4. Land Power and PMSCs

Chapter 4 assesses how and why Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) are so constituted regarding land power. This chapter introduces the importance of state military doctrines that intrinsically set what activities PMSCs perform. As such, this chapter grants particular attention to the multi-valued role of the offensive amongst state militaries that is in keeping with the conventional forces norm. To illustrate the ways by which PMSCs are “boxed in” on land specifically, this chapter describes a South African PMSC, Executive Outcomes, as an offensive minded actor; an outlier in an industry that increasingly was placed, and saw itself within, a defensive context. Even with this defensive limitation, however, PMSCs find an operational space by compensating, numerically and ideationally, for technologically fixated state militaries. This chapter makes it plain that in so doing, PMSCs employ labour-centric approaches rather than those involving expensive major weapon systems typical of modern state military forces.