ABSTRACT
While as recently as ten years ago any discussion of a market for private military training would have been premature, today, an increasingly consolidated and professionalised sector of the private security industry is changing the way states train their armed forces. The last decade has witnessed private security companies (PSCs) transform themselves from a small-scale and ad hoc domestic training asset or discreet tool of foreign military assistance into an important global supplier of military training. This fact has been most dramatically and visibly underscored by the prominent transnational training role played by PSCs in Afghanistan and Iraq, where private firms have been awarded a spectrum of large-scale training contracts for the new Iraqi military, police and paramilitary forces.1 Less spectacular yet equally transformative has been the privatisation of the training of Western armed forces themselves. Offering courses ranging from sniper marksmanship and advanced urban combat tactics to more technologically sophisticated flight simulations centres, the private security industry is now offering alternatives to government owned and operated military training facilities around the world.
