Private military contractors are largely unlawful and destructive companies that allow large countries to impress abuses on smaller countries with sheer might. The private military contractors represent an alarmingly large portion of the total personnel of Western intervention overseas, and are almost totally unchecked by their host nations. There are innumerable examples of acts of gross negligence or outright cruelty committed by the employees of PMCs, which is to be expected given that they are untrained and yet have access to weapons and machinery. PMCs turn war into profit, with no regard for the human lives of the countries they are in. There are thousands of PMCs worldwide, but most are concentrated in the Middle East where they make an already raw situation worse.
Iran finds PMCs to be disgraceful and dangerous. They are just another way for the United States and other Western countries to impress their military might on the tumult of the Middle East. Iran finds US presence in the Middle East to be too big already, and PMCs present nothing more than another example of aggression on their part. One of Iran’s closest neighbors, Iraq, has one of the worlds largest concentrations of PMCs, and their provocative behavior has already leached onto Iranian soil and ignited serious political tension between Iran and the US. Iran sees private military contractors as a serious threat to their ability to sculpt the development and reconstruction of nearby countries such as Iraq and Syria and as a great risk to their own future as an autonomous country.
Iran believes that all countries should be required to explicitly record and report the numbers of contractors working worldwide, and that there be a strict minimum standard of training which all defense contractors must undergo. In addition, countries should hold contractors who commit crimes accountable in military courts, and there should be a worldwide database of contractors found guilty of misconduct, and a ban on their ever again working as a military contractor.
- Hannah Willit
