A private military company (PMC), private military firm (PMF), or private military, is an independent company or organization providing armed combat and/or security services. PMCs refer to their staff as "security contractors" or "private military contractors". Private military companies refer to their business generally as the "private military industry" or "The Circuit". The hiring of mercenaries is a common practice in the history of armed conflict and prohibited in the modern age by the United Nations Mercenary Convention; the United Kingdom, Russia, China, and the United States are not signatories to the convention, and the United States has rejected the UN's classification of PMCs as mercenaries. The services and expertise offered by PMCs are typically similar to those of governmental security, military or police forces, most often on a smaller scale. While PMCs often provide services to train or supplement official armed forces in service of governments, they can also be employed by private companies to provide bodyguards for key staff or protection of company premises, especially in hostile territories. However, contractors who use offensive force in a war zone could be considered unlawful combatants, in reference to a concept outlined in the Geneva Conventions and explicitly specified by the 2006 American Military Commissions Act. The services of private contractors are used around the world. P. W. Singer author of Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry says "In geographic terms, it operates in over 50 different countries. It’s operated in every single continent but Antarctica." Singer states that in the 1990s there used to be 50 military personnel for every 1 contractor, now the ratio is 10 to 1. He also points out that these contractors have a number of duties depending on who they are hired by. In developing countries that have natural resources, such as oil refineries in Iraq, they are hired to guard the area. They are also hired to guard companies that contract services and reconstruction efforts such as General Electric. Apart from securing companies, they also secure officials and government affiliates. Private military companies carry out many different missions and jobs. Some examples are supplying bodyguards to the Afghan president Hamid Karzai and piloting reconnaissance airplanes and helicopters as a part of Plan Colombia. They are also licensed by the United States Department of State, they are contracting with national governments, training soldiers and reorganizing militaries in Nigeria, Bulgaria, Taiwan, and Equatorial Guinea. According to a study from 2003 the PMC industry was worth over $100 billion a year at that time. According to a 2008 study by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, private contractors make up 29% of the workforce in the United States Intelligence Community and cost the equivalent of 49% of their personnel budgets. According to the Brazilian geostrategist De Leon Petta, far from meaning a possible weakening of the national state power and its monopoly on violence, these PMCs will actually serve as alternative forms of power application abroad through irregular means, without violating international law, causing troubles in the domestic or public policy, or too many international repercussions. American scholar Phelps makes a similar claim by finding that PMCs cloak themselves in the state governments "cloak of legitimacy." It is often difficult to tell national troops from private security contractors, or national support personnel from supply and support contractors. The obfuscation between private and public actors allows for the responsibility of criminal actions to be placed on the private firm, while allowing the state to achieve its foreign policy goals.

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