The term “private military companies” or, as some prefer, “private security companies,” has only recently entered the lexicon. The issue became pertinent to a lot of Americans when the headline “Blackwater Mercenaries Deploy in New Orleans” appeared in a September 10, 2005 news report.
Overnight, we were told, squads of heavily-armed private security contractors were out on patrol in the streets of this stricken Louisiana city. That followed serious hurricane and flood damage in the wake of America’s biggest catastrophe since the Civil War.
Details were sparse. What soon became clear was that some of these mercenaries—many who had just returned from stints of active duty in Iraq—had not only been “deputized” but wore gold Louisiana state law enforcement badges on their chests. That was in addition to their Blackwater USA photo ID cards. The pay, one of them intimated, was $350 a day, only a fraction of what the men were earning out east where a good operator can get anything between $80,000 and $180,000 a year depending on specialties and risk.
When asked what they were doing there, those who would talk to the media—there were many who wouldn’t—said that they were part of a Homeland Security deployment. They had the authority to use lethal force to maintain order, they declared, though once the matter had become controversial, that was disputed by Eddie Compass, the New Orleans Police Commissioner.
Whatever the truth, Blackwater is no novice when it comes to operational matters. I know Gary Jackson, the CEO quite well, having visited him at his Moyock, North Carolina headquarters. We stayed in touch afterward and shared a few insights by e-mail including the fact that his men provided security to employees of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, including its former U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremer.
British-born and a SEAL-team veteran, Gary’s first choice of recruit for work in remote and dangerous parts is somebody with solid Special Forces credentials. He started out by recruiting many of his former SEAL buddies, though by now many nations are represented within the company’s ranks. Essentially the market is something of a moveable feast, with supply dictated by demand, and in Baghdad these days, the need for such professionals remains desperate.
Also, it is no secret that Blackwater USA is one of the field leaders among PMCs/PSCs in Iraq and Afghanistan. The company has numerous government contracts. Its men provide security to American embassies, VIPs, government officials, workplaces and construction sites (including getting crews to and from them on often-dangerous roads) and so on. In fact, the list is extensive, especially when determined and competent groups of zealots are in the business of killing people.
Blackwater works extensively with private corporations in other parts of the globe. Indeed, Gary told me in late 2004, company contracts were rapidly edging up toward the billion dollar mark, which, he admitted, is nice work if you can get it.
More recently, the company was involved in a huge and complex retraining program of members of the U.S. Navy following the bombing of the USS Cole in Aden. Its members put several thousand sailors through their paces in an intense training program in the close-quarter use of firearms. For that purpose, the company built a mock ship superstructure on one of Backwater’s extensive properties about ninety minutes by road south of Virginia Beach.
Significantly, the name Blackwater first rose to prominence when four of its staff members were caught in a road ambush in Fallujah, Iraq in March 2004. Who can forget the horrific images of charred and dismembered bodies strung up on one of the bridges leading into that city?
More recently, Blackwater was linked to the in-flight destruction of a Bulgarian owned and operated Mi-8 helicopter that was brought down during an action just north of Baghdad. The “commercial helicopter” was owned and operated by Heli-Air Services, a Bulgarian subcontractor to SkyLink Air and Logistic Support, a Canadian firm under contract to Blackwater in support of a Department of Defense contract. Though the pilot managed to bring the damaged chopper and everybody in it safely to ground, all eleven people onboard were murdered by al-Qaeda-linked insurgents immediately afterward.
Which begs the question: If the United States is in control of the situation in Iraq—and around Baghdad especially—why then didn’t one of the many U.S. helicopters—gunships included—in the air around the Iraqi capital just then not hasten to assist when the pilot reported that his machine had been hit and he was going down?
Apart from the three Bulgarian crew members, there were two Fijian PMC contractors and six Blackwater employees onboard, which brought the number of Blackwater USA operators KIA in the Middle East in the previous two years to twenty-four, surely a record for any private military company.
Though the jury is still out on the future role of the hired gun in international politics, a landmark decision was made in London in early 2002, when Whitehall gave the nod to regulating Private Military Companies. The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office—in response to a request from a parliamentary committee—released a briefing paper on the subject which noted that in the post-Cold War world, “The demand for private military services is likely to increase.”
More important, it advocated the advantage of relying on private companies rather than national militaries. Its thrust was that a “strong and reputable private military sector might have a role in enabling the (United Nations) to respond more rapidly and more effectively in crises.” A rider almost perfunctorily added that the cost of employing such people for certain UN functions, “could be much lower than that of national armed forces.”
It is fortuitous that British minister Jack Straw released the paper when he did. Five months earlier, the strategic international focus had been reversed by the events of September 11, 2001. Overnight, small wars like those that blighted Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Sudan, Liberia, the Congo, East Timor and elsewhere didn’t get anything like the attention they warranted.
Shortly before that, Colonel Tim Spicer—today head of Aegis and a major PMC player in Iraq—made a comment that was both prescient and timely. Though he was talking about Africa, what he had to say was relevant to any country struggling with an insurgency, particularly in the Third World.
“Peacekeeping deployments in Africa are doomed to failure until the United Nations recognizes that issuing blue helmets to ill-equipped and inadequately trained troops from helpful nations is a futile exercise.” Just because these were the countries that came forward and proffered help was not enough reason to use them, he declared to what must certainly have been silent applause in many of the West’s corridors of power.
“Establishing, enforcing and maintaining peace in volatile regions of Africa requires a more robust and effective form of intervention,” stated an employee of the British firm Sandline. The major powers should continue to accept the offers of other nations, he stressed, but they needed to supplement this with the kind of expertise available from private military companies that could provide cadres of experienced officers and NCOs. They, in turn, could plan, lead and enhance the skills of these forces in the field.
Looking at the game board today, it has become clear that, being composed almost entirely of former Special Forces, the majority of PMCs are ideally suited to accomplish peacemaking tasks, which is exactly what Sandline pointed out in its original policy statement. It wasn’t lost on many observers that PMCs, mercenaries, hired guns—call them what you will—had on numerous occasions already proven their mettle, not just to monitor, but actually to end conflict. If they needed to fight to achieve their aim, so be it, since that is a capability that comes with the job.
