1 00:00:00,480 --> 00:00:06,640 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. 2 00:00:07,770 --> 00:00:13,260 So I to do today is present you some current research which I'm doing for my book on the future of war. 3 00:00:14,160 --> 00:00:22,380 Subtitle It's Not What You Think. And this is really about the privatisation of war and how it changes warfare. 4 00:00:23,010 --> 00:00:31,020 All right. And this topic is a passion of mine, because for many years before I became a scholar, 5 00:00:32,100 --> 00:00:38,490 I was a soldier and paratrooper in the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division. 6 00:00:39,870 --> 00:00:48,660 And then from here, I became a private security contractor, some would say mercenary in Africa, 7 00:00:49,710 --> 00:00:55,020 where I did things that the U.S. government initially on contract that would 8 00:00:55,020 --> 00:01:00,030 have been traditionally outsourced to the CIA or to certain operations forces. 9 00:01:02,250 --> 00:01:14,760 This includes things like arms deals from Eastern Europe to Africa, demobilising warlords raising militaries and forces, 10 00:01:15,810 --> 00:01:23,760 even a one occurrence helping stop a genocide in Rwanda and Burundi and 2004 before it happened. 11 00:01:25,020 --> 00:01:29,100 Here are some warlords. This is right outside in Liberia, right after Charles Taylor had left. 12 00:01:30,120 --> 00:01:37,979 And I was there to try to take his the legacy forces and immobilise them and raise a new army from scratch. 13 00:01:37,980 --> 00:01:41,280 That was actually in the term of the contract. These are warlords. 14 00:01:41,280 --> 00:01:49,580 This is actually how they dress. Keeping the style, doing things normally would be one. 15 00:01:51,930 --> 00:01:57,180 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. 16 00:01:58,380 --> 00:02:05,970 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. 17 00:02:08,070 --> 00:02:14,940 So the first thing about part of warfare to understand is that it's as old as war itself. 18 00:02:15,690 --> 00:02:21,510 We have this notion that mercenaries is a stigma attached to it, but that's wrong. 19 00:02:22,920 --> 00:02:30,750 Most of military history is, in fact, privatised, and for the entire time it's almost never stigmatised. 20 00:02:31,350 --> 00:02:37,570 The Bible even talks about hard swords multiple times, yet never a new approach. 21 00:02:38,970 --> 00:02:44,730 Mercenaries are common and popular in history because they are effective. 22 00:02:45,510 --> 00:02:54,270 They are effective because wrenching force is cheaper than owning it, just like renting a car is cheaper than owning it for most people. 23 00:02:55,170 --> 00:03:00,930 And you know, having it once owned standing army you're around is ruinously expensive and we 24 00:03:00,930 --> 00:03:05,460 are normalised to think that this is typical when in fact it's a historical 25 00:03:05,850 --> 00:03:18,540 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. 26 00:03:18,540 --> 00:03:24,300 He had 5000 foreign mercenaries, the Persians had 10,000 Greeks mercenaries on their side. 27 00:03:24,510 --> 00:03:34,200 And Hannibal's armies from the Second Punic War were mostly mercenary, including mercenary elephants, I suppose. 28 00:03:36,830 --> 00:03:41,000 In the Middle Ages, mercenaries were how you fought wars in Europe. 29 00:03:41,300 --> 00:03:45,040 Nobody was going to invest in their own standing army with two insights. 30 00:03:45,320 --> 00:03:49,730 As I said, even postcard mercenaries. 31 00:03:50,480 --> 00:03:55,270 They even hired mercenaries to wage crusades, not necessarily the Levant, 32 00:03:55,280 --> 00:03:59,780 which they may have done there, but just as in southern France against the Cathars or Cathars. 33 00:04:00,500 --> 00:04:09,620 And this is an episode where Knights and Mercedes got to made up the papal army and they sacked the city of Basra. 34 00:04:10,100 --> 00:04:19,490 And all the Christians, both Orthodox and heretic alike, fled to the church and stood up for sanctuary. 35 00:04:20,180 --> 00:04:25,940 And the cardinal, who is in charge of the mercenary army, said, Burn it down. 36 00:04:26,600 --> 00:04:31,800 God will know his own. And the army was mostly mercenary. 37 00:04:34,530 --> 00:04:39,150 There's also a theory of the late Middle Ages and early modern era. 38 00:04:41,040 --> 00:04:46,620 Were mercenaries, but the word quantity is old Italian for contractor. 39 00:04:47,220 --> 00:04:53,580 And the parallels between mercenaries of the Middle Ages and what we're seeing today are uncanny. 