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 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 frontline. 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 their missions; by global shipping firms to ward off pirates along 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 everything from organizing logistics to 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.
The return of the mercenary marks a potentially world-historic break with an era increasingly defined by national standing armies. The Peace of Westphalia, established by two peace treaties in 1648, placed states at the center of the political system emerging in Europe. This new order led to a transition from private forms of warfare to national militaries—centralizing control, in other words, over the means of violence. The treaties were in part a response to the atrocities committed by the increasingly advanced mercenary bands that rampaged through Central Europe during the Thirty Years’ War, which cost as many as eight million lives, leading to population declines of 50 percent in parts of Germany.
The era of warfare defined by state militaries was the exception to general historical trends. (The last few hundred years of the Westphalian system also saw mercenaries continuing to play a key role in colonial conquests from the British Raj to German East and South West Africa.) Selling violence is probably the world’s second oldest profession, from Xenophon’s March of the Ten Thousand, which saw Cyrus the Younger employ Greek soldiers of fortune in his bid for the Achaemenid Empire; to the auxiliaries who fought with Caesar’s legions in Gaul; to Renaissance Italy’s condottieri, who served the peninsula’s city-states; to the Pioneer Column, sent by Cecil Rhodes to carve out his own private empire in Southern Africa. Much like the oldest profession, selling one’s sword tends to be regarded as base and dishonorable. Perhaps the most famous critic of the mercenary was Niccolò Machiavelli, who argued that mercenaries were “disunited, ambitious, undisciplined, and disloyal. They are brave with their friends; with their enemies, they are cowards. They have no fear of God, and they keep no faith with men.” For the Florentine diplomat, as the historian David Parrott puts it, soldiers for hire turned war from “a crucible for forging republican virtù amongst citizen-soldiers into a cost–benefit calculation in which service, fighting, flight and booty were simply negotiable commodities.”
Machiavelli was wrong about one thing: mercenaries were often better at fighting than peasants or townsfolk levied into service by their local lord. These were professional men of war after all, often at the forefront of innovations in military technology. Unlike town militias or peasant levies, they could also organize their own logistics, provided they had coin or lines of credit. As a result, hiring mercenaries could make for a good deal for the rulers of late medieval and early modern Europe. As ex-mercenary, Georgetown professor, and military strategist (as well as the author of several Tom Clancyesque spy novels) Sean McFate puts it, armies for hire allowed for early modern rulers to “wage war on an industrial scale without long-term administrative costs, like taking care of wounded veterans or pensions, and this lowered the barrier to entry in war while encouraging ever-larger battles. Mercenaries never had it so good, or civilians so bad.”
The return of the mercenary points not just to the transformation of warfare but to a shift away from the Westphalian state-based sovereignty regime. Low intensity in terms of political impact to Western powers but high intensity in terms of indirect and direct costs to human life, there are increasing numbers of forever wars that continue to rage across the world: Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Libya, and more. Recent history has been largely defined by conflicts that do not fit the traditional model of interstate warfare; clashes between conventional armies are rare. Instead, what predominates is usually referred to as unconventional warfare, those activities, as the U.S. military defines them, “conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary, and guerrilla force in a denied area.” As McFate points out, “There’s nothing more unconventional these days than a conventional war.”
Unbroken conflict produces a steady supply of men with skills in the exercise of violence, as well as the demand for their services. Long a multibillion-dollar industry, PMCs are projected to maintain their recent astronomical growth. Meanwhile, maintaining conventional standing armies has proven increasingly expensive and difficult. One need only look to the current recruiting crisis in the U.S. military. While MAGA blames DEI, Pentagon reports find that 75 percent of Americans between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four are ineligible to join the military for mental and physical health-related reasons. Obesity and late-capitalist anxieties distract from a more significant development: young Americans are less and less willing to consider fighting for their country after decades of forever wars and generations of social-contract erosion that enriched oligarchs at the expense of the majority. The return of the mercenary should come as no surprise. After all, if the reach of the market has been expanded to everything from our appified sex lives to our AI-drunk imaginations, why should the market for violence be any different?
