The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (5 page)

In the past, some critics have claimed that private armies are more expensive than public ones. For example, Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes estimate that in 2007 in Iraq, “private security guards working for companies such as Blackwater and DynCorp were earning up to $1,222 a day; this amounts to $445,000 a year. By contrast, an Army sergeant was earning $140 to $190 a day in pay and benefits, a total of $51,100 to $69,350 a year.”
¹⁶
However, this analysis is flawed, since they compare a company’s billing rate—what it charges the government—with the annual salary of a soldier, which does not include the government’s indirect costs and overhead, such as health care, the use of vehicles, housing, hazardous-duty pay, pension, and so forth. Fundamental confusion regarding how firms make their money has led to misleading conclusions about the private sector’s efficiency.

Currently, most PMCs are headquartered in the United States, and members of the senior management are US citizens, but, like all multinational corporations, the companies maintain offices in several countries. Should one government, such as the United States or the United Kingdom, impose strict regulations on their trade, they could move offshore. Dubai is a favorite hub for the industry owing to its proximity to the markets (i.e., the Middle East and Africa) and its business-friendly laws.

In terms of personnel, these new military multinational corporations are comparable to the private armies of old. The people who fill their ranks are densely international. In Iraq, only 26 percent of contractors are US citizens. In Afghanistan, the number is only 14 percent.
¹⁷
Personnel who work for PMCs fall into one of three categories. The first is US citizens, who make up only 20 percent of the contractor workforce, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
¹⁸
They generally fill management positions and highly technical jobs, such as engineering or legal services, and receive the highest pay. A second category is local hires or local nationals, citizens of the country in which the firm is working (e.g., Iraqis working in Iraq). Local hires usually account for the bulk of contractors overseas, and they perform a wide range of mundane tasks, such as driving, food preparation, and interpreting. This is also the lowest-paid category. The last category is third-country nationals (TCNs), who are neither US nor local citizens. TCNs hail from countries as diverse as India, Fiji, Ghana, Ecuador,
Australia, Mexico, and South Africa.
¹⁹
They typically do not fill significant management positions and are almost always paid less than a US counterpart, even if the job is identical and the two are working side by side.

In other words, most American PMC personnel are not American. According to a DOD report, more than 85,000 contractors were working for U.S. Central Command in Afghanistan in 2013. Of these, approximately 16,000, or 18 percent, provided security and training, with the rest performing functions such as construction and base support. Less than 10 percent were American, and more than 80 percent were Afghan nationals. The DOD listed approximately 2,400 individuals providing private security services in Iraq, mostly TCNs.
²⁰
What is significant for the future of the industry is that these TCNs and local hires are gaining valuable trade knowledge that they can use to found new PMCs that are less picky about whom they work for and how they do it.

The US penchant to lean on the private sector in war has produced the modern mercenary. Half of the country’s military force structure was contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, short of conscription, it is unlikely that the superpower could have sustained two multiyear wars simultaneously without them. This was a convenient political solution for the country’s leadership at the time, since premature withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan would look like Vietnam-era defeat, and a national draft was unthinkable. However, this solution came at a cost. In the process, the superpower unleashed a new norm in international relations: the legitimate use of private military force, or what many call mercenarism.

And history with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page.

—Lord Byron,
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
,
Canto IV (1818), Stanza 108

It is a familiar story. A superpower goes to war and faces a stronger-than-expected insurgency in distant lands yet has insufficient forces to counter it because of political and military constraints. The superpower decides to hire contractors, some of whom are armed, to support its war effort. The armed contractors prove to be both a blessing and a curse, providing vital security services to the campaign yet at times killing innocent civilians in their zeal, causing strategic setbacks and damaging the superpower’s legitimacy. Without these contractors, it would be hard for the superpower to wage war, but with them, it is difficult to win.

The armed contractors in question are not in Iraq or Afghanistan but in northern Italy, and the year is not 2007 but 1377. The superpower in question is not the United States but the papacy under Pope Gregory XI, who was fighting the antipapal league led by the duchy of Milan.
¹
The tragic killing of civilians by armed contractors did not occur in Baghdad but in Cesena, 630 years earlier. The military companies employed were not DynCorp International, Triple Canopy, or Blackwater but the Company of the Star, the Company of the Hat, and the White Company. Known as free companies, these for-profit warriors were organized as corporations, with a well-articulated hierarchy of subcommanders and administrative machinery that oversaw the fair distribution of loot according to employees’ contracts. CEO-like captains led these medieval PMCs.

