Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Acronyms
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The state monopoly on collective violence and democratic control over military force
- 3 The transformation of the state and the soldier
- 4 United Kingdom: private financing and the management of security
- 5 United States: shrinking the state, outsourcing the soldier
- 6 Germany: between public–private partnerships and conscription
- 7 Iraq and beyond: contractors on deployed operations
- 8 The future of democratic security: contractorization or cosmopolitanism?
- 9 Conclusion
- Select Bibliography
- Index
4 - United Kingdom: private financing and the management of security
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Acronyms
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The state monopoly on collective violence and democratic control over military force
- 3 The transformation of the state and the soldier
- 4 United Kingdom: private financing and the management of security
- 5 United States: shrinking the state, outsourcing the soldier
- 6 Germany: between public–private partnerships and conscription
- 7 Iraq and beyond: contractors on deployed operations
- 8 The future of democratic security: contractorization or cosmopolitanism?
- 9 Conclusion
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The UK has been one of the first countries to privatize and outsource significant proportions of its national defence establishment since the rise of Neoliberalism in the 1980s. More than two decades later the UK still stands out in terms of the scale to which private businesses are involved in national defence. The UK armed forces have contracted out military and technical support services, the management of military bases and most of its training, and rely on the private financing of military installations and equipment. In fact, the UK government has almost entirely abandoned the notions that there are core functions of the state, excluded, as a matter of principle, from private sector supply, or that there are major differences between professional soldiers and private military contractors. This chapter analyses the scale of military outsourcing and the increasing replacement of professional armed forces with private military contractors in the UK in terms of the dimensions discussed in the preceding chapters. It illustrates that the fragmentation of security provision among public and private providers cannot be fully comprehended without reference to the underlying ideological transformations. These developments have helped present Thatcher's turn to Neoliberalism as the continuation of a Liberal political tradition dating back to the nineteenth century. The expansion of the private military sector under Thatcher's Conservative successor John Major (1990–7) and the New Labour governments of Tony Blair (1997–2007) and Gordon Brown (2007–) has evolved within this shared ideological context, in spite of divergent party-political affiliations.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- States, Citizens and the Privatisation of Security , pp. 84 - 118Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010