The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (7 page)

The first PMC was WatchGuard International, formed in 1965 and registered in island of Jersey by David Stirling and John Woodhouse. Stirling also founded the British Special Air Services (SAS) and staffed WatchGuard International with SAS veterans. The SAS is the United Kingdom’s elite special forces regiment, highly trained in covert operations, guerrilla warfare, and counterinsurgency. The PMC operated mostly in the Gulf States but worked worldwide, and its services included training foreign forces, supporting operations against insurgents, and providing military advisory teams to governments in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and East Asia.

WatchGuard International followed the military enterpriser model, ostensibly working with the United Kingdom. It was the first of many British PMCs in an era when such firms were unknown. Following WatchGuard International, other British PMCs emerged to take its place, all led by ex–SAS officers and largely staffed with former SAS soldiers: SAS counter terrorism warfare team leader Ian Crooke ran Kilo Alpha Services (KAS); SAS squadron leader Arish Turtle managed Control Risks; SAS counterespionage specialist H.M.P.D. Harclerode ran J. Donne Holdings; SAS South American specialist David Walker; and SAS group intelligence officer Andrew Nightingale managed both Keenie Meenie Services and also Saladin Security. Like WatchGuard International, they worked
in dangerous places with unpalatable regimes and conducted risky security operations that most Western governments would wish to avoid.

However, WatchGuard International and the SAS-PMCs are exceptional. Most mercenaries during this period led illicit lives, operating as private warriors in the shadows rather than as for-profit companies in the open market. Individual soldiers of fortune bounced between geopolitical hot spots in China, Latin America, and especially Africa. Their employers included rebel groups, weak governments, multinational firms operating in precarious regions, and former colonial powers that desired clandestine influence in the affairs of their past colonies. The decolonization that followed World War II offered particularly rich opportunities for these private warriors.

The Congo Crisis of 1960–1968 began with national independence from Belgium and ended with the seizing of power by Joseph Mobutu, causing the deaths of tens of thousands of people. During this maelstrom of conflict, international mining companies such as Union Minière hired hundreds of mercenaries known as Les Affreux (“The Frightfuls”), including Irishman “Mad” Mike Hoare and Frenchman Bob Denard, to support the Katanga secession. Later, Hoare attempted a coup d’état of the Seychelles Islands, and Denard fought in many African countries, including Angola, Zimbabwe, Gabon, and the Comoros Islands, where he participated in four coups, the last in 1995. Their exploits informed movies such as
The Wild Geese
(1978), for which Hoare was a technical adviser, and
The Dogs of War
(1980), based on a Frederick Forsyth novel inspired by the life of Denard. These and other treatments still shape mercenary stereotypes in today’s popular” imagination, summed up by a scene in
The Dogs of War
when one mercenary makes a toast before the ad hoc team embarks on its mission: “
Vive la mort! Vive la guerre! Vive le sacré mercenaire!
”
¹⁷

It was not until the 1970s that the laws of war noticed mercenaries, and only then as a response to the African wars of decolonization in the 1960s, where a black market for mercenaries thrived. This prompted the society of states to formally proscribe mercenaries in the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions. The primary objection to mercenaries was that they were warriors without a state, fighting for money rather than national ideology. The most widely accepted definition of a mercenary in the laws of war is in Article 47 of Protocol I Additional to the Geneva Conventions, which states as follows:

However, this definition is so restrictive yet imprecise that almost no one falls into the category. As Best remarks, “any mercenary who cannot exclude himself from this definition deserves to be shot—and his lawyer with him!”
¹⁹

Shortly after the Cold War, the world witnessed the resurgence of private military force. Perhaps it is not surprising that the first real mercenary firm emerged in Africa. With the fall of the South African apartheid regime, Lieutenant-Colonel Eeben Barlow left the South African Defense Force to establish the first combat-offensive PMC, the appropriately named Executive Outcomes. Its ranks were populated by soldiers from South African special forces units, such as the 32nd Battalion and the Koevoet (“crowbar” in Afrikaans), a special counterinsurgency police force. Unlike the SAS-PMCs, Executive Outcomes was not a military enterpriser but a true mercenary firm: a private army in the mold of the old
condottieri
. It was a fully functional, self-contained military organization, complete with its own air force, which would conduct full-spectrum combat operations for the right price.

