The Politics of Private Force in the Philippines

Two Private Military Contractors, courtesy of markk2/Flickr

Two private military contractors
(cc) markk2/flickr

Due to the activities of American private security companies, military relations between the Philippines and the US are now in the spotlight writes Jody Ray Bennett for ISN Security Watch.

By Jody Ray Bennett for ISN Security Watch

In October 2002, a dirty bomb mounted within a small motorbike detonated, thrusting hundreds of nails, small pieces of metal and other debris into a crowded marketplace in Zamboanga, Philippines. Reports later confirmed that the explosion killed two Filipinos and one US Green Beret, while injuring dozens. The national police chief blamed the attack on Abu Sayyaf, an “Islamist separatist” group that operates in much of the southern region of the Philippines. Weeks prior to the explosion, the group claimed they would soon attack Filipino and American military targets in retaliation “for the ongoing government offensive against Muslim rebels in the southern Philippines.”

While Abu Sayyaf has attacked several Filipino and civilian targets since 2002, the group has been unsuccessful in targeting US military targets long established throughout the multi-island nation. However, on 29 September 2009, the organization successfully detonated an improvised explosive device (IED), killing two US soldiers and a Filipino marine “on Jolo Island, a poor, predominantly Muslim region where the Americans [had] been providing combat training and weapons to Filipino troops battling the Abu Sayyaf militants,” AP reported. The US soldiers were a part of the Seabees, the construction battalion of the US Navy that builds and constructs bases, airstrips and other civic projects such as schools and libraries.

The attacks partly resulted in an increased US presence in the Philippines. Since 2002 the US military has been operating a “low-key advisory mission” to support the Filipino government’s counterinsurgency efforts, a stark difference to the American counterinsurgency effort in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. The Joint Special Operations Task Force – Philippines (JSOTF-P) describes itself as “temporarily deployed to the Philippines in a strictly non-combat role to advise and assist the [Filipino Armed Forces], share information, and to conduct joint civil military operations […] at the request of the Philippine Government.” The JSOTF-P has deployed no more than 600 military personnel throughout four key areas in the country.

This particular relationship formed soon after the 11 September attacks as the “Filipino” side of the Bush administration’s Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF). While operational symmetry is often described as the US military and Filipino state versus nonstate groups Abu Sayyaf, Jemaah Islamiah, the Rajah Sulaiman movement and the New People’s Army, the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (Maoist), few analyses have included the role and continued interest of various private military and security companies on the island since its post-9/11 industry boom.

Contractors calling

Much like the Ugandan contingency in Iraq, Filipinos have been shipping off to the Near East and elsewhere, providing various tasks that largely support logistical duties that are handled by various defense contractors and private military and security companies (PMSCs). The continued need for inexpensive labor coupled with some US State Department contracts that require PMSCs to hire third country nationals (TCNs) has caused some PMSCs to look to the Philippines, a long-established US ally, for a pool of potential workers. In 2006, Triple Canopy, the PMSC that gained slight attention as the company to take over Blackwater’s role in Iraq, used this supply of labor to recruit for its own contracts abroad. According to an Asia Times report, a recruiter for the company was “alleged to have employed about 300 former Philippine soldiers for Triple Canopy's operations in Iraq [after a] Philippine government ban was first imposed in 2004.”

The Asia Times report also mentions that in March 2002, three months after the OEF partnership between the US and Philippine government, a local recruitment firm called Anglo-European Services recruited for Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), “sent 250 Filipino construction workers to build additional detention cells for US-held terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

“The recruitment was kept under wraps by both the US and Philippine governments, which apparently agreed that all worker travel documents and recruitment requirements would be expedited in just a few hours by US Embassy officials […]. The Guantanamo-bound Filipino workers were allegedly slipped out of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport without passing through standard immigration procedures and left Manila onboard a chartered flight to Cuba.” According to its website, Triple Canopy still maintains an office in the capital city of Manila.

Parallel with the coverage of the Seabees attacks, rumors began to surface making robust claims that the company formerly known as Blackwater has been training forces on a leased US naval base in the Subic region of the Philippines, despite the company’s 2007 announcement that it “scrapped plans” to use acquired 25-acre area near a jungle in Subic for survival training. None of these recent rumors were confirmed by the company.

“Those Filipinos who were recruited by Blackwater [went] to Iraq on their [own] private capacities. Most of them are former Philippine armed forces or national police personnel, so they have severed their ties with the Philippine government and most of them work as private security personnel who are not involved in the US counter-insurgency operations in Iraq,” Renato Cruz De Castro, professor of international studies, De La Salle University of Manila, told ISN Security Watch.

However, Dyncorp, part of the infamous “Big Three” PMSCs in Iraq, was competitively awarded over $16 million by the US Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Pacific to provide “all labor, supervision, management, tools, materials, equipment, facilities, transportation, incidental engineering, and other items necessary to provide support services” in support of JSOTF-P.

In September 2009, Philippine politicians began to question why Dyncorp was controlling an area of the military base that was closed off even to Filipino access and implied that although the Philippine government requested the assistance of the US military, there was no indication that the relationship would involve the presence of a private contractor that some Filipino politicians have described as having “produced important scandals, directly implicating the enterprise in the commission of crimes and human rights violations.”If the US military apparatus felt it did not have to inform or request the Philippine government that it would be outsourcing various responsibilities to a private company, what might this demonstrate about how the US military perceives its relationship with contractor companies?

A lesser known PMSC called Corporate Training Unlimited (CTU Consulting) states that it has been operational in Iraq since 2003 and “provide [sic] PSD ‘Personal Security Detail’ service to Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR MER Baghdad) top executives.” In its “Philippines Operations” website, it lists (with photographs) the Clark Eagle Range, a “multi-million peso state of the art firearms training facility located 80 kilometers north of Manila.”While all of this appears to within legal order, it is interesting to note that the owner of CTU was arrested in Baghdad in June 2009 with four other contractors who were implicated in the murder of another fellow US contractor. According to reports, the owner’s alibi maintained that he was in the Philippines when the murder occurred. He was eventually released by an Iraqi judge.

The ongoing relationship between the US and Philippine government will be interesting to watch over the coming months, but it is doubtful the stringent US ally will protest private contractor presence on the base. The government of the Philippines gains financially from the military partnership with the US, and if it perceives gains in training and security operations against non-state threats on the island, it would seem it has little incentive to aggravate its position within such partnership. This might ultimately be decided by the behavior and actions of PMSC companies contracted by the US military, a factor that should make weary those who believe these companies operate too independently or for the industry itself, to the degree it has an interest in repairing the negative and damaged image of PMSCs globally.

Jody Ray Bennett is a freelance writer and academic researcher. His areas of analysis include the private military and security industry, the materialization of non-state forces and the transformation of modern warfare