View the pdf - Australian Army

20children are actually sent into potential combat situations. And they are aptto view their wounding or death as an outrageous scandal, rather than anoccupational hazard. 73In response to the diminishing ability of the great powers to employ their armedforces as a consequence of the need to minimise casualties, Luttwak examines two‘rather improbable’ solutions. Significantly, both solutions involve the use of hiredsoldiers, one based on the Gurkha model and the other based on the French ForeignLegion. 74 William Shawcross has also argued that the United Nations requires a militarycapability, noting that a force of ‘... 5000 well-led soldiers could have saved the lives ofthousands of Tutsi victims of the Rwanda genocide in 1994’. 75The casualties suffered by Coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have provenboth painful for their families and politically difficult for their governments. As a result,casualty minimisation is now a feature of modern armed conflict. ADF troops operatingin Iraq, for example, were constrained by orders that placed so-called ‘force protection’above the requirement to achieve any given mission. PMC are no less reluctant to suffercasualties, but their losses are less visible to the general public. Robert Young estimatesthat, by the spring of 2006, the toll of US PMC killed in Iraq had reached 314, a figurethat has continued to rise. 76Fifth, PMC are generally not constrained by formal military tactics, techniques andprocedures. For this reason, they may be more capable of achieving strategic resultswith relatively small tactical forces. Some examples of this at the tactical level includethe successful motorised charges of Hoare and Callan while, at the operational level,EO used helicopters to dominate entire provinces. While more traditional militarydoctrine tends to frown on these risky techniques, PMC are able to innovate and maycomplete their missions far more efficiently.Sixth, relative perceptions of insecurity are increasing and, as a result, securityorganisations are proliferating. Martin van Creveld predicts that low intensity conflictwill eventually replace traditional inter-state conflict and that the task of defending73 E N Luttwak, ‘Where are the Great Powers? At Home with the Kids’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 4,July/August 1994, p. 25.74 Ibid., p. 28.75 W Shawcross, ‘In Praise of Sandline’, The Spectator, 1 August 1998, p. 16.76 R Young, Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror, Crown, New York, 2006, p. 339.