Today’s conflict zones are filled with mercenaries and private military contractors.

Increasingly, states rely on private military contractors to protect their bases abroad, conduct intelligence, service vehicles, ship arms, patrol streets, and even engage in combat operations. For example, both warring parties of the civil war in Libya use mercenaries from across the globe to spearhead offensives. Russia has used them to covertly further Kremlin interests in Syria, Venezuela, Sudan, Libya, and Ukraine. The U.A.E. notoriously filled its military with Colombian mercenaries only for many of them to be blown up in the Yemen War.

In 2018, the U.S. Department of Defense quietly reported it had over 28,000 private military contractors deployed in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which was more than the total number of official troops stationed in all three countries at the time. By some measures, private contractors outnumber official troop counts by a 3:1 margin.

The rise of mercenaries on the battlefield has changed the way wars are waged.

Rather than mobilize an entire domestic population for a singular war effort, states can simply hire bands of mercenaries and private military contractors to engage the enemy covertly. They operate with few legal constraints and do battle in an international sphere that has yet to adapt its institutions to cope with private war.

It is also a recent phenomenon, and is intimately connected to the ways in which the military industrial complex has made war a profitable enterprise.

Former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince is the most famous example of a 21st century mercenary. Beginning in the late 1990s, Prince took a fledgling business training police officers in North Carolina and created a global mercenary conglomerate sucking up billions of dollars in military contracts. After getting into legal trouble from a massacre in Iraq committed by Blackwater mercenaries in 2007, Prince then traveled the world consulting with various authoritarian regimes like the U.A.E. and China, reworking their militaries and police toward the mercenary model.

Former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince is the most famous example of a 21st century mercenary.

But before Prince and Blackwater, there was retired two-star General John Singlaub and his band of marauding Americans secretly shipping themselves to countries like Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe, Angola, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. Singlaub was convinced the only way to effectively fight the Cold War was to maintain a series of covert conflicts across the globe using private paramilitary groups.

Before highly professionalized outfits like Dynacorp, there was Soldier of Fortune magazine, which featured back-page ads for mercenary gigs from which hundreds of Americans found employment. Anyone interested in playing soldier could find a copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine, get private training and get smuggled to a warzone where they imagined themselves in a global struggle against communism.

Soldier of Fortune magazine (Wikipedia)

In these ragtag operations, private citizens brought weapons to the mujahideen in Afghanistan, trained and advised death squads in El Salvador, and some even attempted to invade and occupy the tiny island nation of Dominica—all the while being founded by private donors they were courting stateside.

These mercenaries would forge extralegal and off-the-books agreements with officials from the Department of Defense (DOD) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), creating an ad hoc fusion of public and private interests that was kept hidden from lawmakers and the public.

To better understand this history, Al Bawaba spoke with Kyle Burke about the beginnings of the mercenary industry in the U.S. Burke is a professor of history at Hartwick College and author of the book Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War.

Kyle Burke (Courtesy of Hartwick College)

Burke argues that the misadventures of people like John Singlaub and those responding to the ads in Soldier of Fortune magazine laid the conceptual groundwork required for the kind of privatized warfare we see today.

Although contemporary private military contracting firms have more stable and codified relations to the state, key parallels remain. Then and now, an overarching mentality pervades both the upper echelons of the policymaking sphere and the executive offices of private military contracting firms: that the state has become unable or unwilling to win wars, so they must be waged by private actors.

To listen to the full conversation, click here: