New York City responded to the attacks on September 11, 2001, by calling on firefighters, police officers, and paramedics, all of whom sustained fatalities, as well as the Coast Guard, the Civil Air Patrol, the National Guard, a U.S. Navy hospital ship. Later, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration were involved. The New York City Office of Emergency Management coordinated the city’s response to the attacks, and the mayor became the public face of the effort.

A human-security approach requires that the response to human catastrophes anywhere in the world, whether from violent attacks or natural or man-made disasters, is as comprehensive as the one mobilized in Manhattan. In many parts of the world, states lack this combination of services. And in some places where conflicts are taking place, the state may contribute to the catastrophe. What are needed, therefore, are global human-security capabilities that can be deployed at short notice in areas that lack or have inadequate capabilities. There should be a common pool, reserved, trained, and equipped for global operations, and led by people who can secure the trust of the affected population.

Preparation is critical for both military and human security operations. A human-security approach emphasizes prevention, so we need to be able to identify potential security risks and what causes them. To plan, we need new ways of measuring security, new methods of human intelligence, and better forms of communication.

Data

In the twentieth century, threats to security were measured in terms of the military capabilities of potential enemies. Huge efforts were made to measure numbers of men under arms, types of equipment, the scale of defense spending in Communist countries. Publications such as Military Balance by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) would provide lists of capabilities of NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and nonaligned nations. Satellite pictures of tank sheds would enable the CIA, for example, to estimate the number of tanks possessed by the Soviet Union, and hence the threat posed to Western Europe. Many people still prefer this method of counting. A recent publication on the F-22 Raptor, the new stealth fighter aircraft, talks about the “New Deterrence Metrics”; these consist of current Russian and Chinese military capabilities.¹

There have been many efforts to measure human insecurity or the likelihood of human insecurity. Because this is a new field, the effort is fraught with definitional and empirical difficulties. The Human Security Report, published by Simon Fraser University in Canada,² takes what is known as the narrow approach, focusing on insecurity in armed conflicts. The data is produced by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) and was initially based on a twentieth-century notion of conflict. For a conflict to be included in the data, there had to be at least 1,000 battle-related deaths and a state had to be involved. This is highly problematic since formal battles are rare in twenty-first-century conflicts and conflicts usually involve non-state actors or a mixture of state and non-state actors. More recently, UCDP have updated their data to include conflicts involving non-state actors and to include what they call one-sided violence—that is, violence against civilians. In addition, recent versions of the report also include some measure of human-rights violations (in particular, the use of child soldiers). But they still mainly count battle deaths as casualties and provide insufficient information about direct civilian casualties (from violent attacks) and indirect civilian casualties (from lack of access to food and medicine, the spread of disease in conflict zones, and the loss of livelihoods). Moreover, they depend primarily on media reports, which tend to underreport deaths and whose coverage is incomplete.

Other efforts have attempted to quantify an interrelated set of factors that affect the well-being of human beings. Thus, for example, the Arab Human Development Report for 2009 addresses the challenges to human security in the Arab region. It includes qualitative and quantitative data on seven dimensions of human security (taken from the 1994 Human Development Report, which first used the term).³ These are people and their environment; the state and its insecure people; the vulnerability of those lost from sight (women, children, displaced persons, and the like); volatile growth; high unemployment and persisting poverty; hunger, malnutrition, and food insecurity; and health-security challenges. The report provides invaluable documentation of human-development failings in the Middle East that would undoubtedly need to be studied by those identifying insecurity in the Middle East. But because the report’s scope is so broad, there is perhaps an inadequate emphasis on physical threats to security, which are most pressing for people who experience them; these are not only deaths from violent conflict as in Gaza but include the breakdown of or disruptions in law and order.

Indicators need to be developed to address the physical aspect of insecurity. In addition to violent conflict, these include human-rights violations, violent crime, domestic violence, refugees and displaced persons, and casualties from natural disasters (e.g., floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes). A number of organizations collect data on human-rights violations (Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, Amnesty International, the U.S. State Department, the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office), but the results tend to be anecdotal and difficult to compare. The major database for crime statistics is a project of the UN Office of Drugs and Crime.⁴ It collects data via questionnaires addressed to governments. However, as is typical with these kinds of data, coverage is weakest in those countries experiencing the greatest insecurity. Other sources of information about crime include statistics collected and supplied by national governments. These vary greatly in terms of availability and coverage.

Obtaining comparable data on domestic violence is extremely difficult, for a number of reasons. Definitions vary between sources, and so, therefore, do measurements. Currently there is no central or major database for this indicator. Case studies exist for individual countries, and it is possible to draw information from reports by Amnesty International, Oxfam, local women’s groups, and the like, but there is no global repository for “hard figures.” Official statistics are scarce, especially in developing countries.

Data on refugees and internally displaced persons is more comprehensive. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) provides detailed statistics on refugees and internally displaced persons, as does the United States Committee for Refugees. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva also traces internally displaced people.⁵ According to UNHCR’s 2008 Global Trends Report, some 42 million people are uprooted worldwide; 16 million are refugees and some 26 million are internally displaced people.⁶

Finally, the main source of information about victims of natural or man-made disasters is the international disaster database at the University of Louvain in Belgium.⁷ A general problem with this data collection, like in any database that builds on various sources, is the dependency on the individual data suppliers and their accuracy. This is especially problematic because the original data is not specifically collected for statistical purposes. In addition, data for a number of countries is not available in the database at all.