This was aptly illustrated in April 2004 when eight members of Blackwater USA—together with a single U.S. Marine and four military policemen—fought off an attack by hundreds of Iraqi militiamen in the Shi’ite town of Najaf south of Baghdad. Most significantly, though the company men took three wounded and the marine was critically hurt, U.S. military forces only arrived when it was all over. By then Blackwater had sent in its own helicopters to resupply the embattled occupants and to take out the wounded. During the scrap, which lasted three-and-a-half hours, the defenders’ house was completely surrounded and all the injuries apparently came from a single sniper on the roof of a nearby building.
Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt arrived at the battle zone shortly afterward and his observations at a press conference the next day are instructive.1 Of the Blackwater people he declared: “They knew what they were here for. They’d had three of their own wounded. We were sitting there among the bullet shells…the bullet casings…and frankly, the blood of their comrades, and they were absolutely confident.’
In contrast, it was later established, the attackers took an awful lot of casualties.
The modern-day mercenary falls into several categories and, for a variety of reasons, the world at large remains skeptical both of their role in the international arena and their ultimate agenda. Bear in mind, too, that this is an age when a large sector of American society still cannot agree whether the use of atom bombs against Japanese cities was justified. Or even if events surrounding 9/11 – should the mastermind be identified – deserves any kind of retaliation. Thus, the question of using freelancers to fight wars remains contentious.
So, while Colonel Mike Hoare built his reputation on the rock of what he set out to accomplish in Moise Tshombe’s troubled Katanga of the 1960s, he demolished it a decade or so later by trying to invade the Seychelles in an operation botched as much by booze as bad planning. Since then, there have been mercenaries in a score of countries including Columbia, both Congos, Angola, Eritrea, El Salvador, Togo, Nigeria, Rhodesia, Sri Lanka Mozambique, Chad, the Sudan, Uganda and elsewhere.
Some of the players we’ve already met. These are people like Neall Ellis, Bob Denard, Bob MacKenzie and the Rob Marafonos of the world. There are more, such as ex-French Foreign Legionnaire Phil Foley, who at extremely short notice absconded from an illustrious thirteen-year career in the service of the tricolor when his CIA cover was blown in Tahiti.
Which brings us back to Robert Kaplan. In his timely 1994 Atlantic Monthly article, Kaplan predicted growth in the use of civilian-based “Special Forces.” Such a development would come about partly due to cost, he believed. He went on to say that by buying “private” protection, the international community would get it as cheaply as possible while warding off a new enemy: the skilled, high-tech terrorist.
Kaplan also saw elite former soldiers being able to meet the needs of cities in North America, where the future will “be brutal to industrial-age armies with big tanks and jets, and kind to corporate-style forces in urban settings.” Then why not turn to corporate structures themselves instead of changing the nature of the armies that our public pays for?
Then one must ask, will private security companies replace armies at home as well as abroad? In some senses, they already have. These organizations have proliferated worldwide. In fact, as we all know, there is barely a large corporation, airport, building site, housing estate, school, university, dockland or industry that has not got uniformed security people on its staff.
Private security companies can be very well “regulated” in the public interest, a point already made by David Shearer in his seminal work for London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies.2 The history of regulation, however, bears frequent witness to how eventually the regulators have served the interests of the regulated. Only transparency and understanding can prevent this, not only in the public interest, but also in the interest of the investors who form private companies,3 particularly those involved in resource development in Africa, where mercenaries have been so much in the news.
Overnight, all this effort is tarnished by the actions of a group of renegade “hired guns” such as the Southern Africans that intended to dislodge the status quo in Equatorial Guinea.
As if to anticipate the possible resurgence of organized professional fighters bringing order to areas devastated by civil war, there has been a sudden market surge in mercenary recruitment in other domains as well.
A television documentary produced in the Ukraine and shown on Kiev’s commercial station, ICTV, exposed a huge network of mercenary activities behind what was once known as the Iron Curtain. This has taken place in countries such as Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus and others. The film exposed a worldwide network created by officers of the former Soviet Military Intelligence Directorate (GRU) and detailed the hire of war dogs, arms smuggling and illegal sales to rogue nations—and even more insidiously—human trafficking.4
It also dealt with supply and demand. The TV program showed that whereas soldiers of fortune from the Ukraine had previously been paid $5,000 a month to train and fight in Laurent Kabila’s Congo, there had been so much interest among Soviet veterans to get a piece of that action that eighteen months later, the average East European recruit was lucky to be offered $900.
Brigadier-General Ian Douglas, a retired Canadian soldier, had his own views on the subject. He made the case for the UN to use “private security firms” to fulfill peacekeeping requirements. Citing the work of Executive Outcomes in Sierra Leone and Angola in 1995, this veteran soldier believed that there is a place in the international community for these organizations.
“Look at what EO did in Sierra Leone. Without them, there would have been no peace to pursue. They literally stopped the war,” he declared. Both Ironically and tragically—considering the number of innocents who were to die or end up without limbs—that “peace” was soon overtaken by a coup, launched by the Sierra Leone Army in May 1997. The revolt was ended in February 1998 following armed intervention by ECOMOG, the West African peacekeeping force built around the Nigerian army.
At the same time, it is consistently (though hardly vociferously) argued that Turtle Bay needs to be more practical in its peacekeeping efforts. In 1995, Douglas helped to organize an $8 million UN operation that saw fifteen hundred Zairian troops hired to provide security for the refugee camps along their country’s eastern border. That cost, he maintained, would have been $80 million if “traditional peacekeeping troops” were used. Indeed, he believed, it was a very practical solution to something that could very quickly have turned nasty.
As we are now aware, the UN did not follow up on their promises of additional support. They did absolutely nothing. As a consequence, hundreds of thousands of innocents were murdered in one of the worst examples of internecine strife the world has seen since the end of World War II. British writer Aidan Hartley was there and saw the carnage from up close. He spells out the scenario that led to this terrible catastrophe in his last book, The Zanzibar Chest.5 Of all recent books on Africa’s woes, this is essential reading, because if the world is stuck with the United Nations in its present form, we’re likely to see such bloodshed again. The way events have been unfolding in Darfur in the Islamic Republic of the Sudan, it is likely to be sooner rather than later.
