Excerpts

Why not, when nations have already lost the monopoly of violence, consider creating volunteer mercenary forces organized by private corporations to fight wars on a contract-fee basis for the United Nations - the condottieri of yesterday armed with some of the weapons, including non-lethal weapons, of tomorrow?

Governments unwilling to send their own young men and women to die in combat against Serbian, Croat, or Bosnian irregulars, including rapists and genocidal thugs, might have had fewer reservations about allowing the UN to contract with a nonpolitical, professional fighting force made up of volunteers from many nations - a rapid-deployment unit for hire. Or one under contract to the UN alone.

Of course, to prevent such companies from becoming wild cards, strict international ground rules would have to be set - transnational boards of directors, public monitoring of their funds, perhaps special arrangements to lease them equipment for specific purposes, rather than allowing them to build up gigantic warstocks of their own. But if governments cannot directly do the job the world may well turn to corporations that can.

By contrast, one might also imagine the creation, someday, of internationally chartered 'Peace Corporations,' each of which is assigned some region of the globe. Instead of being paid for waging war, its sole source of profit would come from war limitation in its region. Its 'product' would be reduced casualty numbers as measured against some recent base-line period.