In the early days of the Rwandan genocide, Executive Outcomes approached then–UNDPKO chief Kofi Annan and offered to help contain the violence as the United Nations generated a competent peacekeeping force, which normally requires several months. Annan refused Executive Outcomes’ offer, claiming later that “the world may not be ready to privatize peace.”
²⁰
This view was costly, as more than eight hundred thousand people died within one hundred days, or eight thousand people a day, more than all those killed in the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Later, Angola, Mozambique, Uganda, and Kenya also turned to Executive Outcomes for help. Some scholars suggested, with a fair degree of hyperbole, that Executive Outcomes represented the future of armed conflict, but this has not come to pass.
²¹
Executive Outcomes remains
an exceptional phenomenon. Taking a cue from its progenitors 350 years earlier, the South Africa government outlawed mercenaries in 1998, and Executive Outcomes was dissolved as mandated by the Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance Act.

However, Executive Outcomes’ legacy lives on. The firm was loosely linked to a London-based PMC known as Sandline International, managed by former British Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer, British Special Air Service (SAS) officer Simon Mann, and US Army Special Forces Colonel Bernie McCabe. Connecting these two PMCs were Mann, who had worked for Executive Outcomes, and Anthony Buckingham, a British army officer–turned–oil executive who helped Executive Outcomes secure contracts in Angola.

Fearing Executive Outcomes’ imminent demise in the late 1990s, Buckingham turned to Sandline for services, although the exact relationship among Executive Outcomes, Sandline, and Buckingham remains unclear. In 1997, Papua New Guinea’s prime minister, Julius Chan, contracted the firm to recapture copper mines held by separatists on Bougainville Island for $36 million.
²²
Sandline subcontracted most of its personnel from Executive Outcomes, only to be rebuffed by the Papua New Guinea army, which arrested and deported the contractors without shots fired. Chan was forced to resign, and the entire spectacle made world news as the Sandline Affair.

Around this time, ousted Sierra Leone president Ahmad Tejan Kabbah contracted the firm to train and equip forty thousand Kamajor militia and members of a regional peacekeeping force to overthrow the military junta and secure diamond areas. Sandline was also to provide logistical and air support to the operation and launch a full countercoup from neighboring Guinea. This, too, ended in failure, resulting in the arms-to-Africa scandal in the United Kingdom.

Later, the private warriors found themselves working for different sides. Mann led a group of mercenaries with alleged financial backing from Mark Thatcher, son of the former UK prime minister, in an attempted coup d’état of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea in 2004, known as the Wonga Coup. The coup failed, and Mann was sentenced to thirty-four years in prison, but he was released on grounds of compassion. McCabe left Sandline to become the head of global security for the Marathon Oil Corporation, which invested heavily in Equatorial Guinea and would not wish to see the country change political hands. It would be interesting to imagine a reunion between these two brothers-in-arms on opposite sides of the cell door in Equatorial Guinea’s notorious Black Beach prison. As for Spicer, shortly after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, he founded a new PMC called Aegis Defence Services and won a lucrative contract worth $293 million over three years, providing armed protection, logistical support, and intelligence services to the US government.
²³
Executive Outcomes’ progeny lives on today.

Over the past millennium, European rulers first encouraged, then delegitimized, and finally all but eliminated mercenarism. During the Middle Ages, conflicts were often settled on the battlefield between both sides’ mercenaries, and contract warfare was common. Over time, kings and other rulers of states monopolized the market for force by investing in their own standing armies, loyal only to them, and outlawed mercenaries in order to avoid the problems associated with mercenarism.