What is needed is an international statistical institution that can pull together this miscellaneous collection of facts, fill gaps, and improve accuracy. It is extraordinary that, whereas information about military casualties involving regular forces is accurate and detailed, in most conflicts, even the order of magnitude of civilian casualties is disputed. There needs to be data collection on civilian casualties that depends on the kind of epidemiological methods developed by the World Health Organization for tracing the spread of disease, rather than patchy reports based on media coverage. Moreover, statistics that could assist planners in identifying areas of actual or impending insecurity are, at present, quite inadequate.⁸

Intelligence

During the Cold War, intelligence tended to focus either on technologically driven information, especially satellite photographs, or on the behavior of states and officials rather than society, with an emphasis on potential enemies. This is why, time and time again, the intelligence community was taken by surprise. Three examples illustrate this.

The intelligence community was taken by surprise by the fall of the Shah of Iran in January 1979, and, when in November 1979 sixty-six U.S. citizens and diplomats were taken hostage by an angry mob in Iran, there was little reliable intelligence information to guide what became a failed rescue effort. Similar shortcomings characterized the U.S. Embassy bombing and the Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon in 1983.⁹ In both cases there was abundant intelligence based on satellite photos but very little from human sources. As Lieutenant Colonel Donald Anderson, the Marine commander, stated: “the biggest shortcoming [in intelligence was] the inability of the Marines to gauge the feelings and emotions of the local population on the ground.”¹⁰

Yet a third example is the 1989 revolutions and the collapse of the Soviet Union, which, again, took the intelligence community by surprise. In think tanks, universities, and government offices, analysts of the Communist Bloc pored over official documents, many of which were obtained through covert agents of the James Bond variety. They studied the order in which politburo members sat or stood in photographs of May Day parades in order to ascertain their relative importance. They calculated levels of military spending, numbers of soldiers, and types of equipment through calibrated analyses of satellite imagery of military bases. By contrast, peace groups, individual intellectuals, and NGOs who traveled to Communist countries as tourists and talked to dissidents and ordinary people realized that something profound was changing. For about a year, the intelligence community agonized about what went wrong and why they failed to predict these momentous developments.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have also drawn attention to the need for human intelligence. The U.S. effort lacked Arabic, Farsi, and Pashto speakers. There was a huge wall between U.S. personnel and local people, graphically expressed in Iraq by the difference between the so-called green zone (the protected area where international staff were deployed) and the red zone (everywhere else). During the surge, Petraeus’s injunction to “live amongst the people” greatly improved human intelligence. But there was also a recognition that intelligence requires social scientists, who understand society, demographics, and culture. The Minerva Initiative launched in April 2008 is a program designed to promote research and improve the relationship between government and defense, on the one hand, and universities, on the other. According to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates:

Throughout the Cold War, universities were vital centers of new research—often funded by the government—and also new ideas and even new fields of study such as game theory and Kremlinology . . . in the last few years, we have learned that the challenges facing the world require much broader conception and application of national power than just military prowess. The government and the Department of Defense need to engage additional intellectual disciplines—such as history, anthropology, sociology, and evolutionary psychology. ¹¹

One controversial program has been the establishment of human terrain teams (HTTs). HTTs are composed of military personnel, linguists, area studies specialists, and civilian social scientists. They are assigned to a brigade combat team (BCT), and they support the commander with open-source, unclassified sociocultural analysis. Human terrain analysis teams are similar in composition and function to HTTs, but provide support at the division level. They have also developed a database, called the Map-HT Toolkit, which is a combination of hardware and software designed and developed specifically to facilitate research, analysis, storage, archiving, sharing, and other application of sociocultural information relevant to the unit commander’s operational decisionmaking processes. Thus, Map-HT Toolkit products include maps showing the spatial distribution of tribes and related social entities; link charts showing power structures and social networks in informal economies; time lines (for example, the time sequence of key religious holidays); visualizations (for example, topographic views of Iraqi infrastructure); and reports on such issues as the role of ethnicity in Iraqi power sharing.

HTTs were initiated in 2003, when the Pentagon received many complaints from U.S. soldiers that they lacked adequate cultural and political knowledge of Iraq. The Pentagon contacted Montgomery McFate, a Yale anthropologist, who had been advocating the use of anthropologists and other social scientists to improve military strategy and operations. The initial program, launched in 2004, was known as the Cultural Preparation of the Environment (CPE). Subsequently, McFate developed the HTT database, which included detailed information on local populations in Iraq. Together with Steve Fondacaro, a retired special-ops colonel who advocated embedding social scientists with U.S. combat units, McFate founded the HTTs, and prototypes were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2006. The first HTT deployed to Afghanistan in 2007 with the Map-HT Toolkit, version 0.0. The same year, five more teams deployed to Iraq with the Map-HT Toolkit, version 0.5.

