From: "An Unorthodox Soldier - Peace and War and the Sandline Affair" by Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Spicer Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh, Scotland. [ ISBN: 1 84018 180 X ] Chapter One SANDLINE 'Everything changed with the end of the Cold War. Up to then we knew what we had to do and who the potential enemy was and we could train and prepare accordingly. Now its all guesswork.' GENERAL SIR PETER INGE, CHIEF OF THE DEFENCE STAFF, 1996 This is a story in three parts. Part of this book concerns the events leading up to what became known as 'The Sandline Affair', in which, during 1998, the British government tied itself into an almighty knot over the work of my company, Sandline International, in Sierra Leone. That may seem a small, transient incident, worth a few feature articles in the national press or an in-depth analysis on television, but the issues raised by the Sandline Affair are not going to go away. However, I did not create Sandline International on my own, nor start it without a great deal of previous experience in the military arena. Over the years, in different places and at different times, the need for something like Sandline began to grow in my mind. Therefore a major part of this book is autobiographical, tracing my military career over two decades, from my time at Sandhurst to the time I commanded the 1st Battalion, Scots Guards, on operations in Northern Ireland. Sandline came later, after I had served in Bosnia and seen what level of chaos the world is heading for unless some practical steps are taken to tackle the growing list of problems in a pragmatic way. The last part of the book offers my views on those issues that are likely to trouble the world in the next century, issues where private military companies like Sandline may have a useful role to play. Private military companies - or PMCs - are corporate bodies specialising in the provision of military skills to legitimate governments: training, planning, intelligence, risk assessment, operational support and technical skills. Sandline International is just such a company and was created to tackle a growing number of situations which the world's major nations are unwilling or unable to tackle themselves, or to assist smaller nations where these military skills were found necessary - and lacking. This raises the 'Sandline Affair' from an issue that affected only a small number of people in a couple of countries - in this case Britain and Sierra Leone - to something that will affect many governments and many people in many parts of the world for decades to come. The hard fact is that the world, having come out of the Cold War into the 'New World Order', is not actually getting any safer. One of the greatest of the Cold War warriors, Henry Kissinger, said as much in an interview in January 1999. Asked if the world seemed a safer place now than when he was in government, he replied: From the point of view of nuclear danger, infinitely safer; from the point of view of structure, far more chaotic. In those days you had a Cold War; you had basic criteria of what would benefit one side or the other. Today you have a very amorphous situation. What exactly is NATO supposed to do? What do we want to happen in Bosnia, in Asia, in the Middle East, in the long term? Moreover, you have the economic and political organisations of the world at variance from each other. The economic concerns are global, the political firmly regional. And all these forces are moving at a time when the quality of political leadership is declining - because the leaders are too busy getting elected or re-elected. In other words, we have inherited the ancient Chinese curse 'May you live in interesting times'. The world's political leaders are afraid of political or military involvement in the world's endemic conflicts because they don't want the bodybags coming home as in Vietnam or, more recently, Somalia, or because they don't want to take risks or to be blamed if matters go awry, or, rather less creditably, because they simply want to be popular and garner votes at home. This creates a vacuum in the search for world peace, part of which private military companies like Sandline should be able to fill. Until Sandline was established I had spent most of my life as a professional soldier in the Scots Guards, one of the crack regiments of the British Army, a career which gave me the chance to see the world, to gain experience in a growing and diverse number of roles, to serve in dangerous places, including Northern Ireland, the Falklands and Bosnia, to take part in two wars and to rise to a respectable military rank. I can fairly say that life has not been dull. This experience has given me a few precepts that I apply personally. First, I believe that your effectiveness comes totally from within your own efforts, and the excellence you obtain in whatever you do is directly proportionate to the effort you are prepared to put in. I know that war or combat 'Is different for everyone but that is where a soldier develops his capabilities and finds his own strengths and weaknesses. As a soldier you have to draw on that, research your experiences, absorb what is useful, reject what is irrelevant or useless, add what is your own. No one should be under any illusions about soldiering. Soldiering is about fighting and, if need be, killing. That fact can be cloaked in a wide range of fancy garments, or hidden by pomp and flummery, but when you get right down to it, soldiering is about hitting the enemy hard, before they can kill you. Soldiering is a means of getting your way by force and cunning, often in very dangerous places, and even in