One of the most famous mercenary captains was Englishman Sir John Hawkwood, who led the transalpine White Company. He achieved international celebrity on the battlefield, earning fame and fortune. He served as England’s ambassador to the Roman court, received angry letters from Saint Catherine of Siena, and joined English writer Geoffrey Chaucer, Flemish chronicler Jean Froissart, and Italian humanist Francesco Petrarch at a lavish wedding feast for King Edward III’s son.
²

Contemporaries admired and reviled him. According to fourteenth-century Italian storyteller Franco Sacchetti, two Franciscan monks encountered Hawkwood near his fortress at Montecchio. The monks greeted him with the standard salutation, “May God grant you peace.” Hawkwood coldly replied, “And may God take away your alms.” Shocked by this rudeness, the monks demanded an explanation. “Don’t you know that I live by war,” Hawkwood answered, “and peace would destroy me? And as I live by war so you live by alms.” Sacchetti adds: “And so, he managed his affairs so well that there was little peace in Italy in his times.”
³

The parallels between earlier and modern PMCs are strong. Today the United States and other countries employ contractors to fulfill security-related contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. In the late Middle Ages, such men were called
condottieri
—literally, “contractors”—who agreed to perform security services described in written contracts, or
condotte
. Both modern and medieval contractors were organized as legal corporations, selling their services to the highest or most powerful bidder for profit. Both filled their ranks with professional men of arms drawn from different countries and loyal primarily to the paycheck. Both have functioned as private armies, usually offering land-based combat skills rather than naval (or aerial) capabilities and deploying force in a military manner rather than as law enforcement or police.

Both historical and contemporary PMCs have been international in composition. Although the mercenary companies in the high Middle Ages fought mostly in northern Italy, their ranks swelled with men from every corner of Europe and even Muslim Saracens from the Levant. Private armies today also gravitate to where the fighting is, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, yet they employ personnel and subcontractors from all over the world. Differences also exist, as ancient firms were private armies akin to Executive Outcomes rather than today’s weaker PMCs, but suffice it to say that today’s firms share DNA with their ancestors.

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.

This way of warfare gradually changed between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, shifting from a free market for force dominated by mercenaries to a monopoly controlled by states and their national militaries. This transformation coincided with states’ steady consolidation of power during the Middle Ages
over political rivals such as the church, the Holy Roman Emperor, city-states, and aristocratic families, all of which used mercenaries to assert their sovereignty over one another. States invested in their own standing armies, loyal only to them, and outlawed mercenaries, eventually driving them out of business and leaving their nonstate adversaries defenseless.

States’ monopolization of the market for force was gradual. In the hundred years leading up to 1650, warfare became increasingly violent as armies grew larger, weapons increasingly destructive, and consequences more grave. Power struggles such as those between Habsburg Spain and Holland, Habsburg Austria and the Ottomans, or French Huguenots and French Catholics, dragged on for decades, and the demand for force was great. The reliance on mercenaries was ubiquitous, and the overall cost of warfare was little more than the
solde
, or “pay,” due to mercenaries, from which the word
soldier
is derived. Battles were fought mostly between hired units, and as one military historian explains, “by and large, the military forces of every country consisted of mercenaries.”
⁴

During the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), for example, the majority of Sweden’s military was mercenary, a significant number given that Sweden was a military superpower at the time and that King Gustavus Adolphus was one of the great innovators of maneuver warfare. At the Battle of Breitenfeld, only 20 percent of Sweden’s army consisted of Swedes, and at the Battle of Lützen, the figure was 18 percent. European armies were an amalgamation of mercenaries, and the concept of patriotism was unconnected to military service.
⁵

By the middle of the seventeenth century, the conduct of violence was a capitalist enterprise no different from any other industry. According to historian Michael Howard, “war became the biggest industry in Europe,” as each side bought and brought increasing numbers of troops to the battlefield.
⁶
Major engagements during this period typically involved fifty thousand soldiers, as evidenced by the battles of White Mountain (1620), Breitenfeld (1631), Lützen (1632), Nördlingen (1634), Wittstock (1636), and Rocroi (1643).