It is Hartley’s view, that had a PMC like Executive Outcomes been allowed to go into Central Africa in what might euphemistically have been termed a pacifying role (this was actually debated behind closed doors at the UN at the time) its personnel could have halted the slaughter. It might have taken a bit of time and lives would have been lost, but nowhere on the scale that took place while the world community sat on its thumbs.
In a related article on post-Cold War mercenaries, USA Today reported that “private military companies are working hand in glove with various governments to fight their wars in a businesslike manner.” That was followed by observations from Dianne Alden in an article titled “Soldiers R US: The Corporate Military.” Among a raft of comments, she suggested that the modern mercenary force “is no longer an unkempt, unprofessional band of soldier wannabes.”
Continuing, she said, “They are, for the most part, organized former military officers and enlisted men from all ranks and nations. Ostensibly advisers and strategists, they also conduct warfare in places where official government armies are not prepared to go.”
Ed Soyster, a thirty-five year U.S. Army veteran and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, added his bit. He said that if you accept that there is a national treasure called retired and former military people, “and if you bring them together to form a company and give them the necessary resources and support, they can accomplish just about anything.” Soyster’s role as the erstwhile spokesman for Military Professional Resources, Inc. placed him in an excellent position to judge, if only because MPRI remains one of the biggest in the business of PMCs.
Regarding terminology, some prefer the acronym MSPs (military service providers) and still more, like Tom Valentine, a senior vice president of Control Risks Group’s Washington offices, prefer the appellation Private Security Companies (PSCs). Like Gary Jackson of Blackwater, Valentine is also a former SEAL: in fact, the two men served together.
Strictly speaking, where MPRI is concerned, one needs to distinguish training from combat support, because the American company does not fight others’ wars for them. Whatever they call themselves, all such entities do similar work and, were there no need for their services, they simply wouldn’t exist. Underscoring that premise, the private military industry has burgeoned and there is a stock of them.
For its part, MPRI—run by a group of retired generals—handles anything from military training programs in countries facing war to setting up a coast guard service, as they accomplished in Equatorial Guinea. The company also supports the U.S. Department of Defense in the establishment and operation of the Africa Center for Strategic Studies (ACSS). It used a $3.5 million budget funded by USAID, for instance, to “review the Nigerian military in order to formulate a plan for its professionalization and modernization.”
Africa has not been the only theater where MPRI was instrumental in turning things around. During the 1990s the company showed its mettle when it took charge a bunch of ill-disciplined militias that passed for a Croat army and hauled them off to an island off the Dalmatian coast. There, in a remarkably short time they taught these hopefuls a lot of what there was to know about combat and they did it from the bootstraps up. Within a year, this same group—by now relatively responsible and much better disciplined than before—were formed into units under a single central command.
As Ian Bruce tells us in “Guns for Hiring and Firing,” these same “one-time nondescript Croats launched Operation Lightning Storm, a counter-offensive which combined tanks, artillery and infantry in an unstoppable assault which drove the Bosnian Serb army out of the Krajina region.” In fact, those efforts—coordinated by a dedicated bunch of American professionals—marked the beginning of the end of Serb domination of the Balkans.
The downside is what one veteran termed MPRI’s “almost intimate relations” with the Pentagon. Among the majority of undeveloped nations in this unstable era of burgeoning “Washingtonphobia,” that kind of conjunction in the long term is likely to become counterproductive. Politics aside, MPRI has acquired an enviable reputation as an organization that can deliver the goods.
Mercenary-related work can take many forms. For instance, more than two decades ago, contracts worth more than $170 million for training Saudi Arabia’s National Guard and air force went to the Vinnell Corporation and a sister company, partly owned by Washington’s Carlyle merchant banking group. And that in an age when you could do a lot more with a million dollars than today. It is perhaps not coincidental that the company’s chairman was former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Frank Carlucci. Vinnell advisors subsequently provided “tactical support” and advice to the Saudi military when, in a spate of brief, bloody battles in 1979, it retook the AlHaram Grand Mosque in Mecca after armed zealots had occupied it by force.
Although the operation was muddled and innocents died in the crossfire, things might have been very different in Saudi Arabia today had the fundamentalists not been checkmated. They directly threatened the Saudi ruling dynasty, in much the same way that Osama bin Laden managed to do in the mid-1990s. He was bought off with a $200 million “incentive” from Riyadh. It is also worth nothing that two Vinnell-trained Saudi armored brigades fought in the Gulf War and by some accounts put up a reasonably good show.
More recently, according to P.W. Singer, a Fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, during the period from 1994 to 2002, the Pentagon entered into more than three thousand contracts with private military firms. Companies like Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former firm, he pointed out, now provide the logistics for just about every major American military deployment.
“Corporations have even taken over much of military training and recruiting, including the Reserve Officer Training Corps programs at more than 200 American universities. (Yes, private employees now train our military leaders of tomorrow.),” is Singer’s view.
Not all the companies involved are American. One of the most enterprising of the lot is Safenet Security Services, a PMC that started with twenty men in Baghdad in 2004 and now employs more than fifteen hundred, a significant proportion of them South African. Operating unobtrusively and very low key, the company’s unofficial watchwords are “tactical prudence.” Put another way, said Mauritz le Roux, its chief executive, “Don’t go looking for crap. Don’t give anybody the opportunity to give you any either.”
Safenet’s policy appears to work. It has excellent relations with Iraqis “on both sides of the fence” and gets the done job quietly and methodically. It is perhaps significant that the company has yet to lose one of its men in action. At the same time, company convoys and patrols have come under fire numerous times, attacks that were both concerted and well-planned and that sometimes took half-an-hour or more to beat off. Since most of those providing support are veteran Special Forces personnel who have seen a lot of action in conflicts all over the globe, they invariably dispense better than they get.
In the long term, the Third World is going to see a lot more of this kind of freelance military activity. Countries like Nigeria, for instance, offer marvelous PMC prospects for the future, which is a good reason why ArmorGroup, a global security consulting and services firm, has been active there. The company has also worked in nine other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, though its specialty remains countering threats to oil operations in Nigeria. Much of the demand for commercial security protection over the past decade, said a spokesman, “was driven by the need to provide a degree of insulation for expatriate employees from the rough-and-tumble of daily life and petty crime in Lagos or Port Harcourt, rather than to protect them against serious threats to life, which were rare.” The company has also dealt with problems relating to hostage-taking (with dozens of workers being detained at a time), especially around the drilling platforms in the oil-rich Niger Delta region, where large ransoms tend to predominate.
