The Glade 4.0

It seems to me that organizations such as Blackwater (now Xe Services) are examples of Privateering. While it has naval connotations due to it's origin, at the core Privateering is using private organizations to fight a war.

Seeing as they were officially sanctioned by the state to attack other ships, i.e. to gain war prizes, their purpose was to assist the war effort by monetary gain and supply interdiction - not political change; I believe they don't fall under the definition of terrorists


As long as you ignore the definition of privateer.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

I actually had a friend at work here who's a naval nut correct me on the definition of privateer.

I still submit that technical details (naval vs ground, payment structures) aside, the core purpose of these organizations is the same. Get a private company or individual to help you fight your war.

No, you're making the definition too broad. By that definition if you link up with local irregular forces, they suddenly become privateers, such as when we linked up with the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan early in the invasion. You could even argue that a private corporation manufacturing arms is "helping you fight your war".

A privateer is specifically oriented on attacking enemy trade. Privateers aren't hired by governments; rather they make their money and a profit for their investors by salvaging and selling what they capture - in exactly the same way as pirates do. A privateer isn't a pirate for the same reason that a special forces soldier who blows up the enemy government building isn't a terrorist. What would normally be a criminal act becomes an act of war because it is performed by someone acting on behalf of a nation-state.

A person or group that a government hires and directly pays the expense for is called a mercenary. A privateer can be a form of mercenary if they payment from the government in addition to what they make by capture and salvage, but not all privateers are mercenaries (most are not) and very few mercenaries could be called privateers.

The last letter of marque issued by the United States illustrates this; the airship Resolute was given a Letter of Marque to hunt submarines.. which it did. However it was armed only with a rifle, and if it ever did actually find a submarine (to my knowledge it did not) I don't see any way it might have captured, much less salvaged it. In other words, although it had a letter of marque, calling it a "privateer" was a serious stretch of the term.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

DE, I understand the definition of the term Privateer. And I'm not trying to change or modify the definition.

All I'm pointing out is that substantively (i.e. the effect that the groups have) there really isn't a difference between a Privateer and a firm like Blackwater. Both are being leveraged to improve one's ability to successfully win a war.

Sure they do it by different means, but the end result is the same. Hinder the enemy's ability to win.

From my perspective, all the details around how they are paid, their specific targets and if they are land/air/sea units are basically irrelevant, given that perspective. Potentially important when determining which type of group to use, or what you need for a specific engagement, but it's all minutia detail that only matters after you've decided that you're going to try and outsource some of your war.

Yes, if you can limit your "privateers" to only attacking the ships of the nation you're fighting. If they don't, they quickly become pirates. Moreover, once you start doing this your opponent can fairly easily start arming his merchant vessels with machine guns and such, or using such expedients as helicopters to patrol the routes his merchant vessels take, or possibly even jet fighters.

At some point, however, your privateers, wanting to make money (that's the point of becoming one after all; make money on the war) are going to make a mistake and do something that's going to piss off a country with a more powerful Navy. Privateering was predicated on the idea that the privateer would have his behavior governed by fairly civilized rules and confine his targets to what the government wants. 3rd world areas aren't known for observing a lot of niceties in warfare, and it's really only a matter of time before someone; it could be us, Russia, China, Britain, France, Spain, Italy or a number of other countries start sending destroyers and frigates to put a stop to the nonsense.

Not only that but even 3rd world navies often have elderly frigates or destroyers and sometimes missile boats. It's not like they're going to be doing any amphibious assaults so its entirely possible that even a third world shithole can take on privateers.



That's very easy to type as a one-line assessment, but think about it - how are you going to do that?

Pirates operate small speedboats from motherships or shore in order to outmaneuver their targets in confined waters. They can't really deploy far out into the ocean because of the limitations of the speedboats themselves. Moreover, a privateer has to operate only against the nation(s) he has a letter of marque against. This makes it pretty easy to figure out which ships he's going to target, and if you know where and when they'll be going it's a lot easier to protect them. He can't just attack whoever he wants or the aforementioned modern navies will start showing up.

Even if you're a third world shithole fighting your equally shithole neighbor (in which case most merchant traffic coming to you won't be under your flag anyhow) it's fairly easy to figure out where the privateers are going to have to go and when, and send your shitty helicopters and shitty ancient MiGs out there to look for them, and even a MiG-17 or -21 will make short work of a privateer speedboat. If you figure out where the mother ship is, you just radio back to base and a few more shitty MiGs come out with iron bombs and blow it out of the water. If you're a very lucky third world shithole you might have a few Exocets and be able to blast him from well outside the range of shoulder-fired SAMs that he might have, if he's a really lucky privateer.

