Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010

PMC’s Bad – War

PMC involvement perpetuates war – governments of rising nations choose cheap brute force over expensive peace settlements.
Beutel 5 (PRIVATE MILITARY COMPANIES: THEIR EMERGENCE, IMPORTANCE, AND A CALL FOR GLOBAL REGULATION by M. Dee Beutel A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Norwich University, June 2005, http://princess.digitalfreaks.org/thesis/beutelmdthesis.pdf)KM

The PMC’s’ involvement in the continually conflicted regions of the world provides states with the easy answer of buying military force rather then seeking expensive or complicated peace building policies. Regardless of the wishes of the sponsoring government, these private contractors have no desire to pause and seek peace as they are employed by combat. However, in these deep-rooted conflicts between nations, the answer is not going to be illuminated by a continual cycle of death. The repeated use of private contractors allows for the malevolence within the region to continue rather than forcing alternative issues to the table.188 Neither the major world powers nor the local governments are under pressure for a long term solution to the problem when it is clear that the option of force will always be present.189 The departure of a PMC leaves the hiring government in an uncomfortable situation regarding sovereignty. The state wishes to maintain and control its newly won (or reclaimed) country; the tools that it has used to gain control, and may need to continue to use to maintain control, are that of an outside corporation which has no obligation or accountability to the state once the terms of a given contract have been fulfilled.190 The use of PMC’s does not assist states with conflict resolution nor does it address any of the underlying issues; it simply places a band-aid on the unresolved internal strife. In order to make the use of force beneficial, a plan for reconciliation must be ready for implementation with the international community’s support. It must address the underlying causes of the conflict, not simply finance a PMC to provide stopgap solutions.191

PMC’s are bad – destroys efficiency and makes conflict worse

Jennings 6 (Kathleen, Researcher M.Phil in Politics, St. Antony's College, University of Oxford, www.fafo.no/pub/rapp/532/532.pdf, AD: 6/22/10) jl

The efficiency argument is perhaps the easiest for PMC sceptics to rebut. Indeed, we have seen above that, even for those not wholly opposed to the use of PMC’s, it is not difficult to challenge the assertion that using private contractors leads to greater efficiency and savings (see for example Bouckaert & Pollitt 2000l Avant 2000; Singer 2004b; Holmqvist 2005). The distortion of the private military market neutralise or disproves many of the assumptions underlying the economic efficiency argument.

Critical analysts also content that the effectiveness argument – that is , that PMC’s are decisive in ending wars – is overstated. Examining the involvement of Executive Outcomes in Sierra Leone in the 1990s, Spear (2006) writes that EO provided short-term tactical successes that bought breathing space for the government, but notes that it was ultimately unable to comprehensively defeat the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front and lay the proper groundwork for peace to be negotiated and sustained. Her conclusion brings together several key points:

Because PMC’s can do very little to solve the root problems that underlie the conflict, they may in fact worsen the situation...PMC’s are employed as a temporary solution to problems that have much deeper and more challenging roots, and which therefore remain unresolved at a fundamental level even if events at the surface–level seem settled. The primary benefit of PMC’s therefore seems to be that they can provide a beleguered government with a 'strategic pause', which can be vital for a government on the edge of collapse... [T]he medium to long-term effects of PMC operation is to undermine the reconstitution of state effectiveness, primarily through the violence unleashed by reversion to the military option combined with the decreased perception of the government as the provider of security (Spear 2006: 40).

PMC’s Bad – War

Growing influence of PMC’s allows them to unleash global instability
Pieterse 4 (Jan Nederveen Pieterse is professor of sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Neoliberal Empire Theory, Culture & Society 2004 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 21(3): 119–140 TBC 6/24/10)

One of the implications of neoliberal empire is that distinctions between public and private domains have eroded; the public domain is privatized. What matters is not merely the link between threat and profit and war and business, but what kind of business: privileging military contractors means that the US economy has become uncompetitive. The military-industrial complex has been a major source of distortion (as in the economic shift from the Frost Belt to the Sunbelt and the consequent rise of the conservative South) and structural inequality in the American economy and politics. The growing role of private military contractors who operate outside national and international law implies that private actors can unleash global instability or global crisis.

PMC dependency will perpetuate and intensify any war and create instability.
Thurer and Maclaren 7 (DANIEL THÜRER & MALCOLM MACLAREN* Military Outsourcing as a Case Study in the Accountability and Responsibility of Power”, The Law of International Relations - Liber Amicorum Hanspeter Neuhold, p 353, http://www.ivr.uzh.ch/lstthuerer/forschung/FSNeuholdt.pdf)KM

The potentially adverse effects of PMC’s’ growing power on the international system, national societies, and the rule of law are manifold and serious, as the incidents cited at the outset indicate. An uncontrolled military industry: poses a threat to world peace and stability by accelerating the end of the exclusive entitlement of states to use force in international relations. Normative concerns that led states to establish this pillar of the modern international system in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War and to try to end the use of mercenaries in the 20th century remain relevant. State control is the most effective means of limiting violence and its loss might well lead to an increase in the incidence and intensity of confl ict, by rendering recourse to arms easier, by providing additional means with which to fi ght and by making equilibrium between the confl ict parties harder to reach.17 In particular, there is the danger that PMC’s could aid a corrupt regime in suppressing a people’s right to self-determination or lend support to rebels, warlords, organized criminals, and terrorists in undermining legitimate regimes; that the growth of the private military industry might weaken the enforceability of arms control / reduction agreements through the resultant links between PMC’s and armed forces; and fi nally, that the employment of PMC’s will lead to small arms proliferation and contribute to greater instability in particular areas.18