Similar trends have been evinced in South and Central America. According to the Mexican publication La Jornada, the U.S. company Epi Security & Investigation hired a thousand Colombian military and police veterans to work as mercenaries for U.S. forces Iraq. Salaries offered were between $2,500 and $5,000 a month, or a good deal less than what their U.S. counterparts were making. A U.S. source suggested that most of the people were retired military or law enforcement elements that had originally been trained by Americans. Before that, the Bogota daily El Tiempo reported that the U.S. contractor Halliburton had recruited twenty-five retired Colombian police and army officers to provide security for oil infrastructure in Iraq. There were also U.S. media reports that former soldiers from Chile and Spain had been recruited to beef up Iraqi security forces
Then there is Levdan, one of a variety of low-profile Israeli firms that peddles military assistance abroad. Not long ago the company completed a three-year stint in the Congo (Brazzaville) where two hundred Israelis trained the armed forces, together with the elite guard that protected President Pascal Lissouba. This Congo Government—not to be confused with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) across the river—afterward agreed to buy more than $10 million worth of Israeli weapons and military equipment. Not that it did much good, because soon afterward Lissouba was ousted in a putsch supported by the Angolan military.
The difference between Israeli PMCs and those from other countries is that the Jewish operators inevitably try to sell the products produced by their country’s arms industries. Though more expensive than similar items from Eastern European states, this material is of good quality, though not always suited to primitive Third World conditions.
Another company, formerly British and now American (acquired by the New York Stock Exchange-quoted L3 Communications) is Defense Systems Limited, or DSL, founded by former Guards and SAS officer Alistair Morrison in 1982. In its day, DSL was a world leader among PMCs. It would provide a variety of services including mine clearing, training of military personnel and provision of security in Algerian oil fields, Columbia and many other countries, as well as administrative support for UN operations. DSL boat teams have been active in offshore counterinsurgency operations in Angola’s Cabinda oilfields.
Looking at the broader, international perspective, it is Africa that could most urgently use help from the private security community. The problem, however, is that the majority of states that need assistance the most are broke.
In the case of Sierra Leone, for instance, Neall Ellis has been battling for over two years to get the million dollars-plus he is owed. In theory, the Sierra Leone government could, with American help, have used a company like the private security firm International Charter Incorporated of Oregon (ICI) to do its air work, but then they wouldn’t have done the fighting. Instead, in the modern era, this organization is at the forefront of the kind of non-combat services that a PMC is able to offer. In a briefing, Danny O’Brien, ICI’s chief executive officer, told me that his is a Civilian Aviation and Government Services company, at one stage the prime contractor in Sierra Leone after 2000.
“We worked directly for the United States Department of State, USAID, and OFDA,” he declared. When ICI was involved in the evacuation of the American Embassy in Liberia and brought in reinforcements in 2002–03, that was a State Department contract, O’Brien said. While still operating in Sierra Leone, the ICI directorate had allocated about twenty hours a week to that country’s army. Its Russianbuilt helicopters (see Chapter 3) also flew free hours for some NGOs such as Geneva’s International Committee of the Red Cross.
PMCs and PSCs have also distinguished themselves in the aftermath of natural, as well as man-made disasters. When the damage following a series of devastating earthquakes in Pakistan and surrounding regions was still being assessed toward the end of 2005, ICI’s Danny O’Brien sent me a brief e-mail which read: “Just checking in from Pakistan. We have been flying our trusty Mi-8’s in support of The Earthquake Relief Mission.”
The disaster had barely happened when O’Brien got a call from the U.S. State Department to move his men and machines into action, half a world away from where they had been operating in the Sudan. Attached to his message were a bunch of photos, one of which is to be found in this book.
The projects embraced by this kind of PMC are remarkably cosmopolitan. Danny O’Brien traditionally uses Russian pilots to crew his Mi-8 helicopters, and for very good reason, he adds. “For a start, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) would never allow a civilian ‘N’ registered aircraft or helicopter to fly in the zones we work. In any event, American civilian pilots are sometimes impossible to work with, especially once the shooting starts. I have had this experience, and don’t wish to repeat it.
“Also, you must accept that the Russian CAA does not allow mixed crews to fly in ‘RA’ registered aircraft.
“More important, as far as operational capability is concerned, we have the additional advantage that Russian aircraft design philosophy is such that it is possible for us to perform heavy maintenance in the field using in-house [Russian] engineers. We can repair radios down to the component level, replace engines and main gear boxes in the field. It would be extremely difficult to achieve that kind of versatility with Western machines. In fact, considering where some of our missions take us, that is a huge plus!
“Last, ICI’s pilots are unmatched anywhere in the world. Our captains average twelve thousand hours as PIC. More salient, they are trained for conditions in the arctic, the desert, over water as well as for any kind of mountain operation. They have thousands of flying hours in uncontrolled airspace, most of it at low level.
“In addition, I can only say that they have big balls. They don’t whine about money and many have run unauthorized cross-border missions with the company and have never said a word.
“But that is something about which I will not expand,” were O’Brien’s final words on the subject.
Asked about moral issues surrounding what an interviewer termed “Murder for Profit,” British author and UN authority William Shawcross spoke candidly about the use of mercenaries.
“Obviously, money has always been the issue,” he replied, adding that all soldiers are paid. “I don’t see that it really matters whether they are working for the ministry of defense of, say, Bangladesh, or employed by a private security company that is regulated and is transparent.
“What we are arguing about here, is that these should not be mer cenaries of the old traditional ‘dogs of war’ type. They would have to be private companies whose dealings were entirely open and accessible to the United Nations, or whoever it was that was employing them…. Now all these things are not easy, and I’m not saying that this is a panacea for all the world’s problems. But I do think that if we in the West are confronted with horrible images on television and say that something must be done, then something must be done.”
As a postscript he added that this was an alternative that global leaders should look at “very seriously and rather quickly.” Also, if the international community wished to put the world to rights and were not prepared to sacrifice their own troops, “then governments like that of Sierra Leone should have the right to call upon forces from elsewhere.” That seemed to him to be “not an immoral proposition in any way whatsoever.”
