What do you picture when you think of mercenaries? Do you think of pay-for-hire, sword-wielding warriors during the time of the Roman empire? Maybe you think of the musket-carrying Hessian mercenaries Great Britain hired to quell the American Revolution. Maybe you picture local warlords, operating in war-torn areas, with a few hundred guns-for-hire under their command. While all of these depictions aren’t incorrect, they also fail to fully capture the present-day mercenary landscape. Recently, mercenary groups have adapted to the market economy and rebranded as “Private Military Companies” (PMCs), doing work for many countries; even the U.S. At one point, PMC mercenaries even made up half of American forces in Iraq and 70% of those in Afghanistan. It is estimated that the Department of Defense spent about $160 billion on private security contractors between 2007 and 2012. But the U.S. isn’t the only power to support recent military engagements with PMCs. Russia has all but proven ties to the Wagner Group, France has its own championed Légion Ètrangère (Foreign Legion), and the UK has groups like Aegis Defense Services and G4S Security, the second largest private employer in the world, headquartered within. The PMC market is huge and kept hidden from you and I. In this article I seek to take a peek into the modern world of mercenary work, explaining why they’re utilized so frequently and why their secrecy, lack of accountability, and gaps in public oversight should worry you.

Let’s start with the basics: Why do countries contract PMCs, in the first place? In general, these companies are used for some of the same reasons soldiers are deployed to the battlefield: to secure and further geopolitical interests. While geopolitics don’t always have to include an element of violent conflict to them,  many times they do. I cannot stress enough that in spite of the perception of a more peaceful world, countries like the US, France, the UK, and Russia have continuously been involved in military conflicts since the end of World War I. These conflicts have been numerous and varied but recent ones include the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq, France’s counterterrorism-focused Operation Barkhane in North Africa, the UK’s support of the invasion of Afghanistan, Russia’s support of Donbas separatists in Ukraine, Iran’s support of militia groups in the Syrian Civil War, and Turkey’s intervention in the Libyan Civil War. These situations, by definition, require troops, and mercenaries offer advantages in cost, expendability, and deniability over normal military personnel. 

For one, PMC contractors are cheaper. The Congressional Budget Office found that an infantry battalion at war costs $110 million a year, while a comparable private military unit only costs $99 million. While normal soldiers must receive healthcare, life insurance, dental care, pensions, and other post-duty perks, mercenaries require none of these from the governments which contract them. Additionally, contracts can be instantaneously cut off with PMCs when peace is secured. Governments cannot afford to treat their own soldiers so carelessly. Going along with this reasoning, mercenary groups are much more expendable. Governments don’t have to show the same care for mercenary troops as their own. These private militia fighters can be deployed into the most dangerous combat zones, with little blowback. If a few US soldiers die while engaged in another country, they will receive highly-publicized national recognition for their service and the government risks a backlash against the war. If a few mercenaries die doing the same task, no one bats an eye.   

For the US, these groups have served to help them secure geopolitical interests without having to worry as much about the public opinion. As much as military engagements are touted in some academic circles, its popularity tends to wane significantly over time. In Vietnam, lawmakers learned an important lesson that conscription and the continued killing of citizens’ sons overseas, for a conflict the average person has no personal stake in, is both political suicide and a good way to destabilize the country. Why risk the backlash against putting American boots on the ground, when you can just use mercenaries instead? With less soldiers telling war stories of what they’ve experienced and fewer documents detailing activity in other countries, it is also easier to keep the scope of a war from the public’s view. The contracting of PMCs has thus been one of the tools that have allowed the US to stay at war, while maintaining a state of domestic peace.

Mercenary groups also add an air of deniability to the actions of a government. Until the public acquires mountains of proof detailing collusion with a PMC, a government can easily deny its role in the actions of its mercenaries on the ground, since those troops are not technically government troops. Even when that proof is discovered, there is still a sense of separation between the government and the PMC, which lessens the accountability the former has to take for the latter’s actions. We saw this in action with the Nisour Square Massacre in Iraq. Though Blackwater forces were hired by the Department of Defense, because they weren’t official US soldiers, the Department quickly flipped on them to curry favor with the public after they came under bad press. This plays out on the geopolitical level as well. Active in supporting Russian-aligned governments during the Ukrainian, Syrian, Libyan, and Central African Republic civil wars, the Wagner group, a Russian-based PMC, is obviously being used to substitute Russian army boots in these countries. However, since the Wagner Group is its own independent entity, the Kremlin easily brushes off claims by U.S. analysts that Russia is using the group to carry out its foreign policy. This no doubt hampers legal measures U.S. lawmakers can take against Moscow on the matter.