The Future Starts in South Africa
In the world of the modern mercenary, South Africa’s most recent and newsworthy travails are tragicomic: seventeen hapless members of former President Jacob Zuma’s political party (and family) were allegedly trafficked by his daughter, Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, sent to fight for Russia in the trenches of the Donbas. The men traveled to Russia under the impression they would undergo intensive bodyguard training. Upon arrival, Zuma-Sambudla (currently on trial for inciting a violent insurrection in July 2021) convinced them to sign contracts written in Russian, and soon afterward they found themselves on the frontline fighting for Wagner.
Unbroken conflict produces a steady supply of men with skills in the exercise of violence, as well as the demand for their service.
The farce in the Donbas belies the seriousness of South Africa’s long history of hired guns, however, from the white mercenaries who fought in the Third Zulu Civil War to the former soldiers who took their services to the private sector during the last years of apartheid. There is a good reason that the country’s mercenaries, emblematic as they are of the state of the industry, have been a staple villain for Hollywood in movies like Blood Diamond and Elysium for years, as well as serving as the inspiration for adversaries in hit video game series such as Metal Gear Solid and Far Cry. This mirrors the key role played by South Africans in the development of the modern PMC and their ubiquitous presence across global conflict zones for decades; estimates about the number of South African contractors who did security and logistics work in the Iraq War vary, for instance, but some placed the figure as high as ten thousand.
Around the same time, South African mercenaries were involved in the Wonga Coup of 2004. Masterminded by Simon Mann, a former Special Air Service (SAS) officer and founder of Sandline International (a PMC infamous for triggering a political-military confrontation in Papua New Guinea leading to the fall of its government in 1997), the plan was for a group of South African and British mercenaries to pull up in Malabo, depose Equatorial Guinea’s dictator Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, and replace him with an opposition politician, all for a healthy share of the small central African country’s oil wealth. Its financiers included a requisite shady Lebanese billionaire, arch-Tory novelist Jeffrey Archer (allegedly), and most notably, Mark Thatcher, the former British prime minister’s failson given to trading off his mother’s name for all manner of disreputable business ventures. My earliest memory of the world of PMCs as a South African was of Thatcher’s son being yanked out of my school after news broke that his father had been involved in a failed coup—the mercenaries were apprehended in Zimbabwe en route to Equatorial Guinea, and most of those involved quickly found themselves guests of some of Africa’s most infamous prisons—making clear to me that Cape Town’s Southern Suburbs were home to men and women who made their living selling violence.
More than half a century before the Wonga Coup, South Africa was already home to Michael “Mad Mike” Hoare, one of the most infamous mercenaries of his time. An Anglo-Irish accountant, Hoare served on the Burmese front during the Second World War but soon grew bored with postwar life in London. Based on remarks he made later in life, it seems that Hoare’s decision in 1948 to immigrate to South Africa was at least in part political: apartheid South Africa was, as Hoare put it, “the bastion of civilization in an Africa subjected to a total Communist onslaught.” The growth of the welfare state and a more egalitarian social order as Britain’s imperial glory faded disgusted men like Hoare, who believed in colonial glory and (violent) individualism. South Africa attracted a particular type of European and North American immigrant who rejected the postwar social democratic order or believed, like Elon Musk’s grandparents, that decolonization was part of a Jewish conspiracy against the West.
While the weather in Durban proved a significant improvement over the gloom of postwar Britain, the life of an accountant in apartheid South Africa was still rather dull. To liven things up, Hoare dabbled as a safari guide and attempted to find the mythical Lost City of the Kalahari. In 1961, Moïse Tshombe—a hardline anticommunist politician and then leader of an independence movement in Katanga, a mineral-rich province in the east of Congo, itself newly independent—began recruiting white mercenaries. Hoare joined a group of mostly French, Belgian, and South African soldiers of fortune against the national government of Patrice Lumumba for Tshombe’s rebellion, which was backed by the CIA, the Belgians, and the Portuguese. These men were described by veteran war correspondent Al J. Venter as “a bumptious, ill-disciplined bunch of racists almost to a man.”
Regardless, Hoare caught the eye of Tshombe, who, now prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, tasked Mad Mike in 1964 with assembling a mercenary band of one thousand men to help put down the Simbas, a rebel group with a taste for brutalizing civilians that had seized control of much of the northeastern Congo and declared it a “People’s Republic” following the CIA-backed assassination of Patrice Lumumba. Tshombe didn’t trust local troops and was correctly worried about the possibility of a military rebellion after leading his own in Katanga. Hoare, as he recalls in Congo Mercenary, his unsubtly titled memoir, took to the task with great enthusiasm. Posting newspaper ads for “any fit young man looking for employment,” he assembled a motley crew of mostly Rhodesians and South Africans containing professional anticommunists, degenerates, and even a notorious Wehrmacht veteran. (Hoare was fond of proclaiming that “you can’t win a war with choir boys.”)
