The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (6 page)

However, this did not necessarily make the market safer. While monarchs found the loyalty of military enterprisers attractive, populations were less enamored with their contractor armies. The havoc wreaked by these behemoth forces was not limited to the battlefield. They sustained themselves by pilfering the countryside, sometimes violently and often lawlessly, and the tyranny of plunder wore heavily on civilian populations. Rectifying the social damage caused by en masse larceny was expensive for employers, who consequently attempted to station troops away from population centers and ideally to deploy them in offensive campaigns in foreign lands. However, this was not always possible. The inhabitants of Brandenburg complained bitterly that the mercenaries guarding them were far more terrible than the enemy Swedes outside the city walls, and they begged their ruler, Frederick William, the Great Elector, to disband the unruly companies. Assessing the situation, the elector wrote in April 1641: “We find that our military forces have cost the country a great deal and done much wanton damage. The enemy could not have done worse. We do not see that we have had, or are likely to have, the least benefit from their services. Therefore we have resolved to keep only what is necessary as a garrison for our fortresses.”
⁸

The elector’s sentiments were not unique. The unrestrained actions of mercenaries caused widespread destruction and misery in the course of the Thirty Years War. These mercenary companies were often intractable and could usurp their employers if left unchecked. Additionally, because they were recruited only during a military emergency and dismissed immediately at its conclusion, they frequently roamed the countryside like brigands of the Middle Ages while awaiting new contracts. These and other bitter experiences taught both rulers and ruled that they could not entrust the protection of their homeland to unreliable mercenaries. At the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, leaders
of all sides tacitly agreed that an open market for force was too destructive and expensive to continue and that public armies should replace private ones; that is, the state should take over.

Shortly after the Peace of Westphalia, the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III established the first peacetime field army in the history of the monarchy. He issued a decree in 1649 announcing that of the fifty-two regiments raised during the great war, nine infantry (including both pike and shot) and ten cavalry (one of dragoons and nine of cuirassiers) would not be demobilized with the rest but would remain as permanent units. Previously, there had been small attempts to create standing public armies. The force of King Charles VII of France in 1445 consisted of nine thousand French soldiers. Rudolf II of Austria had three winter regiments in 1598 at key fortifications along his frontier. Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus’s Fekete Sereg, or Black Army, captured parts of Austria and Bohemia in the fifteenth century. However, these antecedents did not attempt to dislodge private armies and take over the market for force. The size, scale, and scope of Ferdinand’s ambitions were unprecedented, as he sought to expunge the need for mercenaries and thus began the state’s monopoly on violence, the end of private armies, and the beginning of modern public armies.

The transition from private to public armies was gradual, spanning centuries. It arguably began in the sixteenth century, and by 1650, it was clear that on-demand military services were no longer economical to rulers, given the destruction that mercenaries wrought upon the countryside and the threat they posed to their employers. What was needed was a public army of systematically trained and disciplined professionals, maintained in peace and war, winter and summer, with a regular means of obtaining supplies and replacements. Critically, this military force would be paid by and loyal to the state, unequivocally. Following the Thirty Years War, the Great Elector of Brandenburg-Prussia retained four thousand soldiers and increased that number to twelve thousand after the Northern War (1655–1660). Wurttemberg, Hesse, Saxony, and Bavaria undertook similar efforts.

France formed a standing army by absorbing most of Louis XIV’s officers into the
gendarmerie
and establishing six standing infantry units that endured after the Peace of the Pyrenees (1659). These regiments enabled the Sun King to mobilize his armies swiftly in the War of Devolution and overrun the Habsburg-controlled Spanish Netherlands and the Franche-Comté, encouraging him to create an even
larger standing army at the end of the war in 1668. Concurrently, in England, Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army was a prototype standing army, and after the Restoration of 1660, Charles II was permitted to retain five regiments from this force, totaling about three thousand men, to garrison his fortresses as royal guards.

