Sources
A starting library. If you are researching private military and security work, these are the places the figures actually come from. Every entry here has been opened and checked; the list will grow as more are verified.
Official records
- Defense Base Act case summary reports: US Department of Labor
- Counts of injury and death claims filed by civilian workers on United States government contracts overseas, by employer, insurance carrier and country. Published as a cumulative report, financial-year reports and older quarterly snapshots. These are claims filed, not a casualty count, and the Department says so itself.
- Contractor support of United States operations in the USCENTCOM area: US Department of Defense
- The quarterly contractor census, published for roughly eighteen years and ended with the second quarter of the 2025 financial year. Each report gives contractor numbers split into United States citizens, third-country nationals and local nationals, by country and by type of work.
- USAspending.gov: US federal government
- Every federal contract award, searchable by agency, company, place of performance and industry code. Guard and security services sit under code 561612.
Compilations and analysis
- Department of Defense contractor and troop levels in Afghanistan and Iraq, 2007-2020: Congressional Research Service
- Heidi M. Peters, 22 February 2021. The Service compiled the quarterly census into tables for Congress because the Department published only recent quarters at a time. It is the best existing check on any reconstruction of that series, and it stops in 2020.
- Costs of War: Watson Institute, Brown University
- Independent estimates of the human and financial cost of the post-2001 wars, including contractor deaths. Their contractor figures are estimates built on reported claims plus an estimate of unreported ones, and they are clear about which is which.
- US government private contract worker deaths and injuries: ProPublica
- T. Christian Miller, September 2009, covering September 2001 to June 2010. A company-level table of contractor deaths and injuries, built from Department of Labor claim data. Frozen, but the first compilation of its kind.
Academic datasets
- Private Security Events Database
- Deborah Avant and Kara Kingma Neu, Journal of Conflict Resolution 63(8), 2019. More than 1,200 events involving private military and security companies in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, 1990 to 2012. Published on Harvard Dataverse in February 2019 and not extended since.
- Commercial Military Actor Database
- Ulrich Petersohn, Vanessa Gottwick, Charlotte Penel and Leila Kellgren-Parker, Journal of Conflict Resolution 66(4-5), 2022. Commercial military actors in civil wars from 1980 to 2016, in every region except Europe, coded mainly from a newspaper archive.
On the limits of the data
- PMSCs and humanitarian security: what the data do — and do not — tell us
- Anne Lauder, Deborah Avant and Kara Neu, International Code of Conduct Association, 18 October 2023. Written by people who built one of the datasets above, on how hard accurate and representative data on this industry is to find. Worth reading before trusting any figure in this field, including the ones published here.
If you know of a public source that belongs on this list, or think something here is wrongly described, write to mercenomics@gmail.com.