Product Description

No longer dogs of war running ragtag armies, the new breed of private soldiers operate their million-dollar contracts from executive boardrooms worldwide. Whether they're ex-special forces, CIA spooks or Foreign Legionnaires, you'll find them exchanging gunfire with insurgents in Baghdad, patrolling government buildings in Afghanistan, or spying on environmental protestors. The lucrative contracts of the 'War on Terror' have made their plans even more ambitious - to offer governments and corporations discrete and well-trained private armies. These corporate soldiers are part of the last great outsourcing - the privatisation of war. "War Plc" examines how we got here, how these companies operate, and how close we are to letting them run our battlefields.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #159021 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

About the Author
Stephen Armstrong is a freelance journalist who writes for the Sunday Times, the Guardian, New Statesman, GQ and Esquire as well as presenting the occasional documentary on Radio 4. This is his second book.

Customer Reviews

Poorly written, poorly researched
I have personal knowledge of the security industry, and every time Armstrong writes about events I know, he gets it badly wrong. Its breathless, tabloid style is difficult to follow, the `facts' are unreliable, and the author lists no sources

For example, casualties suffered by contractors are not "so vague to be almost opaque" as he alleges on page 144; they are published by date, name and employer. He says that "by June 2007 just over 1,000 contractors had been killed", whereas the published figure is 414.

The author states that the security industry in Iraq was only regulated in 2007 after the Nissour Square incident. In fact, in 2004 the Iraq government imposed registration on security companies and weapons carrying licensing on armed individuals. And the US government has exercised criminal authority over civilian contractors since 2000, before the Iraq War, with the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act which applies to all civilian contractors; this did not only come in after 2007.

The author's line is to portray security companies as unregulated cowboys. He invariably takes the anti-company point of view in all cases, and fails to use the fuller and often more balanced stories published in the media, even when from the author's own paper, the Observer.

Being so full of errors, there are plenty of absolute howlers: for example, "in 2003 Sean Cleary became Jonas Savimbi's political adviser", but this was the year after Mr Savimbi's death (22 November 2002).

Most of the errors (I gave up listing them there were so many), are very simple to check: Wikipedia and newspaper reports would have helped him get most of the facts right.

If you want an accurate, balanced analysis of the private security industry and the way it has operated in Iraq - this isn't it. It's even unreadable as fiction.

War gets privatised
Since pretty much everything else has been privatised in the West, it was only a matter of time before war itself got sold to the highest bidder. In this clearly written, meticulously researched investigation on the modern day equivalent of the mercenary the private security contractor, Stephen Armstrong goes deep into the world of former SAS men, foreign legionnaires and underpaid foot soldiers who discover the benefits of being paid $10,000 a month to spy on pesky environmenalists, fight off pirates and, most of all, protect oil fields from Iraqi insurgents. This is frequently shocking material - Donald Rumsfeld suggesting replacing the Ministry Of Defence with the Private Sector 24 hours before 9/11, for example -- and essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the reality of war and "security" in a free market economy.

a fascinating insight
This book has changed the way I see warfare. It is a strikingly well researched investigation into modern warfare. I would whole heartedly recommend it.