This article Warfare in a Box was published by The Baffler and is part of Alameda’s After Order project.

Executive Outcomes and the making of the modern mercenary

MERCENARIES HAVE BECOME AN INESCAPABLE PART of today’s landscape of conflict and disorder. Guns for hire now cover the globe. Rechristened outside of Ukraine as the Africa Corps after the demise of its director, Yevgeny Prigozhin, Russia’s Wagner Group has popped up everywhere in Africa, from Burkina Faso to the Central African Republic. Elsewhere on the continent, the United Arab Emirates has sent the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) to secure access to gold mines in Sudan. In the Western Hemisphere, Colombian mercenaries return from a stint in Ukraine’s international brigades to Mexico to spread the gospel of drone
warfare to cartel sicarios, and the Trump administration’s schemes to secure Venezuela’s oil assets not with U.S. troops but with private military contractors, or PMCs, as they’re usually known.

Placing profit over ideology, modern mercenaries are as at home in the boardroom as on the front line. Their companies are registered in the appropriate tax haven, like the City of London, and operate through shell firms. They are contracted by international humanitarian organizations that regularly employ PMCs for protection from East Timor to Haiti as part of humanitarian missions; by global shipping firms to ward off pirates off the coast of Somalia; or by governments of troubled states, such as Mali, to train their militaries. Contracting PMCs is not limited, however, to so-called failed states and countries short of military-age men (and citizens) like Qatar and the UAE. Offering more than just frontline troops for hire—services provided now include organizing logistics and running troll farms—these companies form an essential component of the most powerful militaries in the world; Wagner has in effect been nationalized by the Kremlin, and the United States has channeled billions of dollars to PMCs over the course of the twenty-first century, beginning with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

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