Authors: Steven Pressfield
The Empty Quarter, as el-Masri has predicted, is anything but empty. Our plane touches down at 1300 local time into a facility as sprawling as Disneyland and as packed with troops and transport as D-Day at Normandy. The place is called PSAB, Prince Sultan Air Base. It’s eight thousand acres in the middle of absolutely nothing, seventy-five miles southeast of Riyadh.
The Egyptian and I step down onto concrete so hot it blisters your feet right through your boots. Chris Candelaria is waiting for us in a ’23 Chevy Simoom bulletproof with a cooler of iced Rolling Rock. Salter has acquired his contract, he confirms for me, along with those of my entire Iran team, plus several ex-UAE Special Forces operators and a former SAS captain named Coombs, whom I will meet as soon as we get back to the converted hangar that the team has turned into our temporary home. Chris gives me an orders
packet from Salter (actually from his aide Pete Petrocelli) and Pete’s secure number on-base, which I am to call ASAP. Chris brings us up to speed as we drive. PSAB was an active U.S. base in the ’90s. The air force flew combat sorties out of here in the post–Desert Storm days of the no-fly zone and Saddam Hussein. It was used again as a support facility in ’01, during Operation Anaconda, and throughout OIF and the campaign in Afghanistan. The Saudis shut the base down in ’16, following the Ramadan coup attempt that supposedly originated from the site. It’s been sitting empty ever since.
No longer. Financed by God knows who, the place has been brought back to roaring life. Transport planes are coming and going. Lines of troops in full kit snake across the tarmac, boarding C-130s, An-225s, and converted civilian 747s. A sand berm thirty feet high, topped with razor wire and studded with security towers, rings the expanse. I get on the horn to Petrocelli, whom I’ve known since East Africa in ’22.
“What’s up, Pete? Where are we going?”
“Couldn’t tell you, Gent, even if I knew. Did you get your OP?” He tells me to disregard everything except the top sheet; plans have changed.
“Iraq?” I ask. “Back to Iran?”
Pete can’t say. “Tim Hayward’s on his way. You’re gonna be working with him again.”
“Is Salter here? What the fuck’s going on?”
Salter’s flying in from Basra right now, says Pete; he wants to brief you and your team tonight. “Chow with the boss, I’ll get back to you with time and place.” He laughs. “Welcome to history, cowboy!”
El-Masri has already sussed out the drill. “This is Saudi money,” he says. “I got to give them credit, the princes have grown gonads at last.” Salter, he says, holds the fields of southern Iraq. “That’s where these troops are going; they can’t be heading nowhere else.”
Chris agrees. The mobilization’s aim is to hold Iraq, to prevent
the Iranians’ move to establish a Shiite Crescent. PSAB is wall to wall with aircraft and armor. On the tarmac and inside Mahaffey and CoStruct hangars sit scores of big-bellied C-130s and C-17s, even a massive C-5 Galaxy. More jumbos squat in the sunblast a mile away across the field. We pass two EC-130s and one 130H—jammer craft that can broadcast TV and radio and interdict enemy transmissions. Behind Hesco revetments squat row after row of recycled transport choppers—Sikorsky D-12s, Army Chinooks, and Marine Super Stallions—plus scores of Iraq-era Cobra gunships, Apache attack helicopters, and the new Chinese drone Wasps, which are basically pilotless missiles. Out on the runways, ancient Ilyushins and Andropovs land and take off in steady succession. This fleet can only be Alessandro Martini’s Regia Aeronautica and Teddy Ostrofsky’s Air Martiale (or whatever names these notorious arms merchants are using currently to identify their private air forces out of Iran, Angola, Sierra Leone, Sharjah in the UAE, and Burgas in Bulgaria). The whole armada is protected from aerial and drone attack by hundreds of Chinese I-SAM rocket trucks and cloaked from satellite surveillance by Tata/Hewlett-Packard masking stations. Everything is private enterprise. Ground transport is KBR, Pilot, Acacia, Overnite, or owner-operators from Bulgaria and the Czech Republic, Serbia, Macedonia, Turkey, Pakistan, Jordan, and Egypt, all independent contractors with their names and home ports on the truck-cab doors. No vehicles bear the American flag or the banner of any nation. You see the logos of Force Insertion, Trans-Asia, Iramco, Neilson, Moxie, ZORX, AmmasaUniv, and the ubiquitous Roman helmet insignia of the Legion.
