August 23, 2023. An Embraer Legacy 600 business jet on its way to Saint Petersburg crashes shortly after departing from Moscow. One of the passengers – who are all presumed dead – is Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the infamous Wagner Group. The cause for this ‘incident’ is obvious: Prigozhin pays the ultimate price for leading his mercenary group to the Russian capital in what seemed an attempt to overthrow – or at the very least upset – Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime.

This peculiar event of history exemplifies the dangers of relying on private companies for national security purposes. Yet, NATO and its members are highly dependent on private companies for its conducting military operations. While none of these actors are remotely similar to the Wagner Group, NATO’s reliance on the private sector is still worrisome. Currently, around 90% of all transport for large military operations is provided by the commercial sector. The same applies for over 70% of satellite communications used for defence purposes and 95% of transatlantic internet traffic, including military communications. This swing towards the private sector is primarily driven out of cost-efficiency. However, as argued by former NATO Deputy Assistant Secretary General, Jamie Shea, this “quest to reduce costs and overheads to increase profitability has also led to less redundancy and less resilience”. After all, private companies’ main concern is profits, not national security. While Shea’s warnings were made in 2018, they are even more relevant today. Since Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, many of the NATO members are seeking to increase their defense spending. Most likely, the bulwark of these investments will flow to private companies. While this approach is reasonable and arguably necessary, NATO should remain cautious in its embracement of the private sector into the public sphere of defense. This is especially the case when it comes to private military and security companies (PMSCs).

The Montreux Document, drafted by Switzerland and the International Committee of the Red Cross to regulate the behavior of these companies, defines PMSCs as “private business entities that provide military and/or security services”. Consequently, what makes PMSCs different from regular state defense and security agencies is their private company structure, not the nature of the services they provide. This distincts PMSCs from the transport or communication sector – whose operations are not inherently military – on whom the military relies as well, which makes dependence on PMSCs even more exposed. The sector has grown at enormous rates, rising from 200 to 1200 companies from 1980 until 2020.

In her piece The United States, PMSCs and the state monopoly on violence, Elke Krahman puts forward the Montreux Document as being illustrative of an ongoing shift of the state’s monopoly on violence. She argues that the norms regarding this monopoly have transformed in favor of PMSCs, who are increasingly involved in military and security matters previously deemed state-exclusive. First, Krahman points to the abovementioned extensive use of PMSCs during the past decades, primarily by the Global North. Additionally, states like the US and the UK have explicitly legitimized the presence of private personnel in their military operations. Moreover, both the US and European states have adopted regulations that allow the deployment of maritime PMSCs to combat piracy. Lastly, some states have increasingly narrowed their interpretation of the state’s exclusive right to violence in order to make way for the legal use of violence by private actors. These developments strongly indicate the diminishing role of the state’s monopoly on violence. However, while Krahman’s insights are valuable, she fails to convey the significance of this trend. Why does the growing role of PMSCs in the usage of legitimate violence matter? Should one encourage this trend, or be skeptical?

Krahman does acknowledge that the growing legitimization of PMSCs creates an environment in which “collective violence and conflicts may be fuelled by the profit motives of PMSCs” but does not elaborate on the issue. Indeed, PMSCs are by definition businesses and are hence driven by profits. This is a fundamental difference with governmental agencies, which are established to protect public goods, primarily the state itself. As a result, PMSCs often lobby at the state level to convince decision-makers to adopt security measures that fit their company interest.

In this regard, the ‘securitization theory’ might prove to be valuable in analysing the role that PMSCs play in security processes. During these processes, according to the so-called ‘Copenhagen School’, actors – traditionally states – ‘securitize’ certain topics by presenting them as an existential threat towards a particular ‘referent object’. One of the defining moments within this process is the so-called ‘speech act’, in which the existential threat is articulated. If successful, namely when a significant audience ‘accepts’ this speech act, this justifies the implementation of means that exceed the realm of ordinary politics. Besides its analytic advantages, the securitization theory is also able to address ethical questions. As argued by Elbe, “securitization theory can address these normative questions more readily than many longer standing neorealist or neoliberal approaches to international security”. Whereas Elbe addressed the morality of securitizing certain issues, namely HIV/AIDS, our central question assesses the desirability of certain actors, in our case PMSCs, determining the security agenda.