peacetime can involve living in difficult conditions, under considerable hardship and often at some risk to life or limb. Soldiering, in short, is hard, dangerous work, a vocation which offers little reward in terms of either finance or thanks from the public the soldier has elected to serve - and soldiers know that. Kipling's words 'It's Tommy this and Tommy that, and throw him out, the brute But it's hero of his country when the guns begin to shoot' are as true now as they ever were. That is why, when I was commanding troops in the British Army, I always trained them for war fighting and why one of the offences I considered most serious was a soldier letting his rifle become dirty or rusty. I came down hard on such people, for a very good reason - if that weapon jammed in combat, they would die wishing they had kept it clean. I am very patriotic - I really believe that Britain is best - but there is a revolutionary streak in there too and I can rarely restrain the attempt to find humour in a situation or to 'take the piss' out of the system. Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy was a benchmark in the development of my military philosophy. Having said that, I understand the importance of being organised and of employing method and I respect professionalism. My service experience gave me a grasp of those military skills that Sandline markets to its clients all over the world in places where indigenous professional military skills are sadly lacking. That soldiering, and the lessons I learned from it, form part of the Sandline story and are therefore a part of the Sandline Affair. The final part of this book is a personal view of the security situation facing the world, especially the Western world, as we enter the next millennium. A whole range of problems are coming on stream and these problems - disputes ranging from civil wars to quarrels over water rights, from international terrorism to genocide, from the destabilising of legitimate governments to the ethnic cleansing of entire populations are not only not being addressed by national governments, they are often being actively ignored. This cannot continue. I have seen a great deal of misery in the last few years and to let it go on without trying to do something about it is intolerable. If this book succeeds in getting a number of uncomfortable issues on to the agenda for public discussion it will have done a great deal of good, and if, in the process, I can explain how private military companies have a role to play in these situations and how a modern, corporate PMC differs from the rightly discredited image of the mercenary soldier, it will have filled a useful purpose. At the very least, I hope to make people think. I have been told that the main difference between a book and, say, a television programme or a newspaper article is a matter of time and reach. The last two appear within a given country or circulation area, cause a stir or pass unrecorded within a matter of days or weeks, and are then forgotten. Books, on the other hand, tend to circulate all over the world and stay around for years for criticism or consultation. That is another reason for telling this story in book form, for the tale I have to tell and the facts that it reveals will, I believe, become ever more relevant as the next decade unfolds. First, though, let me explain what Sandline is all about. Sandline is a private military company. Other people, with a rather wearying ability to miss the point or an inability to tell the difference, have called us mercenaries, or a corporate kennel for the 'Dogs of War'. PMCs exist to tackle those situations, mostly but by no means entirely military situations, which national governments are, for various reasons, unable to deal with themselves and where outside agencies, the UN or friendly nations, have refused to become involved. This begs a number of questions, the first of which is that if national governments choose to leave a situation alone, should private companies meddle? The short answer is that the national government concerned - and legitimate PMCs only work for legitimate governments - have the right, and indeed the duty, in the absence of international intervention to find solutions that can resolve an internal situation at the greatest possible speed and the minimum cost in lives. In Papua New Guinea and Sierra Leone, the two countries with which Sandline has been publicly concerned since the company was founded in 1997, the elected, legitimate national governments faced a situation where 'friendly' governments had either flatly refused to help or restricted their help to pious murmurs about diplomatic solutions and negotiated peace settlements. The objections to our participation in both Papua New Guinea and Sierra Leone came from outside governments, not from the national governments of those countries, who in each case desperately sought our help. When the situation is fully considered - years of war, rape, looting, starvation and murder before a PMC is called in - one is driven to the old conclusion: with 'friends' like these, who needs enemies? If the threatened government feels that a PMC can help in such situations, who has the political or moral right to deny it that help, unless they are willing to step in themselves? Writing in The Times on the situation in Sierra Leone, Sam Kiley recorded what happened when the rebel RUF took over Freetown: Eastern Freetown has been razed by rebels. Their scorched earth tactics and the staggering level of their atrocities blight much of the countryside. Yesterday the rebels were seen cutting the hands off civilians fleeing from their path. Refugees talk of wholesale slaughter