The scale of the mobilization is beyond anything I’ve seen short of full-bore invasion. It’s incredible how far the merc biz has come in only twenty or twenty-five years.
In the original Iraq and AfPak eras a generation ago, military
contractors were hired individually and assigned to teams of varying size and specialty. Primary missions back then were to provide security for VIPs, diplomats, press, aid and humanitarian workers, and civilian staffs of various NGOs; detention, prisoner interrogation, and so forth; as well as force protection—guarding bases and troop concentrations. That was the low end. At the other extremity you had elite teams of highly skilled operators undertaking such business as in-country and cross-border direct action and sensitive site exploitation—assassinations and raids. In such capacities, contractors usually worked in conjunction with, and under command and control of, conventional military or special forces, as the hybrid teams did in Iraq and Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Some of these operations were spectacularly successful. Few, if any, made the evening news.
Gen. Pietter van Arden, the iconic South African commando, was the first to organize, train, and equip full-scale private combat formations and put them out for hire as units. In the profession in those days, the late teens and into 2020, there was no such thing as a standing force. An individual operator was either CS—Core Service, meaning command cadre—or TA, Time Available, meaning on call. Mercs were either working or waiting to work. This system functioned well as long as the jobs didn’t get too big. Company- and even battalion-sized formations could be put together with a six-month train-up, with their logistical tail outsourced and the employer fronting the funding in cash.
But when the first legions and armatures were put together in 2021—meaning brigade- and division-sized airmobile fighting units—under van Arden and, later, under Salter, it became necessary to have basing, manning, and staffing of a far more professional and permanent basis. Intelligence, communications, and logistics arms were added—outsourced but full-time—along with artillery
and antiarmor, medical, air defense, satellite, drone elements, and so on. A command and logistical architecture evolved, based loosely on a Marine Expeditionary Force—in other words a force designed to project power across oceans, into theaters in which basing and resupply could not be counted upon.
An armature was constituted of three primary maneuver elements, called legions, each roughly the size of an army brigade or a Marine Regimental Combat Team. These were commanded not by colonels, as a conventional formation of that size would be, but by former one- and even two-star generals. The saying in the profession was “Step up in pay, step down in rank.” Within the mercenary corps, the billet of sergeant was filled by a former staff or gunnery sergeant; captains served in lieutenants’ posts; if you had been a lieutenant colonel, you stepped down to major.
Each legion was constituted of three battalions—two infantry and one weapons. Battalions were divided into three centuries—the equivalent of reinforced companies—and platoons. Each legion was supported by its own armored brigade, called a maniple; its own artillery arm, called a ballista; and a dedicated air wing called a corvo, or crow. The air wings were unique in that their command and control elements beneath armature staff level, as well as equipment, organization, training, and operation, were outsourced to private contractors. This was Wild West Central. Individual aircraft and crews were brought on board in one of three ways—as OOs, owner-operators (in which the pilot himself or a syndicate of investors supplied its own plane or helicopter and hired it directly to the company); straight hire (where the company itself owned or leased the plane and contracted with the pilots and crew to fly it); or the “sillidar” system, in which a single firm or investor supplied a number of planes and leased them to the contracting company as units—with or without flight teams.
Service crews and equipment maintenance were also outsourced. What made the system even more colorful was the manifestation—overnight, it seemed—of a middleman apparatus of hiring reps and lawyers, many of whom were female and at least half of whom were either married to or sleeping with the individual contractors whose deals they were negotiating. The verb was “bitch.” “Who’s bitching you?” meant “Who’s your hiring agent?” To be “bitched over” was to get double-crossed or screwed. By and large, the reps were honest and they worked hard. Standard commission was 15 percent for an individual and 10 percent for a package, meaning a team that signed up collectively, as a unit, with 20 percent for bonuses and incentive pay. Some reps would work free for the individual contractor, taking their commission from the hiring entity or its employer. There were other firms, called “slop shops,” run by paunchy ex-campaigners working out of their basements that scoured the docket for cheap and last-minute openings. The system sounds nuts, I know. But in Georgia and in San Tome and Principe in ’21 and in Yemen and Angola in ’22, these jury-rigged schemes were put to the test and passed with all banners flying.
