Volume 51, Number 13 · August 12, 2004
Iraq: America's Private Armies
By Patrick Radden Keefe
Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry
by P.W. Singer
Cornell University Press,352 pp., $19.95 (paper)
As the ragtag killers of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) advanced on Freetown in the spring of 1995, the government of Sierra Leone took a desperate measure. The rebels had cut a violent swath across the country, enlisting child soldiers and leaving thousands with amputated limbs or dead in their wake. Sierra Leone's government was too hobbled by its own corruption to effectively resist; its military was largely ceremonial; and the United Nations, the United Kingdom, and the United States had all refused to intervene. Catastrophe seemed inevitable, until the government approached a South African security firm called Executive Outcomes. For a hefty fee, Executive Outcomes agreed to rout the RUF and reestablish government control in the country's fertile diamond regions, a task which it proceeded to accomplish, using its own private army and helicopter gunships, in a little under two weeks.
Review, 3775 words
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