Glossary
The records in this field are written for specialists, and a single misread word can turn a figure into a false claim. These are the terms used on this site, in plain English.
The actors
- Private military company (PMC)
- A firm paid to fight, train troops, or plan and run military operations.
- Private security company (PSC)
- A firm paid to guard something: a building, a site, a ship, a convoy, a person. The line between this and a private military company is often a matter of what the contract says rather than what the staff carry.
- Military contractor
- A firm paid for support work that an army would otherwise do itself: supply, construction, maintenance, catering, laundry, translation. The largest group by headcount, and the one most often missing from public discussion.
- Mercenary
- In everyday use, anyone who fights for money for a foreign power. In international law the definition is much narrower and almost nobody meets it, which is one reason the word is rarely useful in a dataset.
- Protection racket
- Payment demanded for protection from the people demanding it. Economically it is the same transaction as buying security, with the threat supplied by the seller.
The records
- Defense Base Act
- A United States law requiring employers to insure civilian staff working overseas on American military bases or under United States government contracts. Claims under it are the closest thing there is to an official record of contractor injuries and deaths.
- Claim
- A case filed with an insurer after an injury or death. A claim is not the same as an injury: some injuries produce no claim, and a claim is counted in the year it is filed, not the year the injury happened.
- Contractor census
- The United States Department of Defense's quarterly count of contractor personnel supporting its operations in a given region. It counts people funded by that department in that region, not all contractors working for the United States.
- Third-country national
- A contractor who is neither a citizen of the hiring country nor of the country they are working in. A Bangladeshi cleaner on an American base in Iraq, for example. Usually the worst-paid group and often the largest.
- Local national
- A contractor who is a citizen of the country where the work is happening.
- Suppression
- Hiding a figure because it is too small to publish without identifying individuals. A suppressed cell is not a zero, and treating it as one understates the total.
- Obligation
- Money a government has committed to a contract. It is not the same as money spent, and a single contract action can commit funds for several years at once, which is why yearly contract figures can jump about.
The economics
- Principal-agent problem
- When you pay someone to act on your behalf, you cannot fully control what they do with the power you have handed them, and their interests are not identical to yours. The central problem in hiring force.
- Information asymmetry
- One side of a deal knows more than the other. A recruiter knows what the job really is; the worker signing the contract often does not.
- Incomplete contract
- No contract can specify what happens in every possible situation, so some decisions are left to whoever holds the power at the time. In armed work, those gaps matter more than the clauses.
- Externality
- A cost that falls on someone who is not party to the deal. When a contractor is killed, the cost is largely borne by their family, not by the buyer or the seller of the service.