But lets say our intrepid privateer gets lucky and seizes a ship. Well, privateers must make money by seeling their salvage, and since a ship is a big thing it's not all that hard to figure out where it went. Then assuming that anyone's willing to buy the salvaged ships, there's the problem of concealing which mother ship our little speedboats came off of. About the only thing that has a chance in hell of working is to false-flag your ship, but that's likely to piss off whoever's flag you use, and it's also not going to work for long because someone's obviously going to know there's a privateer at work in the area and when this one particular ship isn't in Lloyd's Registry under that flag.. and never seems to go anywhere else.. and seems to switch flags every now and then.. it's not going to be long before those MiGs show up with their iron bombs, or, if you've succumbed to typical 3rd world behavior, before you do something so brutal or so far out of line that it's not MiGs but Harriers or something showing up because Her Majesty's Government or someone else is none too pleased with your indiscretion.

There's also the fact that getting rid of all the witnesses is easier said than done. Modern merchant ships have radar. Radar can be detected by ESM at more than twice the range it can detect things, and it can also see targets at about 33% greater range than the human eye can given the same horizon. So even if you don't see any ships or planes around, they may see you if they're still fairly close (especially plane since you might just not see it) and when they see your target start behaving erratically on their radar or the target's radar suddenly disappear off their ESM plot if they're farther away, they may wonder what's going on.

Then of course, there's the whole issue of noise.. which travels through water and is how submarines find things. How will you ever know if a submarine has figured out what's going on?

In other words, this ruse might work for a short time, but it won't be for very long, and it will actually be harder for you to hide than a pirate because you'll have a far more limited and therefore predicatable target selection. Then of course, one wonders who will buy your plundered ship? The political implications of owning a ship captured by a privateer for a third party corporation or government are unknown, but certain to be volatile at least.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Except that it's really not minutia because you have to pay mercenaries, but you don't have to pay privateers. On the other hand, there has to be trade worth seizing in order to expect to employ privateers because that's how they get paid. So you may or may not be able to employ one or both. The reason privateers have traditionally been at sea is because it's a lot easier to seize cargo when it's neatly contained in a ship and there's nowhere for the ship to run away and hide once overhauled.

Obviously they are both a way of "outsourcing" some of your warfighting, but trying to say they're all basically the same and the differences are irrelevant is really just pointing out the obvious. Of course they both do that, but different terms arose to describe the different ways they go about doing that.

If you're going to discuss what a privateer is, then you're already getting into the details of how one is going about getting private augmentation of one's military. However a firm like Blackwater is not engaging in privateering. They're engaged in mercenary work. Claiming there's no difference between them is really just saying you don't think the difference is important. It might not be for some subjects but for the issue of whether or not privateering still goes on, it's exteremly relevant because the difference is what makes them mercenaries instead of privateers.

Furthermore, you can't just arbitrarily get rid of the naval connotations of the term and say "well, now it means getting private organizations to fight a war". No, it doesn't. That's just making up your own definition in order to apply the term how you please. That's like if I started referring to tanks as "battleships" and say "well the term originally had naval connotations, but it really refers to the same thing: an armored plaform with a powerful gun."

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

well.... such things do happen. words do get appropriated like that. Its just not typically the guy on a message board in cyberspace that starts that revolution. More often its the designers.

I was trying to think of an example--
"Torpedo" comes to mind.

The famous "Damn the torpdeos, full speed ahead" line was uttered during the American Civil War did not refer to what we now think of as Torpedoes, but what we now refer to as mines (Naval mines more specifically though there are references to Land Torpedos). The term has been appropriated to mean a self-propelled underwater munitions.

While your historical account is factual, it really illustrates the opposite of what Aizle is trying here. Torpedoes were originally a wide variety of devices, free floating, moored or deliberately placed (to keep to the naval example), and later, self-propelled. As time passed, that broad name was narrowed to be specific, not broadened even further to be generic.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Torpedo has fallen out of usage for anything except the self-propelled variety (so much so that "like a torpedo" implies rapid motion, the one quality original torpedos lacked)

That's true. However, when no such evolution of a word has occured you can't just suddenly proclaim it out of the blue by fiat.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."