However, this did not occur quickly. The transition from a free market of mercenaries in the Middle Ages to a monopolized one of national armies in the nineteenth century was gradual, and in between, a mediated market existed, made up of military enterprisers that were a hybrid of mercenaries and national armies. These for-profit actors built armies rather than commanding them, usually for a single government client in a monogamous public-private partnership. In some ways, military enterprisers are “dogs of war” domesticated by states, as they are mercenaries incentivized to stay in one house and obey house rules, rather than wandering the wilderness and fending for themselves. Exceptions exist, of course, but the general arc of the market for force flows from free to mediated to monopoly.

Now mercenarism is returning. Since the end of the Cold War, private military actors have reappeared in force, some as mercenaries, others as military enterprisers. Strong PMCs such as Executive Outcomes and Sandline are mercenaries organized as multinational corporations. They seek out conflicts, negotiate a price with a customer, and deploy their private army to defeat their client’s foe. Weaker PMCs such as Blackwater are more analogous to military enterprisers that build forces or augment a powerful state’s own armed forces rather than deploying a stand-alone military. Not all strong PMCs are mercenary, nor are all weak ones military enterprisers. However, military enterprisers can grow into mercenaries if they have the requisite resources and clientele, since an entity that knows how to build an army probably knows how to use it.

The presence of a private military industry today is significant. It indicates that the market for force is shifting back to a mediated market and that the state’s monopoly on force is loosening. If this trend continues, then the world will return to a free market of mercenaries and contract warfare. Some may find this shocking; however, private military force has been the norm rather than the exception in military history, and the last four hundred years are anomalous.

Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?

—Milton Friedman

Observers of history should not be surprised by the return of private armies, as they are ubiquitous throughout the history of warfare. Yet important questions remain regarding exactly how and why this occurred. We know that weak states lose their monopoly of force when they lack the military muscle to dominate armed threats. But why would the United States, a military superpower, rely on the private sector to wage war? And why now?

The move toward private solutions to public problems began during the Cold War as a way to use business know-how to streamline government operations. The intellectual roots for the logic of privatization originated in the Austrian school of economics at the turn of the twentieth century in Vienna, and later found fuller expression at the University of Chicago with economists Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase, George Stigler, and others. The Chicago, or “freshwater,” school of economics advocates laissez-faire banking rules, unfettered free markets, and minimal government intervention. It stands in stark contrast to the “saltwater” school of economics based at coastal US universities—notably, Harvard, MIT, and Berkeley—which espouses the macroeconomic theory of John Maynard Keynes and others who believe that government intervention in markets is necessary to prevent market failure.

The ideas of the Chicago school found an enthusiastic champion in British Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher. During the economically bleak summer of 1975, a Conservative Party strategist proposed that the party should take a pragmatic “middle way” between the liberal Keynesian policies of its
rival Labour Party and the free-market ideas of the Chicago school that many Conservatives backed. Interrupting him, Thatcher reached into her briefcase and pulled out a copy of Hayek’s
The Constitution of Liberty
, held it up for all to see, and asserted, “This is what we believe.” With this, she banged the book down on the table.
¹
When Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979, she had the opportunity to test Hayek’s ideas and initiated a comprehensive and controversial program to denationalize and privatize many state industries. Despite enormous public resistance, her efforts helped achieve the unthinkable by turning around the British economy. The privatization revolution was under way.

Over the next three decades, fervor for free markets swept across the world. The Soviet Union and communism collapsed. State-managed economies from India to Latin America liberalized, and globalization led to an economic boom. At the core of this transformation was privatization, as states retreated from what Lenin called the “commanding heights” of the economy: large industrial plants, banking, foreign trade, and other key sectors of a national economy. International financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF helped turn the ideology into a normative reality by encouraging rulers to turn their backs on patrimonialism and liberalize not only their economies but also their political systems by embracing democracy. They found willing partners in nascent postcommunist countries that were eager to join the rising globalized economy.

Western ideologues and especially neoconservatives interpreted this as proof of a causal relationship between free markets, democracy, and freedom, a link Hayek had posited in his popular book
The Road to Serfdom
, written at the apex of totalitarianism in World War II. US President Ronald Reagan shared Thatcher’s faith in free markets and was fond of saying that “the best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away.” He meant it. As Thatcher did, he introduced sweeping economic policies, christened Reaganomics, that opposed government regulations, tariffs, and other infringements on the marketplace. He pushed for massive tax cuts that favored business growth at the expense of government budgets to help stimulate the private sector and recover from the economic malaise of the 1970s.