40 00:04:54,450 --> 00:05:00,389 Today we don't talk about mercenaries, but contractors back then, just like today, 41 00:05:00,390 --> 00:05:07,170 they form multinational corporations that are diverse and from a heterogeneous, heterogeneous mix. 42 00:05:07,620 --> 00:05:11,250 When I was in this industry, I worked for a couple of different firms, 43 00:05:11,940 --> 00:05:18,870 but I would be next working to something from say, I know somebody from El Salvador, from the Philippines. 44 00:05:19,530 --> 00:05:23,190 All that mattered is that we had a command language and we had some basic skills. 45 00:05:23,640 --> 00:05:29,100 It was the same. There are these trans alpine companies that have people from Scotland, Germany, the Levant, even. 46 00:05:30,030 --> 00:05:36,100 And you had like a CEO mercenary captain who is in charge of profit and loss. 47 00:05:36,660 --> 00:05:42,120 You had a contract with individual people, with their fighters, just like today. 48 00:05:42,390 --> 00:05:47,190 The only difference between then and now is that they had a booty clause and what the booty clause was like. 49 00:05:47,190 --> 00:05:51,810 If you sack a city, you get such a percentage of the loot. We don't do that today. 50 00:05:53,160 --> 00:05:59,850 But here's an example of they had. Companies are called the company of the White Star, for example, which had like 5000 mercenaries. 51 00:06:00,300 --> 00:06:08,160 And this was led. This one was led by Sir John Hopwood, an Englishman, one of the most famous contemporary captains of his day. 52 00:06:08,550 --> 00:06:16,110 And he was loyal to Florence, who was his client, for 23 years until he died. 53 00:06:17,430 --> 00:06:24,630 Now, when we when most people talk about mercenaries, there is invoke Machiavelli who calls them faithless, 54 00:06:24,810 --> 00:06:31,770 horrible, villainous, and that that stigma has ossified into received wisdom. 55 00:06:32,850 --> 00:06:37,650 But in fact, they are not. You know, he's an example of monogamous mercenaries. 56 00:06:39,000 --> 00:06:47,880 We can talk about Q&A. Machiavelli was on sour grapes since he got burned as he mishandled his mercenaries and turned on him. 57 00:06:48,660 --> 00:06:55,530 And that comes out in the prince. But his charge that they are faithless is overwrought. 58 00:06:56,430 --> 00:07:01,230 The historical record of mercenaries is not as depicted by the prince. 59 00:07:01,710 --> 00:07:06,210 His ideas at the time when he wrote The Prince in 1511 were considered. 60 00:07:08,040 --> 00:07:11,820 They were considered. All they economists had no real influence. 61 00:07:12,140 --> 00:07:17,850 You know, the future of war for him the next 20 years was still mostly called the theory of mercenaries. 62 00:07:18,570 --> 00:07:23,310 It's only a 20th century that he gets resurrected and lionised by kids. 63 00:07:23,550 --> 00:07:29,730 He has many wonderful ideas, but his work on private forests is not one of them. 64 00:07:29,850 --> 00:07:36,350 I would contend. So the years what happened after Machiavelli, you had things like the Lance connection. 65 00:07:36,380 --> 00:07:39,890 You had the Swiss companies. You had all sorts of mercenaries. 66 00:07:40,280 --> 00:07:42,290 Mercenaries, again, were hired to fight wars. 67 00:07:44,690 --> 00:07:52,130 Now, here are some implications for what happens when you have when when forces commoditize a market for force. 68 00:07:52,820 --> 00:08:04,280 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. 69 00:08:04,610 --> 00:08:15,470 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. 70 00:08:16,250 --> 00:08:22,700 So were aristocratic families, sober city states that were flush like Florence or Venice. 71 00:08:23,750 --> 00:08:29,880 So we're you know, there's all sorts of anybody could be a superpower if you had the resources to hire. 72 00:08:29,900 --> 00:08:38,990 And right now, the military mercenaries also were incentivised to starting a long day wars for profit, and this created more war. 73 00:08:39,860 --> 00:08:44,330 So if you can think about a system where you have unconstrained political rivalries, 74 00:08:45,020 --> 00:08:51,980 you had people making overlapping claims to the same parcels of land and people you had like a bishop saying, 75 00:08:52,490 --> 00:08:58,700 Peasant mcfate, you owe me your allegiance. And some prince saying, Peasant McFate, your mere allegiance. 76 00:08:59,060 --> 00:09:05,450 Sometimes those those overlapping, duelling authorities would take their conflicts and fight it out with mercenaries. 77 00:09:07,010 --> 00:09:11,270 Contract enforcement was a huge problem. There are really no courts. 78 00:09:11,270 --> 00:09:14,780 You can sue your mercenaries and and vice versa. 79 00:09:15,080 --> 00:09:17,600 And you had structures, behaviours and both sides. 80 00:09:17,810 --> 00:09:25,010 It wasn't just, as Machiavelli contends, the mercenaries who doing treacherous behaviour, which they were what they would do. 81 00:09:25,010 --> 00:09:33,610 For example, they we see this today. They manipulate asymmetries of information between their clients and themselves. 