With a little help from the CIA, these white mercenaries offered a military solution with no direct connection to the United States and at a bargain price; the Johnson administration was eager to put down what it perceived as a Soviet-backed rebellion, but commentators in the media and senior officials were wary of becoming entangled in a direct intervention just as the administration was escalating its involvement in Vietnam. Their form of highly irregular warfare proved somewhat effective, from hijacking riverboats to launch surprise attacks on unsuspecting hamlets to dispatching convoys to flush out enemy units for bombing by a mercenary air force piloted by Cuban exiles. Their most notable achievement was the rescue of more than one thousand white civilians held hostage by the Simbas in the city of Stanleyville (now Kisangani) with the aid of other white mercenaries and Belgian paratroopers.
Hoare’s mercenary band became known as the Wild Geese, in reference to the Irish soldiers who left their island to serve in various continental European armies from the sixteenth century onward. (In 1978, a film starring Richard Burton and Roger Moore as leaders of a band of mercenaries with the same name was released; the Geese are hired by a London banker to rescue the leader of a fictitious African country before his scheduled execution by a general who seized power in a coup.) He also became one of the patron saints of Soldier of Fortune magazine. Founded in 1975 by Robert K. Brown, a Vietnam veteran and former Green Beret, this “Journal of Professional Adventurers” promoted a romantic view of mercenaries as the vanguard of the international anticommunist crusade from Nicaragua to Afghanistan, while also recruiting American Vietnam veterans to fight for the Rhodesian cause.
Hoare’s embrace of the mercenary life was inspired not only by the pursuit of adventure but also by his professed desire “to strike a blow to rid the Congo of the greatest cancer the world has ever known—the creeping, insidious disease of communism.” Anticommunism provided the worldview and market for Hoare and his generation of white mercenaries. They sought meaning in Africa, where they saw little or no difference between communists and African nationalists such as Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah, who promoted a political vision for the continent outside of the West. (In Hoare’s words, “Killing communists is like killing vermin, killing African nationalists is as if one is killing an animal.”) There they looked to preserve the colonial world they viewed as their birthright amid the turbulence of decolonization. As Hoare put it, “The Africans have gotten used to the idea that they can do what they like to us whites, that they can trample on us and spit on us.”
Hardline anticommunism led a number of these mercenaries to view the Nazis as having got a bad rap—after all, they, too, had tried to defeat the real enemy, the Soviet Union. Unsurprisingly, some of these soldiers of fortune who made their way to Africa fought for the losing side of the Second World War. The most notorious of these men was Siegfried Müller, also known as Congo Müller. Müller described himself as “the last defender of the West” and drove a jeep decorated with a human skull across the eastern Congo. Born to Prussian military stock, Müller managed to survive the Eastern Front. After a brief stint in Libya clearing mines on behalf of a British oil company, he immigrated to South Africa, then fought in the Congo as one of Hoare’s Wild Geese, where he earned notoriety for his nostalgia for the Third Reich (as demonstrated by the Iron Cross he insisted on wearing) and taste for atrocities.
The Wild Geese were, in the words of the U.S. ambassador, “an uncontrolled lot of toughs . . . who consider looting or safe cracking fully within their prerogatives.” Their “serious excesses,” the CIA reported, included “robbery, rape, murder and beatings.” The spectacle of white men killing black Africans and widespread looting (the Wild Geese had blown the doors off a few bank vaults when they came into town on their travels) garnered a negative reaction in Africa and beyond. Such deeds committed by white mercenaries offered free propaganda for anti-imperialist governments while undermining the legitimacy of attempts such as the Monrovia group, which included Liberia, Nigeria and most francophone countries from Senegal to Madagascar, to chart a more pro-Western brand of African nationalism. Hoare and his men’s deeds tarnished the image of mercenaries in Africa for years to come, leading the UN to declare in 1968 that the use of mercenaries against national liberation movements was a criminal act. Despite this, white mercenaries continued to play roles in African conflicts from the Biafran War to the Comoro Islands, which were ruled on two occasions by Robert “Bob” Denard, a Frenchman Venter once described as “a warrior king out of Homer.”