These early efforts were the germ of the large national militaries centuries later. As military historian John Mears explains, “the nature of military conflict in the seventeenth century provided a further impetus for the creation of permanent armed forces … giving them an appearance which men in the twentieth century can recognize as being distinctly modern.”
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Technological improvements in weaponry helped make public armies possible. Previously, mercenaries provided not only on-demand military services but also highly specialized ones. The Swiss Guard delivered precision tactics in the heat of battle that required extensive training. Similarly, the heavy crossbow known as the
balestrieri
, with armor-piercing bolts, required a significant investment of time and training to use with any skill in combat, especially against moving or ranged targets.

The cost of developing similar in-house capabilities for states was simply too high, which is why they outsourced these needs in the Middle Ages. However, the need to outsource began to change with the advent of the musket, which allowed relatively unskilled infantry to punch holes in the armor of highly skilled knights, killing them from a safe distance. Also, the declining price of gunpowder made training musketeers cheaper and less time-consuming, giving rise to the possibility of the citizen-soldier. Combining this with the practice of conscription, rulers discovered that they could muster large national armies without the risks associated with mercenaries.

Napoleonic reforms also helped consolidate the states’ monopoly of force. The armies that swept across Europe under Napoleon’s command were mostly made up of French citizens, mustered under
levée en masse
, rather than professional soldiers. With the decisive French victory over and occupation of Prussia following the twin battles of Jena and Auerstedt in 1806, Prussia quickly adopted a citizen-soldier model and rejoined the campaign later to help defeat the French forces. As the Napoleonic wars continued, this model of national conscription eventually became the norm for all powers, and it survives today, as demonstrated by the modern draft.

Administrative changes also helped put private armies out of business. Sustaining a large standing army is complicated and expensive, requiring a considerable bureaucracy to collect taxes and administer revenue. Over time, large centralized state bureaucracies replaced feudal lordships in the machinations of governance and especially military administration. Louis XIV established a sophisticated bureaucracy to manage state affairs at the expense of the estates
and the great nobles. Influenced by Swedish ideas and the reforms of Gustavus Adolphus, Secretary of State for War Michel le Tellier and his son the marquis de Louvois managed the
intendants de l’armée
that reorganized the French army into a pyramidal structure of responsibility and authority, led by generals and managed by bureaucrats. It eventually grew to four hundred thousand soldiers.

Modeling this bureaucracy, Great Elector Frederick William, ruler of Brandenburg-Prussia, created the
Generalkriegskommissariat
in 1655, with subordinate officials in each of his various territories. This bureaucracy eventually eclipsed the authority of local aristocrats on all matters of finance and taxation connected with the army. Paying for the new civil service and soldiers mandated an ever-increasing tax base built on an economy unfettered by marauding mercenaries, reinforcing the need to outlaw private armies. By the end of the eighteenth century, the bureaucracy and the army were so big in relation to the total population that the marquis de Mirabeau reputedly quipped, “Prussia is not a state with an army, but an army with a state.”
¹⁰

Enlightenment ideas and their accompanying political revolutions also spurred the demise of private armies by strengthening the bond between soldier and state. Previously, mercenary organizations were a conglomeration of nationalities bound by a desire for profit, a shared “command language” for issuing military orders, and perhaps loyalty toward colleagues. Although some private armies, such as the Swiss companies, consisted of a single nationality, most were a multinational lot, such as the
landsknechts
. This began to change when ideas of rationalism, the social contract, and natural rights emerged from the English, American, and French revolutions, ushering in a new era that transformed the individual from royal subject to national citizen and proclaimed that kings no longer ruled by the divine right of God but did so by the consent of the ruled, on pain of death. However, with new privileges came new responsibilities. Just as the state was obliged to protect citizens’ rights, citizens were duty-bound to defend the state, as demonstrated by the
levée en masse
that swelled Napoleon’s ranks. The revolutions cemented a bond between individual and state, giving rise to nationalism and linking military service to patriotic duty.