82 00:09:33,620 --> 00:09:36,530 So you so for for mad imagine this for a second. 83 00:09:37,520 --> 00:09:43,040 You're going to get your kitchen redone at your house and you ask a carpenter to come over and he says, 84 00:09:43,040 --> 00:09:50,720 Well, you know, you think £2,000 is what you need doing £30,000 because of all these problems you don't see. 85 00:09:51,020 --> 00:09:56,000 Trust me on the expert. Right. It happened and it happened back then. 86 00:09:56,480 --> 00:10:05,510 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, 87 00:10:05,840 --> 00:10:12,230 you know, Blackwater in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but also clients do this, too. 88 00:10:12,530 --> 00:10:18,380 So one famous trick is they would hire a mercenary company to do something big and 89 00:10:18,560 --> 00:10:22,600 then pay the big bill and hire another mercenary company for a little bit of money. 90 00:10:22,610 --> 00:10:26,600 Choose off the other mercenary company or that is deadbeats. 91 00:10:27,080 --> 00:10:29,239 The Pegasi was a deadbeat people. 92 00:10:29,240 --> 00:10:35,150 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. 93 00:10:35,480 --> 00:10:40,190 But the U.N. is really slow to pay, besides other ideological reasons why they would want to do that. 94 00:10:41,750 --> 00:10:45,770 Also, this is the key thing out of work, mercenaries. What do they do? They become brigands. 95 00:10:46,490 --> 00:10:52,640 They prey on the countryside to sustain themselves. It's the one type of supply that can generate its own demands. 96 00:10:53,240 --> 00:10:59,090 They even become racketeers. So, for example, they would go up an army of mercenaries. 97 00:10:59,090 --> 00:11:02,960 You go up to a city in Italy and say, you know, you have, you know, 98 00:11:03,170 --> 00:11:09,560 two days to give us all the gold or we sacrifice so frantically to say runs around, 99 00:11:10,400 --> 00:11:16,520 comes up with all the gold they can, gives it to the mercenary captain and says, Great, we'll be back next month. 100 00:11:18,290 --> 00:11:22,980 This happens. It's like 30 times in seven years and then 40 something. 101 00:11:25,400 --> 00:11:29,330 So the bottom line is, is you have an active free market for force. 102 00:11:29,960 --> 00:11:32,190 You generally have a lot more conflicts. 103 00:11:33,580 --> 00:11:40,490 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. 104 00:11:42,200 --> 00:11:53,230 Now things start to transform warfare, to transform 30 years war and mercenaries transform the weapons we saw for various reasons a large battle, 105 00:11:53,240 --> 00:12:01,040 50,000 combatants in a size of a small city battling it out, and most of which were privatised. 106 00:12:02,120 --> 00:12:09,590 And what you had here is that as war became sort of like preindustrial but sort of industrialised, 107 00:12:10,010 --> 00:12:15,110 you had mercenary oligarchs who are not warriors and solving problems, 108 00:12:15,110 --> 00:12:24,260 staying, for example, who created vast rental regiments and then gave them to the sovereign to use at his disposal. 109 00:12:25,460 --> 00:12:30,380 And so you had. But during this time, there's a lot of horror. 110 00:12:30,620 --> 00:12:33,859 This is one of the most bloody wars in European history. 111 00:12:33,860 --> 00:12:42,889 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. 112 00:12:42,890 --> 00:12:46,520 But you know, by the time of Peace of Westphalia, 113 00:12:47,780 --> 00:12:54,200 there would seem to be a tacit agreement that mercenary use had gone too far and for some different reasons, 114 00:12:54,200 --> 00:13:00,109 which, when discussing Q&A, states began to invest in their own standing. 115 00:13:00,110 --> 00:13:05,890 Armies costs be damned in places like France and later Prussia. 116 00:13:07,300 --> 00:13:10,850 And there are some reasons for it and some technology as well. 117 00:13:11,330 --> 00:13:21,800 But the state literally monopolised the market for force by having its own standing militaries, the outlawed mercenaries. 118 00:13:23,000 --> 00:13:28,160 And this that you think has created a stigma against mercenaries which we exist today. 119 00:13:28,880 --> 00:13:32,420 Mercenary is synonymous, a villain or murderer or something like that. 120 00:13:33,200 --> 00:13:38,660 It also it also left their non-state competitors defenceless. 121 00:13:39,440 --> 00:13:44,960 Because if you're a pope or if you're a rich family, the market's been dried up. 122 00:13:45,050 --> 00:13:47,630 There are no more mercy being chased away. And she's a threat. 123 00:13:48,440 --> 00:13:57,290 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. 