The Terrible Ones
While Cold War mercenaries of the 1960s may have been effective killers, they were, per Sean McFate, “not an organized military. They were more or less lone actors who would band together and disperse” after a conflict ended. Hoare and the other mercenaries of his generation who fought in the Congo did not form a private army for hire for any government looking to put down a rebel movement or invade their neighbor. This would change as the debt crisis of the 1980s and the dogmas of neoliberal globalization triggered the collapse of state-based development in Africa and beyond. Structural adjustment programs, outsourcing governance to management consultants, and privatization to pay off debts destroyed state capacity and the sovereignty of postcolonial African nations.
These men were described by veteran war correspondent Al J. Venter as “a bumptious, ill-disciplined bunch of racists almost to a man.”
As it made its uneasy transition to majority rule, South Africa stood at the center of the new world that was emerging: the men who had fought apartheid’s dirty wars embraced the spirit of globalization and took their skills to the private sector. Years before Erik Prince launched Blackwater, when Yevgeny Prigozhin was still selling hot dogs, Colonel Eeben Barlow more or less invented the modern mercenary company with Executive Outcomes, arguably the most infamous PMC until Wagner made its mark. Originally founded in 1989 as a special forces training company, EO transformed the mercenary band into a modern corporation by providing “warfare in a box,” in McFate’s words, that was able to deploy special forces operators behind enemy lines while providing its own air support and armored personnel carriers. While several PMCs predated EO, they were restricted to providing training or security; EO, on the other hand, offered a modern army for hire.
Mostly composed of elite ex-soldiers of the apartheid-era South African Defense Force (SADF), EO was a product of the South African Border War, a bloody affair with staggering death tolls that ranged from counterinsurgency operations against Namibian guerrillas to pitched battles with the Cuban military in Angola and covert raids in Zambia. The Border War lasted from 1966 to 1989, overlapping with Zimbabwe’s War for Independence as well as Mozambique’s national liberation struggle and subsequent civil war. In that latter conflict, South Africa provided material and military aid to the anticommunist RENAMO (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana, or Mozambican National Resistance), founded with the direct assistance of Rhodesian intelligence in 1976. And of course, these wars were intertwined with the long struggle against apartheid in South Africa. The armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC) was hosted by the governments in Angola, Zambia, and Mozambique, all of which became targets for South African black ops as a result.
The most intensive phase of South African involvement in Angola began in late 1975. With the encouragement of Henry Kissinger, the SADF launched Operation Savannah, a large-scale invasion that reached the outskirts of Luanda before retreating under international pressure. The war continued as a series of incursions and operations in support of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), an anticommunist rebel group led by Jonas Savimbi, against Namibia’s national liberation movement the South West Africa People’s Organisation and the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), as well as the Cuban forces deployed in Angola in support of the MPLA. This continued until the SADF was defeated by the Angolan army (FAA) and Cuban troops at Cuito Cuanavale in 1988.
Barlow began his military career as a sapper, going on to serve as an officer in 32 Battalion’s reconnaissance wing. Nicknamed “Os Terríveis” (The Terrible Ones), 32 Battalion was one of the most notorious formations in African military history. Founded by Colonel Jan Breytenbach, it was one of the rare units in the apartheid military where black and white soldiers served together. The majority of its troops were Angolan nationals who had fought for the right-wing National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA); the officers were white. The unit also included active personnel from Rhodesia, Australia, Portugal, and the United States. While the unit’s white foreign recruits largely avoided the charge, 32 Battalion’s black soldiers were often accused of being mercenaries for joining the racist apartheid army. (Colonel Breytenbach strongly contested the claim, telling a journalist such soldiers only joined “after being betrayed by their own people,” in reference to the FNLA’s defeat in the civil war at the hands of the MPLA.) Many of these black soldiers later joined EO, alongside veterans of other elite units such as the special forces Recces (Reconnaissance Regiments) and 44 Parachute Brigade; South African intelligence operatives and members of elite police units; former members of Rhodesia’s elite Selous Scouts and Special Air Service; and even black South Africans who had fought for the ANC’s armed wing. EO’s operators, compared to the Wild Geese, were motivated more by profit than ideology or adventure; they were, for one, paid significantly better than the Wild Geese’s relatively modest salaries of £140 a month, and EO’s executives became wealthy men.
