KEY POINTS:
In Nigeria, corporate commandos exchange fire with local rebels attacking an oil platform.
In Afghanistan, private bodyguards help to foil yet another assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai.
In Colombia, a contracted pilot comes under fire from guerrillas while spraying coca fields with pesticides.
On the Iraq-Iran border,
privately owned Apache helicopters deliver United States special forces to a covert operation.
This is a snapshot of a working day in the growing world of private military companies, arguably the fastest-growing industry in the global economy.
The sector is worth up to US$120 billion ($161 billion) annually with operations in at least 50 countries, said Peter Singer, a security analyst with the Brookings Institution in Washington.
"The rate of growth in the security industry has been phenomenal," says Deborah Avant, a professor of political science at UCLA. The single largest spur to this boom is the conflict in Iraq.
The workings of this industry have come under intense scrutiny this week in the angry aftermath of the killing of Iraqi civilians by the US-owned Blackwater corporation in Baghdad.
Yesterday the Iraqi Government, after initially demanding the North Carolina-based company be withdrawn, said it would not rush to expel the firm because it would leave a "security vacuum" in Baghdad.
With Blackwater responsible for the protection of hundreds of senior US and Iraqi officials, from the US Ambassador to visiting congressional delegations, there is certainty in diplomatic and military circles that the firm will not be expelled.
The origins of these shadow armies can be traced back to the early 1990s and the end of the Cold War, Bob Ayers, a security expert with Chatham House in London, explains: "In the good old days of the Cold War there were two superpowers who kept a lid on everything in their respective parts of the world."
He likens the collapse of the Soviet Union to "taking the lid off a pressure cooker". What we have seen since, he says, is the rise of global dissident groups, ultranationalists and multiple threats to global security.
The new era also saw a big cut in the size of standing armies, at the same time as a rise in global insecurity which increased both the availability of military expertise and the demand for it. It was a business opportunity that could not be ignored.
Now the mercenary trade comes with its own business jargon. Guns for hire come under the umbrella term of privatised military firms, with their own acronym, PMFs. The industry itself has done all it can to shed the "mercenary" tag and most companies avoid the term "military" in preference for "security". "The term mercenary is not accurate," says Ayers, who argues that military personnel in defensive roles should be distinguished from soldiers of fortune.
There is nothing new about soldiers for hire, the private companies simply represent the trade in a new form.
"Organised as business entities and structured along corporate lines, they mark the corporate evolution of the mercenary trade," according to Singer, who was among the first to plot the worldwide explosion in the use of private military firms.
In many ways it mirrors broader trends in the world economy as countries switch from manufacturing to services and outsource functions once thought to be the preserve of the state. Iraq has become a testing ground for this burgeoning industry, creating staggering financial opportunities and equally immense ethical dilemmas.
None of the estimated 48,000 private military operatives in Iraq has been convicted of a crime and no one knows how many Iraqis have been killed by private military forces, because the US does not keep records.
According to some estimates, more than 800 private military employees have been killed in the war and 3300 wounded. These numbers are greater than the losses suffered by any single US Army division and larger than the casualties suffered by the rest of the coalition put together.
A high-ranking US military commander in Iraq said: "These guys run loose in this country and do stupid stuff. There's no authority over them, so you can't come down on them hard when they escalate force. They shoot people."
In Abu Ghraib, all of the translators and up to half of the interrogators were reportedly private contractors.
Private soldiers are involved in all stages of war, from training and war-gaming before the invasion to delivering supplies. Even humanitarian agencies are dependent on PMFs in almost every war zone from Bosnia to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Which raises the next market the industry would like to see opened: peacekeeping. And the lobbying has already begun.
- Independent