124 00:13:57,440 --> 00:14:06,020 Now, whether that's real or not, we can discuss in Q&A. But mercenaries start to gradually decline around this time frame. 125 00:14:06,530 --> 00:14:12,469 They did not completely disappear until the middle, middle of the 19th century, Wolf. 126 00:14:12,470 --> 00:14:16,250 Mercenaries and privateers. And they didn't disappear. This was underground. 127 00:14:17,510 --> 00:14:27,910 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. 128 00:14:29,360 --> 00:14:36,860 Contentious label. But states use the monopoly of force to guarantee their supremacy. 129 00:14:37,370 --> 00:14:40,660 So much so that 40 years later, we think it's not. 130 00:14:40,670 --> 00:14:46,520 We have it through. But many scholars normalise this as the way political order should be. 131 00:14:46,790 --> 00:14:57,150 States centric order with national militaries and only states have the privilege of waging war codified in international law in a lot of work, 132 00:14:57,180 --> 00:15:02,480 which is essentially Westphalian conflict and even becomes the definition of a state. 133 00:15:02,600 --> 00:15:12,409 Looking at scholars like Max Faber, so this sort of normalised, I would say food, it's been exported around the world through colonisation, 134 00:15:12,410 --> 00:15:20,960 etc. So without mercenaries, again, non-state actors are left defenceless and the states go unchallenged for their supremacy. 135 00:15:21,680 --> 00:15:28,570 And this is a gradual process. So this is war becomes exclusive interstate affair. 136 00:15:28,580 --> 00:15:34,790 This is the birth of conventional war. This is the warfare of classic work out process. 137 00:15:35,480 --> 00:15:43,310 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. 138 00:15:43,580 --> 00:15:46,700 But that's to him is still sort of a fringe element of warfare. 139 00:15:49,160 --> 00:15:53,210 Now, mercenaries are coming back after several century hiatus. 140 00:15:53,780 --> 00:15:57,050 I know I was there for much of this, but that's not all. 141 00:15:57,380 --> 00:16:01,460 And it started happening around the time the Cold War sort of was ending. 142 00:16:01,820 --> 00:16:06,050 The first crew that did this was like a chemical executive outcome. 143 00:16:06,680 --> 00:16:10,290 This was a post-apartheid South African combat corporation. 144 00:16:10,290 --> 00:16:13,430 It was a mercenary corporation. It was a private army. 145 00:16:13,820 --> 00:16:17,980 They did things like kill, you know, the rebel group Angola. 146 00:16:17,990 --> 00:16:23,180 They went to Sierra Leone, some other groups. And those came up like Sandline International. 147 00:16:24,530 --> 00:16:33,380 But it really the market didn't really take off literally until the U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. 148 00:16:34,100 --> 00:16:40,430 And this catapulted the Morphin Power Force into sort of full on resurrection. 149 00:16:40,460 --> 00:16:47,720 If I could say that, especially the notorious Blackwater and the notorious you know, we think of contractors. 150 00:16:47,720 --> 00:16:55,700 We think of NiSource Square in 2007 when Blackwater contractors killed 17 Iraqis at 151 00:16:55,700 --> 00:17:00,350 traffic circle in Baghdad and basically were sent home without any accountability, 152 00:17:01,460 --> 00:17:11,520 which infuriated a whole region. This is sort of become the new American way of war or an element of it, I would argue. 153 00:17:12,060 --> 00:17:15,840 This in blue shows you troops red as contractors. 154 00:17:16,200 --> 00:17:25,620 The past century, contractors like in World War Two contractors were 10% of the workforce. 155 00:17:26,310 --> 00:17:32,670 In Afghanistan, there are 50%. There was a 1 to 1 ratio for every troop contractor. 156 00:17:33,540 --> 00:17:38,640 And in Afghanistan, it's closer to 70%, right? 157 00:17:38,940 --> 00:17:44,400 70%. Now, please note that when I say contractor, I mean all contractors. 158 00:17:44,820 --> 00:17:49,650 And only about 15% of contractors in Iraq or Afghanistan were figure pollers. 159 00:17:50,220 --> 00:17:56,010 Most contractors were making food or carrying trucks, doing great, innocuous things. 160 00:17:56,430 --> 00:18:01,260 I'm really I'm my research focuses on the lethal contractors. 161 00:18:01,470 --> 00:18:08,010 But the fact that the U.S. has moved to a contracting model for wear for war is astounding. 162 00:18:08,820 --> 00:18:12,149 And the reason that this happened, it wasn't a deliberate policy. 163 00:18:12,150 --> 00:18:17,940 It's like many things in Iraq and Afghanistan just sort of a wall that way, for lack of it, perhaps planning. 164 00:18:17,940 --> 00:18:28,530 They initially policymakers in 2002 under George W Bush thought that both wars would be quick and easy. 165 00:18:29,400 --> 00:18:37,860 And when they proved that they were not. The U.S. all volunteer force to could not recruit enough volunteers to fill the billets. 166 00:18:38,400 --> 00:18:45,240 And so policymakers had some ugly options. They could either withdraw and concede defeat to al Qaeda, which it didn't want to do. 167 00:18:46,200 --> 00:18:55,320 They could have a Vietnam like draft to forcibly fill all the vacant slots, which would be political suicide. 168 00:18:57,660 --> 00:19:02,520 Or they could just contract out the difference and they end up contract out the difference. 169 00:19:02,520 --> 00:19:10,679 Small at first, but over time, more and more and more to the point where over half the force was contractors and 170 00:19:10,680 --> 00:19:15,120 they weren't even all American majority contractors were not even American citizens, 171 00:19:15,420 --> 00:19:22,080 other like non-citizens fighting U.S. wars. Contractors also did more than dying. 172 00:19:22,590 --> 00:19:27,239 Blew our troops, our contractors. As the war progressed, they flipped. 173 00:19:27,240 --> 00:19:34,770 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. 174 00:19:34,770 --> 00:19:40,079 Most truck driver truck drivers were exactly truck drivers. 175 00:19:40,080 --> 00:19:47,100 And remember, following that, probably security like the trigger plumber types because they're in the line of fire. 176 00:19:47,100 --> 00:19:49,740 But it was actually it was truck drivers were getting ambushed. 177 00:19:51,840 --> 00:19:57,389 Now, this is an idea that came out this summer by Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, 178 00:19:57,390 --> 00:20:02,190 that we should go to a 100% contracting model in Afghanistan. 179 00:20:02,820 --> 00:20:11,250 He proposed this idea that we replace all troops in Afghanistan by mercenaries and private military contractors. 180 00:20:12,060 --> 00:20:21,630 That would presumably be his own. This idea might sound absurd, but it got a lot of play and airlift in Washington this summer, 181 00:20:22,290 --> 00:20:26,930 and it still could happen because President Trump can change his mind at any moment. 182 00:20:27,960 --> 00:20:38,520 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. 183 00:20:39,150 --> 00:20:44,639 But this is the fact that that he that not just this idea was floated, but that Erik Prince, 184 00:20:44,640 --> 00:20:51,690 who's kind of toxic in Washington, reputation alive, could float it and get the time of day is an interesting point. 185 00:20:52,260 --> 00:21:01,020 I would say. Now, here's the issue, is that after the U.S. was sort of the U.S. during Iraq, 186 00:21:01,050 --> 00:21:07,040 Afghanistan was a money meaning that it was it wasn't a free market for had one buyer 187 00:21:07,250 --> 00:21:13,340 with a lot of supply and that fire had market power to shape the industry as they wish, 188 00:21:13,340 --> 00:21:15,650 which the U.S. didn't really do, unfortunately. 189 00:21:16,190 --> 00:21:23,060 But now that the U.S. is no longer hiring that number of contractors, the question is where have they gone? 190 00:21:24,530 --> 00:21:28,940 And most of them have their private sector entities looking for new clients. 191 00:21:29,360 --> 00:21:34,190 And so, as they say, the genie has left the bottle and they're all over the world now. 192 00:21:34,460 --> 00:21:39,950 The market right now is bifurcating. It's taking two courses, the market splitting. 193 00:21:40,370 --> 00:21:44,240 One course is sort of what we call overt private military actors. 194 00:21:45,230 --> 00:21:57,379 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. 195 00:21:57,380 --> 00:22:03,200 But military contractors are doing there are armed civilians in war zones doing military things. 196 00:22:03,290 --> 00:22:11,659 It's not the same as guarding someone's house, but these these actors here reject the mercenary label, 197 00:22:11,660 --> 00:22:19,160 and they only want to work for legitimate clients, governments, legitimate multinational corporations, things like that. 198 00:22:20,300 --> 00:22:25,970 They actually they're organising themselves to obey international international standards, 199 00:22:25,970 --> 00:22:31,780 ISO standards, 20 of these 20,007 and 18,007, eight, eight I. 200 00:22:32,210 --> 00:22:38,600 I am not enough of a business star to make sense of what that is, but they're trying to legitimise themselves. 201 00:22:38,600 --> 00:22:43,640 There are some of them also volunteer to be certified and audited by external groups. 202 00:22:43,940 --> 00:22:50,600 One is the American Society for Industrial Security, based in Washington, D.C., which is a huge trade association. 203 00:22:51,230 --> 00:22:56,480 And the second is a Swiss initiative called the International Code of Conduct Association. 