After Apartheid
After leaving 32 Battalion, Barlow had an intensive course in black ops work as part of South Africa’s military intelligence, which, alongside other intelligence and covert police units, produced many future EO operatives. After South Africa entered U.S.- and Soviet-supervised negotiations to end the Border War, Barlow joined the country’s military intelligence before being recruited by the Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB), a black ops intelligence unit and death squad active in South Africa and internationally. Besides murder, the CCB’s operations ranged from an intimidation campaign against journalists reporting critically on the government to introducing cholera into the water supply of a Namibian refugee camp and hanging a baboon fetus in Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s garden. Barlow led the Middle East and Europe section, where he claims he primarily focused on intelligence gathering.
Anticommunism provided the worldview and market for Hoare and his generation of white mercenaries.
In 1990, the CCB’s South African operations were exposed by the media after the murder in the previous year of David Webster, a left-wing South African academic in Johannesburg, by Ferdi Barnard, a former cop with a crack problem who was paid 40,000 rand (about $15,000 at the time) by his CCB paymasters for the hit. The scandal contributed to the closure of the CCB, ending Barlow’s covert employment. Barlow found himself broke and unwanted, searching for a place amid the birth throes of the new South Africa. The SADF’s professional soldiers were an inconvenience not only to the new democratically elected ANC-led government but also to the apartheid military and political elites who were desperate to avoid any legal or financial consequences by, in Barlow’s words, “finding scapegoats for apartheid’s misdeeds.” While his time as a spy left him with an international network and experience in building intelligence operations, Barlow still had a real asset to his name: Executive Outcomes.
In 1993, Tony Buckingham, a former UK special forces operative and the CEO of Heritage Oil, and Simon Mann, who went on to lead the Wonga Coup, approached Barlow with a simple proposal on behalf of the MPLA government: put together a group of experienced men to capture and defend valuable oil tanks and the harbor in the city of Soyo, which was in UNITA hands and located by the strategically important border with Congo. Despite the official withdrawal of South African support for UNITA in 1988 (according to Barlow, elements of the apartheid military and intelligence services continued to provide covert support) and the 1991 peace treaty, Angola’s civil war had continued. Rejecting the 1992 election, UNITA, which by then already held most of the country’s diamond fields and oil producing regions, went on the offensive.
Based on faulty intel, EO deployed half of the men initially planned, encountering stronger-than-expected resistance from opposing forces, which included several of UNITA’s most elite units, among them Moroccan mercenaries. Still, the company achieved its objectives: capturing Soyo and its oil facilities while inflicting several hundred casualties on UNITA, including two of their top field commanders. Impressed with EO’s performance, the MPLA government continued to contract EO to turn the tide against UNITA. Barlow and EO recruited more discerningly and built their own infrastructure, supply chains, field hospitals, and air support, including helicopter gunships, troop carriers, and fighter jets. Now empowered to advise the FAA’s frontline commanders to the point of directing major battles, the company expelled UNITA from the mines and oil platforms that funded the rebels’ war effort.
Over the course of its involvement in Angola from 1993 to 1996, EO helped the MPLA government reclaim significant parts of the country. In return, they were paid around $20 million in direct compensation a year; there have been numerous allegations that they were also granted oil and diamond concessions. (This was always denied by Barlow, and being paid in mineral concessions is often a bad deal: bringing diamonds or oil to market requires fixed capital investment and is a complicated endeavor for major mining and oil companies, let alone a PMC trying to fight a war at the same time.) EO’s successes in Angola played a significant role in the signing of a new peace treaty in November 1994, a few months after South Africa held its first democratic election.
But these victories came at the cost of bad press. EO was accused by the South African and international media of being everything from war profiteers fueling a conflict; to racist former apartheid war criminals (the fact that many of EO’s operatives were black tended to be downplayed or ignored); to proxies for Russia, Britain, or the United States. Moreover, the company now posed a threat to various interests that were making a killing off the war, including—according to Barlow, at least—members of the apartheid intelligence apparatus and military leaders.
Executive Outcomes’ operators, compared to the Wild Geese, were motivated more by profit than ideology or adventure.
