/int/ - International (1 reader)

Back in the 90's, there used to be 50 military personnel for every one private contractor. Today the ratio is 10 to one. Considering the US is home to over 1.3 million active duty personnel, that means there are somewhere 130,000 armed Americans committing acts of violence in regions around the world at the direction of US corporations, wealthy individuals, and intelligence groups, operating in every continent but Antarctica.
Since 2003, Blackwater has received billions of dollars in contracts from the US state department, the military, and the CIA for work they've done in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has run the gambit from protecting various dignitaries, to securing oil fields.
As we saw with Blackwater's massacre in Baghdad in 2007, it's incredibly difficult to prosecute "PMC"s because the nature of their work is inherently secretive and conducted in other countries with very little oversight. Private military companies are nothing more than a convenient way to pursue violent imperialist goals without the dirtying the hands of the US military. Money that would've been spent on the military is more and more often being diverted to fund private groups of armed thugs and murderers, often veterans of the armed services who have demonstrated their capability for incredible cruelty. This is the future of warfare, a hand's off approach from the official branches of the military, with a heavy investment in more secretive, more violent, and less accountable paramilitary groups. These groups not only enable state violence, but also allow US corporations operating overseas to peruse their own violent forms of suppression of competition and resistance.