American security contractors walking thin line in Gaza

Opacity by design

Founded in Davidson, North Carolina, in 2023, UG Solutions offers little information about its operations on its website. There is little publicly known about it and the company did not respond to multiple inquiries by RS. Jameson Govoni, a principal individual managing the organization, is a former U.S. Special Forces soldier.

Former contractors described UG Solutions’ furtiveness to RS as an industry hallmark. “The need for non-attribution in warfare, the need for plausible deniability to get away with things, is one of the drivers of the market for… mercenaries,” said Dr. Sean McFate, a former contractor and author of The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order. “That's why [the industry is] opaque, because that's one of the chief selling points.”

Indeed, the rules governing private military and security contractors’ conduct rest on shaky foundations due to the legal ambiguities created by operating abroad as non-military personnel.

“We weren’t under the UCMJ [Uniform Code of Military Justice] as civilians. We weren’t under the laws of Iraq as PMCs [private military contractors], and U.S. laws are not meant to govern civilians in combat zones,” said former Blackwater contractor Morgan Lerette, the author of Guns, Girls, and Greed: I Was a Blackwater Mercenary in Iraq. “We didn’t have any codified rules of engagement or defined chain of command. It was legally ambiguous.”

The former contractors also observed that their peers had had little outside support during and after their service, despite risking their lives on the job, but also, as Lerette had observed, suffering from post-service mental health problems sometimes leading to suicides.

According to Brown University’s Cost of War project, 50% more contractors than troops were present in the U.S. Central Command region in 2019, which included Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, more contractors than service members have died in wars waged post-9/11.

“Contractors are cheaper than hiring your own military…when the conflict is over, you don't have to send them home to sit at… Fort Liberty, where they're drawing a paycheck but not fighting. You just fire them, the contract is over,” McFate explained. “You don't have responsibility for [contractors’] physical or mental health. You don't have responsibility for taking care of their funeral. There's no Arlington Cemetery for them.”

And working in Gaza certainly poses varying risks for contractors and Palestinian civilians alike. “If I were there [as a contractor], my biggest concern would be taken hostage by Hamas and used as leverage for negotiations,” Lerette explained, elucidating the risks faced by U.S. contractors in a conflict zone.

UG Solutions’ contractors are allegedly tasked to stop vehicles only if something brought to the checkpoint is “deemed unsafe,” according to Washington Post reporting. But Truthout reporter Sharon Zhang, observing that Israel has often banned necessities, including food, from Gaza, wonders whether UG Solutions’ purported checkpoint activities would stay true to their publicly proclaimed scope.

Along similar lines, McFate asserted that contractors’ wrongdoings, even accidental ones, could “inflame the situation.” Again, it would be easier to avoid backlash and brush it under the rug. “Israel and Washington can really try to use the inherent plausible deniability with…contractors and say, ‘okay, they're fired. It wasn't us,'" he said.

​Private contracting: a tool for forever war?

We should not be surprised that contractors are being used to provide security in this volatile situation because contracting has become one to engage in war without incurring political baggage or accountability. Indeed, former contractors say the practice can actually feed conflict.

“Using PMCs [private military contractors] has become a way for politicians to put U.S. citizens in harm's way while avoiding ‘boots on the ground,’” Lerette said. “PMCs are being used as proxy armies so the American public doesn’t protest getting into the next forever war…A contractor being killed or injured overseas doesn’t get the same media attention as a service member.”

Then there are the baked-in incentives to keep business going.

“When you tie lethality to profit margin [through contracting], you're incentivizing the potential to start and elongate conflicts for interest, for profit,” McFate told RS. “I'm not accusing the contractors on the ground in Gaza of wanting to do that, but they are a tentacle of a larger animal that is seeking to do this very thing.”

“I'm not saying it's happening, but it's possible some [contractors] would go to a place and, you know, start messing things up so they can create demand for their own supply,” he added.

On the other hand, McFate highlighted that the private contractors being sent to Gaza by UG Solutions, as former Green Berets, are experienced and competent. “Contractors, if they're well used, can do a great deal of good in the world, and I'm hoping that these individual contractors in Gaza can help do that,” said McFate. “But there's a chance they can royally mess it up.”

In this respect, Lerette expressed concern regarding the many responsibilities, especially ethical ones, that could be imposed on personnel operating in Gaza. “I call [private contracting] outsourcing the morality of combat operations to private contractors, because those guys have to make split decisions [about tenuous on-the-ground-conditions] without having those rules and regulations like a military member does,” Lerette said.

“It is a big moral conundrum on what to do or what not to do [in a conflict zone]. And when you outsource that morality [to private contractors], it’s a bad way to go.”