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INFOWAR: Mercenaries and Infowar
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ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 98
INFOWAR. information.macht.krieg
Linz, Austria, september 07 - 12
http://www.aec.at/infowar
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[From the Radio National program 'Background Briefing' (Australia)
See also: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s10592.htm
Thanks to Eveline Lubbers (evel@xs4all.nl) and David Isenburg
(isenbergd@dyncorp.com) - geert]
Some excerpt from the radio program:
Mercenaries and Infowar
Private military companies - what we used to call mercenaries - are
becoming 'vertically integrated' - they'll now train your soldiers, sell
you computers and guns, feed the refugees, and reconstruct your
society. In the modern corporate world, the 'soldiers of death' have
spotted a market niche as 'angels of mercy'.
Stan Correy: Besides Executive Outcomes and Defence Systems Limited, the
other big company is MPRI - Military Professional Resources Inc. They
began business in 1988, when a group of ex-Pentagon Generals decided to
put their expertise out for hire.
David Isenberg, of the Centre for Defence Information in Washington: They
are a completely private sector organisation, albeit with extensive
contacts with the public sector , the US military, government and defence
establishment. And I think the perspective on them is simply at this point
a lot of people don't know. They're really still a relatively new group,
at least insofar as their public profile, which they take great pains to
keep rather low fact. And they're squeaky clean, they don't do anything
which isn't fully vetted and scrutinised and approved by the relevant US
government agencies, and the US State Department. Their motto, after all,
is the world's greatest corporate assemblage of military expertise. They
do have extraordinarily former high-ranking levels of officers within
them. And we're talking about people who were former Commander-in-Chiefs
of the Unified Commands, people who had over three decades of active
experience, people who were actively involved in wars and military
campaigns ranging from Vietnam to Desert Storm to active
counter-insurgency or special operations experience. They have a former
commander of the special operations command as a member of their staff
just to give one example. So it is true, there is no firm I'm aware of in
the world which has quite their assemblage of military expertise in terms
of either the rank or the depth of active duty experience. MPRI's success
as a corporate army role model comes about because of its work in Croatia
in 1995.
Stan Correy: The Croatians' Operation Storm was a stunning success. It
took only four days to retake Krajina. And MPRI were given the credit.
The Croatians had asked the Pentagon for help in early 1994, but there
was an unwillingness to commit US troops. Instead, the Pentagon suggested
the Croatians go to MPRI.
Paul Harris reported the war for the British media: The Croats launched an
offensive simultaneously on seven or eight fronts, and this is not from
the old Warsaw Pact textbook, this offensive was straight from the NATO
textbook. And I don't believe that the Croats were quite up to reading
military strategy and doing this on their own.
Now by coincidence - and my coincidence is somewhat in inverted commas -
MPRI had for a couple of years been training the Croatian army. MPRI of
course would stoutly deny to you that they were in any way involved in
this offensive, but equally I think it's naive to take that at face value,
and to me the offensive bore all the hallmarks of a western-style planned
military strategy.
Stan Correy: MPRI do deny that they led the campaign in Krajina. Genera
Ed Soyster is MPRI's spokesman. He's also a former head of defence
intelligence for the US military. They did train the Croatian army, and
their success in that training led to them winning a contract with the
Bosnian armed forces. They call this training 'democratisation', which
means teaching western-style military practice to armies that have no
democratic tradition.
However the 'guns for hire' label does still around MPRI. The phrase 'US
military advisor' has a rather nasty echo in recent US history. After all,
it was US military advisors who began the protracted US involvement in
Vietnam. So when it leaked out last year that private American advisors,
identified as MPRI, were said to be taking a contract to train soldiers in
one of modern Asia's civil wars, media alarm bells began to ring.
Paul Harris explains how it all started at a going-away party in
Sri Lanka's capital, Colombo:Paul MPRI were involved in drawing up I
understand, a long-term training strategy for the Sri Lankan army, a
program which would vastly improve its capability. Well the news of this
started to leak out after drinks party at which the retiring commander of
the Sri Lankan army, possibly had one over the odds. He revealed that
America was coming to the assistance of the Sri Lankans, and he rather let
the cat out of the bag. It was very embarrassing to the American Embassy
in Colombo, and for those of us who knew how many beans made five, it's
quite clear that MPRI was involved, that the US government was involved at
a more official level, and the bottom line was that the Americans
withdrew from Sri Lanka, announced that withdrawal at the end of August,
beginning of September last year in a run-up of course, to Presidential
elections. And the White House was extremely concerned about publicity
which the actions were getting in Washington, and they felt obliged to
publicly say that 'We're not getting involved in another Asian adventure.'
They migh have added, 'In the run-up to an election'. People in the US
State Department told me, 'Nothing to do with us, it must be those
MPRI people.' And of course MPRI said, 'Oh well, we're not involved.'
And so everybody was using the presence of the other, as you might say,
to dodge the column.
To David Isenberg, a company like MPRI stands at the pinnacle of
the new hierarchy of private sector military firms: There's intense
interest, because on the one hand they are private, and independent, but
on the other hand they are very close to the US government military elite.
In fact all their overseas contracts are vetted by the State Department.
Couldn't they very easily become another arm of the US government, doing
what the State doesn't want to do directly with it own military?
And with future war scenarios predicting armed forces that are lean, mean
and carrying computers, David Isenberg predicts the current niche market
of these private military contractors is bound to grow.
David Isenberg: I joke about this, but only partly. Will a Microsoft
Corporation of information warfare hackers, organise their own group of
sort of if not mercenaries, at least for profit on temporary detail, or on
loan to other organisations, be able to teach people about becoming
information warriors, and break down computerised systems governing the
infrastructure of other countries? I don't know the answers to that
question, but I know there are people out there thinking of it, and I
think certainly there must be groups like MPRI, given the depth of
expertise on the part of their personnel, many of whom worked in these
areas will probably be offering in the future.
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