“My Lord, may God grant you peace,” the Franciscan monks solemnly intoned, as they found themselves before Sir John Hawkwood—gentleman, adventurer, and mercenary in the service of the great states of Florence, Milan, and Pope Innocent VI.
The answer wasn’t what the monks expected: “May God take away all the alms ye have received.”
“The monks were affrighted and cried : ‘Lord, wherefore say ye that?’”
“Do ye not know that I live by war,” the fourteenth century poet Franco Sacchetti recorded Hawkwood as replying, “and that peace would ruin me?”
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Last week’s assassination of Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse, has been largely ignored in India. The bizarre cast of characters alleged to have carried out the execution—evangelical Christian pastor, and formerly bankrupt physician, Christian Emmanuel Sanon; a Florida-based Venezuelan émigré Antonio Emmanuel Intriago Valera and his firm CTU Security; and battle-hardened Colombian mercenaries—are straight out of a John Le Carre novel on shabby, Fourth-World coups.
This happy disregard is wrong. The Haiti coup demonstrates the rise of a privatised warfare which is emerging across the world. “It is literally the marketisation of war,” Sean McFate has written in a seminal paper, “where military force is bought and sold like any other commodity... In such a world, states would be mere prizes to be won rather than agents of their own destiny. This has the potential to upend international relations as we know it.”
In recent years, organised mercenary forces have appeared in theatres of conflict across the world: Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Syria, Ukraine. The companies are known—Wagner, Sandline, Xe Services, Military Professional Resources, DeWe, Dyck Advisory, Paramount, a hundred others—but the scale of the business isn’t: the United Nations estimates that private military contractors make upwards of $100 billion a year.
The use of mercenaries isn’t new. In the course of the Cold War, the scholar Akbarali Thobani recorded, former super powers routinely used mercenaries to stage insurgencies and regime changes targeting pro-Soviet governments in Africa. London was a major hub for the business. “A private British firm, Security Advisory Services, did most of the recruiting there and a spokesman admitted that recruitment was financed with United States money and that the group was dealing through a liaison officer in the United States Embassy in London,” Thobani noted.
Large-scale use of mercenaries remained a core feature of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operations, media investigations in the 1980s showed, running from South-East Asia to Latin America and Africa. These operations provided the United States itself a—small—fig-leaf of deniability, distancing the government from direct responsibility for terrorism and war-crimes.
“In Eastern Europe, Latin America, South Asia, and the Middle East,” scholars Allison Stanger and Mark Eric Williams write, “outsourcing has enabled Washington to undertake a diverse set of strategic operations—and in some instances, to do so without committing a large contingent of United States troops. Such flexibility is especially useful to presidents who pursue policies that lack strong support from Congress or the American public.”
From 1989, though, as the Cold War ended, new threats began to emerge to nation-states themselves. Insurgents captured large swathes of territory in Asia and Africa; narco-traffickers came to control small empires in Latin America; transnational terrorist groups began operating out of the bowels of collapsed polities and States. For nation-states to fight these challenges using conventional force was expensive—and, as the United States’ experience showed in Afghanistan and Iraq, often pointless.
The first major mercenary corporation emerged from South Africa during this meltdown of the State system. Executive Outcomes, operating mainly in Africa, protected oil facilities and mines from rebels, and trained conventional militaries, earning an estimated $40 million a year at its peak. In 1994, Executive Outcomes offered to put down the genocide in Rwanda for a mere $120 million; then United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan responded that he was not willing to “privatise peace”.
Firms providing mercenaries did not restrict themselves to peaceful outcomes. In 2005, Mark Thatcher, former United Kingdom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s son, pleaded guilty in a South African court to planning and organising a coup in Equatorial Guinea. The CIA still uses mercenaries in its so-called war on drugs in Latin America.
As its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan escalated, though, the United States—short of personnel, and concerned about costs—became increasingly dependent on mercenary groups, fuelling an unprecedented boom in the business. “At the height of these wars, contractors comprised over 50 percent of the United States force structure in Iraq and 70 percent in Afghanistan,” McFate records. The rank-and-file were often drawn from countries in Latin America, Africa or Eastern Europe; salaries were low; no disability benefits or pensions had to be paid.
Today, mercenaries are at the cutting edge of some of the world’s most bitter wars. The United Arab Emirates is believed to have hired veterans of Colombia’s drug wars to fight in Yemen, who have brought new, ruthless tactics to the battlefield with them. Nigeria used mercenaries—equipped with helicopter gunships and armoured vehicles—to stamp out the jihadist group Boko Haram. In Ukraine, both sides have hired guns-for-hire.
Among the biggest clients are large corporations with interests to protect in conflict-torn countries. Energy giant EvroPolis, which received energy concessions in Syria in a quid-pro-quo for Russian intervention in that country, is reported to have employed the Wagner Group to capture and protect oilfields from the Islamic State. Chinese energy firms in Sudan, similarly, use mercenaries to guard their assets. The South African security firm repulsed jihadists in Mozambique, who were threatening a liquefied natural gas facility operated by French firm Total.
Freight traffic across Asia and Africa, similarly, is guarded by mercenaries. As Indians learned in the course of the Enrica Lexie case, international shipping firms hire armed guards—sometimes legitimate soldiers; mostly not—to guard ships transiting through piracy-torn Gulf of Aden, Strait of Malacca, and Gulf of Guinea. Armed contractors based on floating arsenals—or so-called motherships—helicopter in to ships in need.
Electronic intelligence gathering is a third major area of growth. Last year, New Delhi-based BellTroX was alleged to have conducted digital espionage targeting corporate entities, among them, private equity giant KKR and short seller Muddy Waters. The firm, now under investigation in the United States, is also alleged to have hacked judges in South Africa, politicians in Mexico, lawyers in France and environmental groups in the United States. Large-scale operations of this kind have also been reported to be operating from Russia, China and several other countries.
Firms have even made their services available in the most improbable niche markets, like terrorism. Malhama Tactical, made up of former jihadists, is alleged to have offered training services for the al-Qaeda affiliated al-Nusra Front in Syria, the Turkistan Islamic Party, and other terrorist organisations in West Asia.
It isn’t impossible to imagine that mercenaries will exercise even greater reach and influence in the not too distant future. Conflict-by-contract, operating outside the laws of warfare established by nation-states from the nineteenth century onwards, may become the new norm. Future corporations may be able to rent destructive capabilities that only nation-states today possess.
To the fourteenth century mercenary Hawkwood, this world would have seemed familiar. Like our own times, Renaissance Italy was a place of spectacular technological achievement, economic globalisation and creativity. It was also marked, however, by States ruthlessly competing for power through warfare. Like then, war is again becoming a way to make a living.
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