The establishment of the HTTs has, however, been greatly criticized. The American Anthropological Association has formally condemned the program on the grounds that it breaches the ethical guidelines of anthropologists and could undermine the trust on which anthropologists’ work depends. According to the Network of Concerned Anthropologists:

During the Vietnam War knowledge generated by the equivalent of Human Terrain Mapping (CORDS) was used in Project Phoenix to target the assassination of thousands of Vietnamese. In Guatemala anthropological research was used by death squads in the selection of victims. The creators of the Human Terrain Team concept have spoken about integrating cultural and tactical intelligence on the battlefield, and Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, John Wilcox, has said that Human Terrain Mapping “enables the entire kill chain.” Human Terrain Mapping will inevitably be used not just to avert fighting in some instances, but also to select people for death and injury in other cases. We do not believe this is an appropriate use of anthropological knowledge.¹²

Anthropologists and other social scientists face great peril if their knowledge is used to identify enemies to be attacked. The key difference between a human-security operation and, say, a counterinsurgency operation is that in a human-security operation intelligence focuses on human needs and what is required to establish institutions that can provide human security. It may be necessary to identify threats to human security, but this is a secondary function of intelligence. Insofar as these threats can be equated with adversary groups or individual people (as opposed to, for example, hurricanes or floods or hunger), the task is either like conflict regulation (where the aim is to provide a basis for reconciliation among groups) or like police intelligence (where suspects need to be identified for possible arrest).

One of the reasons it is so important that human-security operations are under civilian control is precisely so that social scientists and other advisers can help without compromising their role and future work.

In human-security operations, human intelligence provides the basis for planning. And human intelligence is not focused on enemies but on the needs of the local population. This does not mean that technology is not useful. On the contrary, communications, satellite information, and new methods of data analysis can be invaluable if directed toward human-security goals and combined with bottom-up human intelligence. NGOs, for example, have been using satellite imagery to track human-rights abuses. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, in partnership with Google Earth, is tracking violence in Darfur by comparing images of villages before and after attacks.¹³ Human Rights Watch has used satellites to prove the occurrence of attacks on civilians in the Iraq War and to demonstrate illegal demolition of Palestinian houses in the Gaza Strip.¹⁴ Amnesty International has a project called Eyes on Darfur that uses

high-resolution satellite imagery to provide unimpeachable evidence of the atrocities being committed in Darfur—enabling action by private citizens, policy makers, and international courts. Eyes On Darfur also breaks new ground in protecting human rights by allowing people around the world to literally “watch over” and protect twelve intact, but highly vulnerable, villages using commercially available satellite imagery.¹⁵

Amnesty worked closely on the project with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which offered expertise on satellite imagery and other cutting-edge geospatial technologies. Other similar initiatives include the Rome-based INTERSOS project, which has developed a Web-based interactive system, integrating geographic-information-system software to monitor the path of displaced persons to refugee camps as well as the work of the AAAS.¹⁶

An excellent, high-tech, governmental human security-oriented initiative is the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS-NET), which tracks food insecurity.¹⁷ It was first developed by United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1985. The purpose is to strengthen the ability of governments and regional organizations to manage risk of food insecurity by providing early warning and vulnerability information on emerging food security issues. It works in Africa, Central America, Haiti, Afghanistan, and the United States. Funded by USAID, it is implemented by a private firm, Chemonics International, and several U.S. government agencies, including the United States Geological Survey, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the USDA.

Where intelligence and intelligence activities of the twentieth century were designed to be compartmentalized to protect against the possibility of penetration by the enemy, the exact opposite is needed for the twenty-first century. These same activities should be transparent, open, and shared with trusted partners. Where twentieth-century intelligence looked at air, land, and ground forces, twenty-first-century intelligence will have to see forces of nature. To date, there’s not been much information found about mosquitoes carrying malaria or pending natural disasters that shouldn’t be shared among communities of interest.

Communications

Communication is crucial for military operations, but it tends to be top-down and vertically organized, and a great deal of emphasis is placed on secrecy. Two types of communication are critical. One is strategic communication to explain and justify the mission both to the local population and to the public back home. The other is communication among the various components of the mission to direct, coordinate, and keep the various units informed. Both types of communication are tightly controlled, and the second type of communication is highly secretive.

Communication is even more important in human-security operations, but here transparency, openness, and a good interface between civilians and those engaged in operations are key. Communication among the various components of the mission need to be both vertical and horizontal and to be interoperable among different agencies, (civil and military), and different international partners, as well as civilians and victims. Twenty-first century technologies are essential, but in open-source interactions rather than stovepiped, clandestine endeavors, which can prevent rather than foster communication, cutting the military off from other agencies as well as local populations.

Communication with local populations does not take the form of “strategic messaging”—top-down efforts to explain to local populations the purpose of military operations. Rather it has to be two-way, involving a variety of means. This includes dialogue and discussion at the local level in town halls, cafés, or private homes as well as open media, especially radio, but also new media like blogs and social-networking Web sites. It needs to be “bottom-up”; that is to say, it needs to involve communication and dialogue with ordinary people and not just political leaders or warring factions. It also needs to involve civil society—local religious, peace, human-rights, and/or women’s groups.

Communication for the purpose of coordination and information needs, above all, to be interoperable and to be effective in remote places. In current operations, this is one of the biggest shortcomings. Reports from the ground in different operations all highlight the inadequacies of current communication systems.¹⁸ During the Kosovo war, for example, each of the participating nations had significant communications capabilities, but Ptarmigan, the telephone system of the Allied Command Europe Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC), was unable to interface with most of them. There were also big problems in attempting to communicate with NGOs, most of whom made use of satellite communications. In the end, the most efficient form of communication was Hotmail. According to the chief of the multinational joint logistics headquarters for the NATO force in Kosovo: “We each deployed with our own communications system, none of which could talk to the other.”¹⁹ The best solution for human-security communications is to make use of the best available civilian capabilities—cell phones and the Internet—as well as satellite technology to ensure coverage in remote places.

