Stephen Armstrong on War Plc

Tell me about your first choice.

Bob Shepherd’s book The Circuit is a true story about an ex-SAS man. It’s a good example of how the private security industry has evolved, from a first-person perspective.

Bob Shepherd left the SAS and joined the private security industry before Iraq kicked off. At that point the private security industry was very much a nod and a wink game. It was really just for the elite special forces. If you were a quality SAS person at the end of your time in the forces you would join a private members’ club near Harrods. In those days the group was called the Circuit because you knew all the people involved and there weren’t that many jobs about. You’d get people like a Saudi prince coming into town and he would have his own security people, but he might have brought his daughter with him so he’d need more people to look after her.

Bob Shepherd quickly specialised in looking after journalists. He worked with CNN so most of his stories are about specific events and moments in history. For example he was there when CNN went into Yasser Arafat’s compound in the Gaza Strip.

Bob Shepherd is a smart bloke who is very aware of how the security industry is changing and he starts to unpick that as he is going along. You get this sense of how this small group of specialised people suddenly found that the demand for their type of work had escalated. He talks about how amateurs were starting to get into this line of work, like the nightclub bouncer from the UK who turned up in Iraq, picked up an AK47 and got himself some private security work! This book makes you remember that there are blokes who were trained as soldiers, then the army said, ‘You’ve served your time, out you go,’ and they are doing the best they can. And can you blame them? The book de-demonises the job. Most of these people are not bloodthirsty mercenaries, they are just trying to get by using the skills they have.

Moving on to Blackwater, tell me about that.

Well this is the exact opposite of The Circuit, in that it is much more academic. I think they are both incredibly important books. Blackwater is written by a US journalist called Jeremy Scahill. The book shows the beauty of American print journalism. It is so well researched and thoroughly documented that it moves beyond a research book and into an impassioned, well written, freely flowing account of the story of Blackwater – the security firm.

Everything is minutely covered by footnotes. And it’s important for the footnotes to be there because some of the things that he is talking about sound like they are from a bad movie. For example Blackwater is named after a dark swamp in Virginia. The founder was a right-wing Christian ideologue who had wanted to be in the special forces but then dropped out. So he bought a load of land and built a huge military base which he allowed anyone to train in. Then through judicious payment to the Republican Party he became important in those circles.

When the Afghan War broke out he put together people who had been training on his site and tried to get involved in some ops and it worked. He got a CIA name tag, thousands of dollars’ worth of contracts and within two years he had built up the world’s largest army with helicopters, armoured vehicles, ships, and intelligence.

There are films which have come out since about Blackwater which you might think are ludicrous, but when you read the book you realise that this is actually what really happened. What he’s really talking about is how the Bush administration had a doctrine of privatisation which was at the very heart of its approach to Iraq.

So where does your next book, Private Contractors and the Reconstruction of Iraq, take us?

Christopher Kinsey is probably at the leading edge of studying this industry. He works at Kings College in London and at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, which is like the university for the armed forces. So he has unrivalled access. He wrote a very successful first book which was an overview of how private contractors started, and with this second book he is looking at the effect they are having in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq really was unlike any other war in our lifetime in that it was so astonishingly privatised. The private contractors on the ground were roughly the same size as the US army.

That is a key philosophical thread for the West at the moment – the idea of contracting out force. It leads to the idea of what is the definition of a state. The book’s not a racy read but if you are intrigued by the implications of all this contracting out work it’s a very interesting read. There’s this real idea of the philosophical shift that has been going on during the last 20 years in how people manage war.

Your next book is all about Tim Spicer.

Yes, Tim Spicer is the closest thing to the father of the private security industry you are going to hear from.