So thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. This year for me, I learned a great deal already from from you.
So I to do today is present you some current research which I'm doing for my book on the future of war.
Subtitle It's Not What You Think. And this is really about the privatisation of war and how it changes warfare.
All right. And this topic is a passion of mine, because for many years before I became a scholar,
I was a soldier and paratrooper in the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division.
And then from here, I became a private security contractor, some would say mercenary in Africa,
where I did things that the U.S. government initially on contract that would
have been traditionally outsourced to the CIA or to certain operations forces.
This includes things like arms deals from Eastern Europe to Africa, demobilising warlords raising militaries and forces,
even a one occurrence helping stop a genocide in Rwanda and Burundi and 2004 before it happened.
Here are some warlords. This is right outside in Liberia, right after Charles Taylor had left.
And I was there to try to take his the legacy forces and immobilise them and raise a new army from scratch.
That was actually in the term of the contract. These are warlords.
This is actually how they dress. Keeping the style, doing things normally would be one.
This is I took some time off as a graduate of Harvard. I sent it back to our dean just to see what you think.
He was not very pleased. I don't know why. And this is also what sort of mercenaries do when they're out having a good time.
So the first thing about part of warfare to understand is that it's as old as war itself.
We have this notion that mercenaries is a stigma attached to it, but that's wrong.
Most of military history is, in fact, privatised, and for the entire time it's almost never stigmatised.
The Bible even talks about hard swords multiple times, yet never a new approach.
Mercenaries are common and popular in history because they are effective.
They are effective because wrenching force is cheaper than owning it, just like renting a car is cheaper than owning it for most people.
And you know, having it once owned standing army you're around is ruinously expensive and we
are normalised to think that this is typical when in fact it's a historical
or the last couple hundred years have we seen that even going back to Xenophon's 10,000 Alexander the Great he had five when he invaded Asia minor.
He had 5000 foreign mercenaries, the Persians had 10,000 Greeks mercenaries on their side.
And Hannibal's armies from the Second Punic War were mostly mercenary, including mercenary elephants, I suppose.
In the Middle Ages, mercenaries were how you fought wars in Europe.
Nobody was going to invest in their own standing army with two insights.
As I said, even postcard mercenaries.
They even hired mercenaries to wage crusades, not necessarily the Levant,
which they may have done there, but just as in southern France against the Cathars or Cathars.
And this is an episode where Knights and Mercedes got to made up the papal army and they sacked the city of Basra.
And all the Christians, both Orthodox and heretic alike, fled to the church and stood up for sanctuary.
And the cardinal, who is in charge of the mercenary army, said, Burn it down.
God will know his own. And the army was mostly mercenary.
There's also a theory of the late Middle Ages and early modern era.
Were mercenaries, but the word quantity is old Italian for contractor.
And the parallels between mercenaries of the Middle Ages and what we're seeing today are uncanny.
Today we don't talk about mercenaries, but contractors back then, just like today,
they form multinational corporations that are diverse and from a heterogeneous, heterogeneous mix.
When I was in this industry, I worked for a couple of different firms,
but I would be next working to something from say, I know somebody from El Salvador, from the Philippines.
All that mattered is that we had a command language and we had some basic skills.
It was the same. There are these trans alpine companies that have people from Scotland, Germany, the Levant, even.
And you had like a CEO mercenary captain who is in charge of profit and loss.
You had a contract with individual people, with their fighters, just like today.
The only difference between then and now is that they had a booty clause and what the booty clause was like.
If you sack a city, you get such a percentage of the loot. We don't do that today.
But here's an example of they had. Companies are called the company of the White Star, for example, which had like 5000 mercenaries.
And this was led. This one was led by Sir John Hopwood, an Englishman, one of the most famous contemporary captains of his day.
And he was loyal to Florence, who was his client, for 23 years until he died.
Now, when we when most people talk about mercenaries, there is invoke Machiavelli who calls them faithless,
horrible, villainous, and that that stigma has ossified into received wisdom.