204 00:22:56,840 --> 00:23:00,440 And this is a compendium of governments, 205 00:23:00,440 --> 00:23:09,320 NGOs and private security companies who come together and agree on a code of conduct that respects international law and human rights. 206 00:23:09,710 --> 00:23:15,500 And some of the bigger firms have already submitted to being audited by this, which is a big deal for them. 207 00:23:16,580 --> 00:23:23,360 And the business model is because everything has to be profitable, is that if you're certified as quality, 208 00:23:23,650 --> 00:23:27,020 you will track clients like Exxon Mobil and the United States of America. 209 00:23:29,000 --> 00:23:32,450 But we're not sure that model is working for them. Okay. 210 00:23:33,020 --> 00:23:40,700 Now, this industry is located in Washington, London and New York and Dubai. 211 00:23:41,720 --> 00:23:49,190 Generally, the pay is kind of lame. If you were to join such a firm, you would probably get maybe twice your military salary. 212 00:23:49,790 --> 00:23:54,919 But you don't get any because we know that you don't get a pension and you don't get any medical support. 213 00:23:54,920 --> 00:23:58,090 So you get injured in the field, they will catch you up. 214 00:23:58,100 --> 00:24:02,120 So you're like, not me, I see you. But then they send you home immediately. 215 00:24:02,120 --> 00:24:05,210 And then you're on the road. On the street. So you. 216 00:24:05,220 --> 00:24:10,760 So contractors, despite all the the ballyhoo, they don't make all that much money. 217 00:24:12,320 --> 00:24:15,400 Now, over I think this is dwindling right now. 218 00:24:15,410 --> 00:24:19,040 That's the danger. So what else is going to get covered? 219 00:24:19,040 --> 00:24:25,910 Actors who sell firepower and plausible deniability, which is pretty key in an information age. 220 00:24:27,320 --> 00:24:34,920 That's a word of mouth business. And the way they recruit is it's based on network. 221 00:24:34,940 --> 00:24:43,250 So if I got a contract from, say, oil company or somebody, I would then hit my contacts and that usually American military, 222 00:24:43,260 --> 00:24:47,420 the UK or Commonwealth military would kind of mirror the five eyes actually. 223 00:24:48,350 --> 00:24:52,700 And we assemble a team, we sort of get things going. 224 00:24:53,060 --> 00:24:58,310 There's other networks as well. There's the Russian speakers. We see them in Syria and Eastern Ukraine. 225 00:24:58,790 --> 00:25:09,290 We see Latin Americans. ex-Special Forces in Latin America were hired by Abu Dhabi to initially to protect oil infrastructure, 226 00:25:09,620 --> 00:25:17,960 but now they've been deployed to Yemen to help with these. You have executive outcomes from that first mercenary. 227 00:25:18,380 --> 00:25:21,440 They're still in Africa. Their job is on London network. 228 00:25:22,040 --> 00:25:30,590 But two years ago, the government of Nigeria secretly hired them or the remnants of them to go after Boko Haram. 229 00:25:31,550 --> 00:25:35,600 And the Nigerian military, which had for six years, struggled against Boko Haram. 230 00:25:36,290 --> 00:25:41,090 The mercenaries came in with the military and clear them out in weeks and weeks. 231 00:25:41,900 --> 00:25:47,690 They didn't solve the problem. They just push them into the neighbour's backyard, which, you know, happens, right? 232 00:25:48,830 --> 00:25:54,560 But they're having to. WEITZ This industry is is. 233 00:25:55,070 --> 00:26:03,860 Based in corporate America. These low grocery store places like Erbil or Dubai or Uganda has become a hub for this recently as well. 234 00:26:04,190 --> 00:26:10,250 The pay is variable, but the risks are high, so one contract payment is still a problem. 235 00:26:10,790 --> 00:26:15,470 Maybe you do this. What's going on? What's Syria done with Russia? 236 00:26:15,770 --> 00:26:25,160 Russia companies said, look, if you can secure these oil fields from ISIS, we will give you the release of that. 237 00:26:25,790 --> 00:26:31,429 And then the the Russian oil company had hire this group called the Wagner Group, 238 00:26:31,430 --> 00:26:38,120 who would then mark mercenaries, as you can correct me if I'm wrong, who just did just that today. 239 00:26:38,420 --> 00:26:42,740 They had a joint venture with the government of Syria, the client, which is essentially where they get around that. 240 00:26:43,280 --> 00:26:50,030 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. 241 00:26:50,750 --> 00:26:55,340 But if you're if you're an overt actor, you can quickly become Cobra one, vice versa. 242 00:26:55,640 --> 00:27:04,460 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. 243 00:27:05,300 --> 00:27:13,040 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. 244 00:27:13,280 --> 00:27:17,210 This industry is now truly globalising, and it's it's rising. 