Clearly the industry has flourished, though rarely to its credit because the civilized world is prone to be critical of people who are prepared to take lives for cash, even if they are fighting terror and losing some of their own in the process. Writing in the US Army War College Quarterly Parameters, Lt-Col Thomas K. Adams—an unusually prescient observer of these disciplines—declared that there were three basic types of mercenaries.
The first, he said, might be called the “traditional” type, consisting of groups or individuals that have military skills directly applicable to combat or immediate combat support. These are basic, industrial-age and hi-tech forces. An example would be Russian and Ukrainian exmilitary aviators flying jet fighters for the Congo government. A generation ago, this group included individuals who responded to ads in macho, true-to-type magazines. Since then, things have changed.
Consider the deal by the Moscow-based Sukhoi Design Bureau to provide Su-27 jet fighters to Ethiopia for its war with Eritrea in the late 1990s. Although the Addis Ababa government was anxious to acquire modern fighters, it lacked the pilots to fly them. As part of the agreement, the firm included former Soviet military airmen and ground crews. They delivered a compact little air force to Africa’s troubled Horn that in the end crippled Eritrea.
By the time it was over, there were former Soviet Union pilots flying MiG fighters on both sides. During a previous phase of hostilities, US News and World Report carried the story of Colonel Vyacheslav Myzin, depicting him emerging from the cockpit of one of Ethiopia’s newly acquired Su-27s after a demonstration flight. He was labeled one of Africa’s “new mercenaries.”
The second type, says Adams, is a late 20th-century phenomenon: fairly large companies that provide the services of a “general staff” in one of the more developed countries. They provide high quality tactical, operational and strategic advice for the structure, training, equipping and employment of armed forces. This, he explained, was what MPRI had to offer. There are also specialized companies like AirScan, which offers “airborne surveillance and security operations” as well as specialized consulting services for a variety of companies, particularly those involved in government or the oil industry. Last heard, clients in its portfolio included the U.S. Department of the Interior and some multinational oil giants in Angola and elsewhere.
Other companies in this category—such as Freetown’s Southern Cross Security—might have both military and civilian skills performing functions such as personnel protection, signal intercepts, computer “cracking,” secure communications and technical surveillance. Until recently, Southern Cross also operated an anti-piracy and fish poaching division off the West African coast out of Freetown in conjunction with the European Union.
Obviously, says Adams, none of these skills emerged overnight. They took time to develop. Also, they tend to draw on the expertise and disciplines that could only come with close involvement in a sophisticated military environment.
South Africa’s Executive Outcomes slotted very neatly into the first and second categories. In its day it effectively represented what Adams termed “the expanded model of the military contractor.” It did spectacularly well in such a short time that it astonished everybody when it unexpectedly wound down its affairs at the end of the millennium. Those close to the organization say that South African government pressure had a lot to do with it.
One of EO’s founders told me that there were quite a few ancillary factors that contributed to the closure: “We just felt it was time to pull down the shutters.”
The move was apparently precipitated as much by a lack of new contracts as questions about how much had been earned, who was supposed to pay taxes, to whom and so on. Though almost all transactions were offshore, there were governments eager to claim their piece of the action. But this became rather involved, not least because the company had financial links to a variety of commercial organizations abroad. Even today those connections remain contorted.
Then there was the issue, possibly, that EO sometimes did not take as many prisoners as some would have liked. Because of this, there were those among its staff who believed that war crimes might eventually become an issue, though in the harsh reality of what has been going on in this distant West African jungle, that would be absurd. In reality, hardly anybody in Sierra Leone (or Angola, for that matter) took prisoners unless there was a very good reason to do so. More to the point, few of those involved in those bitter struggles—on both sides of the front—had ever heard of Geneva, never mind its namesake convention that dictates the actions of combatants in wartime.
While much of what took place in the back and beyond in Sierra Leone could probably never be condoned in terms of international or any other law, there was sometimes good reason for EO combatants to act as their own judges and executioners. One example will do:
In Sierra Leone’s eastern hills, one of their units came on a village where everybody had been murdered. The women had had branches rammed up their vaginas in a particularly brutal manner that must surely have resulted in some of these pathetic souls dying of shock. It was truly dreadful.
A youngster emerged from the bush shortly after the EO squad got there and said that the rebels had terrorized them all. His entire family was dead, he cried, saying that he had only escaped because he was fetching water when the rebels arrived and he had heard the desperate cries. So rather than show himself, he hid.
The mercenaries—all of them black except for two white officers—were incensed. There was no question that these mindless atrocities cried out for vengeance. The child indicated a path that the perpetrators had taken and, at a trot, the group headed down it. Twenty minutes later, the rebels were found laughing and drinking at the next village. Seven of the eight-man insurgent group was killed. By this time the rescuers weren’t looking to arrest anybody who might or might not eventually come to trial.
Sir John Keegan phrased this kind of circumstance rather eloquently in a recent piece for his paper, The Daily Telegraph. Quoting in the original Latin, he called it inter arma silent leges, which, roughly translated, says there is no law on the battlefield. That might be a useful precept for some of my more vociferous colleagues to remember when they report from Iraq. A ruthless enemy with homicidal/suicidal tendencies can not always be met by forebearance.
It’s actually quite easy to offer your services to fight in some of the more obscure destinations of the world. Jim Penrith, then working for Johannesburg’s Argus Africa News Service, was, as we saw in Chapter Eight, almost recruited in a Kampala bar to fight in the Congo.
These days, all you really need is a decent military background, preferably with good (and verifiable) combat experience and perhaps half a dozen friends with similar proclivities. Having spent time in uniform, you’ve probably read appropriate books, as well as magazines like Soldier of Fortune and Britain’s Combat & Survival. No doubt you will have access to the right websites and there are a lot of them.
Having established your parameters—and perhaps even made a preliminary approach to a specific government—a single discreetly worded advertisement in the Johannesburg Star or one of the Moscow or Kiev dailies (in Russian) is likely to prompt scores of inquiries. Usually the return address is abroad because some countries, the United States in particular, have laws about its citizens fighting under foreign flags, though that does not seem to have affected PMCs in the Middle East.
