ABSTRACT
Paralleling Zakaria's description of the varied military procession that marked Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, one can describe the make-up of a similar American parade today. It would consist of close protection specialists from South Africa, sentries from Chile, embassy guards from Australia, cleaners from the Philippines, drivers from India, and cooks from Nepal. All of these individuals would be contractors. During the last two decades in which Zakaria contends that “the United States was utterly unrivaled” and that this was “a phenomenon unprecedented in history,” the symbiotic relationship between the United States and the private security industry writ large grew to unrivaled levels. In Iraq, the ratio of contractors to troops was as high as 1:1, and in Afghanistan, at the time of writing, the figure was 1.6:1. 1 Just as the United States is now essential in shaping “the [private security] market's ecology,” contractors, both armed and unarmed, are a key ingredient of American power projection: “[C] ontractors are not replacing force structure, they are becoming force structure.” 2 Given this intimate relationship, how might private security contribute to the bringing about of a post-American world? What might private security look like in a post-American world?
