Top Highlights

• Executive Outcomes provided its own combat units, air forces, global supply chain, and so forth, to defeat the enemy.
• DynCorp provides a wide range of services for the US government, from repairing military jets to guarding the president of Afghanistan to flying counterdrug missions in Colombia to preventing a possible genocide in Africa.
• This is increasingly how foreign policy is enacted today: through corporations. Superpowers such as the United States cannot go to war without contractors in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, which was not the case even a generation ago.
• For-profit warriors cause concern. I recall being lambasted as a “mercenary” and “morally promiscuous” by fellow graduate students at Harvard University, insinuating that my existence somehow imperiled world peace.
• The critics of the private military industry do have a point: linking profit motive to warfare has frightening implications in modern times.