But in fact, they are not. You know, he's an example of monogamous mercenaries.
We can talk about Q&A. Machiavelli was on sour grapes since he got burned as he mishandled his mercenaries and turned on him.
And that comes out in the prince. But his charge that they are faithless is overwrought.
The historical record of mercenaries is not as depicted by the prince.
His ideas at the time when he wrote The Prince in 1511 were considered.
They were considered. All they economists had no real influence.
You know, the future of war for him the next 20 years was still mostly called the theory of mercenaries.
It's only a 20th century that he gets resurrected and lionised by kids.
He has many wonderful ideas, but his work on private forests is not one of them.
I would contend. So the years what happened after Machiavelli, you had things like the Lance connection.
You had the Swiss companies. You had all sorts of mercenaries.
Mercenaries, again, were hired to fight wars.
Now, here are some implications for what happens when you have when when forces commoditize a market for force.
The first is that it empowers the super wealthy when anybody can afford the means of war, to lose it for any reason they want, any reason they want.
It changes who has power in the system. And so, for example, you know, the Catholic Church was a super power in the Middle Ages.
So were aristocratic families, sober city states that were flush like Florence or Venice.
So we're you know, there's all sorts of anybody could be a superpower if you had the resources to hire.
And right now, the military mercenaries also were incentivised to starting a long day wars for profit, and this created more war.
So if you can think about a system where you have unconstrained political rivalries,
you had people making overlapping claims to the same parcels of land and people you had like a bishop saying,
Peasant mcfate, you owe me your allegiance. And some prince saying, Peasant McFate, your mere allegiance.
Sometimes those those overlapping, duelling authorities would take their conflicts and fight it out with mercenaries.
Contract enforcement was a huge problem. There are really no courts.
You can sue your mercenaries and and vice versa.
And you had structures, behaviours and both sides.
It wasn't just, as Machiavelli contends, the mercenaries who doing treacherous behaviour, which they were what they would do.
For example, they we see this today. They manipulate asymmetries of information between their clients and themselves.
So you so for for mad imagine this for a second.
You're going to get your kitchen redone at your house and you ask a carpenter to come over and he says,
Well, you know, you think £2,000 is what you need doing £30,000 because of all these problems you don't see.
Trust me on the expert. Right. It happened and it happened back then.
And it happens today. If you look at all the fraud, waste and abuse claims that have been filed against companies like Time for a Triple Canopy like,
you know, Blackwater in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but also clients do this, too.
So one famous trick is they would hire a mercenary company to do something big and
then pay the big bill and hire another mercenary company for a little bit of money.
Choose off the other mercenary company or that is deadbeats.
The Pegasi was a deadbeat people.
When I was in the industry, everybody wanted to work for the U.N. They all want the U.S. to privatised peacekeeping to some extent.
But the U.N. is really slow to pay, besides other ideological reasons why they would want to do that.
Also, this is the key thing out of work, mercenaries. What do they do? They become brigands.
They prey on the countryside to sustain themselves. It's the one type of supply that can generate its own demands.
They even become racketeers. So, for example, they would go up an army of mercenaries.
You go up to a city in Italy and say, you know, you have, you know,
two days to give us all the gold or we sacrifice so frantically to say runs around,
comes up with all the gold they can, gives it to the mercenary captain and says, Great, we'll be back next month.
This happens. It's like 30 times in seven years and then 40 something.
So the bottom line is, is you have an active free market for force.
You generally have a lot more conflicts.
I would say if it is low intensity or medium or high intensity, but you have more conflict, which is that which is the concern.
Now things start to transform warfare, to transform 30 years war and mercenaries transform the weapons we saw for various reasons a large battle,
50,000 combatants in a size of a small city battling it out, and most of which were privatised.
And what you had here is that as war became sort of like preindustrial but sort of industrialised,
you had mercenary oligarchs who are not warriors and solving problems,
staying, for example, who created vast rental regiments and then gave them to the sovereign to use at his disposal.