In principle, any actor – ranging from states and pressure groups to individuals – is able to successfully securitize an issue. However, in practice, this equality does not hold up. Evidently, some actors are more capable of making their threat claim effective than others simply because of the power inequalities between them. Therefore, Williams contends that the ability to securitize “is structured by the differential capacity of actors”. This authority does not only refer to public entities, both public and private actors may have the ability to successfully securitize issues. Concerning the latter group, this might be problematic considering the fact that private entities are not necessarily interested in the public good.

While she does not link her arguments to the securitization theory, this issue is central to Leander’s The Power to Construct International Security. In this piece, one of the main points she refers to is the growing influence that PMSCs have on security considerations. PMSCs perform the bulwark of the collection and analysis of intelligence, which forms the basis of every security assessment. As a result, Leander argues, “this direct production of security understandings shapes actions in the field of security”. Stronger even, these companies deliberately shape security concerns. After all, “[t]he bottom line is that firms have to sell their products” and will therefore attempt to fit the state’s security considerations to their benefit. de Groot and Regilme, for example, observe a militarization of the humanitarian sector. The primary reason for this trend is the increasing presence of PMSCs who “assess threats in a way that allows them to sell more security services”. The growing legitimization of PMSCs that Krahman and Leander speak of will only enhance this influence. These authors even observe identical processes in UN peacekeeping missions. Although their research focuses on more operational, low-level security measures, they do contend that “PMSCs are increasingly involved in setting the standards for how much security of what kind is warranted”.

The above reveals that PMSCs are not only growing in material power but also in vocal and knowledge power. Considering the growing legitimization of these companies by the states or international organizations that employ them, this should be no surprise if one takes into account the fundamentals of the securitization theory. As argued by this theory’s founders, one of the ‘facilitating conditions’, i.e. “conditions under which the speech act works”, is the position of authority of the actor. Consequently, the power of PMSCs will grow since legitimization raises the level of authority that these entities have within the realm of the military and security. Therefore, their ability to securitize certain issues rises as well. Under the right circumstances, these private entities might even level or exceed the authority of state agents.

This evolution is particularly evident in the United States. Leander refers to US company MPRI’s successful attempt to convince the US government in changing their policy approach towards Equatorial Guinea, effectively overstepping the US State Department. More recent cases exist too. In 2023, co-founder of the PMSC Pacem Solutions, Cory Mills, was elected to the US Congress. Despite Mills’ refusal to disclose his companies’ and personal relations with foreign powers, he still sits in the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committee. In late 2024, US President Donald Trump nominated private equity investor Stephen Feinberg as the deputy defence secretary. As co-chief executive of Cerberus Capital Management, a company that heavily invests in the defense industry, Feinberg has close contacts with PMSCs such as DynCorp and Remington. This latter example demonstrates the significant legitimacy the private military sector enjoys, at least at the political level. The same can be argued for the intense relations between Russian President, Vladimir Putin, and the Wagner group. Until the likely assassination of Prigozhin, the mercenary group operated with relative autonomy, for example in the Sahel region, indicating the amount of trust granted by the state institutions. While such cooperations between the public and the private might make sense out of economic efficiency concerns, closer business-military relations also increases the risk of security becoming a market product exploited by private firms. And most likely, at least to some extent, it already is. Since companies operate only on the premise of making profit, this evolution can only lead to one outcome: an increase in both the number and duration of conflicts. An EU research paper argued the same by concluding that PMSCs are a “threat to peace and stability” precisely because their business model is “based on the existence of conflict or the threat of conflict”.

NATO should therefore carefully assess the desirability of this ongoing trend towards outsourcing defense competences to private actors. NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan already made clear that the organisation does not shy away from involving private actors in its military operations. In fact, its reliance on PMSCs in Afghanistan was hailed as ‘unprecedented’. Ever since, NATO has signed an increasing amount of contracts with private security and support partners. This phenomenon, however, has been largely reduced to its ‘out of area’ operations. The urgency of this day and age could lead to an expansion to within border operations, which consequently exposes NATO policy to profit concerns. Moreover, the embrace of PMSCs by its members – first and foremost the United States – indirectly affects NATO’s modes of operations as well. Despite these risks, NATO and its member states still fail to recognize the possibly detrimental consequences of allowing PMSCs to operate within their military apparatus. If NATO wishes to safeguard our security in a responsible manner, it has the responsibility to educate itself, its member states and the public about the liabilities involved. Otherwise, these entities’ authority will continue to rise, and will soon not only be able to undermine the monopoly on violence, but also the exclusive right to set the state’s security agenda.