Contractors as Military Professionals?

Contractors in Iraq: Exploited Class or Exclusive Club?

“…Scholarship focusing on such exploitation within the industry offers a typical profile of the private military contractor as an uneducated, unskilled, and impoverished young man from a region with few career opportunities, someone who was pushed toward this type of employment because other options were lacking (Whyte, 2007). We assert that this supposedly typical profile in the literature fits only for a portion of the industry, and our view is supported by others in military sociology and security studies whose work emphasizes, instead, the professionalization and specialization of this sector (Berndtsson, 2012;Higate, 2012;Joachim & Schneiker, 2012;Leander, 2005;Schaub & Franke, 2009). Focusing on the American workforce, specifically those working as combat and security specialists, we provide further evidence that this subsector consists of highly skilled, educated, and experienced veterans.…”

“…While TCN contractors might be assigned to routine security functions such as guarding gates or equipment, the security contractors escorting high-ranking personnel or vehicle convoys are more likely to be chosen from among this group of American or Western security contractors with extensive combat experience in their national military forces. Such specialty assignments, included but not limited to combat, are part of the professionalization of the sector as indicated by multiple scholars (see, e.g., Berndtsson, 2012;Leander, 2005;Schaub & Franke, 2009). As Joachim and Schneiker (2012) have shown, PMSC companies themselves cultivate a public image of providing a highly skilled professional workforce to their clients, using a repertoire of vocabulary and images in their promotional materials that they share with traditional bastions of white-collar professionalism such as banks and insurance companies.…”