The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (9 page)

Unconstrained by nationality in their recruitment, private armies can endure wars of attrition, as long as there is a paying client and enough willing men-at-arms on the planet. Such conditions only propagate private warfare. More war means more mercenaries, which gives private armies more resources to ply their trade, fostering more war. This self-feeding and ever-escalating cycle of violence generates the perpetual war that is the market for force.

On-demand military services make it easier and subsequently more tempting to go to war, in several ways. The option of private warriors lowers war’s barrier to entry for consumers. For the United States, using contractors saves the government from more painful political solutions, such as a national draft, courting unwilling or unsavory coalition partners or a premature withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan. Proponents and opponents of the wars admit that without contractors, the United States would require a total force of 320,000 in Iraq and a force of more than 210,000 in Afghanistan.
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Hiring contractors in domestically unpopular wars also allows the government to dodge national political debate over whether the wars should end, since few Americans care about contractor casualties.
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Similarly, when a policy is politically too risky, outsourcing it to the private sector offers employers a layer of plausible deniability in the event of failure. Not surprisingly, the origins of plausible deniability are tightly bound to nonstate violence. State rulers invented the concept at the turn of the seventeenth century to give themselves political cover for dubious ventures. If a private undertaking authorized by the ruler met with success, he or she could claim a share of the
profits, but if it met with failure, the ruler could claim that he or she was not responsible.

Plausible deniability was especially useful when using private forces could accidentally draw the state into war with another state. Since the end of the Cold War, governments have relied on the industry for clandestine and covert operations. Clandestine operations are those that the United States hopes will remain secret, but if they are exposed, it will either admit to or simply remain silent on them; covert operations are ones that the United States will always disavow. Typically, the United States only uses PMCs for clandestine operations, which is a legal gray area, whereas only the CIA is authorized under federal law to conduct covert operations.

However, this trend may be changing, as the United States has increasingly employed private spy firms for intelligence collection. These firms are typically founded by ex–CIA personnel, such as Cofer Black, the chairman of Total Intelligence Solutions, a subsidiary of Blackwater. Similarly, former CIA spy Duane Clarridge runs a network of contracted spies in Pakistan and Afghanistan to collect information on militant fighters, Taliban leaders, and the inner workings of Kabul’s ruling class. Michael D. Furlong created a private spy ring to track militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan for $22 million, although senior Pentagon officials claim that Furlong “deliberately misled” senior generals when journalists questioned the contract—a safe claim for the United States to make if a politically embarrassing operation fails or is exposed.

Plausible deniability also allows the government to hide secrets from itself, especially official oversight mechanisms. The United States’ use of contractors allows the executive branch a method of circumventing congressional oversight, because there is (at present) little requirement to report on the activities of contractors. The State Department, DOD, and intelligence agencies all have dedicated congressional oversight committees. Members of Congress are continually concerned with the deliberate lack of executive branch transparency regarding contractors; according to a 2008 Congressional Research Service investigation, “as oversight hearings have demonstrated, the executive branch either has not kept sufficient records to produce or has been unwilling to present basic, accurate information on the companies employed under United States government contracts and subcontracts in Iraq.”
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More generally, the White House can exploit the oversight loopholes to prosecute war while politically insulating itself with plausible deniability.

Plausible deniability fosters moral hazard among decision makers, making it easier to enter and remain at war. Moral hazard is a concept used by economists to describe a situation in which a person or institution does not have to face the full consequences of its decisions and therefore acts in a reckless manner. For example, people might be more likely to steal a car if they knew the
police would not catch them, or a bank may make riskier loans if it knew the government would bail it out if the loans defaulted. Economist Paul Krugman describes moral hazard as “any situation in which one person makes the decision about how much risk to take, while someone else bears the cost if things go badly.”
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In contract warfare, moral hazard encourages war. The plausible deniability provided by contractors allows democratic regimes to circumvent their own checks and balances, established to prevent rash decision making such as declaring war and risking the survival of the nation. In the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan, the private military industry allowed the White House to wage war without the full supervision of Congress. Moreover, contractors are easier to blame in the event of failure than one’s own military. This situation invites moral hazard, because decision makers are not fully held accountable for their actions, lowering the threshold to go to war.