Veterans from some former Eastern bloc countries are available for as little as $600 a month, though most aren’t noted either for reliability or proficiency. For that, you pay what the British or American markets will bear and it doesn’t come cheap. Remember that a British Army private earns about $2,000 a month and a major as much as $75,000 a year. But then you are getting top-drawer quality, backed by years of training and expertise.
South Africa has any number of experienced soldiers of fortune for hire. Because of a depressed economy and, for a long while, an unstable rand, many veterans of that country’s insurgency wars were looking for jobs. These days South African war dogs come relatively cheap, though field commanders everywhere (except from Balkan states) are paid roughly the same as their counterparts in places like the Congo and Angola.
As for hardware, you can buy most of the basics off the shelf in countries such as Bulgaria, Romania and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. There’s a lot of surplus about in the warehouses of some of the CIS states, where good military materiel can be had at much less than you’d pay for the same kind of thing in London or Paris.
A good Asian copy of the American M-16, for instance, comes at about $350. A crude crib of the AR-10 costs even less, though Thailand’s version of Heckler & Koch’s 33/93 needs solid input if you’re going to force costs down. But, as one gun enthusiast suggested, why buy NATO calibers when there are AKs a-plenty out there, and they’re going at about a quarter the price? Standard squad weapons like the RPK, the Degtyarev DPM light machine gun or the PKM might cost a bit more, depending where they come from and how many rounds have been through their barrels. Anybody with reliable Serbian contacts can get a container-load of the old Yugoslavian M76s wholesale.
Scratch a bit and you’re likely to come up with a few Israeli, Ukrainian or South African dealers who handle more complex items such as claymores, grenades and mortars. Be circumspect about your dealings: they’re usually under surveillance when they’re in someone else’s town and the activities of most of them have been highlighted not only on the web, but also by Interpol.
With armor, there’s enough good surplus material floating about in Europe to satisfy most needs. You should be able to come up with sufficient BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicles to put a couple of divisions into the field and they’re relatively cheap, too. Quality refurbished versions can be had for as little as $100,000, but that doesn’t include shipping and their engines will probably need some attention.
Don’t bother going heavier: tanks are usually more of a hindrance than a help in primitive terrain, a description that fits just about all of sub-Saharan Africa north of the Zambezi.
You can even buy what you need in South Africa, where there are six hundred companies vying for arms contracts.6 A UN report accused the Pretoria government in April 2005 of ignoring international arms embargoes and supplying a host of countries that were involved in cross-border conflicts, insurgencies, internal suppression and other iniquities with weapons of war. Mentioned in this regard were Uganda, Rwanda, Zambia, the Sudan, Ethiopia and others. Because a finger was pointed at the biggest culprit of all, the stateowned Denel corporation, it is unlikely that the top echelons of government in South Africa—including the president—were unaware of the transactions. As the report implied, money was at the core of it, but then that is the story with most of Africa.
When I was last in Freetown, Neall Ellis had prepared a proposal for a small force of eighty-eight combatants (including sixteen Air Wing personnel). It was the size of a force that he believed he could put together at short notice. The proposal covered operations over a sixty-day period and involved communications equipment, protection, logistics, support, a small field hospital (with medical staff) as well as the positioning of personnel and equipment.
He listed a requirement of about fifty thousand gallons of Jet A-1 aviation fuel (at plus/minus US$1.60 a gallon) together with about three thousand gallons of diesel. To that, Nellis added capital equipment costs at $1.5m each for two Mi-17/7 medium transport helicopters plus their respective spares packages. Also essential, he reckoned, would be a light reconnaissance aircraft plus night vision equipment at $150,000. Overall, he believed that about half a million dollars would cover ammunition. Transport, probably from Eastern Europe, would be another $150,000.
Nellis’ total package (with a ten-percent contingency for the twomonth period) amounted to just short of $4 million, which is perhaps a little more than what Sierra Leone’s UN operation cost the international community toward the end of that war for roughly forty-eight hours work. Extend this activity to a year—without having to spend on more capital items—and it would average out at even less.
A more elaborate breakdown for what he termed “A Proposal for Deployment of Air and Ground Forces—Two Months” such as what was offered to Mobutu’s government toward the end of that rule was calculated as follows, though bear in mind that he had Africa in mind here. In the Middle East or Asia these costs could feasibly double.
And if these prices appear to be basement bargains, bear in mind that all this took place in the late 1990s. By early 2006, many of these amounts might have doubled, fuel and expatriate manpower costs especially.
TWO-MONTH DEPLOYMENT OF AIR AND GROUND FORCES
(In U.S. Currency)
| 1. Salaries – 72 ground force personnel | 1,313,000 |
| 2. Salaries – 16 air wing personnel | 240,000 |
| 3. Salaries SLA troops | 187,500 |
| 4. Rations: two months—163 person @ US$20/day plus 20 percent7 | 202,120 |
| 5. Field Hospital, medical equip plus supplies | 150,000 |
| 6. Charter fees/air fares for positioning and repositioning of personnel and equipment | 225,000 |
| 7. Logistics, administrative and communication equipment | 192,000 |
| 8. Jet A-1 Aviation fuel—53,000 US gals @ $1.62/gallon | 188,730 |
| 9. Diesel – 3,000 gals @US$2.00/gallon | 16,020 |
| TOTAL: | 2,714,370 |
| “Contingency” payments at 10 percent8 | 271,437 |
| TOTAL FOR THE GROUP FOR TWO MONTHS | $2,985,807 |
CAPITAL EQUIPMENT COSTS
| 1. Two Mi-17/8 medium transport helicopters plus spares package | 3,000,000 |
| 2. One light reconnaissance aircraft plus night vision equipment | 150,000 |
| 3. Mi-24 ammunition requirements | 600,000 |
| 4. Transport costs | 150,000 |
| TOTAL: | $3,900,000 |
RENEWAL OF CONTRACT—88 TROOPS FOR ONE MONTH
| 1. Salaries 72 ex-pat personnel, Ground Force | 536,500 |
| 2. Salaries 16 ex-pat personnel Air Wing | 120,000 |
| 3. Rations for one month 163 personnel @ $20 per day/per person | 101,060 |
| 4. Medical equipment and supplies | 40,000 |
| 5. Charter fees for positioning + repositioning personnel and equipment | 40,000 |
| 6. Logistics, administrative and communication equip. | 50,000 |
| 7. Jet A-1 Aviation fuel | 94,770 |
| 8. Diesel and oil for vehicles | 8,010 |
| TOTAL: | 990,340 |
| “Contingency” fees | 99,034 |
| TOTAL REQUIRED FOR ONE MONTH | $1,089,374 |
Obviously, the majority of those involved would be locals who customarily would be paid less than expatriates. Second, the number of personnel for such an “Air Wing” would, of necessity, be flexible. It would vary according to the number and type of aircraft available.
