Private Military Companies

Private armies are back and not likely to go away. Over the past centuries, rulers first encouraged, then delegitimized, and finally all but eliminated mercenarism. Now it is returning. Since the end of the Cold War, private military actors have reappeared in force, some as military enterprisers and others reminiscent of medieval mercenaries. The future of private warfare seems bright, while the future of war looks perilous.

McFate, Sean. The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (pp. 149-150). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Private Military History Mercenaries fight primarily for profit rather than politics, and the job is as old as war itself, often referred to as the second-oldest profession. The word mercenary comes from the Latin merces (“wages” or “pay”); today it connotes vileness, treachery, and murder. But it was not always so. Being a mercenary was once considered an honest albeit bloody trade, and employing mercenaries to fight wars was routine throughout most of military history: King Shulgi of Ur’s army (2094–2047 BC); Xenophon’s army of Greek mercenaries known as the Ten Thousand (401–399 BC); and Carthage’s mercenary armies in the Punic Wars against Rome (264–146 BC), including Hannibal’s sixty-thousand-strong army, which marched elephants over the Alps to attack Rome from the north. When Alexander invaded Asia in 334 BC, his army included five thousand foreign mercenaries, and the Persian army that faced him contained ten thousand Greeks. In fact, Greek mercenaries were core to his military campaign, on all sides of the conflict. Rome relied on mercenaries throughout its thousand-year reign, and Julius Caesar was repeatedly saved, even at Alesia, by mounted German mercenaries in his war against Vercingetorix in Gaul. Nearly half of William the Conqueror’s army in the eleventh century were mercenaries, as he could not afford a large standing army, and there were not enough nobles and knights to accomplish the Norman conquest of England. In Egypt and Syria, the Mamluk sultanate (1250–1517) was a regime of mercenary slaves who had been converted to Islam. From the late tenth to the early fifteenth centuries, Byzantine emperors surrounded themselves with Norse mercenaries, the Varangian Guard, who were known for their fierce loyalty, prowess with the battle ax, and ability to swill copious amounts of alcohol. In Europe, the condottieri, Swiss companies, landsknechts, Bretons, Gascons, Picards, and other mercenaries dominated warfare from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The list is long. For at least three thousand years, private military force has been a feature—often the major feature—of warfare. Independent mercenaries foster a different kind of armed conflict: contract warfare. Contract warfare is literally a free market for force, where private armies and clients seek each other out, negotiate prices, and wage wars for personal gain. There were problems with this way of war, especially in the European Middle Ages, when bands of brigands sold their services to the highest bidder during wartime and became marauders in times of peace, raiding and ravaging the countryside. In extreme cases, such as medieval Italy, this attracted more fortune-seeking mercenaries, perpetuating a tragic cycle that resulted in ceaseless conflict. Continuous wars combined with a lack of economic opportunity swelled mercenary ranks, which drew warriors of all stripes from across the continent. Italy was awash in free companies during this tumultuous era. In France, they fought in the Hundred Years War and were known as routiers or écorcheurs (literally, “skinners of dead bodies”). In Spain, they fought for both Peters in the war between Peter the Cruel of Castile and Peter the Ceremonious of Aragon. Hiring private armies was how war was usually fought.

McFate, Sean. The Modern Mercenary (pp. 27-28). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

In the twentieth century, the Westphalian order was at its zenith, and the free market for force was pushed underground. World War I, World War II, and the Cold War were emblematic conflicts of the period, waged between “great power” nations using huge public militaries as gladiators to settle political disputes. The privilege of legitimately waging war was arrogated exclusively to states and their militaries and was the view espoused in international relations theory, which arose during this period. In fact, so Westphalian were the emergent “laws of war” that they sought only to regulate interstate warfare and largely ignored armed nonstate actors. Early laws of war, such as the Lieber Code (1863), the First Geneva Convention (1864), and the Hague Conventions (1899 and 1907), simply codified nineteenth-century customs of war as fought between national armies. States developed a positive legal regime through multilateral treaties that dictated appropriate behaviors on the battlefield between their armies. In other words, the laws of war codified battlefield custom originating in European religion, chivalry, and culture. Historian and legal scholar Geoffrey Best describes the period from 1856 to 1909 as the “epoch of highest repute” for war etiquette.

McFate, Sean. The Modern Mercenary (p. 35). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

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.