Lastly, PMCs have much more freedom in their operations than traditional militaries. The public backlash over the Nisour Square Massacre was very much the exception. Mercenary groups don’t face the same press coverage and scrutiny as armies and thus don’t have to worry as much about violating treaties or international law. With less coverage of unethical actions, these private militias don’t have to worry about what a domestic army might: the opinion polls and the ballot box. Their work is shrouded in enough secrecy to make the problem negligible.  

There are a few problems, however, with contracting out combat work to mercenaries ranging from mistreatment of workers to lack of oversight and accountability, which carry grave omens for the future.

As private companies, these organizations have the same vices as any other. Chiefly that even though many of these companies started out and are headquartered in developed countries, they take advantage of wage inequality between the developed and developing world and lack of economic opportunities in some areas to cut costs, by hiring primarily in developing countries at lower salaries. Though not quite an example of this since it is based in Lima, Peru, the PMC “Define Internacional” came under international pressure once word got around that it was only paying its employees $1,000 a month. People whose job it was to work in active war zones and  constantly be alert for gunfire and explosions were being paid less than grocery store workers in the U.S.

Second, and arguably more important, because of the globalized nature of PMCs, it can also be extremely difficult to hold mercenaries accountable for war crimes and violations of human rights. An analysis from Sean Mcfate, a former mercenary, gave a good example of this: “What happens if a Colombian private military contractor kills an Afghan family while on an American contract? Does he go to trial in Afghanistan, the United States, Colombia, or nowhere? No one really knows, and a good labor lawyer could probably shred the case in minutes.” Though the process may be slow and gradual, and may sometimes fail completely, there are proven mechanisms to hold countries accountable for the unforgivable actions their troops commit in combat. The same cannot be said regarding PMCs.

Oversight and accountability issues carry the gravest consequences of continuous mercenary contracting. As a U.S. citizen, it is one’s right to influence the government’s involvement in foreign engagements. Whether you are a pacifist or a war hawk, theoretically the majority desire should be fulfilled through the ballot box, but the use of PMCs could subvert this system.

For example, due to the increasing unpopularity of the war in Afghanistan, by 2017, the troop cap was set at an 8,400 maximum by then President Obama. The Department of Defense claimed to not exceed the cap, however, subsequent reports revealed that there were around 12,000 troops present during that period and estimates of up to an additional 26,000 PMC contractors, on the ground, supporting them. To be fair, not all PMC boots acted in combat capacities. Most jobs go to assisting the army in its day-to-day maneuvering: getting food to the soldiers, cleaning, machine repair and other behind the scenes work is common for contractors. But these are still military-like personnel, on the ground. Regarding the situation, it is unknown how many contractors were acting in combat capacities and due to the secrecy of PMC dealings, we will likely never know. What we do know is that the Department of Defense favored the war, when public opinion did not and these companies were used as a convenient way to go around the will of the people.

The U.S. military is directly involved in a number of conflicts around the world, and based off the various opinion polls in which between 50% and 70% of respondents thought supported the idea of a withdrawal from Afghanistan and a 2020 YouGov poll in which 76% of respondents supported a troop withdrawal from Iraq, I do not believe the American public would be generally in favor of these other ongoing engagements. As conflicts continue to be exposed to the public, PMC contractors could again be used to circumvent future troop caps or withdrawals imposed by the public. In fact, this could currently be happening and we would be lucky to find out about it. With continuous involvement of countries like France, the U.S., and the UK in proxy conflicts overseas, PMCs have become more globalized and taken on a corporate nature. Though the less-than-moral reasons governments are incentivized to work with these companies, and the lack of care mercenaries are treated with, may be reason enough to discourage support of these organizations, I believe that the more pressing issue is their opacity. The clearer military actions are to civilians like you and me, the more information about our engagements elsewhere will be widely available. As this availability increases, these engagements will become more integrated into everyday politics and people will eventually be able to end or scale down these conflicts at the ballot box.  As this whole system of a publicly-responsible military is reliant upon the availability of information, the secrecy of PMC operations poses a significant challenge to this idea. Whether you are a proponent of a bigger or smaller US military footprint, you should find the proliferation of mercenary use to be very worrying.