The moral hazards in the market for force extend beyond plausible deniability. As with many business transactions, the market for force is plagued by asymmetries of information, which also encourage moral hazard. In economic theory, information asymmetry arises when one party has more critical information than another in a business transaction, which can be leveraged for advantage. This is especially true when an employer needs to hire a specialist who is far more expert in the situation than the employer and is tempted to exploit this gap in knowledge for profit.

This leads to a related challenge that economists call the principal–agent problem. Take the example of a leaky roof. The home owner calls a carpenter to fix it, and the carpenter tells the owner that the entire roof must be replaced, when, in fact, only a small hole requires repair. The unscrupulous carpenter is incentivized to lie, because he will make substantially more money replacing the whole roof than repairing a small hole. The home owner innocently agrees to the costly roof replacement, because he lacks the expertise to know better. In economic theory, the employer is the principal, and the carpenter is the agent. The agent, who should act in the principal’s interest, instead acts in his own interest because of moral hazard.

Similarly, in contract warfare, the employer is the principal, and the private military organization is the agent. Dishonest PMCs can exploit this asymmetry of information for profit, since it is difficult for the employer to observe and understand what the PMC does during a campaign. To alleviate this problem, medieval customers would have representatives, called
provveditori
, travel with
and monitor the hired mercenary companies during the campaign and even goad them into battle to ensure that they did not shirk their obligations.

However, this was a defective system, as
condottieri
could manipulate key information, such as intelligence on the enemy that only the
condottieri
knew, to unduly influence the
provveditori
to make business decisions in favor of the
condottiero
’s interests rather than the client’s. Or
condottieri
could simply ignore the
provveditori
and allow themselves to be outbid on the field of battle, turning against their original employers. This is precisely what happened to the Milanese at Canturino in 1363, when Milan’s entire Hungarian contingent went over to the enemy. During their war with Pisa in 1364, the Florentines successfully bought off Pisa’s mercenaries amassed before its walls. Who was managing whom?

Similar asymmetries of information exist between the United States and the private military industry that the industry can exploit for profit. The bureaucracy needed to competently oversee contractors did not grow commensurately with the industry during the Iraq and Afghanistan boom years, and as a result, the government lacks the capacity to manage the industry, as the Gansler report and other government studies repeatedly show. A 2010 US inspector general’s investigation found that the State Department did not adequately supervise the PMCs that were paid $1.6 billion to build the Afghan National Police.
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To avoid this problem, the United States deploys modern
provveditori
, called contracting officers’ technical representatives (COTRs), into the field to oversee the government’s interests, but, as in the Middle Ages, this system is deficient. There are insufficient numbers of COTRs, those that exist receive inadequate training, and they lack the needed tools and authority to manage multimillion-dollar contracts in conflict zones. Owing to this, COTRs are vulnerable to manipulation in the same manner as
provveditori
, because they are often too reliant on contractors’ specialized knowledge and access to key information to make important decisions regarding the contract. This represents a clear conflict of interest. Contractors, like the
condottieri
, are incentivized to share only expert opinion or information that lengthens or expands their contract for profit.

That the mercenaries can themselves be cheated is another type of moral hazard; if a manager cannot be fired because he or she is protected by nepotism or cronyism, then that manager can treat his or her employees unprofessionally with impunity. Strong employers in the market for force can renege on paying their mercenaries without fear of consequence. In the Middle Ages, a scammed mercenary company could attempt to attack its unfaithful employer but may have been too weak to do so after a long military campaign. Furthermore, the employer could hire a fresh company at a fraction of the price to chase off the remnants of the war-weary company.

Some employers were also relatively untouchable. Pope Gregory XI was infamous for lack of payment during the War of Eight Saints and drove Hawkwood and half of the Breton companies to defect to his enemies. As in the Middle Ages, there are at present few options for PMCs whose customers have backed out of their contracts. The market for force is inherently a distrustful environment that encourages both principal and agent to behave in treacherous ways, which is dangerous in the context of war.

Doug Brooks, president of ISOA, once made a case for the privatization of warfare this way: “write a cheque, end a war.”
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While appealing, it is obviously simplistic, even if there are some examples, such as Executive Outcomes’ involvement in Sierra Leone. Generally, contract warfare is fraught with difficulties, especially in contract enforcement. According to military historians Jurgen Brauer and Hubert van Tuyll, the challenge of holding parties to contractual promises eventually put the
condottieri
out of business.
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There was not—nor is there today—an effective judicial system to enforce contracts in the market for force.