A fascinating recent example of participatory technology, which makes use of existing civilian technologies in areas of human insecurity is Ushahidi. Ushahidi means “testimony” or “witness” in Swahili. Ushahidi was developed during the 2007/2008 electoral violence in Kenya. It combines social-networking technology with Google Maps to share local-level disaster information.²⁰ It allows any mobile-phone user to report community tension, violence, looting, and other incidents via local SMS messages. The incidents are verified by a local NGO and then displayed on a Web-based map using the Ushahidi Web engine.²¹ Kenya was the first testing ground, and now Ushahidi is jumping into other countries in conflict. As of November 2009, the group was already receiving an average of four reports a day from the DRC. This growing breadth could make Ushahidi something like the Wikipedia of conflicts, wrote Harvard researchers Joshua Goldstein and Juliana Rotich in a recent paper: “They are tools that allow cooperation on a massive scale.”²² Al-Jazeera is now using the Ushahidi technology to report on the Gaza conflict.²³

Personnel

The human-security officer is a new type of hero with a mandate to help humanity. Groups of human-security personnel could be called engagement brigades. Each brigade might contain a mix of capabilities ranging from the use of force, the delivery of humanitarian assistance, support for reconciliation in violent situations through responses to natural and manmade disasters including terrorist attacks or the capacity to deal with breakdowns in law and order and to stop looting, rioting or criminal gang warfare. There is a role for the military, but it is an atypical role—in human-security operations, military personnel act more like police, protecting people in conflicts. Engagement brigades could be tailored to mirror the security needs of the population. The mix of civilian and military personnel in engagement brigades could be varied according to the situation. At present, military personnel deployed overseas far exceed civilian personnel. U.S. troops, theoretically available for deployment overseas, number half a million, while the State Department has only 6,000 employees. As of 2008, there were sixty peace operations in the world employing 187,586 personnel, of which 166,146 were military and 21,440 were civilians, including 13,409 police officers.²⁴ For human-security operations, there would need to be a much higher proportion of civilian personnel.

Civilian agencies often argue that it is important to keep their distance from the military and are reluctant to be involved in civil-military cooperation. In Afghanistan, the military complain that they lack civilian assets and that civilians have not contributed to the reconstruction effort. The provincial reconstruction teams, which were supposed to be about military-civilian cooperation, have not been nearly as successful as hoped because it is almost impossible to do development and reconstruction when the military part of the team is engaged in a shooting war.

Military-civilian cooperation is only really possible within the framework of a human-security mission. Humanitarian agencies quite rightly fear becoming targets if they are aligned with the military. The bombing of the UN compound in Iraq in August 2003, which killed one of the most talented senior UN officials, Sergio Vieira de Mello, impelled a huge rethink among the United Nations and other agencies about their role in conflict and the need to retain their autonomy from the military. It was this kind of reasoning that led the International Red Cross to develop humanitarian principles of impartiality and neutrality in order to preserve what became known as humanitarian space, where it is possible to help victims of war regardless of which side they are on.

The problem is that the concept of humanitarian space depends on a traditional notion of war in which there are two distinct sides who fight each other and who, at least in theory, respect the rules of warfare. In contemporary violent upheavals, humanitarian space no longer exists. The only safe spaces are military bases. And when militaries are engaged in enemy-centric warfare, it is no wonder that civilian agencies feel they cannot operate. In a human-security operation, the job of the military must be to create humanitarian space, to protect the populations and provide safe areas where humanitarian and development efforts, as well as a political process, can happen.

Engagement brigades would constitute a standing professional service available for international human-security operations. The service could be supplemented by volunteers on the model of the Peace Corps, whose volunteers have offered assistance in 139 countries. Sixty percent of Peace Corps volunteers have been women, and, in recent years, the corps has encouraged older people to make their skills and experience available. In the proposed European constitution, it was planned to establish a humanitarian-assistance volunteer force for Europe.

Engagement brigades would need appropriate equipment, especially for communications and transportation. Of course, some equipment will be the same as equipment used in military operations (e.g., light weapons or equipment to counter improvised explosive devices or mines). But in general equipment will need to be lighter, cheaper, and more robust than military equipment, and interoperable by both civilians and military personnel.

It is often argued that equipment designed for war fighting can also be used for human-security operations. “For decades,” Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has argued, “the prevailing view is that weapons and units designed for the so-called high end can also be used for the low end. And to some extent that is true.”²⁵ But even Gates now suggests that increasingly complex and elaborate high-end weapons divert funding away from the specialized equipment and people that are needed for what are known as low-end operations, or what we could call human-security operations.