Faced with ballooning federal deficits, Reagan established the Private Sector Survey on Cost Control to eradicate waste and inefficiency in the federal government. Its chairman, J. Peter Grace, unsurprisingly concluded that “government-run enterprises lack the driving forces of marketplace competition, which promote tight, efficient operations.” The solution was privatization: “Turn government operations over to the private sector and you get innovation, efficiency, flexibility.”
²

Consequently, a number of areas previously considered inherently governmental were increasingly privatized, from the postal system to prisons,
rationalized by the belief that businesses could find more efficient and effective solutions to public functions than the government. This faith in free market forces cleared the road for the eventual privatization of security.

Reagan’s successors continued his privatization policy, as hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of government activities were outsourced to businesses. In 1993, President Bill Clinton announced the creation of the National Performance Review, an interagency task force led by Vice President Al Gore to identify problems and offer solutions and ideas for government savings, including privatization. Across the aisle, the Republican-majority Congress was equally dedicated to the cause. The result was “cost savings in a range of 20 to 50 percent when federal and private sector service providers compete to perform these functions,” according to the Office of Management and Budget.
³

By the time George W. Bush entered the White House, privatization was a well-established norm despite the fact that the relative cost saving associated with the private sector remains hotly debated among economists. During his tenure, he sought to privatize parts of the gigantic social security program, which paid out $675 billion in benefits in 2009, and nominated devout followers of Ayn Rand, the high priestess of unfettered capitalism, to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which polices Wall Street. It should not be so shocking that the US military also acceded to privatization.

The Cold War’s end produced a perfect storm of market conditions that forged the private military industry. As the world became unstable, the United States was simultaneously downsizing its massive military by 40 percent in order to reap a “peace dividend.” Almost immediately upon taking office in 1993, the Clinton administration implemented a 40 percent drop in the defense budget and reduced forces from 2.2 million to 1.4 million active-duty soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines. The cuts affected the entire military. Army divisions were reduced from eighteen to ten, navy ships were decreased from 547 to 346, and air force fighter wings were dropped from thirty-six to nineteen. Overseas troop strength was especially targeted for reduction, as the United States no longer required a massive army standing watch over the Iron Curtain to guard against Soviet invasion. Troops stationed overseas shrank by more than 50 percent, from approximately six hundred thousand in 1990 to two hundred fifty thousand in 1999.
⁴
These dramatic reductions in force structure generated the labor pool of experienced ex–military personnel that the new private military industry needed to grow.

Just as military supply was shrinking, demand for military operations was on the rise. From 1960 to 1991, the US Army conducted ten operational events
outside of normal training and alliance commitments; by comparison, from 1991 to 1998, the Army conducted twenty-six operational events. The US Marine Corps undertook fifteen contingency operations between 1982 and 1989 but conducted sixty-two such operations after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
⁵
US land forces found themselves surprisingly busier in the post–Cold War era than during the decades of Soviet Union nuclear threat.

The dwindling military force structure combined with the mission creep of stability operations created a post–Cold War security vacuum that the budding private military industry was eager to fill. The United States licensed MPRI to work for Croatia and Bosnia, which hired it to train and equip their forces for more than $150 million. The State Department contracted DynCorp International to provide “peace verifiers” in Kosovo, and to train Haitian police, and eradicate coca plants as a part of Plan Colombia, during which three of its American crop-duster pilots were shot down and killed.
⁶
Lacking its own full complement of forces, the United States permitted the private military industry to perform tasks traditionally associated exclusively with the national armed forces. As Tim Spicer of Sandline International explains: “The end of the Cold War has allowed conflicts long suppressed or manipulated by the superpowers to reemerge. At the same time, most armies have got smaller and live footage on CNN of United States troops being killed in Somalia has had staggering effects on the willingness of governments to commit to foreign conflicts. We fill the gap.”
⁷

