A Private Military Corporation is a private organization/company that provides security services or armed combats for money. PMCs call their staff “security contractors” or “private military contractors”.
P W Singer, author of the book Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, when talking to the VICE said “ A PMC, is Private Companies when taking over the roles that have traditionally been done by the military and intelligence agents by the broader, national security complex. We have this assumption of war and who fights it, a man in uniform and that uniform, to us, means; well they are a part of national military and when u look at the 21st century, that image in our mind…. It just doesn’t hold.
These companies have taken on all the different roles of war. Everything from the back-end logistics, to training and consulting, to the tactical battlefield role.
Pretty much, it’s the new American way of war, whether you’re talking about Iraq or now Afghanistan, roughly of half of the force there, is the private military”
The international Private Military Industry is being developed for the past 20 years. In 2014, the global market for Private Security Services reached $218 billion in 2014.
According to Erik Prince, the founder of Black Water and the most important person in the PMC world, “PMCs are as American as Thanksgiving day.
The First colonies were started by contractors, they were hired to secure most logistics of private companies. I started Blackwater as a way to stay connected to the SEAL teams.
When our customers called us, we ran very hard to fill their needs but we were mischaracterized as “out of control mercenaries” and the fact is we were American Veterans serving America again and getting pain or a competitively big contact.
We exactly did what the job the U.S government hired us to do and did it well, more than 100000 missions, on the security side, no one under our care ever killed or injured.”
There are many security training facilities where future PMC soldiers have been trained before they go out and work.
One of such facilities is located in Czech Republic, Europe, and is being called as “Anti-Terror Academy”, a former military base that is now one of the most popular security facilities in Europe.
The motto of a facility like this is to take the skills these soldiers possess and to use them for offensive combats and reshape them to provide defensive, special forces level security and protection.
It’s hard to find someone, who knows about the PMC more than Simon Mann, a Former PMC contractor. Simon served for the British Special Forces and then he spent 20 years in the PMC until 2004 when he served 5 years in prison in Equatorial Guinea for his role in attempting to help stage a coup.
According to him, a PMC is a company that is prepared to carry out full-on offensive Military operations under a contract.
“ These guys are fighting for money, they’re not fighting for the state, they are not fighting out of a sense of duty of patriotism.”
Seriousness begins when you get a PMC that starts to get excessively muscular, the line between defense and offense gets very blurred.
Robert Young Pelton, a journalist, and an author says “ it is a myth to assume that contractors are aligned with governments, however, they have opposing goals. In some cases, the contractors were arrested by the Military”.
Jan Schakowsky, the U.S congressman had introduced to limit them from use in warzones altogether.
The best and the brightest from of armies around the world are now working for PMCs. There’ll be no wonder if the next military superpower won’t be a country but a corporation.
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