Private military companies operate under exceptional conditions. Their image in society, the policy of states in regulating their activities, market conditions and the cost of contracts depend on two main factors: the will of a private military company and the conditions of its environment. In this study, the authors consider private military companies as a black box, when the focus of the study is their environment, the conditions in which PMCs exist and work. Three main areas are consistently considered: the sphere of contractual relations (the sphere of clients), within which the authors single out PMC strategies in relation to the choice of clients, which affects the competitive advantage, the operational sphere — the sphere of military operations and its main, general characteristics that determine the behavior patterns of employees PMCs and the scope of local legislation of target countries in military operations, which creates the possibility for PMCs to use illegal methods of warfare. The last part of the article is devoted to a practical consideration of the influence of the external environment on the activities of PMCs in the framework of the “grey market” operations of private military services. The authors use a wide methodological toolkit: the main method in the work is the system analysis method used to study factors in their interdependence aimed at PMCs, general scientific methods of synthesis and deduction are used to generalize the material and forecast. The normative-institutional method is used to establish the imperfection of national legislation used by PMCs for personal gain.
For citation:
Sokolov R.N., Ryzhov I.V., Rogozhina E.M. Influence of external factors on the specific activities of private military companies in the framework of the military services system, Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2022, iss. 3, pp. 125—140.