Modern Adventurers in War Zones; war correspondents and mercenaries

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Sword-dancer

would somebody to surprised if Blackwater did it or members of the US Forces.

Wasn´t that that the case with drug smuggling in Nam?

There's no such thing as Blackwater at the time the game is set, in 2011. And Academi, the successor company, doesn't really have much of a presence in Iraq at that time, either.

The United States Forces - Iraq are leaving and the security for the State Department is mostly done by Triple Canopy.

And, yes, it would be a considerable surprise if serving members of the armed forces of any Western country contrived to be absent from their duties while on deployment in a war zone, for months, while they served as the private mercenaries of a criminal organisation.

Any high-profile PMC or PSC is also subject to far too much oversight for that to be plausible. If a shooting incident involving a couple of employees can cause an international incident, it's pretty clear that it's not possible for such companies to conceal the existence of a dozen or more employees who openly commit hundreds of crimes over a period of months, without it becoming the sort of scandal that leads to corporate ruin.

I did find an interesting publication SALW and Private Security Companies in South Eastern Europe: A Cause or Effect of Instability, which suggests that Bulgarian and Serbian PSC might be able to do that sort of thing on an international scale and that Albanian, Bosnian, Moldovan and companies from several other countries could do it inside their own borders.

I'll continue looking, see which other countries in the world have poor regulation over their PSC or PMC sector and where connections to organised crime might plausibly exist.

Originally Posted by Sword-dancer

http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/

Thank you. That's great.