A NICE Private Army

It's because in international waters, you can get away with some serious shit.

Which is as it should be. No reason to hamstring the ROE of mercs on the high seas, nobody is going to come up beside their ship unless it's a pirate ship, and you have a lot of time to see them coming and determine what they are. With the silly shit that the somali pirates are packing as boats all you need is .50 cal coverage on all sides of the boat and you're immune to piracy.

...what happens if the pirates have enough money to hire mercs?

You hire ninjas, obviously.

Jokes aside, I don't think it is ever economical for a bunch of bandits (which is why real life pirates are) to hire mercs.

If they had money, they wouldn't be pirating.

Most PMC's worth a damn wouldn't work for pirates, the paychecks would be too unreliable. None of the first world groups would work for them because of a combination of that and the stigma that would destroy them if they were ever found out.

Deboss is right. Instead of looking for the next Iron Man-esque solution that acts as a temporary fix, we should look to the policies and systems that create these entities to begin with for more lasting results.

For example, 40,000 people have been killed in Mexico alone for the drug wars. If America redid NAFTA, focused on legalization and rehab situations, and tweaked their immigration and NGO movements, we could have a serious impact on giving better conditions for the Mexican officials to help curb the violence.

Or we could establish some clear rules and laws for mercenaries, making it not so shady and to where they can more easily be employed to do things like fight the Cartels...

That would be ideal.

I doubt Mexico would give permission for PMC-style non-governmental military activity. Lighter armed security guards are probably permitted (and likely are used extensively already) although they would by definition be outgunned by the cartels and may have to turn the odd blind eye to survive.

What could PM Cs bring to the table that the Mexican military don't already have? (I don't know much about either). And who would pay them? (I assume not the US or Mexican governments - they are already heavily funding the War On Drugs via the Mexican Army, so any money going to the PM Cs would be counter productively taken from the Army).

edited 26th Sep '12 11:28:26 AM by betaalpha

All I know is that PMC's are already used by oil companies in Central and South America. My friend and her husband have recently moved to Bolivia with his job and they have PMC support because of the fact if anyone did try to mess with them, they're already going to be too tough for the average security force.

For a private company to have and use its own paramilitary force, there would need to be some sort of profit to gain. Aside from hiring out your PMC to somebody else, obviously. Most of the time, you'd hire them to protect important natural resources or industrial facilities. Of course, those sort of things are generally not seen as "nice". A private navy could be used to track down and destroy pirates, but where's the profit in that?

Historically, governments would issue Letters of Marque and Reprisal to privateers and mercenaries. But while the mercenaries would operate for a profit motive, they would do so under the rules and protection of their home country.

So what it boils down to is whether there is some profit to be made for a PMC actually doing nice things.

Protecting facilities is a perfectly "nice" thing for a PMC to do. The thing is that the risk has to justify the cost for a company to do something like that.

Sure, most every sizable company employs security guards. But there's a big difference between a security guard and a PMC. What sort of scenarios would justify dedicating that level of firepower and equipment? Most likely it would be political instability, fear of insurgents or rebels, fear of workers revolting, or occupying a legitimate war zone.

So that then leads inevitably to the question of why are you doing business there in the first place? Obviously it would need to be profitable. But I think that any location where you would need a PMC to protect your facilities is probably also a place that doesn't have a stable government, workers' rights laws, an OSHA-equivalent, or a functioning police force. Which then implies that you are, for lack of a better word, exploiting the people in an unstable third-world nation.

But you may say, what if the employer is paying his workers well and maintaining high standards of safety? My response would be that if you're going to do that, then just set up shop in a country where you wouldn't need to incur the cost of gun-toting mercenaries.

edited 26th Sep '12 2:08:45 PM by Lawyerdude

Maybe they can't easily get whatever they want elsewhere? Or that there's so much worldwide demand that it makes it viable to set up major operations in unstable countries?

Maybe they are being employed at a facility that was in place when there was stability, and conditions changed? Blackwater did some security in New Orleans when martial law was in place post-Katrina, simply because the security situation had changed considerably.

Wait, who said we couldn't do any Ironmanning? I am all about the Ironman solution of building things to solve our problems.

Never heard of an arms race?

I'd like to point out that it was the Arms Race did play a large part in ending the Cold War. Mainly due to the fact that Soviet Union tried to match and outspend whatever the USA invested into the Arms Race, despite the Soviet Union lacking the adequate funds to do this. This caused a decade of economic stagnation during the Brezhnev years. Regan's attempt to restart the arms race through the production of new weapons and anti-weapons systems was the straw that broke the camel's back.

You mean the part where technology develops at a very rapid pace? Why was that a bad thing again?

Because humans control that technology.

And we have a long history of abusing it.

Yeah, I think the idea that war brings us better technological innovation than we would have otherwise is bull. There are much more efficient ways of utilizing our resources and ingenuity than wasting it on trying to find better ways to kill each other and hoping that trickles down.

Potential for abuse is not a reason to not try and develop useful tech.

As for why PMC vs a security guard?

Most security guards are not military trained, packing lots of fire power, are often not willing to risk life and limb for their meager pay checks, or have experience with extremely agressive assailants using military tactics. That and most security guards are just there to watch property, call for help, render first aide, and provide some discounts for various forms of liability and fire insurance.

PMC's on the other hand have all of that. They are better trained and equipped to deal with well armed hostiles targeting a facility. They are also paid to possibly risk their lives for said pay checks.

In general, wars tend to accelerate technological development to adapt tools for the purpose of solving specific military needs. Later, these military tools may evolve into non-military devices. That's not to say that we wouldn't have invented them eventually, but wars do tend to accelerate the progress(by how much is debatable). You can't ignore a prevailing trend in history.

" Potential for abuse is not a reason to not try and develop useful tech."

- Every military officer in the Manhattan Project, 1944.

The resources we spend on waging war could otherwise have been used for more technological innovation. True, wars tend to exploit resources more than we do normally, and this can accelerate technological development sometimes. But this is only because we use our resources so inefficiently in the first place.

Well if you're really concerned about the costs of war, there's an easy way to avoid that.

Surrender.

Doesn't do much for advancement, though...