McFate, Sean. The Modern Mercenary (pp. 36-37). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

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: 1. A mercenary shall not have the right to be a combatant or a prisoner of war. 2. A mercenary is any person who: a. is especially recruited locally or abroad in order to fight in an armed conflict; b. does, in fact, take a direct part in the hostilities; c. is motivated to take part in the hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain and, in fact, is promised, by or on behalf of a Party to the conflict, material compensation substantially in excess of that promised or paid to combatants of similar ranks and functions in the armed forces of that Party; d. is neither a national of a Party to the conflict nor a resident of territory controlled by a Party to the conflict; e. is not a member of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict; and f. has not been sent by a State which is not a Party to the conflict on official duty as a member of its armed forces.18

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!”

McFate, Sean. The Modern Mercenary (pp. 37-38). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

On April 27, 1522, two armies faced each other at dawn across a soggy field ready for battle at a manor park of Bicocca, a small town six kilometers north of Milan. On one side stood the combined forces of France and Venice, numbering more than twenty thousand troops, including the mercenary captain, or condottiero, Giovanni de’ Medici’s Black Bands and sixteen thousand dreaded Swiss mercenaries. For two centuries, Swiss companies were the scourge of the European battlefield, overtaking superior forces with deadly twenty-one-foot steel-tipped pikes and precision formations that could run down heavily armored knights—as the doomed duke of Burgundy could attest to—making them the most sought-after private armies on the market.1 Opposing the combined army were the comparatively meager Spanish imperial, Milanese, and papal forces, which numbered only sixty-four hundred but included landsknechts, or German mercenary pikemen. The Swiss companies and landsknechts were more than mere business rivals and held special contempt for each other. Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I had formed the first landsknechts regiments several decades earlier and patterned them after the Swiss companies, which regarded them as cheap copies purloining their brand. Consequently, no quarter was given when these mercenary rivals met on the battlefield. The attack commenced at dawn. The French advanced on the outnumbered Spanish imperial forces with two columns of Swiss mercenaries, numbering a few thousand each, bearing down on the landsknechts and the Spanish arquebusiers—soldiers using a predecessor of the musket—who stood behind a sunken road and an earthen rampart. As the Swiss advanced, their French masters ordered them to halt and wait for the French artillery to bombard the imperial defenses first, but the Swiss did not. Perhaps the Swiss captains doubted that the artillery would have any effect on the earthworks; perhaps the Swiss did not trust the French, owing to an earlier pay dispute regarding their contract; perhaps it was the aggressive Swiss push-of-pike strategy that advanced without support of firearms; perhaps it was rivalry between the two Swiss columns, one from the rural cantons and the other from Bern and urban cantons; or perhaps it was their “blind pugnacity and self-confidence,” as a French eyewitness later remarked.2 Either way, the Swiss moved swiftly across the open field without regard for consequence. As soon as the Swiss were in range of the enemy cannons, they began to take massive casualties. With nowhere to go but forward, they moved toward the Spanish positions but came to a deadly halt when they reached the sunken road that acted as a ditch and the tall rampart behind it. Atop that rampart were the landsknechts, who mercilessly attacked their trapped rivals, while the arquebusiers fired downward into the sunken road, massacring the Swiss. Retreating back across the field, they lost more men to cannon barrage. By the time they reached French lines, they had suffered more than three thousand casualties, including twenty-two captains and all but one of the French commanders who accompanied the Swiss assault. The battle was lost, and three days later, the Swiss abandoned the campaign altogether, marching home to their cantons and marking the end of Swiss dominance in the mercenary market. As Francesco Guicciardini, a contemporary historian, wrote, “they went back to their mountains diminished in numbers, but much more diminished in audacity; for it is certain that the losses which they suffered at Bicocca so affected them that in the coming years they no longer displayed their wonted vigour.”3 From this battle comes the Spanish word bicoca, meaning a bargain or something acquired at little cost. The problems of contract warfare are as timeless as the benefits. The unexpected departure of the Swiss mercenaries left their French masters powerless to carry on their campaign, and the French lost the war. Better, Machiavelli would have counseled, to have one’s own troops than to hire mercenaries, which cost the French everything. Although today’s nascent market for force is tame compared with the medieval market, the condottieri have much to teach us about how privatized warfare alters strategic outcomes.

McFate, Sean. The Modern Mercenary (pp. 50-51). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

The SAS, which eschews uniforms, the use of last names, and badges of rank, is a Top Secret regiment skilled in both unconventional warfare and intelligence operations. Accused of using assassination and torture (notably sensory-deprivation techniques) against the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and others, SAS veterans have long been available to Colonel Sterling for service in paramilitary adventures of an ad hoc sort and have served widely as mercenaries under various leaders and banners.

Hougan, Jim. Spooks: The Haunting of America—The Private Use of Secret Agents (p. 28). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.