Training and Exercises

Engagement brigades and volunteers would learn to work together through intensive training and frequent exercises. At present, military and civilian personnel are usually trained at separate institutions. Moreover, military training is overwhelmingly focused on combat in most countries. In the United States, there is a far-reaching effort within the Army and the Marine Corps to shift entrenched attitudes about warfare through the new Counterinsurgency field manual, the Capstone Concept (key ideas for joint operations), and training and exercises. In training, there is much more emphasis on irregular warfare and culture, although the focus is still on identifying enemies. For example, Mojave Viper, a complex scenario-based training, has replaced the U.S. Marine Corps’s Combined Armed Exercises. And at the Army’s National Training Center at Fort Irwin, the Army conducts training “across a wide range of scenarios from kidnapping and car bombs to reacting to sectarian uprisings and conducting negotiations with village leaders and imams.” Nevertheless, combat remains the predominant content of training. As one commentator put it: “The military spends millions to create sites designed to train Soldiers how to kill an enemy in cities. But perhaps equally useful might be smaller home-station sites optimized to teach small units how to cultivate trust and understanding among peoples inside cities.”²⁶ There have also been changes in the curriculum of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College for the first time since the 1980s, though the emphasis on war fighting, of course, remains.

Exercises and role-playing games tend to be based on past wars; very few of them have been adapted to the new challenges. By reproducing past conflicts, they tend to reinforce traditional attitudes. One of the most quoted remarks of the Iraq War was made by General William Wallace, the V Corps commander in charge of all U.S. Army units in Iraq: “the enemy we’re fighting is a bit different from the one we war-gamed against.”²⁷

There are beginning to be more joint civilian-military exercises. There are some interagency training exercises in the United States. The European Union has pioneered joint civilian-military exercises in its crisis-management exercises. Several European countries undertake civilian-military exercises; the Swedish Armed Forces’ VIKING exercises have been made available for European personnel, both military and civilian. There is still very little regular mixed training, although the European Union’s Civilian Crisis Management Centre in Finland has been developing pilot human-security training modules and has introduced joint civilian-military courses.

A much more ambitious approach to training, with a particular emphasis on human dignity and respect for local populations, needs to be introduced. Engagement brigades need to live and breathe together with each other and with their local counterparts.

The Private Sector

Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a dramatic increase in the role of the private sector in international operations. This growth has been largely demand-driven. The private sector, composed of two broad groups—nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and private security contractors (PSCs)—has greatly expanded to meet growing human insecurity around the world.

NGOs are not a new concept, but their proliferation is. During the 1990s, the number of registered international NGOs increased from 10,292 to 13,206, and their memberships increased even more—from 155,000 to 263,000 over the same period.²⁸ There were various reasons for the growth. One was growing public awareness of crises in different parts of the world and a readiness to donate money or volunteer time. A second reason was the increased tendency for official aid to be channeled through NGOs; this had something to do with the contracting culture and the belief that NGOs were somehow closer to people experiencing insecurity. Thus, by the end of the 1990s, some 5 percent of official aid was channeled through NGOs. In some countries, this was much higher: 85 percent in Sweden and 10 percent in the UK. But perhaps most importantly, NGOs were filling a gap that resulted from the decline in aid budgets and the erosion of social safety nets by structural adjustment programs

NGOs play a very important role in two respects. First, they draw attention to, provide information about, and lobby for appropriate responses to human insecurities in various parts of the world. Human-rights groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International monitor human-rights abuses and put pressure on governments to take action. Think tanks like the International Crisis Group, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, and the European Stability Initiative prepare reports on crisis situations that greatly improve policymakers’ knowledge. Groups like the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly support local civil-society groups and provide a channel for such groups to present their ideas and proposals to policymakers.

Secondly, NGOs offer services that governments and international agencies have been unable to provide. Humanitarian and development NGOs like Oxfam, Save the Children, and Doctors Without Borders focus on material and health needs. Conflict-resolution groups like International Alert and Sant’ Egidio (an Italian Catholic group) often provide the basis for future agreements through parallel processes or what is sometimes known as track-two diplomacy. Often NGOs pioneer innovative approaches to problems that are later adopted by official agencies.

There are, however, problems associated with the growing role of NGOs. One is the problem of accountability. Because international NGOs are usually funded by donors in rich countries, they can be more concerned about reporting and proposal writing than they are about their beneficiaries. Alex de Waal claims that at the time of the Rwandan genocide, the main Rwandan human-rights group was busy writing its report to the Ford Foundation. In Afghanistan, Kaldor came across a school built in a place that was accessible for donors to observe although locals thought other locations would be more appropriate. For the same reason, branding is all-important, whatever the local impact. Related to this problem is the “swarming” effect of crises, as NGOs hone in on large-scale funding, which results in considerable inefficiencies, including much duplication, as well as gaps. In Afghanistan, there is layer upon layer of donors, implementing agencies, contractors, and subcontractors, each taking their share of the budget and generating a competitive culture in which the self-interest of each agency comes before the goal of helping Afghans. Kaldor was told of seven layers of oversight in a single project near Herat. In Kapisa, Kaldor was given several examples of excessive cost by the governor, one of the few governors who had not been a commander. According to him, a paved road built by USAID for $250,000 could have been built locally for $40,000. Likewise, the cost of a well built under the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) area-based program is $600 if built by a local shura (community), $1,000 if built by a local NGO, and $3,000 if built by an international NGO.

A final problem is that not all NGOs are purely humanitarian. In conflict zones in particular, the various warring parties usually establish their own NGOs, giving rise to various terms like GONGOs (government-organized NGOs) and MANGOs (mafia-associated NGOs). Many nationalist and religious-fundamentalist groups have their own NGOs, which offer a mechanism for mobilizing beneficiaries as fighters or for channelling funds for violent purposes. Al-Qaeda, the Muslim brotherhood, the Christian right, and Hindu, Serb, and Croatian nationalists all have their own charitable wings that organize schools and provide assistance to poor families.