The medical requirement that Nellis had in mind included medevac by air and hospitalization of wounded in South Africa, though (as with Executive Outcomes) it included finance for a personal death insurance fund payable to the dependents of Air Wing members killed in the line of duty. Also, there would be the repatriation of bodies as well as funeral costs. Any unused funds to be returned to government on completion of the operation.
Apart from medicines/equipment, food and communication systems, the client government would be required to provide all other logistical requirements, including vehicles, aircraft, fuel, weapons and ammunition. If these were not available, the contractor would be in a position to source all requirements for government account. All this stuff would remain in country on completion of the contract.
If the services of the “Air Wing” so formed, were required beyond the initial two-month contract period, the monthly contractual amount payable in advance would be US$4,700,000.
Why Neall Ellis remains a proponent of Russian helicopters has puzzled a lot of people who have done business with him. The answer is that he is not. He favors them in Sierra Leone, first, because they are there, and second because, like his old friend Danny O’Brien of ICI, they are low-cost, and spares can be found just about everywhere. In a worst-case scenario, if one of his Hinds was crippled because of the lack of a spare part, somebody from State House could fly to Guinea in a couple of hours and do a backhanded deal. With the right kind of incentive, he could be back with the item before nightfall.
Nellis has always said that if he could choose an alternate machine, his first option for a medium-sized transport chopper would be something akin to the French-built Super Puma, or even better, the South African Oryx, the latter an excellent upgrade on the standard Puma. These aircraft are easy to fly and visibility from the cockpit is better than from any Russian helicopter, particularly for night operations, which is vital for African conditions where helicopters often have to put down in bush clearings.
As for combat, he has good reason to stand by the Hind, which, for the price, is unbeatable. With a normal take-off weight of about twelve tons, it might be a little heavier than most, but that is offset by reliability.
“Look after it, keep it serviced, and it’ll remain useful longer than most Western machines,” he told one inquiring writer who was predisposed to what was coming out of the U.S.. Nellis asked him pointedly why he should buy an Apache for between $20m to $26m (depending on options)—which, granted, was top of the range—when he could get something similar from Moscow for a fraction of that figure? Anyway, he added, most times the Apache didn’t slot into the kind of environment encountered in primitive regions. Albania—when Kosovo was in flames—was a case in point, he suggested, though since then Afghanistan has proved otherwise.
“Like most pedigrees, the Apache also needs a helluva lot of attention. It must be finely tuned and that becomes expensive when U.S. Air Force technicians are not around. Western ground crews in outlandish places cost a mint since most demand the same kind of facilities that they get back home.”
The Mi-24 is different. “It flies anywhere at any time. It can do exactly the same work as the Apache with a quarter of the down time.” It was great for Europe, he stated, “but Africa is something else: ask anybody who has fought out there.” With the Hind, says Nellis, you can fly more than six hundred nautical miles by fitting four external fuel tanks, which is a comparatively simple task. “That’s a lot of hours sitting cramped in the cockpit.”
One of the principal characteristics that differentiate today’s private military companies from the ad hoc groupings of freelance soldiers of the 1960s and 1970s is that they have a clear structure built along corporate lines. MPRI, for example, is a massive organization structured in the traditional American manner with a full executive, topped by a CEO. The same is true of Blackwater USA.
The new companies are defined, incorporated entities intended to continue in perpetuity. What they are not are bands of individuals who have been recruited to carry out a single contractual obligation. This is a fundamental rationale for reconsidering the definition and applicability of the term “mercenary.”
At the same time, it is a difficult tag to shake. While with Executive Outcomes—an organization whose leaders vigorously discouraged the use of the word—most of the field commanders I encountered would relish the notoriety that it bestowed, though that revelation usually came after a beer or six.
“We’re mercenaries. What else? It’s fooling nobody to give us any other sort of name,” said Hennie Blaauw, in his day among the best combat commanders in a Boer tradition that goes back two centuries. In the final stages of South Africa’s border wars, Blaauw headed the most active of the five Reconnaissance Regiments.
As Sandline said in an insightful paper titled “Should the Activities of Private Military Companies be Transparent?,” there will always be ad-hoc groups such as the unfocused and unruly bunch of Bosnian freebooters that were deployed to the former Zaire in 1996. “They are harder to control and regulate and also less likely to apply internationally accepted standards to operations of their own.” Also, it was suggested that the growth of active PMCs had overtaken the embryonic regulatory framework, both at national and international levels.
As a consequence, PMCs for the most part, have developed their own set of operating principles and processes of self-regulation. Certainly the most important factor that distinguishes PMCs from the distant “dogs of war” is that they are prepared to work only for the “good guys,” which means legitimate clients. Neall Ellis, for example, employed as a combat pilot on contract to the government of Sierra Leone, would not long ago have been damned as a mercenary.
Nellis, in the meantime, has traveled the long road. It says something that he has finally achieved acceptance by the international community, because he never took any kind of action in isolation from the war effort. In his role as the country’s lone combat pilot, he operated directly under the command and control of the Chief of Defense Staff of the Sierra Leone Army. As he told me, if he didn’t follow orders, he’d have been out of a job long ago.
Had Sandline been permitted to act—before Tony Blair’s government stepped in and forced the company out of Sierra Leone—the international community would have been spared the carnage that followed in the wake of a rebel onslaught that lasted several years. Also spared would have been billions of dollars thrown away on a moribund UN operation that in the end yielded nothing but discord and irreverence. It was finally a British military presence, backed by powerful input from both the Royal Navy and Royal Marines that eventually put a close to the war, and it is no revelation that the United Nations spent almost all their time in Sierra Leone as spectators.
Push this concept up a notch or two and the real benefit would have been the saving of tens of thousands of innocent lives, never mind the untold number of amputations, mutilations, rapes, and the million or so souls that were displaced by ongoing hostilities. The true stories behind many of the atrocities and numbers killed by the rebels will never be known.