245 00:27:17,540 --> 00:27:21,110 It's not covered. The news is getting eclipsed by terrorism and etc. 246 00:27:21,830 --> 00:27:26,000 But this and, you know, this is where we're seeing it right now. 247 00:27:28,610 --> 00:27:31,970 And we're seeing it across the four of four or five domains of war. 248 00:27:32,450 --> 00:27:35,600 So, of course, we've talked about land, private military. 249 00:27:35,930 --> 00:27:45,320 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. 250 00:27:45,680 --> 00:27:55,040 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. 251 00:27:55,190 --> 00:28:03,080 And they will they will harden your ship with concertina wire and and protect it with 50 calibre, you know, 50 calibre machine guns. 252 00:28:03,680 --> 00:28:10,290 And once it's called embarked security and once the ship has passed through harbours, 253 00:28:10,290 --> 00:28:16,760 then they go back to the original ship and leaving it to their U.S. Navy officer here. 254 00:28:16,970 --> 00:28:23,209 I'm told that, you know, Arleigh Burke destroyers don't want to sit around chasing Zodiacs and not being. 255 00:28:23,210 --> 00:28:28,340 So it's just kind of not a bad way to go about things while also seeing them in. 256 00:28:28,460 --> 00:28:33,090 We're seeing private air force in terms of kamikazes potentially and cyberspace. 257 00:28:33,090 --> 00:28:36,410 There's this thing called hack that companies which are mercenaries of cyberspace. 258 00:28:37,760 --> 00:28:44,150 All right. Let's move forward. Why are they coming back? Why Emerson coming back for several reasons. 259 00:28:45,080 --> 00:28:49,460 One is that it's still cheaper to rent and own. 260 00:28:50,270 --> 00:28:54,110 That's not change. And for strong countries, it has a couple of advantages. 261 00:28:54,470 --> 00:29:02,360 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, 262 00:29:02,870 --> 00:29:07,279 you can hire mercenaries is if something happens to them, they won't be called cut. 263 00:29:07,280 --> 00:29:11,990 You just cut them away. If they send it working for you, nobody can fully believe them. 264 00:29:12,410 --> 00:29:20,299 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, 265 00:29:20,300 --> 00:29:31,490 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. 266 00:29:31,580 --> 00:29:36,650 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. 267 00:29:37,460 --> 00:29:43,970 There's also these services if you want to rent and my 24 hind helicopter squadron for two weeks, you can do that. 268 00:29:44,660 --> 00:29:50,990 When these mercenaries, when abjure these mercenaries go after Boko Haram, they didn't show up with like Kalashnikovs. 269 00:29:51,140 --> 00:29:58,550 You shoot up with like attack helicopters and, you know, or you want to rent a special operations forces team of high quality. 270 00:29:58,820 --> 00:30:04,070 That's something you can right now in the marketplace. Also, there's a they offer loyalty. 271 00:30:04,610 --> 00:30:08,030 So when Gadhafi was being right before his demise, 272 00:30:08,030 --> 00:30:14,720 he he surrounded himself with tribal militia who did not trust he's trying to look mercenaries who are loyal to his paycheque. 273 00:30:15,200 --> 00:30:20,510 And this is also not new me, King Henry. The second is the same thing here, that whole century. 274 00:30:20,630 --> 00:30:28,390 When faced with a rebellion of nobles. So the implication now, should this trend line continue? 275 00:30:28,390 --> 00:30:33,100 And I think it will, because there's nothing related to stop this, in my opinion. 276 00:30:34,210 --> 00:30:38,650 First of all, regulation is really difficult. Some would say, well, it's international law. 277 00:30:38,660 --> 00:30:47,080 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, 278 00:30:47,080 --> 00:30:52,060 which I don't believe to be the case, who's going to go into Syria and arrest all those mercenaries? 279 00:30:53,380 --> 00:30:58,210 Is it going to be the Royal Marines? No, it's going to be United Nations, probably not. 280 00:30:58,630 --> 00:31:03,280 So it's really difficult to enforce. And this favours covert actors. 281 00:31:06,280 --> 00:31:09,400 I think also as we go forward, the stigma will fade. 282 00:31:10,270 --> 00:31:19,750 It's already feeling the fact right now people in this industry bend over backwards to avoid the M word. 283 00:31:21,040 --> 00:31:23,049 They will say were, you know, 284 00:31:23,050 --> 00:31:32,110 security contractors or we're or military contractors or my favourite euphemism is contingency contractors, which means nothing. 285 00:31:33,850 --> 00:31:42,790 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. 286 00:31:42,790 --> 00:31:47,200 If money can buy firepower, then the super wealthy can become superpowers. 287 00:31:48,130 --> 00:31:52,360 Right at some level, if you get into an army, as can oligarchs, 288 00:31:52,360 --> 00:31:56,500 as can mega-churches who want to do humanitarian interventions and good around the world. 