Industry Structure Overview
What is the United Kingdom private military security industry? How is it defined and who defines it? How is it different from other areas of private security provision? Which services, practices and activities fall within its scope, and how are these areas of practice understood, constituted and expressed by industry practitioners? In this Chapter I describe the ‘scope’ of UK private military security.
In so doing I focus on two important phases of industry development identified by my interviewees. The first is ‘the Circuit’, a term used to describe the private security industry between the 1960s and 1990s18. The second phase, the
‘corporate security’ era, extends from the 1990s through to the current day. In this section I discuss the expansion of private security services following the Global War on Terror, and the maritime security boom of the early 2000s.
This Chapter draws from the experiences of a number of participants who were involved, and in some cases influenced the development of the UK private military security industry: Craig, an ex-Special Forces, freelance security consultant was involved in the security ‘Circuit’ of the 1980s and corporate security in the 1990s and 2000s; Roger, a former military officer, was responsible for managing a number of major United Kingdom firms throughout the days of ‘the Circuit’ and into the corporate era. Mike, an accountant, and civilian, occupied senior executive positions in private military security companies and brought a businessman’s perspective to the emerging industry; and Lawrence, another former military officer was a corporate executive in a maritime security business.
My participants provided a description of the breadth and extent of the ‘field’ of private security within which they were active. To reinforce these narrative explanations, I have sought to provide a visual representation to the reader that reflects how my participants saw their field of work. This approximate topology was drawn from two of the focus groups I conducted towards the end of the study.
Here, participants were provided with a single piece of paper with a timeline on
18 Bob Shepherd uses the same term in his memoir ‘the Circuit’ (Shepherd, 2008). Shepherd’s ‘Circuit’
extends well into the post War on Terror era demonstrating that the term is still in common use.
61 the x-axis corresponding to the duration that they considered the private military field in its current form had been active. The y-axis was split between domestic and international work and further divided into an approximate assessment of the number of people actively engaged in the field. The task was intended to collaboratively develop a visual representation of the private military security field and its development. Groups were asked to record significant points that explained the changes represented in their diagram. The results are reproduced below:
Participant Constructions of Military Private Security Field Topology
Focus Group 2 Focus Group 3
This visual representation was not based on hard data, and was the subject of some uncertainty and debate between interviewees. No directly comparable data exists that would indicate the number of people involved in the UK centric, transnational provision of private security and military services represented in this chart. However, the trends illustrated are broadly consistent with figures that indicate a considerable rise in spending on private military security by the UK Government in the period between 2003 and 2008 (Freedom of Information Act, 2012) and globally between 2003 and 2012 (War on Want, 2016:4). They also broadly correspond with White’s (2017) analysis of the employment trajectories of ‘private military veterans’. Perhaps more importantly for the purposes of this
62 study it provides an insight into the way in which participants understood and constructed the scope and extent of the industry, and the nature of the ‘field’ in which they worked. This ‘field’ was perceived to encompass predominantly former British military service people (overwhelming men) who engaged in the operational provision of security internationally and domestically. It did not encompass third country nationals with whom interviewees may have worked while overseas, but did include former British Army Gurkhas. As such, there were both a gendered and racialised aspects to the construction of field. Accepting these limitations, the chart provides a visual key to some of the major dynamics discussed in this chapter.
The Circuit
Craig was in his 60s, heavy set and athletic in build, his one visible concession to age being the reading spectacles he used to examine text. Before making the transition to private security Craig served in the British Army as a Non-Commissioned Officer in the 22nd SAS Regiment. He was a veteran of the Regiment’s secret involvement in the conflict in Oman during the 1970s. Leaving the military in the early 1990s he began working in private security. Craig’s experience in this sector extended across a range of activity both domestic and international; he routinely undertook four security jobs a year throughout his career, often working for different private security companies doing security training, ‘operational work’ (usually close protection, or ‘body guarding’) and consultancy (often involving security assessments and contract management).