The only company, so far, to have come directly to grips with the kind of savagery espoused by the rebels of Foday Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front is Executive Outcomes, with whom Sandline’s executives maintained close ties over several years.
As Michael Grunberg says, over a twenty-one-month period, an average of about a hundred and fifty EO soldiers, supported by a solitary gunship (and then only for part of the time) together with two transport helicopters, did their thing in Sierra Leone and turned the war around. Apart from retraining elements of the Sierra Leone Army, they drove the rebels back from the edge of Freetown and systematically destroyed their fighting capability in the bush. The cost was a modest $20 million a year, including provision of all the necessary equipment.
The result of EO’s intervention was the signing, in November 1996, of a set of peace accords between the rebels and the government. Part of the deal, ultimately, was that EO’s service should be terminated. And when that happened, the rebels abrogated the peace accord and sent their people back into the bush. Within a hundred days of EO’s departure, the rebels were easily able to orchestrate another coup.
Enter Nigeria and the intervention of a ten thousand-strong regional military force named ECOMOG, again advised and assisted by Sandline. After the British company had gone, the UN stepped in and deployed a mammoth force totaling thirteen thousand, sometimes more. It also had a billion-dollar-a-year budget and more freeloaders that any comparably-sized force in the history of modern warfare.
The situation would have been a joke were the consequences not so serious.
From the earliest, ultra-critical days, the media attempted to monitor the activities of Executive Outcomes. South Africa had just emerged from the apartheid era and since the public face of EO was white and well versed in some of the more unsavory aspects of inter-territorial conflict, their motives, as some observers proclaimed, simply had to be devious. It had been so in the past, was the argument: so what made the new boys on the block any different?
It didn’t help that the EO executive was almost paranoid about the press, as are almost all of these organizations that would rather get on with the job than try to justify what they do to scribes. And therein lies the rub.
Despite all the publicity surrounding the Gulf War, ten years of conflict in the Balkans as well as what is currently ongoing in the Middle East, quite a few so-called combat correspondents don’t begin to know the difference between an Armalite and an AK. Still, EO did make tentative efforts to show the world how it had turned the war about in Angola and later, Sierra Leone.
Time magazine ran a major feature on EO in May 1997, where it described the company as one of the world’s leading purveyors of private military muscle. Peculiarly for a magazine that usually takes a strictly politically correct line, it had kind words for chief executive Eeben Barlow, who was “fast becoming the soldier-of-fortune set’s answer to GE’s Jack Welch.”
It described Barlow as a slim, fair-haired, forty-year-old “military marketeer extraordinary.” The magazine went on: “He puts a cheery face on one of the world’s oldest professions, mercenaries or ‘military consultants’ as most prefer to be known.” Time highlighted Barlow’s earlier work as a one-time intelligence agent for a South African military unit that, it said, carried out assassinations. “But now he prefers gray flannels to fatigues.”
EO was high profile in those days. “At an arms show in Abu Dhabi in 1997, the Executive Outcomes booth quietly competed for business with mercenaries from Britain, France and the U.S.,” the magazine reported.
Shortly before that, American journalist Elizabeth Rubin spent time with EO in Sierra Leone. Having returned from West Africa after she had gone into the diamond fields with the mercs, she told of her experiences in an unusually detailed article in New York’s Harpers magazine.9 EO reckoned itself to be “a kind of advance team” for the UN, she wrote.
“You cannot keep peace if there is no peace, as we saw in Bosnia,” Eeben Barlow told her. Referring to the group’s operations in Angola (and Sierra Leone, in particular) he went on: “But we can help the country achieve some sort of stability before the UN comes in.”
Rubin recounts how EO was founded in 1989 and how, a year later, Barlow had already established the company as a counterintelligence consultancy, numbering among its client base his former employer, the SA Defence Force, as well as the De Beers diamond cartel. Barlow’s links to a shadowy South African military-linked undercover group known as CCB, that had agents operating in all the countries in which the apartheid regime (and its enemies) had interests, appeared to help, she suggested.
She told how Barlow chose for his company logo the paladin, the same chessboard knight once featured in the old TV series “Have Gun, Will Travel,” because “I like the way it moves on the world board.” Like most people in the business, he deplored the use of the word “mercenary.” Rather, he preferred to view the organization as “a team of troubleshooters, marketing a strategy of recovery to failing governments around the world.”
She went on: “In exchange for millions of dollars, the company offers to do what the United Nations cannot and will not do: take sides, deploy overwhelming force, and fire ‘preemptively’ on its contractually designated enemy.” With a force of between two and three hundred, the numbers could hardly be construed as “overwhelming,” she stated. It was the same in Angola where EO turned around a civil war that had been on the go intermittently for the best part of a quarter century. There, EO deployed at most, perhaps five hundred men. At any given time it was usually less than half that.
For an American—a nation traditionally opposed to killing for cash—Ms. Rubin was remarkably forthcoming about EO’s position in West Africa. Further, she was giving a firsthand report about a difficult subject, having made the effort get to EO’s field headquarters deep in the interior. She ended up staying a while, living rough with a tough bunch of rugger buggers, sharing their food, beer and a lot else besides. In doing so, she was privy to much of what went on within EO that was otherwise denied the press.
Speaking of the people at the diamond town, “Many felt…indebted to the soldiers of Executive Outcomes, whom they rather fantastically imagined had come in a gesture of pan-African generosity…. The South African mercenaries, camped on a nearby hilltop overlooking Koidu, were unreservedly hailed by the chiefs, the businessmen and the street people as saviors.”
Ms. Rubin quickly discovered that the local residents actually loved this peculiar band of brothers. Recounting, she was unequivocal that they had brought stability to the land. More important, they had done what they had been paid for and that was to drive the hated rebels back across the Liberian frontier. Pitifully, they were to return not long after EO had gone home.
An interesting aside is that one of her “sponsors”—a mercenary like the rest who had hosted her at Koidu—ended up in a British prison not long afterward. With Executive Outcomes disbanded and he out of work, he’d tried to smuggle a planeload of marijuana from Africa on to a deserted airfield in the south of England. The British police were waiting for him.
As they say, it takes all types.