by the rebels, piles of bodies' lying in the street and all-night parrying by drug-crazed pre-teen killers. The rebels have to be stopped, and soon. Was the legitimate government of Sierra Leone supposed to negotiate with people who chopped children's hands off, or sit down and confer with ten-year-old, drug-crazed killers? Having described the situation, Mr Kiley went on to suggest that Mr Cook, the British Foreign Secretary, should authorise the deployment of 'mercenaries' to help ECOMOG - the West African force helping the legitimate government - drive these rebels out of Sierra Leone. What the Foreign Office posture actually did was trigger a Customs and Excise investigation into Sandline International - and the killing in Sierra Leone went on. The dilemma faced by those Third World governments who, lacking a wide range of options or resources to resolve internal military problems, choose to employ PMCs is illustrated by the reaction to Sandline's activities in Papua New Guinea and Sierra Leone. The public profile gained by Sandline in these operations fuelled debate and dissension over the very existence of PMCs, a debate which uses a lexicon of knee-jerk phrases to feed a set of misconceptions and preconceived ideas which obscure the real issue. That issue consists of two main elements: the moral and the practical. Should something be done in a given situation, should PMCs be used to do it, and do they have the resources to do it better than - not merely instead of - national military forces? The reader can judge after hearing the full story of our involvement in these countries, and this will be covered fully in later chapters. The notion that PMCs are mercenary concerns only in it for the money is the one that attracts the greatest amount of heat, and a rather smaller amount of light, and leads directly to the moral arguments deployed against PMCs. First of all, is it right to go soldiering about the world for money? If PMCs are to be employed, should not their employment be regulated and their work overseen by some legitimate international body? Should not conflicts be resolved by negotiation and diplomacy rather than by force? The short answer to all these questions is 'yes'. We work for legitimate governments and of course we expect to be paid for what we do, just like any other business providing a technical or a professional service. We would welcome some form of regulation and supervision provided we have some say in what form this takes and it takes into account the realities of the world we live in. And the main aim of PMC activity is to create a situation where negotiations can start and diplomacy can work by restoring the political balance, by restoring peace, by creating normality, and this too will be illustrated by our work in Papua New Guinea and the work of another PMC, Executive Outcomes, in Sierra Leone. From this comes a further set of questions. Are PMCs effective and, since military services are not cheap, are they cost-effective? Are the real PMCs competently run, able to keep their bargains, able to work to a pre-agreed brief and not exceed it? Can they be useful on the international stage, settling a foreign dispute without severe political fall-out at home? Although I run a PMC, I intend to examine this subject as objectively as possible in the following chapters and answer all these questions, though I will not be discussing the specifics of Sandline International operations in great detail. Client confidentiality precludes me from discussing current operations or those not already in the public domain. However, I will explain the difference between PMCs and the old-style mercenaries and reveal what Sandline is really about, what it will and will not do, and its corporate ethos. This will, I hope, dispel some of the myths that surround Sandline and move the argument on to more solid ground before I address some specific examples further on in this book. To illustrate the difference, I can take the reader briefly through the Sandline ethos, which can be summarised by two quotes. The first is from T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia: 'Use the smallest force in the furthest place in the quickest time.' The second is from the Chinese General Sun Tzu, writing in AD 500: 'The best general is he who wins a battle without firing a shot.' Sandline aims to solve the problem swiftly by supplying the best possible military services effectively and with the minimum impact on innocent bystanders. We do not advocate the use of force. Indeed, the implied use of force can be more effective, as we demonstrated in Papua New Guinea by intending to use Russian attack-helicopters to sweep low over insurgent positions and transport ships; they did not fire but their arrival concentrated minds among the Bougainville rebel commanders, indicating that the war had moved on to a new dimension. Another effective element is psychological operations, a form of direct propaganda such as using aircraft equipped with Sky Shout loudhailers and flying over insurgent villages to spread the government message. All this has the aim of bringing the parties to the negotiating table. Having said that, if all else fails, we are prepared to use force and would support the military operations of a legitimate government, with the caveat that we remain within the law of armed conflict and show respect for human rights. This is not a pious intent, or put in here to enlist the support of readers. Experience has shown that a respect for human rights works in a military situation; if governments fight terrorism with counter-terrorism they lose all legitimacy and will probably - and deservedly fail. Sandline