The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (15 page)

Retired British army general Sir Rupert Smith calls these neomedieval conflicts “war amongst the people,” because they do not revolve around states. Smith wrote
The Utility of Force
after forty years in the British army and served in East and South Africa, Arabia, the Caribbean, Northern Ireland, Europe, and Malaysia. He commanded the United Kingdom’s Armoured Division in the (first) Gulf War, led UN forces in Bosnia in 1995, and commanded British forces in Northern Ireland from 1996 to 1999. He finished his career as the deputy commander of NATO during the Kosovo War. After this distinguished career, he concludes that the Westphalian way of war is dead: “War as cognitively known to most non-combatants, war as battle in a field between men and machinery, war as a massive deciding event in a dispute in international affairs: such war no longer exists.”
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A key feature of neomedieval warfare is the market for force, creating the possibility of contract warfare. Like their
condottieri
ancestors, PMCs are among the new actors waging neomedieval warfare, further blurring the Westphalian distinction between combatant and civilian and that between war and peace. There are no Geneva Protocols or laws of war that clearly regulate armed civilians, leaving their status on the battlefield unclear and challenging the definition of
mercenary
in international law. This question has generated countless academic articles by scholars and international lawyers steeped in the Westphalian tradition of warfare and generally inimical to the trend. On the more practical side, it raises questions about how public armies should interact with private ones, as demonstrated by government initiatives such as the US Commission on Wartime Contracting, international efforts such as the Montreux Document, which aspires to establish best practices for the industry, and the industry’s own codes of conduct. However, the challenge remains essentially unresolved, as it was at Béziers and also during Machiavelli’s time, and is perhaps unresolvable.

Another consequence is the growing dependency between governments and the industry to win wars. As demonstrated in
chapter 2
above, half of US personnel in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are contractors, and barring mandatory conscription, the superpower cannot wage war without the private military industry. This overutilization of private military organizations alters strategic outcomes in ways national armies do not. For example, in contract warfare, employers, whether Florence in the Middle Ages or the United States in Iraq, are dependent on the industry to deliver victory. The example is most clear with Florence, since the city-state had a relatively weak militia and was almost completely reliant on the services of
condottieri
such as Hawkwood for its military might. The case with the United States is subtler, because the country maintains a potent military, yet it remains true nonetheless.

Despite its strong armed forces, the United States is increasingly dependent on the private military industry to deliver “victory” in modern war. This is because its military is fundamentally structured, trained, and equipped to wage Westphalian warfare, such as defeating the Soviet Union in a World War III scenario, rather than neomedieval enemies such as al-Qaida or the Taliban. For example, US military campaigns proceed in five phases: phase 0 is conflict prevention; phase 1 is the decision to deter or engage the enemy; phase 2 is seizing the initiative to outmaneuver the enemy; phase 3 is decisive operations to defeat the enemy on the field of battle; and phase 4 is postconflict transition and stability operations.
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In Westphalian warfare, decisive victory occurs on the battlefield in phase 3. Accordingly, during the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, the US military concentrated on phase 3 combat operations to win the victory while it contracted out most of the “lesser” phase 0 and phase 4 tasks.

However, in neomedieval warfare, military success in phase 3 matters little. There is no greater metaphor of this than the image of President George W. Bush standing on the deck of the US aircraft carrier
Abraham Lincoln
and declaring “victory” with a large “Mission Accomplished” banner behind him after phase 3 combat operations ended in Iraq, just a few weeks after the invasion began. Few observers today would claim that the United States had accomplished its mission on that brisk day in 2003, and the United States remained embroiled in Iraqi internal warfare well after Bush’s departure from the White House.

Victory in neomedieval warfare is dependent on successful phase 0 and phase 4 operations, which often do not involve combat, rather than winning battles in phase 3. It took the Pentagon a few years to learn this lesson in Iraq and Afghanistan, turning away from Westphalian warfare. This strategic paradigm shift is evidenced by the advent of National Security Presidential Directive 44 and the Defense Science Board Task Force on stability operations, which decree phase 4 postconflict and stability operations a strategic imperative on par with combat operations. Similarly, the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review recognizes
that a core military mission should be conflict prevention, or phase 0, to “prevent problems from becoming crises and crises from becoming conflicts.”
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Victory depended more on pre- and postconflict actions than on what happens on a battlefield.

However, the United States soon found itself unable to achieve victory by itself, because its military was tooled for Westphalian war and it lacked the civilian capacity to successful conduct phase 0 and phase 4 operations.
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To remedy this, President Barack Obama in 2009 announced a “civilian surge” to Afghanistan and established the Civilian Response Corps, but this initiative fizzled, because there was already a robust civilian presence in Afghanistan conducting stability operations: contractors. Tens of thousands of contractors were directing phase 0 and phase 4 operations, while the Civilian Response Corps mustered only one hundred full-time personnel.
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Earlier in the campaign, as the military focused on phase 3 combat operations, the private military industry was busy learning skills pertaining to phase 0 and phase 4 operations and selling them back to the government. This made the United States progressively dependent on the private sector for victory. In fact, many of the lessons that informed the army’s 2008 field manual on stability operations were drawn from private sector experiences.
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Of greater concern to the US military is that many of the specialized skills needed for stability operations can now only be found in the private sector and are considered proprietary knowledge. If the government wants to have access to these skills, it
must
hire the companies that perform them, because the military no longer has an internal capability of its own.