Worse, EO achieved results as a non-state actor that the UN could not. In 1989, the UN had adopted the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries, although the treaty only entered into force in 2001. EO’s role in the Angolan conflict invited official backlash on these grounds. Under U.S. and UN pressure, the MPLA government canceled its contract with EO, which had planned on training the Angolan armed forces and playing a security role, in case fighting resumed. Another UN peacekeeping mission was deployed in 1995, and two years later a short-lived, ill-fated coalition government with UNITA was cobbled together. The mission cost around $1 billion, while, according to available estimates, EO probably made between $40 and $80 million in Angola. Tim Spicer, who cofounded Sandline International, claimed that “UN involvement in Angola cost $1 million a day—$365 million a year—and achieved absolutely nothing.” EO, he continued, “got UNITA to the conference table, putting an end to the war in a couple of months.” The peace treaty proved short-lived, and the UN mission ineffective: following regular ceasefire violations, intense fighting broke out again in late 1997 and continued until Savimbi was killed by government troops in 2002.
EO picked up its next contract in another messy civil war, this time in Sierra Leone, where a particularly vicious rebel group called the Revolutionary United Front was fighting against a corrupt and unpopular government. Funded by blood diamonds and aided by Charles Taylor, neighboring Liberia’s warlord, the RUF became known for their use of child soldiers, drug-fueled mass killing and rape, and a fondness for hacking the limbs off of those they left alive. In May 1995, EO was hired to change the balance of forces and within ten days forced a RUF retreat from Sierra Leone’s capital of Freetown. In nine months, EO had driven the RUF out of the diamond fields that were funding their war efforts, destroyed their headquarters, and forced them to come to the negotiating table. A ceasefire was declared in February 1996, and a peace treaty allowing for new elections was signed on November 30 of that year, although said elections never took place, and the treaty fell apart when the RUF failed to honor the terms of the agreement. Once again, bad press and international pressure followed EO’s operations. As had happened in Angola, the Sierra Leone government canceled its contract with EO in 1997, hiring Sandline International in December 1997 as a replacement. This peace treaty once again proved short-lived; a coup was launched by dissident government forces allied with the RUF, and Freetown was sacked. A four-thousand-strong regional security peacekeeping force of the Economic Community of West African States was deployed to the country following the coup. While the coup was defeated, an UN peacekeeping mission was authorized in 1999; ineffective even by the low standards set in Angola and the Congo, UN troops were unwilling to engage RUF forces, and in some cases even complicit in drug smuggling and the blood diamond trade. As a result, fighting continued until Britain’s intervention in the conflict, beginning in 2000, succeeded in getting the RUF to surrender two years later.
Over their relatively brief period of operations, EO were able to inflict heavy defeats on UNITA in Angola and the RUF in Sierra Leone, leading to (short-lived) peace treaties, all at the fraction of the price of UN peacekeeping missions: the reported cost of EO’s services in Sierra Leone was between $35 and $60 million, while the remarkably unsuccessful UN peacekeeping deployment from 1999 to 2005 cost close to $3 billion. As General Ian Douglas, a negotiator for the UN in Sierra Leone, noted after the 1996 peace treaty: “E.O. gave us this stability. In a perfect world, of course, we wouldn’t need an organization like E.O., but I’d be loath to say they have to go just because they are mercenaries.” Ultimately, both of these conflicts were ended through military efforts; the FAA eventually was able to get its act together and defeat UNITA, while it took British military intervention to defeat the RUF and end the war in Sierra Leone.
Fit in or Fuck Off
In 1998, as EO reached the peak of its international notoriety, the newly democratic, ANC-led government of South Africa passed the Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance Act, which regulated PMC activity. While EO was, according to Barlow, granted a license to operate by the government, the conditions of the act placed severe restrictions on its activities and the company shut its doors in 1998. Barlow claims this was due to internal issues; he had left, in any case, the previous year after growing weary of constant media attacks and intrigues. While proud of his time in the SADF, Barlow denied being a right-wing revanchist, describing himself as only opposed to foreign forces with nefarious agendas on the African continent. Barlow returned to the PMC business in 2009 as the chairman of STTEP (Specialised Tasks, Training, Equipment and Protection) International Ltd. His time there included an attempt to hunt down the still-at-large Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony with a cofounder of Invisible Children, the NGO that gave us the Kony 2012 campaign, as well as allegedly working with the Nigerian government to rescue the schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014.