has five basic operating principles: we only work for legitimate governments; we will do nothing illegal, even for those governments; we will do nothing against key Western nations' foreign policies; we apply First World standards to all our military work, including respect for human rights; and we ensure client confidentiality. First and foremost we are military consultants, particularly at the level of command, control, communications and intelligence. We can evaluate an army and its equipment, from private to general, from heavy artillery to boots. We can cost out their facilities at a time of financial stringency and suggest savings - do they really need all those barracks and all that real estate? We can - and it 'is one of our preferred tasks - supply training of any kind, from basic training for newly joined recruits right up to Special Force units, creating 'Behind the Lines' units like the US 'LRRPS' (Long Range Recce Patrols), and counter-terrorist forces, police as well as army. This might include the creation of police SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams. Since our niche in the market is at the command and control level, we can also supply intelligence support, evaluating and training intelligence personnel, both military and police, and if required we can assist in intelligence gathering. In addition to our military package we offer a humanitarian one, and the recent experiences of UN officials and aid teams in Somalia and Macedonia indicate the need for this. Again, this is based on our military expertise, but it can cover the training or supply of convoy escorts or guards for food distribution points threatened by insurgents or thieves, staff protection and engineer work, such as repairing roads and bridges, digging wells and, of growing importance, clearing mines. This is a highly skilled and dangerous activity, one that calls for professional skills which Third World armies do not always possess and for which First World armies cannot always allocate resources. Another broad question is why have PMCs emerged now, in the 1990s? The short answer is that during the Cold War, political and military matters were, as Dr Kissinger said, to a very large extent cut-and-dried. There were two power blocs: the Soviet Union, its satellites and the Warsaw Pact powers, and the West, the USA, Britain and their allies in NATO, SEATO and all the other defence pacts. Between them, these blocs contained most of the trouble, actual or potential - and created quite a bit of it, from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Anything that might really rock the boat, create serious instability and lead to nuclear conflict was, however, strictly controlled. Although there were periodic conflicts, mostly in the Middle East and Asia, these too were eventually resolved for fear of the escalator effect leading to a spreading world war. Then the Soviet Union collapsed and the West declared a 'peace dividend' by dismantling its defences and running down its armed forces, before the leaders woke up to the fact that the world had actually become more dangerous. I shall have something to say later about the effect this had on the operational effectiveness of the British Army in the Falklands War and the Gulf War of 1990-91. The 'peace dividend' was not paid to everyone. At the moment, in 1999, it is estimated by the UN that there are no fewer than forty-three wars of various sizes going on in different parts of the world, ranging from ethnic disputes in the Balkan state of Kosovo, and tribal wars and oppression in Africa, to civil insurrection in Turkey between the national government and the Kurds, and the ongoing situation with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The potential for violence in the future is almost limitless and with the USA unwilling always to act in the role of the 'world's policeman' and the UN's actions constantly stymied by a lack of resolve, or capability, or by blocking votes, something was bound to fill the gap. And so we see a growth in private military companies; it could be argued that PMCs are the inevitable outcome of the UN's failure to tackle long-term problems with sufficient resolve and adequate resources. David Shearer, who headed Save the Children Fund programmes in Iraq, Rwanda, Somalia and Sri Lanka, is on record as saying, 'There is no doubt that these companies [PMCs] are effective. They have taken advantage of the increasing reluctance of Western governments to intervene in civil conflicts. The civil wars we are seeing at the moment are messy, brutal, nasty things that governments don't want to commit their troops to, but these companies are willing to take that political risk and may even contribute to stability.' Shearer also urged governments to start talking to private military companies, who, he said, are keen to be perceived as legitimate. Ask why governments are disinclined to act and the answers are both varied and complicated. The Soviet Union has no money and plenty of problems at home. The European powers are too diverse, cannot always agree on policy and do not have the right manpower available, or the will to use it if they had. As for the USA, politicians there are hampered by what I have come to think of as the CNN factor - a deep-rooted concern about the reaction of the domestic voter When US troops went ashore in Somalia in Operation Restore Hope in December 1992, their landing was delayed until it could be filmed as it happened and shown on US TV by CNN. So far, so good; the work of the US and other national forces, in suppressing the criminal gangs then at large in Mogadishu and in allowing the international relief