As with most technical revolutions, the rise of mercenary forces came about with virtually no legislative or regulatory oversight. The world woke up one day and merc armies were everywhere. Force Insertion quelled one revolt in Nigeria, then another in Mali. The company did it with half-brigade-sized forces that were in and out in ninety days. By August of 2023, I myself had signed up for a tour. My first check was $92,500 for 110 days in the Pankisi gorge in Georgia, protecting the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline. The employer was a consortium of energy companies, including BP, ChevronTexaco, and ConocoPhillips, as well as the governments of Turkey and Azerbaijan, but the actual check came from Force Insertion, drawn on the National Bank of Capetown. You signed a contract two pages
long that said you had never been a Communist, Fascist, or Islamist; you waived all rights to compensation for death or dismemberment and repatriation of remains to your country of origin, and you indemnified and held blameless Force Insertion for any acts committed by you or contractors serving beneath you, which might render Force Insertion liable to prosecution before a state-founded or transnational court of law. You had to buy your own clothing, gear, and weapons and provide your own transportation to and from the front. In-theater you received the same medical care as Force Insertion’s highest operatives (which was outstanding), but once you got home you were on your own.
It worked. The pipeline stayed safe; the gas went through.
Legal and ethical objections were raised, as they should have been. But the shit worked. No one could argue with it. When the crisis in Guinea broke out in ’26, the solution was a no-brainer. U.S. DoD, with the approval of the president and Congress, contracted with Force Insertion for a one-year fee of $11.7 billion to “secure, stabilize, and pacify” the northern four provinces and to “dismantle and disarm” the Amal tribal and AQWA, al-Qaeda in West Africa, and related militias operating with them. Aerial, satellite, and drone battlespaces were owned by the appropriate arms of the conventional military. The dirt belonged to the mercs.
Salter commanded. What made these merc forces so effective? In the conventional military, three of the four most dysfunctional operational elements are OPCON, OPFUND, and ROE—Operational Concept, Operational Funding, and Rules of Engagement. The fourth element, OPTEMPO—meaning the speed with which a field unit can execute an operation once it conceives it—is a product of the other three. Force Insertion streamlined all four and made them work. Gone were the eleven levels of clearance that a captain or lieutenant on the ground had to negotiate before he could pull the
trigger. One phone call brought the green light—and brought close air support and drone or ground-based fires. Better yet, the definition of an engageable target expanded dramatically. If a suspected enemy stuck his head up, you were cleared to blow it off—man, woman, or child; armed or unarmed. In the realm of funding, Force Insertion operators were supplied with bags of cash and given the latitude to spread it around. Commanders had Lexuses and Range Rovers to pass out as gifts of honor; we could send tribal chieftains’ sons to Atlanta and Houston for surgical operations, get their daughters into Florida State, or set their wives up in condos in Dubai or Miami Beach.
On the home front, the single most powerful attraction tool for Force Insertion was the lump-sum million-dollar payout for CDD, Combat Death and Dismemberment. At one stroke, this grant eradicated 99 percent of all family-based risk aversion—and it cut out the weeping widow shot on the evening news. When the conventional military used nukes on Natanz, Kashan, and Anarak in Iran in 2019 in retaliation for the 11/11 dirty-bombing of Long Beach (for which the Iranian Revolutionary Guard supposedly supplied the radioactive bomb-wrapping material), casualty aversion made it impossible to send regular U.S. troops tramping through the contaminated dust of the No-Go Zone. Force Insertion put two centuries on the ground in forty-eight hours. The mercs didn’t care if their nutsacks glowed in the dark; they lined up by the hundreds for the bonuses and incentive pay.
Long Beach and the nuclear counterstrike against Iran were what finally made mercenary forces preeminent. After that horror show (and the massive anti-American riots and demonstrations that were ignited in response around the globe), the conventional U.S. military withdrew all but token forces from the Middle East and Central Asia. Homeland defense became the new Core Mission. A hybrid
strategy of counterterrorism (much of it outsourced) and “stand-off containment” replaced counterinsurgency, nation building, and all expeditionary or occupational adventures. The American public had had a bellyful. From now on, power would be projected by naval, air, satellite, and drone technology. The troops would stay home.