Imagine this: A
squad of mercenaries from a murky private security world marches on a nation's capital.
They barely meet a whisper of resistance as they approach it.
Then suddenly, gunshots pierce the air, plunging an entire nation into uncertainty and terror.
No, we are not talking about Prigozhin and his Wagner group.
But about a different group of mercenaries.
Namely, those that on July 7, 2021 killed Haiti’s president Jovenel Moïse.
This tells us something important about Prigozhin’s mutiny. His march on Moscow posed
the biggest challenge yet to Putin’s rule and awoke the world to the danger of mercenary groups.
It was the starkest example of their power. But not an isolated one.
Russia is not a one-off exception. // Private warfare is coming back into the 21st century,
as it has always been in human history.
Things are going to get wilder.
So who are these mercenary groups, and why are they making a comeback?
By many people's definition, I am a mercenary.
Simon Mann is one of the most famous mercenaries alive. He is alleged to
have fought in the Bougainville Uprising in Papua New Guinea,
the Sierra Leone Civil War, and in the Equatorial Guinea coup d’etat.
I tried to become an oil and gas man in Angola and our company was
actually attacked by the rebels. This was in January 1993. So I just said to my boss,
you know, why don't we fight back? And to cut a long story short,
that led to the contract between the Angolan government and Executive Outcomes.
We’ll get to Executive Outcomes later on, but for now, all you need to know is that
the company enlisted private soldiers to fight in the Angolan civil war.
That brings us straight to what a mercenary is.
The whole thing about defining a mercenary is quite tricky, believe it or not.
Scholars lean toward "private military contractors”, or PMC
but for the purpose of this video, we'll use a more colloquial language.
And by this definition, mercenaries have been
around for as long as private citizens have been willing to fight for money.
There have always been, you know,
adventurous people willing to do crazy things for money. I mean, that's not new.
All of military history had a huge mercenary component.
Sean McFate has been warning about the threat of hired guns for the last decade.
He says that mercenaries have been a constant throughout history.
• Barbarian nations were integrated into Roman troops to conquer other barbarian nations.
• By the Middle Ages, mercenaries were trained men without a lord
who sold their services to the highest bidder. • But after the Peace of Westphalia Nation-states
started to invest in a standing army and in the West mercenaries were gradually outlawed.
They got pushed underground. They were used in covert ways during the Cold
War by the USSR and by the United States and others. But they were always in the shadows.
However, as the frost of the Cold War began to melt, mercenaries emerged back into the light.
•
In 1993 Executive Outcomes played a key role in the war in Angola. But critics
accused it of predatory capitalism for extracting resources from a troubled state.
Simon: A lot of people reacted rather similarly to how people were reacting, let's say, a few
months ago about Wagner, you know, “Oh my God, the world's changed. It will be like the Italy of the
Renaissance.” So everyone digs out their history books and tries to work out how a world works when
soldiering and warfighting become a business. And Executive Outcomes kind of broke the mold.
• The next phase came in the 2000 with Blackwater, whose employees killed 17 Iraqi
civilians in the Nisour Square massacre. Sean: The United States kind of kicked it
into gear with the Iraq war. Basically, the United States did not have enough volunteers
to join our all-volunteer army, and they could either impose a national draft like Vietnam,
which would be catastrophic. They could leave and say we were defeated or we
can hire contractors to make up the difference. And when the US pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan
it created a large labor pool. And a lot of them sought new contracts, working for whomever.
• And finally Wagner, which had long been active in Africa but truly
emerged with the war in Ukraine. Sean: And it's not just Russia.
We're seeing Latin American mercenaries assassinate the president of Haiti. We're
seeing the CEO of Nissan, who is under house arrest for corruption in Tokyo,
was sprung out of jail by a mercenary. So every time you see a successful mercenary operation,
people around the world who have lots of money are getting ideas. CEOs are saying,
I have a “get out of jail free” card if I just know a good mercenary.
So why are mercenaries reemerging?
The last 200 years were the exception, not the rule.
As the world shifts away from its previous bipolar structure,
it also seems to revert to age-old practices.
after the Cold War, the international system
became much more chaotic. And there is opportunity.
Things are going to get rougher and wilder and there's going to be a lot
of people running around doing stuff for money.
On top of that, there’s one more factor that’s resurrecting mercenary groups:
plausible deniability.
This is the name of the game today about mercenaries, is that we live in an information
age. And in the information age, if you know information matters more than raw fire. And
if you want to wage war and get away with it, you wage it in secret. And for that you need plausible
deniability because, you know, if something bad happens, if your operation goes sideways, you
can totally disavow mercenaries. You can't disavow your special operations troops or your own troops.
And we saw this happen in 2018. The Wagner group in eastern Syria,
went up against American Special Forces. And America killed more Russians that night than
any night during the Cold War. We killed about 300. // Now, the reason it didn't go to World War
III is because both Moscow and Washington invoked plausible deniability. They both
said these are just mercenaries. These are not Russian soldiers, we don’t have to escalate up.
When force is privatized, it changes who's a superpower.
So suddenly we're getting into a world where the super-rich can become superpower, say,
by the middle of this century, ExxonMobil can have its own army, Elon Musk can have his own army.
Prigozhin’s march on Moscow was stopped, but recent assassinations, covert campaigns,
and all-out wars show that mercenaries are on the rise. And we’re not ready for it.
The danger of mercenaries is not just the mercenaries, it's our own strategic ineptitude
and thinking. So we need to get smart on how to do this. And we have history. It's an imperfect
teacher, but it's the only teacher we have. Because
in some ways, mercenary warfare, as awful as it sounds, you can also buy off mercenaries,
which is more humane than shooting everybody.
So, you know, as a grim upshot, I will leave your viewers with that.