operation to begin, was widely praised and gave everyone at home a nice warm glow every evening as the television news showed young American soldiers doing humanitarian work. Then it went horribly awry. The parents of these young soldiers saw their sons under attack in the streets of Mogadishu by the people they had been sent to help. At least two US servicemen were butchered on TV, their naked bodies being dragged about the streets behind trucks - and all this on prime-time TV. There was an understandable public outcry - What are our boys doing in that place? - and within a matter of days the US contingent was withdrawn. The other national contingents soon followed. Somalia remains in anarchy, but who would willingly go back? Support for international intervention has declined and this has created a market for PMCs, for if the work has to be done, someone has to do it. The alternative is chaos. Sandline is not a charitable organisation. What we do we do for money, and we expect to make a profit out of it. We would argue that PMCs, being profit-orientated, are necessarily cost-effective, unlike many UN operations. UN intervention in Angola cost $1 million a day - $365 million in one year - and achieved absolutely nothing. The South African PMC, Executive Outcomes, charged the Angola government $80 million over two years and got UNITA to the conference table, putting an end to the war in a matter of months. Readers may judge which amount of money achieved the better results. So, to revert to the earlier question, is it immoral to work for money? Most people do, including the civil engineers and doctors who work 'In the Third World. Is it right to resolve conflicts by coercion, rather than by negotiation? If common sense ruled the world, everyone from judges to generals would be unemployed. Since the world is not so sensible, however, it often takes a certain amount of coercion, or more often the threat of coercion, to bring the parties to the negotiating table. If the end result is a peaceful, acceptable solution to the situation, why argue about the means? Besides, chapter VII of the UN Charter provides for the use of force 'to coerce conflicting parties to restore or maintain internal peace and security', and it is under this chapter that UN forces are deployed on peace-keeping operations. Unfortunately, even some of the UN officials seem unaware of this, or unaware of what chapter VII means. The UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, speaking at a press conference in June 1997 to discuss civil war in Sierra Leone, declared himself horrified at the suggestion that the UN would ever consider working with a respectable mercenary organisation, arguing that there is no difference between respectable mercenaries and non-respectable mercenaries, which is simply nonsense. That view is hard to reconcile with UN actions in Somalia and Congo, where local militias, armed to the teeth, were hired and paid to protect UN officials and UN facilities. It should already be clear that PMCs are light years away from the popular 'mercenary' concept, but the issue remains. Another frequent allegation made about PMCs is that they are 'not accountable'. Not accountable to whom? World opinion? Outside politicians? I can only speak for Sandline, but we are always accountable, to our own policies and ethos and to our client government, with whom we always have a binding negotiated contract. It is under the terms of such a contract that the new government of Papua New Guinea were ordered by the courts to pay the outstanding debt for our work on behalf of the previous PNG administration. To underline this principle of accountability on the ground, Sandline people are always enrolled in the forces, police or military, of the client state; in Papua New Guinea, all of us were appointed special constables and were subject to the same laws, rules and regulations that governed any other government servant. We did not operate as a private army. It is also alleged that, in hiring a PMC, a government is abrogating its own responsibilities to the citizens or the electorate. A second's consideration will reveal that this is nonsense. A national government cannot abrogate responsibility for its own defence or the ethics and principles it stands for, but it does have a responsibility to be as effective as possible in maintaining the peace and security of the state, and therefore can hire experts if it feels the need to do so - experts who must be subordinate to the host government and fit within the existing military authority. These allegations over practical matters are easy to answer, not least on the grounds of common sense. The argument usually then moves on to the moral issue and the accusation that PMCs are careless of human rights and are 'mercenaries' who go about killing people. This accusation is not supported by the facts. Indeed, I would argue that the presence of a PMC force in a country actually raises standards of behaviour among the indigenous forces, who are often riven with ethnic or tribal rivalries or hatred and are more than willing to extract compensation from the civilian population for past wrongs. PMC personnel, apart from being less involved and therefore more objective, will stamp on this sort of thing hard, partly because as professional soldiers they do not approve of it and partly because they know that brutality does not work. Respect for human rights is not widespread in Third World armies or police forces - and less widespread than it should be everywhere else - but teaching such respect is one of the features of Sandline training. The locals are taught higher standards of behaviour and shown that