Moreover, the country’s primary development organization, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), already contracts out the vast majority of its work to the private sector. This led its director, Rajiv Shah, to compare it to the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower presaged.
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For instance, the Academy for Educational Development, or AED, was one of USAID’s larger partners, managing about $500 million annually in grants and contracts but suspended because of serious mismanagement of funds for programs in Pakistan, causing the firm to go bankrupt in 2011 and pay back $5 million to the government. The United States’ overreliance on contractors—both military and civilian—should concern it strategically, since it must rely on the private sector to conduct the stability operations that win neomedieval wars.

The United States is correspondingly vulnerable to strategic defeat when contractors fail. Nisour Square is the clearest case of this, as the tactical failure of Blackwater became a strategic liability for the United States throughout the Middle East. But other examples exist, too. In 2010, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission in Afghanistan determined that PMCs had failed in their contracts to train and mentor the Afghan police.
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General Stanley McChrystal, then–commander of ISAF, stated that police were one of the most crucial elements of his campaign plan, yet a US government investigation into police training by PMCs found the program did not “provide the [police] with the necessary skills to successfully fight the insurgency, and therefore, hampers the ability of DOD to fulfill its role in the emerging national strategy.”
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By outsourcing victory and defeat, the United States is increasingly becoming vulnerable to the ebb and flow of contract warfare, just like medieval Florence.

Warrior ethos is vital to why individuals fight and in some cases die. The differing motivations driving public and private warriors have long alienated the two from each other, as demonstrated by the brawl between the knights and the mercenaries following the sack of Béziers that resulted in the city’s destruction. Machiavelli is famous for descrying the faithlessness of mercenaries, implying that they have no interests other than profit. Yet many
condottieri
such as Bartolomeo d’Alviano, Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, and Cesare Borgia commanded great respect within Machiavelli’s lifetime. This tension is unfolding today, especially within the ranks of the profession itself.

The differences between public sector and private sector warriors are great. Westphalian militaries are highly normative institutions with a cultivated sense of patriotism and self-sacrifice. Like the knights at Béziers, soldiers are supposed to fight for a selfless ideal—God in the case of the knights and country for the soldiers—rather than for personal gain, and they are not allowed to negotiate salaries or working conditions, unionize, or go on strike. The profession maintains an unspoken covenant with the employer, be it church or state, which bequeaths them societal status and often food, housing, clothing, education, health care, and subsidized goods. In exchange, they are expected to protect their employer with their lives.

This “calling” creates a warrior ethos in Westphalian militaries that internalizes concepts such as “service,” “duty,” “honor,” “sacrifice,” and “country” into a code of conduct that seeks to distinguish soldiers from every other segment of society, which it terms
civilian
. This creed is imbued in every soldier from the moment he or she enters the ranks; for instance, the motto of the US Military Academy at West Point is “Duty, Honor, Country.” Working in the military is called “serving,” and many states such as Germany, Iran, and Brazil require mandatory conscription in part to hone the patriotism of their citizenry. As for the knights, the primary incentive of the Westphalian or public sector soldier should be idealism, specifically nationalism.

Private warriors are an affront to this code, because they reject it. Unlike their Westphalian counterparts, PMCs salute something far more palpable and base
than the state: profit. Scholar Christopher Coker has long studied warrior ethos and modern wars, and as he explains, “private security companies embrace the norms of the marketplace, with its attachment to the law of supply and demand…. Performance is measured against the standards of the marketplace, such as efficiency and cost. Their relationship with society is highly contractual.”
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A growing challenge of neomedieval warfare will be reconciling these dueling models of the warrior ethos, the business-oriented view of private armies with the nationalism of public ones, especially when the former is contracted to the latter. The relationship between society and private warriors is still unfolding, and it has the power to change civil-military relationships, what it means to “serve,” and ultimately who goes to war and who does not.

Neomedieval warfare has the power to affect the future of international relations. States are losing their monopoly of force, sometimes because it is lost in civil wars, as in Nepal or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and other times because they allow it, as the United States did by hiring PMCs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those who control violence can enforce their rule of law, or, as Mao Zedong bluntly said, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
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Another concern about neomedievalism is the commodification of conflict, since offering the instruments of war to anyone who can afford them will change warfare, why we fight, and the future of war. If money can buy firepower, then large corporations and ultrawealthy individuals will become a new kind of superpower.

There are at least two directions that the future market for force will take in a neomedieval world. The first is a mediated market for force, where military enterprisers dominate the market and work in close conjunction with their employers, as Wallenstein did with Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II during the Thirty Years War. The second is a free market in which mercenaries work for the highest bidder, seek war, and possibly generate it, as was the case in medieval Italy.

These two futures hold different outcomes for the world in terms of peace and security. To explore them, the cases of Liberia and Somalia are instructive. Africa is a useful location, since it is plagued by armed conflict and thus attractive to the industry. In fact, Africa will likely be where the industry ventures next, as supply naturally seeks demand.

In Liberia, DynCorp International acts as a military enterpriser, demobilizing the country’s old army and raising a new one for the government after its fourteen-year civil war. The contract for the new army was issued and paid for by the United States, and it is the first time in one hundred fifty years that one state has hired a company to raise another state’s armed forces. In the spirit of transparency, the author was a principal architect of this program. Study of this case examines the benefits and dangers of the military enterpriser model and the viability of a mediated market for force.

The second case involves Somalia, a true free market with “lone wolf” PMCs who fight for the highest bidder and become predatory when it suits them. Like medieval Italy, Somalia is an environment of ceaseless conflict and lawlessness. The case study here explores the implications of this and how private military actors heighten or check its instability.