And so you had. But during this time, there's a lot of horror.
This is one of the most bloody wars in European history.
And a lot of it was due to rogue mercenary units. So much so without, you know, it's just Professor Peter Wilson were here to explain to us.
But you know, by the time of Peace of Westphalia,
there would seem to be a tacit agreement that mercenary use had gone too far and for some different reasons,
which, when discussing Q&A, states began to invest in their own standing.
Armies costs be damned in places like France and later Prussia.
And there are some reasons for it and some technology as well.
But the state literally monopolised the market for force by having its own standing militaries, the outlawed mercenaries.
And this that you think has created a stigma against mercenaries which we exist today.
Mercenary is synonymous, a villain or murderer or something like that.
It also it also left their non-state competitors defenceless.
Because if you're a pope or if you're a rich family, the market's been dried up.
There are no more mercy being chased away. And she's a threat.
And this is the beginning of what many international relations see as the age of sort of, you know, state sovereignty with the Westphalian order.
Now, whether that's real or not, we can discuss in Q&A. But mercenaries start to gradually decline around this time frame.
They did not completely disappear until the middle, middle of the 19th century, Wolf.
Mercenaries and privateers. And they didn't disappear. This was underground.
Right. So again, the relationship between forced power and world order is that states sort of emerge as sheriff and the so-called Westphalian order.
Contentious label. But states use the monopoly of force to guarantee their supremacy.
So much so that 40 years later, we think it's not.
We have it through. But many scholars normalise this as the way political order should be.
States centric order with national militaries and only states have the privilege of waging war codified in international law in a lot of work,
which is essentially Westphalian conflict and even becomes the definition of a state.
Looking at scholars like Max Faber, so this sort of normalised, I would say food, it's been exported around the world through colonisation,
etc. So without mercenaries, again, non-state actors are left defenceless and the states go unchallenged for their supremacy.
And this is a gradual process. So this is war becomes exclusive interstate affair.
This is the birth of conventional war. This is the warfare of classic work out process.
He does talk a little bit about non-state actors in book six of On War when he looks at the guerrilla campaign in Spain.
But that's to him is still sort of a fringe element of warfare.
Now, mercenaries are coming back after several century hiatus.
I know I was there for much of this, but that's not all.
And it started happening around the time the Cold War sort of was ending.
The first crew that did this was like a chemical executive outcome.
This was a post-apartheid South African combat corporation.
It was a mercenary corporation. It was a private army.
They did things like kill, you know, the rebel group Angola.
They went to Sierra Leone, some other groups. And those came up like Sandline International.
But it really the market didn't really take off literally until the U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And this catapulted the Morphin Power Force into sort of full on resurrection.
If I could say that, especially the notorious Blackwater and the notorious you know, we think of contractors.
We think of NiSource Square in 2007 when Blackwater contractors killed 17 Iraqis at
traffic circle in Baghdad and basically were sent home without any accountability,
which infuriated a whole region. This is sort of become the new American way of war or an element of it, I would argue.
This in blue shows you troops red as contractors.
The past century, contractors like in World War Two contractors were 10% of the workforce.
In Afghanistan, there are 50%. There was a 1 to 1 ratio for every troop contractor.
And in Afghanistan, it's closer to 70%, right?
70%. Now, please note that when I say contractor, I mean all contractors.
And only about 15% of contractors in Iraq or Afghanistan were figure pollers.
Most contractors were making food or carrying trucks, doing great, innocuous things.
I'm really I'm my research focuses on the lethal contractors.
But the fact that the U.S. has moved to a contracting model for wear for war is astounding.
And the reason that this happened, it wasn't a deliberate policy.
It's like many things in Iraq and Afghanistan just sort of a wall that way, for lack of it, perhaps planning.
They initially policymakers in 2002 under George W Bush thought that both wars would be quick and easy.
And when they proved that they were not. The U.S. all volunteer force to could not recruit enough volunteers to fill the billets.
And so policymakers had some ugly options. They could either withdraw and concede defeat to al Qaeda, which it didn't want to do.