Early in our conversation Craig described himself ‘a veteran of the Circuit’, a term he used to define the early years of the development of the modern private military security industry in the United Kingdom and, more than this, the informal network of (predominantly) former UK Special Forces personnel who transitioned into private security work on completion of their military service. The construction of ‘the Circuit’ to which Craig referred was more than just a temporal
‘phase’ in the industry’s development, or simply a group of professional contacts;
it described a series of practices, behaviours and values that characterised this form of elite private security. For Craig, his involvement in ‘the Circuit’ defined his professional identity. He described himself as ‘a product’ of the Circuit; a security
63 operator with a specific brand of knowledge and expertise; part of a generation of actors with a ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1990) of security practice that has been foundational in the development of the United Kingdom private military security industry.
At the time of Craig’s transition from the military, private security was a relatively obscure field of practice that attracted little public attention. As a contemporary of Craig observed:
‘The private security industry in 1989 was really a very unknown industry.
I guess what you would have is normal manned-guarding and static-guarding work, and then a lot of the close protection was an overspill for people that live in London, experienced doormen, the big gorilla, or ‘men in black’ type image. There was a more specialist side of the private security industry which was really born in the late 70s and early 80s. Predominantly that was controlled by Control Risks Group, DSL/ArmorGroup and companies like Saladin, doing big training jobs or consultancy. Most with a memorandum of understanding with the FCO19.’ (Ryan)
Even at this early stage within the industry there was a division between two separate ‘fields’ of practice. A less specialist ‘civilian’ sector of security, tied to traditional manned guarding and incorporating nightclub and venue doormen who may have transitioned into the ‘body guarding’ of celebrity and show business clients in a domestic (i.e. London) environment; and a more specialist sector oriented to overseas contracting and predominantly employing former military personnel. This social construction underpins the concept of ‘the Circuit’, which was clearly linked to the latter type of security practice.
Craig traced the history of ‘the Circuit’ to the actions of David Stirling, the former founder of the SAS Regiment during the 1960s:
‘It all stems from Stirling, David Stirling. In the sixties he set up Watchguard International. They did one or two jobs in East Africa20 and maybe in the Middle East and it wasn’t very big or very well-known and it would be literally down to less than twenty people involved at that.’
19 Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
20 See also Musah and Fayemi (2000) on Watchguard’s activities in Zambia between 1967 and 1969.
64 Craig suggested that the security company Watchguard originated from Stirling’s involvement in the Mau-Mau insurgency of 1950s. The company’s work continued beyond Africa with discreet operations in Yemen, ostensibly sanctioned by the British government, providing military services to counter the presence of Nasser’s Egyptian forces in the country during the civil war of 195921. However, Watchguard’s activity considerably expanded following the kidnap of the Saudi Arabian Minister of Petroleum Ahmed Zaki Yamani (and other OPEC oil ministers) by ‘Carlos the Jackal’ at a summit in Vienna in 1975:
‘The thing that kicked it all off then was when Yamani was taken by Carlos in seventy-five. He was the Chief Negotiator for OPEC. Now, this is hearsay, the Saudi’s paid massive [to secure Yamani’s release] fortunately, for whatever reason they negotiated a settlement. Carlos disappeared, Yamani was released, but Carlos seemingly told Yamani that next time he wouldn’t be so lucky. So when the Saudis paid Yamani to carry on doing this work on their behalf, he said “okay but I want a proper bodyguard team not those people who ran away”22. A bloke called Jim Johnson who was, I think ex SIS23, he had been in the SOE24 during the war, David Walker, he was an EOD25 Engineer, been an Oxford graduate; he had been a Troop and Squadron Commander in G Squadron26, He was just about leaving [the military] and the three of them, Jim Johnson, with his connections to the City and the intelligence services, David Walker, with his recent connections to R Squadron, he was OC27 R Squadron28 at the time, and Brigadier Wingate Gray, who was an old Colonel of the Regiment29, those three then put KMS together, Keenie Meenie Services.’ (Craig)
In the foundation of KMS Craig described the establishment of a security
‘assemblage’ (Abrahamson and Williams, 2011) based around a small network of people connected by their service in, or affiliation with, the SAS Regiment. This
21 See also Kinsey (2006:44-46) on Sterling’s involvement in Yemen and the formation of Watchguard.
22 Yamani’s Saudi bodyguards allegedly fled the scene when the group led by Carlos the Jackal attacked the summit.
23 SIS, The Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)
24 SOE, the Special Operations Executive, a clandestine organisation founded by Winston Churchill to wage unconventional warfare against the Germans during the Second World War, a forerunner of the SAS.
