About This Site

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address, this site is dedicated to the proposition that the growth of the Private Military and Security Company (PMSC) sector since the 1980s, along with its growing power and influence, and use by all sorts of clients, from governments to corporations, makes it an increasingly important actor in the realm of international security issues. Thus, it is a strategic issue.

Given the numerous claims, some, but not all, of which are true, made by both PMSC advocates and critics, it is also frequently a source of great pathos and bathos, with many flamboyant claims deserving critical scrutiny and, at times, some straightforward satire. So, you can see why the subject is of interest here at IISS.

Over the past 30 years, the growth of the PMSC sector has been driven by the idea that the private sector can do many of the same things that regular governmental forces can do, only more quickly, cheaply and efficiently. This is what the academics call neoliberalism, or military outsourcing and privatization and what others call free-market capitalism gone wild. It's the real-life equivalent of what the fictional character Milo Minderbinder called for, in Joseph Heller's classic novel, Catch-22, "Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry."

Privatization might make sense for picking up your trash. Whether it works in a war zone is, at a minimum, a question still unanswered, and at maximum, a huge self-serving conceit. Let's just say that there hasn't been a lot of empirical evidence backing up the claims of PMSC advocates.

We can say this with a reasonable degree of confidence because we have been chronicling and analyzing the growth of the PMSC sector for over 30 years. We have watched it grow from a handful of companies operating in places like Angola, Sierra Leone, and Croatia to today where some PMSCs are almost at the point of helping to start wars between major powers.

During these decades of observation, we have learned one thing. If you really want to know what is going on you need a source of unimpeachably credible source of information, And this is that one-stop source, Nobody else has all the information gathered here from a myriad of sources in one place. Nobody else posts as much as we do on a continuing basis.

We do just one thing; follow the PMSC sector. But we do it extraordinarily well.

So, if you want to be informed then this is the site for you.