They could have a Vietnam like draft to forcibly fill all the vacant slots, which would be political suicide.
Or they could just contract out the difference and they end up contract out the difference.
Small at first, but over time, more and more and more to the point where over half the force was contractors and
they weren't even all American majority contractors were not even American citizens,
other like non-citizens fighting U.S. wars. Contractors also did more than dying.
Blew our troops, our contractors. As the war progressed, they flipped.
Initially, troops were taking the casualties. Now it's contractors and won't take a guess as to what kind of contractor was getting hit.
Most truck driver truck drivers were exactly truck drivers.
And remember, following that, probably security like the trigger plumber types because they're in the line of fire.
But it was actually it was truck drivers were getting ambushed.
Now, this is an idea that came out this summer by Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater,
that we should go to a 100% contracting model in Afghanistan.
He proposed this idea that we replace all troops in Afghanistan by mercenaries and private military contractors.
That would presumably be his own. This idea might sound absurd, but it got a lot of play and airlift in Washington this summer,
and it still could happen because President Trump can change his mind at any moment.
So and he's also tight with Steve Bannon, who's running for Senate in Wyoming now with the alt right campaign and the Steve Bannon's insurgency.
But this is the fact that that he that not just this idea was floated, but that Erik Prince,
who's kind of toxic in Washington, reputation alive, could float it and get the time of day is an interesting point.
I would say. Now, here's the issue, is that after the U.S. was sort of the U.S. during Iraq,
Afghanistan was a money meaning that it was it wasn't a free market for had one buyer
with a lot of supply and that fire had market power to shape the industry as they wish,
which the U.S. didn't really do, unfortunately.
But now that the U.S. is no longer hiring that number of contractors, the question is where have they gone?
And most of them have their private sector entities looking for new clients.
And so, as they say, the genie has left the bottle and they're all over the world now.
The market right now is bifurcating. It's taking two courses, the market splitting.
One course is sort of what we call overt private military actors.
And these are like Aegis and Olive Group and maybe guard world, although I don't consider sort of mall cops to be having no effect contractors.
But military contractors are doing there are armed civilians in war zones doing military things.
It's not the same as guarding someone's house, but these these actors here reject the mercenary label,
and they only want to work for legitimate clients, governments, legitimate multinational corporations, things like that.
They actually they're organising themselves to obey international international standards,
ISO standards, 20 of these 20,007 and 18,007, eight, eight I.
I am not enough of a business star to make sense of what that is, but they're trying to legitimise themselves.
There are some of them also volunteer to be certified and audited by external groups.
One is the American Society for Industrial Security, based in Washington, D.C., which is a huge trade association.
And the second is a Swiss initiative called the International Code of Conduct Association.
And this is a compendium of governments,
NGOs and private security companies who come together and agree on a code of conduct that respects international law and human rights.
And some of the bigger firms have already submitted to being audited by this, which is a big deal for them.
And the business model is because everything has to be profitable, is that if you're certified as quality,
you will track clients like Exxon Mobil and the United States of America.
But we're not sure that model is working for them. Okay.
Now, this industry is located in Washington, London and New York and Dubai.
Generally, the pay is kind of lame. If you were to join such a firm, you would probably get maybe twice your military salary.
But you don't get any because we know that you don't get a pension and you don't get any medical support.
So you get injured in the field, they will catch you up.
So you're like, not me, I see you. But then they send you home immediately.
And then you're on the road. On the street. So you.
So contractors, despite all the the ballyhoo, they don't make all that much money.
Now, over I think this is dwindling right now.
That's the danger. So what else is going to get covered?
Actors who sell firepower and plausible deniability, which is pretty key in an information age.
That's a word of mouth business. And the way they recruit is it's based on network.
So if I got a contract from, say, oil company or somebody, I would then hit my contacts and that usually American military,
the UK or Commonwealth military would kind of mirror the five eyes actually.
And we assemble a team, we sort of get things going.
