Patriots for Profit

[B]runeau (Naval Postgraduate School) highlights the difficulty in providing effective management and anything but light or even marginal oversight. This relatively short work does a skillful job of looking at this phenomenon through the lens of the existing literature on civil-military relations, as well as the author's own investigations, concluding that a variety of forces and processes have led to 'the confusion, ineffectiveness, and inefficiency of private security contracting as it is today.' - C. G. Wood, Choice This impressive volume is theoretically coherent and empirically rich, with insights into wider issues of defense policy-making and governance in the contemporary-era. - Tim Edmonds, University of Bristol This is a compelling and important book which is at once rooted deeply in the study of civil-military relations yet persuasively challenges many of its presumptions and precepts. It offers a penetrating examination of the challenges and dilemmas that private military contractors pose for traditional notions of civil-military relations, while placing this issue in a much broader perspective that offers wisdom and insight on defense reform, inter-service rivalries and the continuing impact of Goldwater-Nichols. This is likely to become a contemporary classic in the literature on civil-military relations. - Phil Williams, Posvar Professor of International Security and Director of the Ridgway Center for International Security Studies, University of Pittsburgh Bruneau persuasively makes two points that must be addressed if we are to avoid strategic paralysis: we need to formulate doctrine for how we use personal security contractors, and their employment must be carefully integrated into military planning, as well as budgeting, processes ... In sum, Patriots for Profit is by no means an easy read for military commanders and their staffs. Nevertheless, Bruneau's observations are critical to national security. - Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hanley, Proceedings Magazine