289 00:31:57,790 --> 00:32:02,290 The problem is, is you have a mega church doing a humanitarian intervention in Syria. 290 00:32:02,680 --> 00:32:07,690 Does that, for example, suck the US or UK further into a war in Syria? 291 00:32:10,390 --> 00:32:16,540 This also opens up the possibility of wars without states to say You have, I'm making this up. 292 00:32:16,540 --> 00:32:20,590 The extractive industry likes this industry for obvious supply and demand reasons. 293 00:32:21,040 --> 00:32:27,579 Just say you have two mining companies fighting over a mine and they they start using mercenaries. 294 00:32:27,580 --> 00:32:33,550 And this creates this creates lateral escalation and a security dilemma. 295 00:32:34,480 --> 00:32:46,060 Lastly, if conflict is commoditized, then the logic of the marketplace and strategies that have to not apply to warfare, which is really strange. 296 00:32:46,600 --> 00:32:51,069 So let me come back until then. It's like classic Clausewitz means Adam Smith. 297 00:32:51,070 --> 00:32:59,290 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. 298 00:32:59,830 --> 00:33:06,790 We know that they can. They act as predators when they're unemployed and they can engage in racketeering. 299 00:33:07,180 --> 00:33:10,839 They also engage in patriotism and they can capture states. 300 00:33:10,840 --> 00:33:12,819 We saw this during the Middle Ages, for example, 301 00:33:12,820 --> 00:33:22,330 where large how the theory became rulers for more for Die Dynasty for example or as a family and malign that could happen today. 302 00:33:22,330 --> 00:33:29,410 You can take over eastern Congo and hold it on the demand side. 303 00:33:29,950 --> 00:33:38,240 On the client side, this is what burned Machiavelli is that new strategies exist where you can say, bribe your enemies, 304 00:33:38,260 --> 00:33:46,750 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. 305 00:33:47,350 --> 00:33:53,710 So if got to invade them, the first thing is to retain all the of the mercenaries so that when you invade surprising them, 306 00:33:54,130 --> 00:33:55,450 there's nobody that they can retain. 307 00:33:57,250 --> 00:34:04,450 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. 308 00:34:04,960 --> 00:34:11,020 And you have issues of mercenary lateral escalation and security in any weapon system. 309 00:34:12,640 --> 00:34:17,920 Armed forces start with a lot of clients start to build up their mercenary arsenal that others imitate 310 00:34:17,920 --> 00:34:26,140 that so implications the changing character of war are some of these as many of you discussed. 311 00:34:26,530 --> 00:34:32,799 One is that this lowers the barriers of entry and expands who can engage in warfare. 312 00:34:32,800 --> 00:34:36,850 Now, it's not just states. It can be anybody who's rich enough to do this. 313 00:34:38,470 --> 00:34:41,230 Second of all, is that strategies for private war, 314 00:34:41,230 --> 00:34:50,440 these are these are quintessentially unconventional strategies that CEOs may know more about than fly officers. 315 00:34:50,800 --> 00:34:56,770 And this creates a strategic vulnerability in how we think about articulate and plan for future conflicts. 316 00:34:58,600 --> 00:35:06,340 And lastly, this trend is occurring on autopilot, is there is minimal tension and that's the way the industry likes says. 317 00:35:07,300 --> 00:35:15,640 But there doesn't seem to be any structure agency, in my opinion, to prevent a future market for war in the 21st century, 318 00:35:16,540 --> 00:35:23,440 which can have pull, you know, political ramifications for who has power in international system. 319 00:35:25,960 --> 00:35:33,670 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 320 00:35:33,670 --> 00:35:40,420 sometimes it's easier to talk about new ideas through fiction than non-fiction. 321 00:35:41,200 --> 00:35:45,250 And I've written two models for Harper Collins, 322 00:35:45,790 --> 00:35:52,629 depicting a future of war with anybody rich enough to hire mercenaries in who they are and where they come from, 323 00:35:52,630 --> 00:36:01,420 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. 324 00:36:01,420 --> 00:36:05,270 This actually began as a memoir I was writing a long time ago. 325 00:36:05,290 --> 00:36:09,760 My agent was like, No, no, no, no, no. If you write that, you need to do that. 326 00:36:10,480 --> 00:36:15,130 So this is fiction and that's and we dead and we turned to the next series. 327 00:36:16,960 --> 00:36:24,370 So that's a very well. And, you know, McChrystal liked it and so did Scrabulous, of all people, plus some good criticism. 328 00:36:25,240 --> 00:36:29,740 So with that, I will close it at Komarov and open up to questions.