There's other networks as well. There's the Russian speakers. We see them in Syria and Eastern Ukraine.
We see Latin Americans. ex-Special Forces in Latin America were hired by Abu Dhabi to initially to protect oil infrastructure,
but now they've been deployed to Yemen to help with these. You have executive outcomes from that first mercenary.
They're still in Africa. Their job is on London network.
But two years ago, the government of Nigeria secretly hired them or the remnants of them to go after Boko Haram.
And the Nigerian military, which had for six years, struggled against Boko Haram.
The mercenaries came in with the military and clear them out in weeks and weeks.
They didn't solve the problem. They just push them into the neighbour's backyard, which, you know, happens, right?
But they're having to. WEITZ This industry is is.
Based in corporate America. These low grocery store places like Erbil or Dubai or Uganda has become a hub for this recently as well.
The pay is variable, but the risks are high, so one contract payment is still a problem.
Maybe you do this. What's going on? What's Syria done with Russia?
Russia companies said, look, if you can secure these oil fields from ISIS, we will give you the release of that.
And then the the Russian oil company had hire this group called the Wagner Group,
who would then mark mercenaries, as you can correct me if I'm wrong, who just did just that today.
They had a joint venture with the government of Syria, the client, which is essentially where they get around that.
These are these are you know, the key takeaway from this is that in the future, the market might go one way or the other.
But if you're if you're an overt actor, you can quickly become Cobra one, vice versa.
There's no magical bright line between the two. Here are some of the covert hotspots we've seen in addition, the past two or three years.
And this is based on no one reporting, but this is no longer America in Iraq, which is how a lot of Americans think about this industry.
This industry is now truly globalising, and it's it's rising.
It's not covered. The news is getting eclipsed by terrorism and etc.
But this and, you know, this is where we're seeing it right now.
And we're seeing it across the four of four or five domains of war.
So, of course, we've talked about land, private military.
There's also see private fears and what the way this works is that they sit on an Arsenal ship in the middle of like a golf game or a lot of them.
And if you're a freighter going to pirate waters, they will helicopter over a lot of private Marines, if you will, watch them over.
And they will they will harden your ship with concertina wire and and protect it with 50 calibre, you know, 50 calibre machine guns.
And once it's called embarked security and once the ship has passed through harbours,
then they go back to the original ship and leaving it to their U.S. Navy officer here.
I'm told that, you know, Arleigh Burke destroyers don't want to sit around chasing Zodiacs and not being.
So it's just kind of not a bad way to go about things while also seeing them in.
We're seeing private air force in terms of kamikazes potentially and cyberspace.
There's this thing called hack that companies which are mercenaries of cyberspace.
All right. Let's move forward. Why are they coming back? Why Emerson coming back for several reasons.
One is that it's still cheaper to rent and own.
That's not change. And for strong countries, it has a couple of advantages.
One is it gives plausible deniability. So if you want to do something that's politically risky and don't want your own soldiers caught doing it,
you can hire mercenaries is if something happens to them, they won't be called cut.
You just cut them away. If they send it working for you, nobody can fully believe them.
The second is, if you have a poor, rich country that wants to have force projection, doesn't want to believe in mercenaries or contractors,
are useful, whether you're United States of America in Iraq or you're Abu Dhabi last now for weaker countries, it enables you to engage in war.
Or if you're a private military, if you're inside, if you're a multinational, you now have access to the means of war.
There's also these services if you want to rent and my 24 hind helicopter squadron for two weeks, you can do that.
When these mercenaries, when abjure these mercenaries go after Boko Haram, they didn't show up with like Kalashnikovs.
You shoot up with like attack helicopters and, you know, or you want to rent a special operations forces team of high quality.
That's something you can right now in the marketplace. Also, there's a they offer loyalty.
So when Gadhafi was being right before his demise,
he he surrounded himself with tribal militia who did not trust he's trying to look mercenaries who are loyal to his paycheque.
And this is also not new me, King Henry. The second is the same thing here, that whole century.