25 EOD, Explosive Ordinance Demolition (bomb disposal).
26 G Squadron is one of the four operational, or ‘Sabre’ Squadrons of the SAS. A Squadron consists of approximately 65 SAS soldiers broken down into 4 Troops.
27 OC, Officer Commanding.
28 R Squadron was a Territorial Army Squadron of the SAS comprising former regular soldiers and providing a reserve to the regular army SAS for casualty replacement in the event of war.
29 The 22nd SAS Regiment
65 core group, possessing high social capital, and the specific symbolic capital of elite military service, had connections to a number of correspondingly elite organisations within the world of business and government intelligence. These connections made it possible to commodify the counter-terrorism skills that they had acquired during their military service. Craig describes how the first ‘job’
carried out by KMS was ‘putting together a bodyguard team for Yamani’. KMS’s business developed from here and ultimately resulted in a project that came to be called ‘The Goat Farm’, the establishment of the Sultan’s Special Force in Oman; in Craig’s words, the creation of a Special Forces regiment of the Oman army ‘raised, trained, paid, all the logistics provided, procurement, everything done from the commercial company in London; A brilliant operation’.
KMS’s focus was not restricted to international work. ‘They also had another organisation running on the side called Saladin. Saladin did everything in the UK’
(Craig). Another interviewee (Gary) described having carried out surveillance tasks in London for Saladin including the observation and infiltration of environmental protest groups. Thus, even at this formative stage in the development of the private military security industry, individuals would frequently transition between security work in the international and domestic spheres.
KMS’s development was not unique. During the same period other former members of UK Special Forces were developing commercial opportunities for the sale of security services:
‘At about the same time that KMS was getting set up there was another small group set themselves up as Control Risk. That was in the mid-seventies and people like Arish Turle, another Squadron Commander, and a very, very innovative and bright guy, and Simon Adams-Dale, and they had a connection with the insurance company Hiscox’ (Craig).
Through their connection with the City of London insurance industry, Control Risks began providing kidnap and ransom consultancy to a raft of companies and individuals responding to growing public consciousness of terrorist hijacks and hostage taking. The establishment of Control Risks was quickly followed by that of DSL, Defence Systems Limited, another London based security company formed
66 by former SAS Officers Alistair Morrison and Richard Bethel. Craig describes KMS/Saladin, Control Risks and DSL as ‘the three big players all the way through the eighties’. In Craig’s words the work of these companies, ‘ticked along with jobs in Sri Lanka, body guarding the Sultan of Brunei, the Maktoums30, all the big players, Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador to the US’. This situation prevailed until the advent of large-scale oil industry engagement in Algeria in the early 1990s.
Thus, from the 1960s to the 1990s ‘the Circuit’ provided an opportunity for a small group of, mainly, former-UK Special Forces soldiers to commoditise the skills acquired in the elite military establishment within a market where supply and demand remained fairly stable. Craig described an industry where, for certain types of work, such as complex physical security and asset protection tasks in hostile environments, all the major industry companies would be accessing a pool of seven to ten former-military contractors sufficiently experienced and trusted to undertake this work. The requirement to have already established oneself as a
‘credible operator’ within military Special Forces (or associated units) acted as an informal control over access to this labour market. This, coupled with the ‘social capital’ of network access to potential clients, meant that those former SAS soldiers at the heart of ‘the Circuit’ experienced very little uncertainty in their ability to continue routinely accessing discreet and well paid employment. The alignment between the elite former soldiers and international political elites (particularly in the Middle East and Africa), as well as business elites still benefitting from residual post-colonial advantage (again, particularly in African markets), coupled with the privileged patronage (or benign acquiescence) of the British intelligence and foreign policy establishment, underpinned this small but stable market for military security knowledge and services.