Executive Outcomes achieved results as a non-state actor that the UN could not.
In 2020, Barlow declared on social media that he was relaunching EO after twenty-two years in response to popular demand: “Reactivating a company that faced the anger and wrath of the intelligence services, the media, and non-African governments for assisting under-threat African and other governments [to] defeat armed uprisings and putting a stop to drug and human trafficking, resource smuggling and terrorism took some consideration.” He finished the post by declaring that EO “will once again provide successful African solutions—by Africans—to African problems, regardless of the false attacks that will no doubt again be launched against the company.” What exactly the company has been up to since its relaunch is unclear.
Barlow doesn’t view himself as a mercenary. In fact, he strongly argues against the term whenever he makes a media appearance or social media post. As reporter Elizabeth Rubin described it, Barlow thinks of EO as “a team of troubleshooters, marketing a strategy of recovery to failing governments across the world.” According to Barlow, EO had (and presumably still has) a code: they would only do business with “legitimate” governments that were not prone to mass human rights abuses. Unlike the mercenaries of the 1960s, EO, in its earlier iteration, did not fight on behalf of separatist rebellions and, in a shift from the claims of Hoare and his ilk of defending Western civilization, even employed the rhetoric of human rights as part of its marketing; Barlow, on occasion, portrayed EO as “a kind of advance team for the UN,” according to Rubin, in the sense they won the peace for the UN to keep.
If the future reveals itself on the periphery, as the apocryphal J. G. Ballard quote goes, the fragmentation of the old world of state-based sovereignty first revealed itself in the military doctrine constructed out of the ashes of the Cold War’s hot zones. Sean McFate offers a useful analogy here: due to its pariah status born out of apartheid and fondness for attacking its neighbors, South Africa was “so isolated that it developed its own form of warfare, its own strategic culture, its own tactics and doctrine.” This model of warfare was summed up by former SADF Chief General Jannie Geldenhuys, in an old turn of phrase, as “Do what you can with what you have.” As EO’s unofficial motto put it, “Fit in or fuck off.” EO’s model was an adaptation to a world in which, according to Barlow, “the Clausewitzian view of a single centre of gravity” was no longer applicable; gone were the days of two field armies that opposed each other on the battlefield.
The genie was let out of the bottle decades ago, and the privatization of warfare is no longer exceptional, nor is it an unfortunate trend that can be reversed. As military theorist Martin van Creveld predicted in 1991, “The spread of sporadic small-scale war will cause regular armed forces themselves to change form, shrink in size, and wither away. As they do, much of the day-to-day burden of defending society against the threat of low-intensity conflict will be transferred to the booming security businesses.” From Colombian mercenaries assassinating the president of Haiti to the fiefdom carved out by the RSF in Darfur, we live in a world of fragmented sovereignties. Vast areas of formally sovereign states are governed by non-state actors, from PMCs to militias and armed militants, plugged into global supply chains. Even in relatively wealthy states like Mexico and Brazil, rich global cities stand in contrast to regions in which non-state actors wield sovereign powers formally granted only to the state. In advanced capitalist states, meanwhile, most countries have given up on the idea of a state-led developmental model; their core functions, from health care to education, are increasingly outsourced to private companies, from McKinsey & Company to Palantir.
Post-apartheid South Africa provides an example of the world van Creveld predicted and not just because it produced EO. For over a decade, the country has experienced a form of de-development, diminishing the state’s ability to provide basic services to the point of undermining the ANC’s achievements. GDP per capita has declined and fallen behind peers, for instance, and unemployment hovers around 40 percent. One of these basic services is public security. While South Africa has always been a violent country with high levels of crime, powerful organized crime groups have embedded themselves in recent years within the country’s political and economic institutions, from illegal mining gangs laying siege to entire towns to extortion mafias targeting everything from multinational corporations to small township businesses. As a result, private security is one of the biggest employers in the country, with over sixteen thousand companies and more than 650,000 working guards. In comparison, the mining sector accounts for only 468,000 jobs. As reactionary fears grow in the moneyed countries—of “lawless” cities like London and New York being “invaded” by third-world immigrants—and as elites seek increasingly to wall themselves from accountability and society, the model of private security and private militaries developed in South Africa is spreading to the Global North, the country at the tip of Africa once again providing a window into the future.