I've been thumbing through Bobbitt's 'Shield of Achilles' off an on now for a few months (been too busy finishing up the ye olde dissertation for fun stuff) but I've found his basic argument interesting and largely parallels the work done by many in the field of historical sociology. Charles Tilley's 'Coercion, Capital, and European States' comes to mind, as does a lot of work in the field on institutional economics that looks at the states as basically a 'protection provision' firm - the subject of my own dissertation by the way.

What fascinates and disturbs me is the way in which many of the 'older' political-economy scholars predicted something like this happening but are now totally ignored by the mainstream in the academy today. I don't consider myself a Marxist pe se, but it's hard to look at globalization and the cultural identity destroying forces wrought by it and not see that as something Marx predicted regardless of one's opinion of whether this is ultimately a good or bad thing. Similarly, Polyani's 'Great Transformation' and his discussion of the evolution, resistance to, and ultimate collapse of the self-regulating market prior to World War II was really a precursor to the debate over 'globalization and its discontents' today.

To me, it seems the academic social sciences are missing something big and we're groping towards some new way to interpret the world. Hell, even in economics there's a growing movement that's beginning to question the orthodoxy surrounding the assumptions of the neo-classical model. See:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/education/11economics.html?_r=1&ref=ed...

I'm worried because it's obvious to anybody who looks that something is seriously out of kilter in terms of the balance of social forces working in the world today. The dominance of the unfettered market and the elevation of finance in our economies is causing dislocations, problems, and resistance that looks eerily similar to the period before the First World War. Combine that with ecological damage and resources sustainability...and, well...the future scares me. That many academics, who are supposed to be looking at the world as it is and as opposed to how their theories say it should be, don't see this speaks to the level of corruption caused by these forces in all our major institutions.

T. Christian Miller puts the number of contractors in Iraq at over 180,000:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-na-private4jul04,0,5808...
That includes some Iraqis too, of course, but the overwhelming majority are foreigners. As far as calling many of them noncombatants, the same could be said of many of the 140,000 GI's, who drive trucks, shuffle papers, and cook.

The contractor phenomenon--use by Nation-States, as well as use by multinationals for private security and *other* tasks--certainly supports the dissolution of the Nation-State. The classic Nation-State military mobilization, for example among the great powers during WWI and WWII, left little or no room for their own citizens to be a contract army.

We have private armies being paid huge amounts of money compared to the 'public' army counterparts. In a way it is a reversion to an earlier paradigm in which the conquering army gets to plunder and loot and go home with the spoils. The loot comes to the private armies mostly indirectly through taxes on the weakening nation state that is employing the army or sometimes directly. I would not be surprised to see, as the nation state weakens, that the loot for the private armies will come more directly from the 'conquered' lands.