it is in their own interests to work on 'hearts and minds' activities with the local people. They discover that the results are cumulative: the better they treat the locals, the more support they enjoy, the easier their task becomes and, last but not least, the better they feel. The fact that we take payment for our work clearly bothers some people, as does the allegation that we will take payment in kind, in mineral wealth, in gold or diamonds, in territory or mining leases. This allegation is not even true. Sandline has never accepted payment in this fashion, and we have no intention of doing so. Our reluctance is more practical than moral, for I can see no fundamental objection to payment in kind. Hard currency is difficult to conic by in many Third World countries - we have even been accused of depleting the national stock of hard currency and if we were offered payment in coffee futures or diamonds we would probably consider taking it. But we are a military company, not commodity brokers. We would do so only with the greatest reluctance, for we simply do not have the expertise to get involved in these transactions. A mineral concession to me is worth nothing; it is a liability, likely to soak up millions before any return is seen, if one ever is. Finally, there is the matter of transparency, the demand that all our activities should be open to public inspection and government intervention or regulation. Taking the last point first, where there are legal limits to our policies or actions we obey them, and we also impose limits by sticking to our own corporate ethos and sound professional military practice. We would welcome some form of regulation, not least so that we would then know where we stand and perhaps be spared the usual wearisome moralising - another point I shall return to. On the first point - often interpreted by the media as 'the public's right to know' - the answer lies in this page. This is a book about Sandline's activities and if I had anything to hide I would not be writing it. One frequently expressed concern is that PMCs may step outside their stated, self-imposed operating principles and abuse their position of trust to the extent that 'the tail wags the dog'. In other words, if a government employs a PMC, before long it is no longer the client government which calls the shots but the PMC, which, having the control of command and weaponry, is in a position to alter its terms of employment and dictate to the host government. This is the rational reason, and were it a realistic one, there would be good cause for concern. The situation on the ground, however, dictates otherwise. Simply on the matter of numbers, PMCs lack the muscle to impose their policies on any national government, for the number of operatives deployed in any one place is very small - I cannot recall any instance where we have put more than a hundred people on the ground, and it is usually much fewer. Then there is the fact that professional PMCs work through the legitimate national governmental hierarchy, and on a contractual basis. There is no scope for illegitimate action, extortion or private coups. All this presupposes that the PMC ever wanted to act in such a fashion in the first Place, but there are other, practical considerations. Given that a PMC is a business, it is acknowledged that a fundamental law of successful business is that the supplier is only as good as his last contract. Ethical businesses first build a reputation and then work hard to protect it. If a particular PMC performed badly or unethically, exploited the trust placed in it by a client, changed sides, violated human rights or sought to mount a coup, then the company and its principals would find that their forward order book was decidedly thin. Discarding ethical and moral principles can therefore only be a one-time opportunity. The chance will not recur and the company's prospects would disappear; common sense alone makes such actions most unlikely. Such allegations should, I suggest, be proved rather than asserted. Besides, the company and its clients also have their rights, and confidentiality is one of them. Provided their operations are legitimate, every company is granted a degree of privacy which is embedded in the national laws of the country where it chooses to incorporate or base itself. Why should PMCs be required to present a higher level of disclosure than their peers simply to satisfy the curious? Regulation must work within the bounds of commercial reality. It is often the case that when a client has decided to take up their services, PMCs are required 'in-theatre' almost immediately. Any project-authorisation process must be capable of operating within this time constraint. for as far as the clients are concerned our lack of bureaucracy and our ability to streamline executive decision-making has a definite appeal. It might be pointed out that when the British Army's 'Rapid Reaction Force' was first deployed it took months before it got out of Tidworth Barracks. I doubt if any client would wait that long. However, assuming that this process was in position and worked, we then have to consider the matter of what happens on the ground as the PMC goes to work. It would not be enough to permit their deployment and give them carte blanche. The next step must be some form of operational overview, and again this is something we would welcome. In my opinion, no legitimate PMC would object to the attachment of an observer team deployed alongside it in the field, within certain limits. This team would work in the same way as the referee at a football match, i.e. not interfering with the action, ensuring their own personal safety by avoiding