the production of its nuclear warheads after the government secretly sold
off its shares
in the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston” in 2008. Then there are the
scandals that we’ve come to associate with privatisation and outsourcing (particularly
familiar
to readers of openDemocracy): a privatised army recruitment drive beleaguered by waste
and incompetence;
revelations of “serious problems” with the quality of privatised military homes, and the termination of
defence training contracts that fail to deliver on their promises of
affordability and efficiency.

Moreover, before rushing to condemn
America’s use of private contractors (to some, mercenaries) in overseas
conflicts, we should also look at our own record. With a “green light” from the
Foreign Office, the now-defunct Sandline International, then headed by Lt. Colonel
Tim Spicer, breached a UN arms embargo and orchestrated a counter-coup in
Sierra Leone in 1997 – what’s now known as the “arms-to-Africa scandal.” Spicer went on
to found Aegis Defence Services in 2002, a London-based private security
company which was awarded highly lucrative
contracts
for the reconstruction of Iraq and is likely, despite the reservations of the
US Commission on Wartime Contracting, to maintain an
active role
there for some time. Indeed, the “Iraq Bubble” saw London
emerge as something of a hub for companies like Aegis, in part because of the
willingness of former British generals to pursue careers in the private sector.

The
real “special relationship”

However, it is worth remembering that
the vast majority of UK defence contracting is for relatively mundane tasks:
logistical support, maintaining sewage systems, repairing equipment. Though
waste and mismanagement has occurred, if we can achieve adequate oversight and
regulation is it not perfectly reasonable to utilise the private sector? More
to the point: if the same basic services are being provided – sometimes at a
lower cost – why should we even care? Let the market do its job: foster healthy
competition and provide for the needs of the consumer.

But rather than seeing the proliferation
of competition, we have instead seen power and authority over UK defence shift
to a small group of powerful and largely unaccountable interests.

BAE Systems, for example – Britain’s and
Europe’s largest arms company – has been one of the chief beneficiaries of
outsourcing and privatisation. It has been awarded contracts in maintaining the
RAF’s Typhoon force,
managing
Portsmouth’s naval base and engineering
support for the army’s armoured vehicle fleet. BAE is joined
by the likes of VT Group and
Lockheed Martin
in profiting from the injection of market principles into the Ministry of
Defence. Contracts – many of which are Private Finance
Initiatives
– serve to, on the one hand, deepen public dependence on private companies,
and, on the other, tie their interests closer together: very much a “special
relationship.”

A handful of companies dominate the
market both in Britain and globally. Unsurprisingly, such companies find
themselves in positions of political importance: from the Vice-Chair
of the BBC Trust,
to the “more than 10
executives from BAE alone” who “have been seconded into the MoD and the arms
sales unit at UK Trade & Investment (UKTI)” in the past year. It works both
ways, too, with generals and former MoD officials frequently
taking up jobs in the private sector – on a scale reminiscent of the large
numbers of US soldiers who decided to “go Blackwater”.

As a result we, like the United States,
see successive governments finding a range of creative ways to subsidise
private defence companies. Such public support can come in the form of export credit guarantees – whereby
public money insures private companies against potential late payment or
non-payment – or more directly in the form of large chunks of Research and
Development funding, well out of
proportion
to the amount of employment and economic activity that defence companies
actually provide. Between 2008 and 2011, over a sixth of
our R&D funding was devoted to defence, “a fraction that is about three
times higher than that of the major industrial nations of Germany and Japan.”

Members of the royal family, meanwhile, frequently serve
as unofficial arms salesmen abroad, and governments have looked
the other way when defence companies have been involved in
bribery and corruption.

Making it an issue

Although Britain’s tendency to “punch
above its weight” militarily is often attributed to a vague historical legacy,
sometimes related to an “imperial mentality”, there are clear material
interests which underpin this. There exists a powerful British
“military-industrial complex”, closely resembling Eisenhower’s
description:
“the conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.”
It sucks up public resources in a time of socially destructive “belt-tightening”,
undermines our public institutions, and, we shouldn’t forget, wages its fair
share of wars.

If UK General Elections were, indeed,
genuinely democratic exercises, this would be a headline issue. But it’s not: so
we need to make it one.