Another factor in the new market for force is what war scholar Christopher Coker calls “humane warfare.” Following the Cold War, the Western way of war changed. It sought to humanize war by converting it into a humane endeavor that seeks to minimize casualties on all sides, even among enemy combatants. Perhaps the decades of living under the threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction had curdled the West’s appetite for bloodshed; perhaps the rise of the human rights regime had a hand, as it required UN commanders on Balkan battlefields and elsewhere to fight with human rights lawyers by their sides to parse the excessively complex and convoluted rules of engagement on the use of force. Possibly, the effort to sanitize war of cruelty resulted from a collective amnesia regarding war’s fundamental nature in the modern memory, or conceivably, it was the sight, captured on CNN, of four dead and mutilated US soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by gloating mobs of AK-47-wielding Somalis in 1993. Maybe it was all of this and more.

In the almost twenty years after Somalia, the United States has introduced two significant innovations to realize “humane” warfare: armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, also known as drones) and the private military industry to do the dying for America. Technology such as precision-guided munitions launched from drone aircraft reduces the risk of civilian casualties and collateral damage, and it avoids the sticky situation of a US pilot being shot down and captured or killed by the enemy.

Contractors, meanwhile, are mostly disposable human beings. Although some evidence suggests that the public is just as concerned about the deaths of contractors as it is about military deaths, statistics on the former are much less likely to be known.
⁸
The United States reveres its fallen soldiers: the media pay tribute to the dead daily, politicians running for office reflexively invoke their sacrifices, and members of the public demonstrate their wide support—even if they do not support the wars—with bumper stickers, yellow ribbons and lapel pins (an old US Army tradition), and billboards. In stark contrast, no one even tallies the numbers of dead contractors, much less reveres them, despite the fact that research shows a significant number of contractors died in Iraq and Afghanistan (see
figures 3.2
and
3.3
).

Through technology and contractors, the United States could fight wars without tears. It need not spill much of its own blood, thereby giving the appearance of humanizing warfare and even making war seem virtuous when labeled “humanitarian intervention,” as was the case in the Balkans. Such anodyne endeavors to humanize war are delusional, as Carl von Clausewitz, the great eighteenth-century Prussian war theorist, cautions: “Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: war is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst.”
⁹
Nonetheless, private armies became an attractive option for the United States well before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The appeal of private force is understandable regardless of century. Even Sir Thomas More, the Renaissance humanist and author of
Utopia
, coining the word, advocated using mercenaries. Despite the protestations of Catherine of Siena in the Middle Ages or organizations such as Human Rights First today, private armies are big business for a reason: they work. As with many things in the world, the utility of private force varies from individual situation to individual situation. But for many, the military advantages that mercenaries provide
to employers are significant and timeless, which is why they remain an enduring facet of history.

First, mercenaries offer on-demand military services to execute whatever plans their employers please, whether buttressing national security, furthering a commercial interest, settling a dispute, self-glorification, or self-preservation. In an insecure world, there will always be a demand for security services. The
condottieri
made their livelihoods surfing the maelstrom of armed politics that pervaded northern Italy during the high Middle Ages, so much so that some mercenary captains became political actors in their own right, such as Braccio da Montone and Sigismondo Malatesta, who ruled lands in addition to private armies. Others, such as Francesco Sforza of Milan, became so strong that they took over the states they served, as warlord became lord.

On-demand soldiers also allow rulers to swell their armies’ ranks with mercenaries when volunteers or conscripts are lacking. Examples are numerous: Persia in the fifth century BC; William the Conqueror in the eleventh century; Sweden and the Holy Roman Empire in the seventeenth century; England, France, and Prussia in the eighteenth century; and the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan today. In each of these cases, for-hire soldiers made up one-third to one-half of the overall military strength. On-demand force also allows a surge capacity to serve the immediate strategic needs of rulers who fail to plan. When England found that it did not possess enough ground troops to suppress its rebellious colonies during the American Revolution (1776–1781), England doubled its army by hiring thirty thousand German soldiers. Two hundred years later, the United States is in a similar position to its former foe: half of its military force structure is made up of contractors, and the United States cannot fight without them.