Licensed to Kill by Robert Young Pelton

[bemildred]

"Sometimes doing a book review is difficult. An author may write informatively and lucidly in one chapter and bomb in the next. A reviewer wants to praise where warranted but also feel compelled to point out its flaws. Trying to strike a balance can be difficult.

Fortunately, that is not a problem here. This book is, in a word, terrific. Anybody who is remotely interested in the world of private security contractors should run, not walk, to the bookstore and buy this book immediately. It is going to be the gold standard on private military and security companies for years to come.

That being said, a little background is in order. For years now the media have increasingly publicized what is usually described in sensationalistic purple prose as the murky world of corporate mercenaries. While such firms started gaining attention back in the early 1990s with the exploits of, for example, the now-defunct South African-based Executive Outcomes, which did actual combat operations in Angola and Sierra Leone, and gained more publicity with the training contracts of MPRI in the Balkan wars of the mid-1990s, the war in Iraq propelled the industry to the top of the media and pop-culture food chain. Such firms as Blackwater Security, Triple Canopy, and DynCorp are now conversational staples.

And yet while there have been numerous articles in the periodical press and even many academic books, one of which - Peter Singer's Corporate Warriors - even achieved a measure of popular acclaim when it was published in 2003, they all lacked one key ingredient essential to a real understanding of this world. And that is culture. The key to really understanding any society is to understand its culture. And, as anthropologists have long understood, true cultural understanding comes only from living in the midst of it."

Asia Times