Thanks to outsourcing, it’s an excellent business model: ‘war’!

 

Today I’ll talk about ‘outsourcing’. Firstly, the obligatory quick check of the latest inanities, a.k.a. ‘News’. According to Auntie Beeb’s ‘Staff’, there was one frontpage only which deserved the accolade of appearing in their own headline: “Newspaper headlines: ‘Coronation chaos’ and Biden in Northern Ireland” (link).

Good grief – the coronation rehearsal wasn’t perfect, according to the Mirror, and that’s really important? I wonder why ‘Staff’ didn’t use the iNews page about economic doom and gloom, nor the DT and DM reporting on the hypocrisy of the doctors’ union boss – remember: those junior doctors are on strike – who has gone on holiday. A quick scan of the report in the DT shows that this was a welcome occasion for the members of the New Elite, a.k.a. politicians and other talking heads, to spout off, as usual (paywalled link, if you must)

These truly earth-shattering ‘front-page news’ suggest to me that the chief editors are just as disdainful and contemptuous of their readers as the doctor’s trade union boss is of patients and indeed of his colleagues. 

And so to the main subject for today: the outsourcing of a task which used to be one of the state’s prerogative. Yesterday afternoon I received the latest issue of ‘Unherd’ in my inbox, promoting their top essay with the title “Private armies are making a killing – Mercenaries thrive while democracy dies” (link), compelling em to read the whole thing.

Unsurprisingly, the author frames his essay with descriptions of the Russian ‘Wagner Group’ which is fighting in the Ukraine and has or hasn’t taken the town of Bakhmut. We’re obedient plebs and are certainly not using Russian news sources because they’re all propaganda. Instead we accept our own news which are of course not propaganda – never, ever! – and so we cannot say if this ‘mercenary’ group has or hasn’t taken the town. 

However, the fact that this group is fighting rather successfully at the side of the Russian Army serves as a nice point for the author’s original claim that mercenary groups ‘thrive while democracy dies’, aimed at making us shudder. The author then explains why this isn’t a new, strictly Russian ‘thing’ (all emphases are mine):

“In many ways, Wagner’s emergence from the shadows symbolises the changing nature of modern warfare, in which the traditional Clausewitzian paradigm — based on a clear distinction between public and private, friend and enemy, civil and military, combatant and non-combatant — has given way to a much messier reality, in which state armies now regularly fight alongside private and/or corporate paramilitary and mercenary groups. Today’s conflicts, even when violent in nature, often occur in a “grey zone” below the threshold of conventional military action; adversarial states increasingly confront each other through proxies or surrogates — including private armies — rather than through their own armed forces. And this is not just a Russian issue: the increasingly central role of private military and security companies (PMSCs) in modern warfare is a global phenomenon.” (link)

I sniff hints of ‘it’s ok when we do it’ … We’re next treated to an exhaustive historical description regarding the existence of such private mercenary troops which started appearing during the era of ‘decolonisation’, especially in Africa. In the 1970s the UN started to develop some sort of legal framework, culminating in 

“[…] the appointment, in 1987, of a Special Rapporteur on the use of mercenaries; and then, in 1989, to the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries, which entered into force in 2001 and added language specifying that mercenaries were people undermining legitimate governments — another clause that implicitly reflected the concerns of post-colonial countries. To this day, the Convention — which essentially copies the wording of the 1977 definition — represents the international legal definition of mercenarism.” (link)

After describing how various mercenary troops transformed themselves into proper ‘security’ businesses, in order to escape the  International Convention described above, we get to the core of the phenomenon:

“The growing influence of the neoliberal logic of economic rationalisation and deregulation during the Nineties also pushed states to privatise and outsource many government functions and services — including warfare. Security came to be perceived as a commodity, a service like any other that could be sold and bought in the marketplace. This was also part of a broader push towards the transfer of national prerogatives to suprastate or, as in this case, non-state actors as a way to shift the decision-making process away from democratic institutions. This trend was compounded by the global downsizing of national military forces, which also expanded the recruiting pool for PMSCs.” (link)

All the key points are here in this paragraph – key points illustrating that and how ‘The State’ has divested itself of those main issues on which it relies, here the defence of the realm. We know how far our own Armed Forces have been ‘downsized’ while we pay more and more for them.

Moreover, there are huge ‘mercenary businesses’ in the USA, established long before the Russian Wagner group. We don’t know how much “we” have paid for their services – money in addition to that we shell out for our national Armed Forces.

The most important aspect though is the outsourcing of decision making regarding war and peace, one of the foremost issues facing a country. Why would our own HoC (House of Clowns) need to decide about our country participating in a war when this job can be done by international business groups, perhaps trading on the stock exchange, without the government having to make an ‘official declaration’?

This then  begs two questions. One is ‘what other state prerogatives have been outsourced’, leading to the question why we need the NHS: couldn’t this also be ‘outsourced’? The other is: ‘why do we need a ‘state’ when its major functions have been ‘outsourced’, when such decisions are out of our democratic control?

How deeply have we slid into the abyss of ‘the end of the nation state’, so desired by the global elites? Doesn’t our state  look more and more like a simple distribution machine, distributing taxpayers’ money to the unproductive public service and bennie recipients? Moreover, if even war and peace is outside the vestiges of democratic control which are still resting in Parliament – what use is it?

Finally, going back to the war in the Ukraine: aren’t all those western soldiers fighting and dying in the Ukraine also mercenaries, paid for by Kiev? Those of us who are dipping their unpatriotic toes into non-western reports on that war (shame! How dare you!) know that e.g. Polish troops have been fighting there. Even the DT was forced to report today that “British special forces are in Ukraine, Pentagon leak suggests” (paywalled link).

Being paid by a belligerent state to fight in their war makes them mercenary. If these Brits have simply removed their uniforms but are still paid by us then yes, this shows that the UK isn’t a democracy any longer because Parliament hasn’t agreed to this secretive warfare. 

This report is another piece in the puzzle showing how hollow our state has become. Parliament has long abdicated its role, the eloquent, hifalutin’ sentences of JRM notwithstanding. The New Elites are producing entertainment for us plebs, aided and abetted by the Westminster MSM. And we keep paying for this …

That’s all I have for today. Mercenary troops are another little pointer towards the neofeudal future, going back to the famous troops, the ‘condottieri’. I suggest we ‘outsource’ our ‘social services’, going back to Victorian times. That should save some of our taxpayers money. Have a good day.



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