being hit by the ball (or the player), yet having the authority to caution participants if they are in breach of the regulations. Clearly, the analogy is not ideal. In the case of PMCs and their clients there are lives at stake, and it would be hard to imagine an observer carrying sufficient weight to ensure the removal from the field of personnel who break the ground rules (e.g. the terms of the Geneva Convention), a task that must be left to the local commanders. However, the PMC will be fully cognisant of the fact that their actions are being constantly monitored and will not want to be banned from ,playing in another game' in the future, or to find themselves in front of an international tribunal. This suggestion has merit and might work, not least because it offers something to all the various parties. The observer force, by its very presence, can ensure that criticisms and suspicions often levelled at PMCs, such as unnecessarily prolonging their participation for excessive commercial gain, applying indiscriminate military techniques resulting in unacceptable civilian casualties and collateral damage, or violating human rights, can be independently monitored. By being present throughout the deployment and planning phases, the observer force will be fully conversant with the overall objectives, the chain of command, the directives and orders that are issued and the conduct of operations, thereby creating accountability for all actions of the PMCs. Undoubtedly there are other options, many of which will be variations on those set out here. There needs to be a balance between the extent of oversight required at the 'international level', at the UN and in the media, that which can be practically managed on the ground and that which would be acceptable to PMC management and the client government without 'switching them off' the concept. At this stage, where no such organisation or system exists, it is sufficient to examine the options. In the meantime, the majority of legitimate PMCs are quite capable of continuing to operate and grow without the introduction of a regulatory regime. PMCs will accept external regulation if it is manageable and adds to their commercial aspirations and operational effectiveness. Few businessmen of any kind welcome further regulation, but most sensible businessmen accept that in any business a degree of regulation is usually necessary. I would only suggest that since PMCs operate in an international setting and in high-risk, volatile situations, the sort of heavy-handed regulation employed in other areas of public concern might not be entirely appropriate. Finally, however hard the high-minded or the politically motivated may argue to the contrary, the fact is that private military companies work. They resolve conflicts, they provide-answers and they have proved useful in restoring peace and bringing the parties to the conference table. Because they work, there 'is a growing demand for their services. The advent of PMCs and their obvious effectiveness has raised the suggestion that they have an effective role to play in international affairs, particularly when the traditional 'world's policemen' - the United States and Britain - are unable or reluctant to intervene or, in the case of the UN, are grossly overstretched already and none too effective on the ground because they operate to international mandates that are arrived at by compromise. However, the development of PMCs also raises a number of understandable concerns. It is obvious that those PMCs which operate what British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook has called an 'ethical foreign policy' have their value. The profession of arms is not immoral, but there may well be a need for some form of regulation. Reputable PMCs would welcome this, but they would like to be part of the dialogue in forming these measures. From our point of view, there is a danger of overly prescriptive regulations which will negate much of the speed and flexibility of legitimate PMCs, thus putting them out of business. A more likely scenario is that it will drive the dubious companies underground, making their activities harder to monitor. The profession of arms has a long and honourable history and I am proud of my part in it. I have now moved on into a new military sphere and that too is developing a history in which I hope to play an honourable part. To quote Sir Thomas Legg in his report on the Sierra Leone investigation in London, 'PMCs are part of the international scene and are here to stay.' My experience with Sandline fully endorses that opinion. Since PMCs are here, and here to stay, surely the answer is not to moralise, restrict or criminalise their activities but to engage in a sensible dialogue and maximise the benefits of PMCs as part of the 'New World Order'? I won't pretend it isn't an uphill struggle, and we should never lose sight of the fact that nations cannot abrogate responsibility for their own security. PMCs cannot work miracles and their role will always be limited. However, in certain situations they can assist or enhance national forces and buy time for sanity, decency and peace to return once again to a land ravaged by war. This being so, surely PMCs should be encouraged and supported, rather than criticised and condemned? Much of that condemnation stems from the fact that some people cannot discriminate between a PMC and the 'Dogs of War' mercenary concept and lack any knowledge of mercenary history. So, with Sandline now introduced, let us move on to examine the issues raised in this chapter in more detail, starting with a look at the history of mercenary warfare. End chapter one .....Cont.....