Weak contract enforcement is a central flaw in the market for force, because it allows both the client and the mercenary to double-cross each other, leading to traitorous outcomes. Private military force operates in places with little governance, such as fragile states or war zones, where it is difficult to enforce contracts; there are no war police, judiciary, or prisons for deceitful employers or private armies.

Even superpowers such as the United States have trouble disciplining errant PMCs. When Blackwater personnel killed seventeen Iraqi civilians at Nisour Square in 2007, they were simply sent home without punishment. Or, as Erik Prince, then CEO of the firm, said during congressional testimony, “they have one decision to make: window or aisle” on their return flight home.
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Other than being fired, PMC personnel face little, if any, punishment for mistakenly killing civilians, whereas members of the US armed forces or Iraq security forces could be court-martialed and imprisoned.

For contracts to work without law enforcement, there must be trust between the seller and the buyer. But trust is a rare commodity in the market for force. As fourteenth-century Italian novelist Franco Sacchetti put it, in mercenaries, “there is neither love nor faith.”
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The principal-agent problems in contract warfare breed treachery and tragedy for consumers, providers, and bystanders alike in the market for force.

Conspicuously absent from the list of concerns is the question of legitimacy, which presupposes that only states and international organizations such as the United Nations can rightfully wield military force. This is a modern bias that demands exposure. To understand this prejudice, we must first delve into the origins of the contemporary world order and its special antipathy toward mercenarism.

War made the state, and the state made war.

—Charles Tilly

The morning of November 19, 2005, started just like any other for the US marines of Kilo Company. It was Kilo’s third tour in Iraq, and many of its marines were veterans of the initial invasion, in the spring of 2003, and the hard-fought battle for Fallujah in the fall of 2004. A convoy of four Humvees rolled out of the base that morning for a routine patrol in the city of Haditha. They traveled in a line, well spaced out and heavily armed. Unknown to them, insurgents had planted a large roadside bomb in their path, probably weeks before, and at 7:15, it blasted the fourth Humvee, lifting it into the air and splitting it in two. One marine was killed instantly, and the other two were seriously injured.

What happened next is unclear. According to reports, the marine leader stopped the convoy and ordered five Iraqi men—a taxi driver and four teenagers—out of their car and shot them dead in the street. Next, the marines attacked four adjacent houses and over the next few hours killed nineteen more civilians, ranging in age from three to seventy-six. Many were shot multiple times at close range while unarmed, some still in their pajamas and in their bedrooms. One was in a wheelchair, and four were children.

Many believe that the marines’ killing spree was revenge for the death of their squad mate, similar to the My Lai massacre of the Vietnam War. However, we may never know what actually happened, because the only investigation—conducted on the military by the military—did not fully address the core issue: the killing of unarmed civilians. Instead, it blamed “an unscrupulous enemy” that used unconventional warfare tactics, focused on procedural and bureaucratic processes, and dismissed the entire incident as a “case study” that illustrates “how simple failures can lead to disastrous results.”
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After the massacre of twenty-six civilians, the military quietly dropped all charges against the marines except for
the squad leader, who was acquitted in a court-martial. The world did not seem to notice or care much.

Haditha stands in stark contrast to Nisour Square, a Baghdad traffic circle where Blackwater employees killed seventeen Iraqi civilians under similar circumstances while escorting a US diplomatic convoy on September 16, 2007. Like the marines, the Blackwater personnel went unpunished, but unlike the case with the marines, the world took notice and was outraged.