In Craig’s view, the first real change to this status quo took place in the 1990s. The Algerian Civil War (beginning in 1991) saw the targeting of western oil workers by the GIA31 and other Islamist groups opposed to the secular Algerian
30 Ruling family of the United Arab Emirates.
31 Groupe Islamique Armé
67 Government. Craig described how, during this war, over a period of 20 months, violence cost the lives of 117 expatriate workers (Thornbury, 2011). The acceleration of violence in Algeria created an increase in demand for commercially available military security expertise. For the first time the ‘big three’ companies were unable to meet the demands of the international oil corporations through the small pool of predominantly former-SAS circuit ‘insiders’. Another challenge for British security companies was that Algeria was a former French colony and, while many former SAS soldiers spoke Arabic as a legacy of operations during the 1970s in Oman, very few spoke French. It was natural therefore that companies began to recruit French speaking ex-foreign legionnaires who themselves became incorporated into ‘the Circuit’s’ inner circle. With the expansion of business in Algeria a small number of new companies entered the market and began to compete with the ‘big three’32. However, the impact of this remained limited. The incorporation of former Foreign Legion French speakers providing less a
‘democratisation’ of the labour force than another esoteric pool of regional ‘Africa specialists’ the recruitment of whom was, if anything, more arcane than that their British Special Forces counterparts33.
Craig considered that, even during its period of greatest activity, ‘the Circuit’
remained a relatively ‘exclusive club’ involving only ‘a few hundred’ active members. These were characterised by their ‘credible military background’ and experience of working independently in areas of conflict. Further, the structure of the companies operating during the ‘Circuit’ era replicated the class based rank structure of the British military. Business owners, the first modern generation of military security entrepreneurs, were of the officer class, often former Squadron or Troop Commanders in the SAS. The work of security consultancy, or operational service provision, carried out in large part by former Non-Commissioned Officers of the same organisation. These former NCOs would
32 This included the companies Stirling (another firm associated with David Stirling, founder of the SAS) and Generik.
33 One interviewee described the difficulty of conducting pre-employment due diligence on members of the French Foreign Legion ‘The only way you can be really sure they have done what they say they have done is if you have a contact in the central Legion personnel office in Castlenaudary. The Legion won’t give you anything officially, so you have to know the right people to talk to if you want to be sure.’
68 transition between a number of companies conducting a variety of tasks, the military capital of their Special Forces experience and the social capital of network access to the ‘officer cast’ of business entrepreneur (and the elite clients with whom they had contact), guaranteeing a stable post military second career.
Craig considered the ‘heyday’ of “the Circuit” to have been the Algerian war of the 1990s. For him this provided both interesting work and lucrative remuneration as demand for his services increased. However, the increasing demand for security services by major corporations engaged in the early stages of neoliberal globalisation also heralded the ‘swan song’ of ‘the Circuit’ as a restricted, discreet and privileged market in which unofficial social control maintained a certain standard of operations (and operator):
‘Well in Algeria when these hundred expats were killed the daily rate went up very nicely, levelled off again and then after the Twin Towers, I mean for nine months my feet didn’t touch the ground. I was visa’d up to work in Pakistan. In fact I was working in Pakistan when it happened. So I mean Algeria was a good impulse - I am looking at it purely from an ex two-two34 guy’s point of view - Algeria was manageable in that the market had got too big, but big enough for us to be able to cope with it. After nine eleven, and especially when they decided to go into Iraq, the Circuit as it was, couldn’t handle it; they didn’t have the men. So basically they started watering down the product. If I’m the product of the Circuit, Iraq watered it down.’
(Craig)
Craig’s depiction of ‘the Circuit’ demonstrates all the characteristics of a Bourdieusian ‘field’ (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Bourdieu 1988; 1996a; 1996b;
1999; 2005; Bourdieu et al., 1990a and 1990b), it had a spatial locus and members met, worked and communicated with each other. But it was also sphere of activity defined by a series of ‘norms of practice’, behaviours that constituted the ‘habitus’
1999; 2005; Bourdieu et al., 1990a and 1990b), it had a spatial locus and members met, worked and communicated with each other. But it was also sphere of activity defined by a series of ‘norms of practice’, behaviours that constituted the ‘habitus’