NGOs have a critical role to play in human-security operations, especially in raising global public awareness, supporting and empowering local civil society, and generating a debate about appropriate policies. They are also often needed as service providers, but there needs to be a rebalancing of global public service provision, and those international NGOs that receive public money need to be better integrated into overall civilian-military operations, perhaps through some registration or vetting system.

The difference between PSCs and NGOs is that PSCs are profit-making organizations that focus on the security sector. There is, of course, considerable overlap. Both NGOs and PSCs do de-mining, for example. PSCs differ from individual mercenaries in that they are incorporated and registered businesses, often linked to larger outside financial holdings. Kellogg, Brown and Root was until 2007 a subsidiary of Halliburton. DynCorp has been bought by Veritas Capital, while Military Professional Resources Inc., which recruits retired generals to provide training and advice, is now part of L-3 Communications, and Armorgroup has been taken over by G4S (formerly Group 4 Securicor).

Like NGOs, private security companies have a long history. They have expanded considerably since the end of the Cold War. This is partly a result of the shrinking of military personnel after the end of the Cold War. Former soldiers sought new occupations, and in some cases whole units formed themselves into companies, such as the South African 32nd Reconnaissance Battalion and the Soviet Alpha Special Forces Unit. ²⁹

But another big reason was the lack of security capabilities in both wars and peacekeeping operations. Sierra Leone hired both a Gurkha unit and the South African company Executive Outcomes at different times to help defeat the rebels and defend the capital Freetown. Ethiopia hired an entire former Soviet air force in its conflict with Eritrea. In the Balkan wars, mercenaries were used by all sides. In the Kosovo war, PSCs were used for the international verification mission, for military logistics, for constructing and operating refugee camps, and even for aerial surveillance. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the United States spent between $6 billion and $10 billion on the services of private security firms from 2003 to 2007.³⁰ Moreover, because there is a big disparity in pay, soldiers are very tempted to leave the service and become security contractors. For example, each Blackwater operative costs $1,222 per day, while sergeants in the military generally cost taxpayers between $50,000 and $70,000 per year.³¹

According to one estimate, there were some 265,000 security contractors in Iraq as of Januray 2009³², of which 55 percent were Iraqi and another 30 percent came from third countries like the Philippines. There were 160,000 U.S. military personnel. Private contractors were officially recognized in the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) of 2006 as part of the U.S. military’s “Total Force.” The 2006 QDR defined the department’s total force as “its active and reserve military components, its civil servants, and its contractors.” (Italics added)³³

However, the prevalence of private security raises serious questions. For instance, where does responsibility lie when private contractors are used? Perhaps the most notorious example was when four Blackwater (now renamed Xe) security contractors were killed in Fallujah, prompting the U.S. Marine attack on that city in April 2004. Subsequently, Blackwater employees were involved in a number of killings and other incidents, including fatally shooting 17 civilians, among them women and children, in Nisour Square, Baghdad, on September 16, 2007. There have also been accusations that Blackwater employees having been involved in human trafficking involving Nepalese workers and reports about the use of Blackwater employees in covert operations to assassinate Al-Qaeda operatives.³⁴

It has been very difficult to call Blackwater employees to account since a 2004 decree, known as Order 17, granted sweeping immunity to private contractors working for the United States in Iraq. Order 17 effectively barred the prosecution of contractors’ crimes in domestic Iraqi courts.

Although U.S. soldiers have been prosecuted in U.S. courts for killings and torture in Iraq, the Pentagon does not hold private forces to the same standards. Up to the summer of 2008, no security contractor had been prosecuted. Private security contractors operate in a legal gray zone. Blackwater has resisted attempts to subject its contractors to the Pentagon’s Uniform Code of Military Justice, insisting that they are civilians while at the same time claiming immunity from civil litigation, saying that Blackwater employees are part of the United States’ “Total Force.”³⁵

Only after the Nisour Square incident did the U.S. House of Representatives pass a bill that would make all private contractors in Iraq and other combat zones subject to prosecution by U.S. courts but the White House complained that it would overburden the war effort and it was never put to a vote in the Senate.³⁶ Five Blackwater employees were charged with manslaughter in the Nisour Square shootings, but the case was thrown out by a U.S. District judge on the grounds that the men had given information under duress and that investigators had offered an immunity deal.

Since January 1, 2009, private contractors operating in Iraq have been subject to the Iraqi penal code and Iraqi law on criminal proceedings—even when they are performing under the terms of their U.S. government contracts. Moreover, Iraqi officials may attempt to retroactively enforce this provision and seek to prosecute contractors for acts that were committed prior to 2009.³⁷

Blackwater has lost its contract with the U.S. State Department. However, according to a recent New York Times article, the Obama administration has retained the services of Xe to carry out drone attacks in Afghanistan in addition to providing security at covert bases there.³⁸

Similar problems of accountability relate to other cases; in particular, the charge that private contractors were involved as interrogators and translators in torture cases, most notably at Abu Ghraib. The military investigation into the Abu Ghraib torture case concluded:

“In general, U.S. civilian contractors (Titan Corporation, Californian Analysis Center Incorporated), third country nationals and local contractors do not appear to be properly supervised within the detention facility at Abu Ghraib.”³⁹

A prevailing concern over the use of private soldiers is one that has always been associated with mercenaries: they have a vested interest in the perpetuation of wars and crises. What do mercenaries do in peacetime? One of the reasons monarchs began to professionalize militaries in the eighteenth century was that mercenaries did not have high ethical standards and they had a tendency to seek unsavory ways of surviving in between wars, using their skills to exploit civilians.