To meet the rising demand for troops, a new breed of conflict entrepreneur emerged,
military enterprisers
, who outfitted entire regiments and leased them to those in need of martial services. Distinct from mercenaries, military enterprisers raised armies rather than commanding them. These “rental regiments” or contractor armies allowed rulers to wage war on a grand scale without undue administrative or fiscal reform, effectively lowering the barrier to entry in war and encouraging ever-larger battles. Examples of the greatest military enterprisers include Count Ernest Mansfeld, who raised an entire army for the Elector Palatine; Amsterdam businessman Louis de Geer, who sourced for Sweden a complete operative navy; the Genovese marquis of Spinola, who managed the king of Spain’s military affairs in the Netherlands; and Bernard von Weimar, who produced armies for Sweden and then France. Most famously, Count Albrecht
von Wallenstein offered his services plus an army to Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II and eventually became the supreme commander of the Habsburg monarchy’s armies and the richest man in Europe. By the end of the war, the market had moved beyond oligarchs like Wallenstein to smaller actors, such as mercenary colonels and merchant financiers, empowered by credit and supply networks based in Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Genoa.

Military enterprisers differ from mercenaries in significant ways and represent the median point in the gradual transition from private to public armies, as they were a hybrid of both. Like mercenaries, they are private sector actors involved in armed conflict and motivated chiefly by profit. Unlike mercenaries, they typically worked in monogamous public-private partnerships with a government client to build armies rather than deploying them. They are hybrids of private and public armies, imperfectly blending the profit motive of the former with the loyalty of the latter.

Military enterprisers were attractive to states for two reasons. First, having private military actors generate but not control armed force is less threatening to the client, as medieval mercenaries sometimes operated as a security racket. Second, demanding that private military actors work exclusively for the client was safer, too, as it discouraged defections to the enemy. By the seventeenth century, states were sufficiently powerful to demand such concessions from the market.

This arrangement also served private military actors, since they were often victims of faithless employers and preferred long-term, paying clients in perpetual need of armies. Military enterprisers had other reasons to remain faithful servants to their clients. According to historian David Parrott, they aspired to join the ranks of the military-obsessed European elite and therefore remained loyal to their aristocratic employers, because this bequeathed cultural and social benefits associated with military involvement. Such benefits would be nullified if they were perceived to act against the ruler in whose state they wished to enjoy these benefits. Also, unlike the
condottieri
captains, military enterprisers were often victims of their own success. Employers often made it treasonous for able enterprisers to abandon their contracts and had the power to enforce this clause, causing the enterpriser to lose both fortune and head.
⁷
Such was the case of Wallenstein, who was perhaps falsely accused of treachery and killed in 1634. His death remains shrouded in controversy.

Such public-private partnerships changed the business of war, transforming it from a free to a mediated market for force. In a free market, consumers and suppliers of warfare sought each other out, negotiated a price, and waged war. Both sides of the bargain were generally unconstrained, and the marketplace was laissez-faire in nature. For example, mercenaries such as
condottieri
often worked for the highest bidder, changed sides when it suited their purses, sought wars
out, and occasionally started them. When business was slow, they often pillaged the countryside until they were hired by a client or paid to go away. In many ways, mercenaries and the free market for force perpetuated armed conflict.

This contrasts with a mediated market, which imbued a modicum of restraint into force providers and their patrons. Long-term and exclusive public-private partnerships aligned the interests of client and mercenary, making it harder for either side to defect and infusing stability into the marketplace. For example, Wallenstein was not incentivized to betray Ferdinand II, because the ruler was his main source of profit. Nor was Ferdinand II motivated to break his contract with Wallenstein, as the enterpriser was his primary supplier of armed forces during a war of survival. In other words, they were codependent in ways that medieval mercenaries and their clientele were not. Such relationships had existed in the past, as with Hawkwood and Florence, but by Wallenstein’s time, they were dominant. The presence of shared, long-term interests restrained corrupt behaviors and therefore mediated the market for force.