When faced with a rebellion of nobles. So the implication now, should this trend line continue?
And I think it will, because there's nothing related to stop this, in my opinion.
First of all, regulation is really difficult. Some would say, well, it's international law.
We can make it illegal. Well, how assuming there will be a Geneva Convention in our lifetime that deals with civilian armed contractors or combatants,
which I don't believe to be the case, who's going to go into Syria and arrest all those mercenaries?
Is it going to be the Royal Marines? No, it's going to be United Nations, probably not.
So it's really difficult to enforce. And this favours covert actors.
I think also as we go forward, the stigma will fade.
It's already feeling the fact right now people in this industry bend over backwards to avoid the M word.
They will say were, you know,
security contractors or we're or military contractors or my favourite euphemism is contingency contractors, which means nothing.
But I think it's eventually going to become after a few decades of this, it will become more normal, more substantially like the Middle Ages.
If money can buy firepower, then the super wealthy can become superpowers.
Right at some level, if you get into an army, as can oligarchs,
as can mega-churches who want to do humanitarian interventions and good around the world.
The problem is, is you have a mega church doing a humanitarian intervention in Syria.
Does that, for example, suck the US or UK further into a war in Syria?
This also opens up the possibility of wars without states to say You have, I'm making this up.
The extractive industry likes this industry for obvious supply and demand reasons.
Just say you have two mining companies fighting over a mine and they they start using mercenaries.
And this creates this creates lateral escalation and a security dilemma.
Lastly, if conflict is commoditized, then the logic of the marketplace and strategies that have to not apply to warfare, which is really strange.
So let me come back until then. It's like classic Clausewitz means Adam Smith.
If you have truly a free market for force on the supply side, which is mercenaries, we know that they can elongate and start wars.
We know that they can. They act as predators when they're unemployed and they can engage in racketeering.
They also engage in patriotism and they can capture states.
We saw this during the Middle Ages, for example,
where large how the theory became rulers for more for Die Dynasty for example or as a family and malign that could happen today.
You can take over eastern Congo and hold it on the demand side.
On the client side, this is what burned Machiavelli is that new strategies exist where you can say, bribe your enemies,
our forces did to fact, or what you could do is retain all the forces in the area so they don't have a defence.
So if got to invade them, the first thing is to retain all the of the mercenaries so that when you invade surprising them,
there's nobody that they can retain.
Now both of these suffer from poor contract enforcement which can lead to treachery, and there's no court of law you can go to ensue.
And you have issues of mercenary lateral escalation and security in any weapon system.
Armed forces start with a lot of clients start to build up their mercenary arsenal that others imitate
that so implications the changing character of war are some of these as many of you discussed.
One is that this lowers the barriers of entry and expands who can engage in warfare.
Now, it's not just states. It can be anybody who's rich enough to do this.
Second of all, is that strategies for private war,
these are these are quintessentially unconventional strategies that CEOs may know more about than fly officers.
And this creates a strategic vulnerability in how we think about articulate and plan for future conflicts.
And lastly, this trend is occurring on autopilot, is there is minimal tension and that's the way the industry likes says.
But there doesn't seem to be any structure agency, in my opinion, to prevent a future market for war in the 21st century,
which can have pull, you know, political ramifications for who has power in international system.
So what would a world with private warfare look like? So one of the things I've taken up to recently and here is I've taken I find
sometimes it's easier to talk about new ideas through fiction than non-fiction.
And I've written two models for Harper Collins,
depicting a future of war with anybody rich enough to hire mercenaries in who they are and where they come from,
and how those contracts work, and what kind of wars would look like with this war that states that is what the that's the Tom Locke series is about.
This actually began as a memoir I was writing a long time ago.
My agent was like, No, no, no, no, no. If you write that, you need to do that.
So this is fiction and that's and we dead and we turned to the next series.
So that's a very well. And, you know, McChrystal liked it and so did Scrabulous, of all people, plus some good criticism.
So with that, I will close it at Komarov and open up to questions.