Markets in everything - the new mercenaries

A team of four former Special Forces personnel could clinically target infrastructure in a major city like London, detonating IEDs without loss of life and creating maximum terror. It must be remembered that elite ex-military personnel are trained in infrastructure protection, so it's hardly a quantum leap in thinking for them to turn what they've learned around, moving from defence to offence. Doing so achieves the goals of terrorism as described by Arjun Appadurai in his recent book Fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger:

Terror produces its effects by regularly blurring the bounds between the spaces and times of war and peace …

And it is above all devoted to the decimation of order, understood as peace or freedom from violence. Terror in the name of whatever ideology of equity, liberty or justice, seeks to install violence as the central regulative principle of everyday life. This is what is terrifying about terror, even beyond its bodily traumas, its spatial promiscuity, its dramas of self-sacrifice, it’s refusal of reciprocal humanism. Terror is the rightful name for any effort to replace peace with violence as the guaranteed anchor of everyday life. It uses emergency as its routine and values exceptional forms of violence and violation as its norm.

Terror is first of all the terror of the next attack.

Should we be lucky in this hypothetical, the early days of an “open” market for mercenaries will see us in a situation where we face maximum disruption and no (possibly minimal) loss of life. That's what you get with principled mercenaries who are first to market and skilled in the guerilla warfare concept of maximum terror of a populace for minimal collateral damage.

After a while, as the market for private military services bloats on the supply side, scruples vanish and suppliers start cutting prices, offering bigger bang for your buck. It will be messier, more people will die, but it will be at an efficient market price.

As we talking hypothetically here I can say we shouldn’t worry. I can say The Good Guys, our government security and intelligence services, have contingency plans in place to readily thwart developments such as those I’ve described.

Unfortunately, outside the safety of this hypothetical discussion, all I can see is a dangerous market growing in direct relation the perceived quality of politically expedient solution its suppliers can provide. Like it or not, the tacit acceptance and promotion of PMCs by Western governments has invited the growth of supply firms. Externalities like South Africa’s recent moves to sanction such behaviour aside it’s only a matter of time before the market opens up to all parties with demand, finding a new equilibrium rather than the current quasi-monopolistic demand of Western governments.

It happened with nuclear technology in Pakistan. What makes this scenario so different?

And if I can see this, so can The Bad Guys, wherever and whoever they are this election cycle.