Yet another problem is the military nature of private security companies. PSCs are largely made up of former soldiers who think in military ways. For example, the U.S. State Department proposed sending some 6,000 police trainers to Afghanistan in 2003, but they did not get the funding. Instead, the Pentagon contracted Blackwater, whose excessively militarized training produced “police officers who look more like militia members than ordinary beat cops.”⁴⁰

Beebe and Kaldor interviewed Doug Brooks of International Peace Operations (IPO) in March 2009, a trade association representing over fifty private security companies. Brooks argues that the industry is demand-driven because of the huge peacekeeping gap—in other words, because of human insecurity. Even if peacekeepers are available and professional, they lack engineers, logistics capabilities, and other resources. Moreover, unlike military units, PSCs are not rotated in and out. He argues that the industry already performs what he calls humanitarian-security tasks and also that it mainly uses local people as contractors and helps to train them..

Indeed, the growth of the private sector as a whole can be understood as a response to growing insecurity. If public security services are not restructured to meet human security needs, the private sector will go on growing, and this could be very dangerous. It would mark the emergence of a market in violence.

Budgets and Organization

Human-security services could be paid for by reducing and restructuring defense budgets and by increasing expenditure on civilian capabilities. There also needs to be increased expenditure on global challenges like climate change, poverty, and the spread of disease. But our focus in this chapter is how to pay for engagement brigades—or, more broadly, human-security services.

At present, world military expenditures are around $1.3 trillion. Over half of this is accounted for by the United States. The George W. Bush administration presided over a doubling of defense expenditure, excluding the supplemental costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The War on Terror has provided an opportunity to procure a range of sophisticated weapons systems that were developed in the aftermath of the Cold War for Cold War-type contingencies. These systems are complex, expensive, and less and less useful. Indeed, Defense Secretary Gates has used the term baroque. This concept of baroque military technology was developed by Kaldor in the early 1980’s to describe the way in which the defense companies need to keep producing new systems in order to maintain their capacity and how this leads to the successive development of weapons platforms that are subject to sharply diminishing returns.⁴¹ Each dollar spent produces smaller and smaller increases in performance (protection, speed, accuracy, lethality), with the result that hugely expensive and elaborate machines are acquired in ever smaller numbers. These systems invariably cost more and take longer to build than anticipated; in 2008, for example, the Government Accountability Office estimated that the cost overruns on ninety-five major defense acquisitions totaled $295 billion, and the average delay was twenty-one months.⁴² Moreover, production of these systems creates a chain of further demands—for spare parts, compatible equipment, logistics, and skills.

During the Bush administration, the number of military personnel actually shrank, while the additional funds covered new systems like the F-22 Raptor, a stealth fighter aircraft; missile defense; the Army’s Future Combat System; and the Navy’s DDG-1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer program for open ocean warfare. None of these systems are appropriate for counterinsurgency or human security.

The proposed $700 billion U.S. defense budget for 2010, which includes supplemental appropriations for the wars, is roughly the same size as the Obama administration’s entire economic-stimulus package. By contrast, the U.S. foreign-affairs budget is $40 billion. And it is estimated that the budget for the global peacekeeping effort is around 0.55 percent of the U.S. defense budget—that is, roughly $3.85 billion.

Since 2009 the decline in spending on military personnel has been reversed. What is now needed is a long-term restructuring in which research-and-development budgets are reoriented to civilian and human-security purposes. It is in the research and development phases that big systems are conceived and acquire an often unstoppable momentum.

Much concern has also been expressed in the United States recently about the militarization of civilian capacities. The Pentagon’s share of foreign-aid funds increased from 5 percent to 25 percent under the Bush administration. Likewise, the Pentagon has increasingly taken control of dramatically increased intelligence functions. The CIA spends approximately $4 to 5 billion out of a total of $60 billion that is now estimated to be spent on intelligence.⁴³ According to a 2008 report by the American Academy of Diplomacy,

the “militarization of diplomacy” is noticeably expanding as DOD (United States Department of Defense) personnel assume public diplomacy and assistance responsibilities that the civilian agencies do not have the trained staff to fill. In the area of security assistance—traditionally the authority of the Secretary of State but implemented largely by the Defense Department—a number of new DOD authorities have been created, reducing the role of the Secretary of State even more in this vital area of foreign policy.”⁴⁴

Army regional commands have taken over new civilian responsibilities: the U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) is responsible for disaster management within the United States, while the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) and African Command (AFRICOM) have been tasked with tackling poverty, crime, corruption, and environmental issues in Latin America and Africa, respectively.