Over time, the state became the principal market actor for force and outlawed the competition, such as mercenaries, for fear that they could physically threaten the government’s existence. The only exception to this was for states that wished to “rent” their armies to other states for a profit rather than a cause. During the American Revolutionary War, Great Britain hired nearly thirty thousand soldiers from German states, mostly from Hesse-Kassel, to quell the colonial revolt. The American rebels called these German soldiers Hessians. German states became factories of state-sponsored mercenarism, supplying tens of thousands of German soldiers to other national powers in the soldier trade (
Soldatenhandel
). In a sign of the times, what was once considered a legitimate practice became
morally repugnant, attracting pejorative labels such as
Menschenhandel
(trade in human beings),
Menschenverkauf
(sale of human beings), or
Seelenverkauf
(sale of souls).

Similarly, although pirates were strictly outlawed and typically faced the gallows if caught, it was considered legitimate for states to hire private warships, or privateers, by issuing a letter of marque to attack enemy ships. Privateers were even allowed to pilfer as part of the prize. The key difference between a pirate and a privateer was normative. Acts of piracy were deemed illegal, because, as a nineteenth-century jurist explained, they were “done under conditions which render it impossible or unfair to hold any state responsible for their commission.”
¹¹

States also delegated military affairs to quasi-state-run trading companies such as the East India Company, which commanded its own armed forces and governed India for Great Britain for more than two centuries. The last incident in which a state raised an army of foreigners was in 1854, when Great Britain hired 16,500 mercenaries for the Crimean War (although none saw battle, because the war ended before they arrived in theater). By 1900, the practice of utilizing private forces, even when state-sponsored, was defunct.

In the twentieth century, the Westphalian order was at its zenith, and the free market for force was pushed underground. World War I, World War II, and the Cold War were emblematic conflicts of the period, waged between “great power” nations using huge public militaries as gladiators to settle political disputes. The privilege of legitimately waging war was arrogated exclusively to states and their militaries and was the view espoused in international relations theory, which arose during this period.

In fact, so Westphalian were the emergent “laws of war” that they sought only to regulate interstate warfare and largely ignored armed nonstate actors. Early laws of war, such as the Lieber Code (1863), the First Geneva Convention (1864), and the Hague Conventions (1899 and 1907), simply codified nineteenth-century customs of war as fought between national armies. States developed a positive legal regime through multilateral treaties that dictated appropriate behaviors on the battlefield between their armies. In other words, the laws of war codified battlefield custom originating in European religion, chivalry, and culture. Historian and legal scholar Geoffrey Best describes the period from 1856 to 1909 as the “epoch of highest repute” for war etiquette.
¹²

By the middle of the twentieth century, Western powers declared that the laws of war applied to all armed actors everywhere. After World War II, the
Nuremberg War Trial pronounced that treaties such as the Hague Convention of 1907 “were recognized by all civilised nations” for half a century and were thus customary laws of war and binding on all parties, whether the party was a signatory to the specific treaty or not.
¹³
This is reaffirmed in the 1998 treaty known as the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which claims universal jurisdiction.
¹⁴
Modern notions regarding the laws of war are what chiefly separate “regular” from “irregular” warfare, the former being “acceptable” killing by “legitimate” Westphalian powers, whereas the latter is typically the purview of nonstate actors and tantamount to dishonorable practices such as murder, torture, deception, and other “war crimes.”

Despite the strong norm against mercenaries, state-sponsored mercenarism continued into the twentieth century.
¹⁵
The Flying Tigers—the popular name of the 1st American Volunteer Group of the Chinese Air Force in 1941–1942—consisted of some sixty Curtiss P-40 shark-faced fighter planes based in Burma, which flew missions against Japanese forces occupying China. The unit was staffed by mostly former US military personnel and pilots and its deployment was little more than a way for the United States to combat Japan before war was formally declared. Monthly salaries varied but were all substantially higher than those of the US public military: $250 for a skilled ground crewman, $600 for a pilot officer, and $675 for a flight leader.
¹⁶
Squadron commanders received $750 a month, or $11,486.65 in 2010 dollars. In many ways, the Flying Tigers were precursors of modern PMCs.