Iraqis cursed Blackwater, and a firestorm of anti-US sentiment swept through the country, undermining the United States’ counterinsurgency strategy of “winning hearts and minds.” Radical Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Mahdi Army that spearheaded the first major armed confrontation against the United States–led occupation forces, demanded the expulsion of these “criminals” from Iraq. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki bluntly declared that “it cannot be accepted by an American security company to carry out a killing. These are very serious challenges to the sovereignty of Iraq.”
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The outrage spread beyond Iraq’s borders and generated such international ill will that Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, had to publicly address the shooting and launch an official investigation. Shortly afterward, the US government initiated four additional independent investigations led by the Department of Defense, the FBI, and other agencies. Congress also launched its own investigation, and Congressman Henry Waxman, the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, held hearings “to understand what has happened and the extent of the damage to United States security interests” and concluded that “the controversy over Blackwater is an unfortunate demonstration of the perils of excessive reliance on private security contractors.”
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The investigations and outrage did not stop there. The Iraqis conducted their own investigation and banned Blackwater from operating in Iraq, demanded that the US government end its contract with the company, and called on Blackwater to pay the families $8 million in compensation. Private organizations also carried out inquiries and published their findings in reports such as Human Rights First’s
Private Security Contractors at War: Ending the Culture of Impunity
. The United Nations used the occasion to release an ongoing two-year study into the “tremendous increase” in armed contractors and concluded that even though they were hired as “security guards,” they were, in fact, performing military duties, making firms like Blackwater a “new form of mercenary activity” and illegal under international law.
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Both the marines and Blackwater personnel committed the same crime with the same outcomes, yet international reaction was radically different. In the case of the marines, there was almost no reaction—a single internal investigation, and the charges were quietly dropped. Few around the world seemed to notice, and fewer today remember. By contrast, Nisour Square immediately sparked
international ire and multiple high-level inquiries, and it remains seared in the global imagination as a nadir of the Iraq War, analogous to the My Lai massacre of the Vietnam War. Why this major disparity in reaction? What accounts for the stigma against private military organizations? The answer lies in the origins of the modern world order, and to understand this, we must go backward in time.

Life in the European Middle Ages was chaotic. If you were a peasant, you likely had several masters who demanded your allegiance: the local feudal lord, the king, the neighboring Franciscan monastery, the Holy Roman Emperor, the pope, to name a few. Worse, they often feuded, simultaneously claiming rights to you, your land, and your soul under pain of death. Unlike today, there was no single supreme authority within your territory, as in the modern state, and this led to overlapping authorities and divided loyalties.

Political scientists describe this situation as “fractured” or “fragmented” sovereignty, and it was the central feature of the medieval world order, where popes, emperors, kings, bishops, nobles, city-states, monastic orders, chivalric orders, and vassals frequently made concurrent and conflicting claims to the same parcel of land and the people upon it. Not surprisingly, this led to a lot of war.

Like most of history, the Middle Ages knew no taboo against mercenaries. Despite Machiavelli’s protestations, the mercenary profession was considered a legitimate trade, and often the lesser sons of nobility, such as Duke Werner of Urslingen, Count Konrad von Landau, and Giovanni de’ Medici, sought careers as mercenary captains. There was no stigma attached to hiring a private army; it was considered no different from employing an engineering company to repair one’s moat or commissioning an artist to paint portraits of one’s family. The commodification of conflict resulted in a thriving market for force, as the services of private armies, or “free companies,” as they were known, went to the highest or most powerful bidder. Contract warfare was common in the Middle Ages, especially in northern Italy.

The medieval world order traces its roots back to the fall of the Roman Empire and perhaps reached its zenith during the “high Middle Ages,” about 1000 to 1300. It slowly declined in the centuries that followed. Historians conventionally peg the end of the medieval era around 1500, but the reality is less clear. The centuries between 1400 and 1700 witnessed the gradual consolidation of political authority from the fragmented sovereignty of the Middle Ages—where church, emperor, king, princes, city-states, monasteries, and the like all made competing and overlapping claims of authority—to a centralized system of states that became the modern world order. But there is one date especially associated with this transition.

In 1618, an uprising in Bohemia turned into a war throughout central Europe between Catholics, Protestants, and political opportunists that lasted thirty gruesome years. The devastation of this Thirty Years War was irrevocable. Nearly a third of the populations of what are now Germany and the Czech Republic were wiped out. The armies of Sweden, then a superpower, destroyed up to two thousand castles, eighteen thousand villages, and fifteen hundred towns in Germany alone. The economy was in tatters, and many small villages and cities would take a hundred years to recover. Disease and famine were rampant, and tens of thousands of people became refugees, wandering the plains of Europe. In terms of sheer destruction, the Thirty Years War was comparable to the World Wars for central Europe.