The provincial reconstruction teams in Afghanistan have been filled by Department of Defense personnel because civilian posts in local government or as expert advisers on local issues or agricultural and business development were not available. Military personnel are able to make use of something called the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) , which has funds for quick-impact projects. According to Hillary Clinton,

I came back [from my trip to Iraq] a believer in the CERP program and advocated for it to continue, but when I contrast that with a development officer or a State Department expert who knows the culture, knows the language, unlike, you know, this very well-meaning and well-trained warrior, and that person can’t get $500 to fulfill a development mission that is in service of American security and our national interests, there’s a big disconnect. ⁴⁵

The lack of civilian capacity is largely due to cutbacks. There was some increase in diplomats under Colin Powell, but these were all absorbed in Iraq and Afghanistan. USAID has suffered a 75 percent reduction in staff numbers since the 1970s.⁴⁶ In real terms, it has been reduced by nearly 40 percent since the 1990s. USAID remains primarily a contract-management agency for the State Department. USAID has few technical experts—Clinton recently noted that it only had four engineers for the entire world. To bring the point home even further, Beebe’s USAID colleagues often remind him that there are fewer full-time staff employed by USAID than there are members of U.S. Army marching bands.

There have been a number of initiatives aimed at improving interagency cooperation and expanding the civilian component of complex missions. One was the establishment of the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization within the State Department (S/CRS) in 2004. Its role is to coordinate planning for stability operations and to develop civilian response capabilities. The other is the request by the Obama administration to establish a Civilian Response Corps. However, funding is still quite insufficient and the task of the S/CRS is to coordinate, not to lead. The Department of Defense is in charge.

Many other countries are undergoing similar types of restructuring. The UK established a Conflict Prevention Pool in 2001 to finance and coordinate policies on conflict prevention and a Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit (PCRU) in 2004 that has been renamed the Stabilisation Unit. The prime minister has called for the establishment of a civilian response force. Canada established the Stabilization and Reconstruction Task Force in 2005 within the international-security branch of the Foreign Affairs Department. Germany adopted an action plan on civilian crisis prevention in 2004, while France established the Groupement Interarmées des Actions Civilo-Militaires (GIACM), a strictly military entity that coordinates civilian military activities. France was also the first contributor to the European Gendarmerie Force established in 2004. European states seem to have had more success with civilian-military cooperation than the United States has had.

In the long run, international agencies like the United Nations and regional agencies like the European Union and the African Union should be primarily responsible for conducting human-security operations and should have available standing, professional, human security-oriented emergency-response forces. Individual states, especially the United States, should also possess engagement brigades available to be deployed on multilateral missions. Emergency-response forces could be relatively small, say 10,000 to 20,000 people for each agency. But there could be another million or so in engagement brigades in different countries on standby. At present, there are nearly 200,000 peacekeeping personnel deployed on operations; if one assumes that that number needs to be doubled and that only a third of available forces can be deployed at any one time, then something of the order of a million personnel would be needed. For comparison, the United States has half a million soldiers, while European countries have some 2 million soldiers.

It has been roughly estimated that an international emergency-response force would cost about $2 billion per year.⁴⁷ Funding for these core forces could come from the budgets of international agencies, based on either contributions from individual member states or, perhaps in the future, a new family of global taxes on, say, carbon or currency speculation.

Leadership and Legitimacy

Human-security operations have to be civilian-led. This is the sixth and last, but by no means least, of the human security principles. When General Klaus Reinhardt was commander of the NATO force in Kosovo, he deliberately chose to put his forces under the authority of the United Nations special representative to Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, now France’s foreign minister.

The civilian in charge has to have legitimacy. This means both legal legitimacy—he or she must be appointed through a legal procedure and responsible for making sure that the mission operates within the framework of law—and political legitimacy—he or she must be trusted and respected both by the sending nations and organizations and by the local population.

Human-security operations involving military personnel would have to be authorized under a United Nations Security Council resolution. It is not clear what body of law would govern the rules of engagement of the mission—international criminal law, international humanitarian law (the “laws of war”), domestic law of the sending nations, domestic law of the host nations, and so on. This is why the Barcelona Report, which proposed a human-security doctrine for the European Union, indicated the need for a new legal framework that would provide guidance on what law is applicable when local law breaks down, how to deal with differences in different countries’ domestic laws, and how to bring clarity to possible conflicts between different types of international law, particularly human-rights law and humanitarian law.⁴⁸

In political terms, the person in charge not only has to have sophisticated diplomatic skills for dealing with the politics of different international agencies and sending nations, he or she also needs to have communications skills to address both the local populations and the wider global public. He or she needs to be a visible presence in the aftermath of disasters, to attend memorials and other ceremonies of significance, to support and encourage new initiatives, and to mobilize and inspire the human-security services he or she directs. He or she needs to be the public face of the mission so that people can identify with the mission and the mission can command widespread trust.

Above all, the person in charge needs to articulate the political goals of human security in a way that everyone can understand. Many of the obstacles to a twenty-first-century restructuring of security capabilities have to do with a lack of conceptual coherence and the entrenched character of twentieth-century, overly militarized perspectives. It is the continued preoccupation with fighting wars and attacking enemies that hampers change.

It can be argued that the current period is much like the early modern period, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when monarchs employed mercenaries and mercenary bands, pirates, and bandits that roamed the sea and land. It is a moment of experimentation. But sustainable security has to be provided by a public political authority—a state, a municipality, an international agency, or a combination of all three. Indeed, security is at the heart of the social contract people make with their governments. People trust their governments because they believe their governments keep them safe. Growing insecurity is undermining that trust so that the social contract has to be renegotiated at different levels of governance. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at least in Western Europe and North America, governments gradually built up the trust of their populations by building security institutions that protected borders and established internal peace. Now we need engagement brigades who can contribute to human security worldwide.