Out of the Thirty Years War emerged the modern international system, or so we are told. The war ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, named after two peace treaties signed in the Westphalian cities of Osnabrück and Münster, in modern-day Germany. All the continental great powers were party to this peace that redrew the map of Europe and rewrote the rules of power. The standard reading of this event holds that 1648 delivered humanity from the anarchy of the Middle Ages by creating a new world order, sometimes called the Westphalian order, which should look familiar to modern readers. Some scholars trace the origins of the modern order back to the Peace of Lodi (1454), which founded the Italian Concert, or developments in late medieval France, but 1648 is conventionally seen as the establishment of the modern world order.
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The Westphalian order has three primary characteristics. First, unlike in the Middle Ages, it vests all power into a single political actor: the state. The victors of the Thirty Years War resolved the medieval problem of overlapping authorities and allegiances by declaring that only entities that controlled land may legitimately rule. Certainly, land-based authorities existed before—empires, kingdoms, dukedoms, and so on—but the modern state is different, in that it claims
absolute
power over all people and resources within its territorial boundaries to the exclusion of nonstate actors, such as the pope.

Second, states must recognize other states as equals, and third, states should not interfere with the internal affairs of other states. Unlike in the Middle Ages, this drew a clear line between domestic and foreign politics. For domestic politics, states were free to govern as they wished, so long as they could persuade or compel their populations to obey their rule. Over the coming centuries, states increasingly participated in constructing citizenship and nationalism, so much so that by the twentieth century, most Europeans and others identified first with their nationality and second with their religion, ethnic group, or other affiliations.

States also forcibly compelled dissident citizens to obey their rule and sought a monopoly of violence so no one could fight back. They outlawed their armed competition, such as mercenaries, who could physically threaten the government’s existence. The state’s exclusive claim to violence to uphold its rule of law is, according to many, the very essence of statehood. For instance, in 1919, the eminent German sociologist Max Weber defined the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”
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This definition remains widely used today, and states that cannot maintain a monopoly of force and endure civil war or frequent violent crime are routinely described as “weak,” “fragile,” or “failed” states.

For foreign politics, states made treaties with other states, sometimes sought to expand forcibly into their neighbors’ territory, and prevented other states from interfering in their internal politics. Over time, states developed stronger controls over their own borders and built standing national armies—not present in the Middle Ages—to wage war against other states. The great seventeenth-century Prussian war theorist Carl von Clausewitz describes the use of militaries by states as “a duel on a larger scale” to resolve interstate disputes. For him, war is simply the “continuation of politics by others means.”
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His seminal book
On War
remains the best rationale of the Westphalian way of war, which is fundamentally between states and best exemplified by World Wars I and II.

Westphalian sovereignty demanded that states put private armies out of business. First, if a state were to govern as the sole authority within a given territory, it needed a monopoly of force to uphold its rule of law; all threats to this enterprise, such as mercenaries, were proscribed. Second, the Westphalian system held that each state was responsible for transborder violence that emanated from its territory, even if the regime did not support that violence. Owing to this, states prohibited private armies out of fear that they might start a war with a neighbor and drag both states into armed conflict with each other. The medieval market for force came to an end with the expansion of the Westphalian system, as public armies replaced private ones and mercenaries were outlawed. So powerful is this stigma against mercenarism that it still haunts the world order today, as evidenced by international reaction to the Haditha versus Nisour killings.

Given the state’s interest in violence as a means of control, it is not surprising that the rise of the modern state is closely related to war. The development of states and the subsequent state system that makes up the Westphalian order was gradual and complex, with a thick scholarly literature on the topic. A full review of this research is beyond the scope of this book, but one thing is clear: the state’s
superiority at wielding violence, both domestically and abroad, allowed it to stamp out internal dissidence and conquer nonstate rivals.

According to historical sociologist Charles Tilly, states arose as a sort of security racket, akin to the Mafia, providing “protection” to citizens for a fee, or tax. Over time, states grew powerful through a violent cycle: they created strong security forces to extract wealth from the population in order to pay for those security forces. Additionally, states required security forces to eliminate rivals, both foreign and domestic. Armed force was a significant factor in states’ rise to power, or, to paraphrase Tilly, violence makes states, and states make violence.
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