Oxford University Press, 2014. — 452 p.
The Modern Mercenary Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order by Sean McFate is the go-to reference guide for private armies. It is a most useful handbook for the history and capabilities of private military units. It was 2004, and Sean McFate had a mission in Burundi: to keep the president alive and prevent the country from spiraling into genocide, without anyone knowing that the United States was involved. The United States was, of course, involved, but only through McFate's employer, the military contractor DynCorp International. Throughout the world, similar scenarios are playing out daily. The United States can no longer go to war without contractors. Yet we don't know much about the industry's structure, its operations, or where it's heading. Typically led by ex-military men, contractor firms are by their very nature secretive. Even the U.S. government-the entity that actually pays them-knows relatively little. In The Modern Mercenary, Sean McFate lays bare this opaque world, explaining the economic structure of the industry and showing in detail how firms operate on the ground. A former U.S. Army paratrooper and private military contractor, McFate provides an unparalleled perspective into the nuts and bolts of the industry, as well as a sobering prognosis for the future of war. While at present, the U.S. government and U.S. firms dominate the market, private military companies are emerging from other countries, and warlords and militias have restyled themselves as private security companies in places like Afghanistan and Somalia. To understand how the proliferation of private forces may influence international relations, McFate looks back to the European Middle Ages, when mercenaries were common and contract warfare the norm. He concludes that international relations in the twenty-first century may have more in common with the twelfth century than the twentieth. This "back to the future" situation, which he calls "neomedievalism," is not necessarily a negative condition, but it will produce a global system that contains rather than solves problems.
The Modern Mercenary is the first work that combines a broad-ranging theory of the phenomenon with an insider's understanding of what the world of the private military industry is actually like. The Modern Mercenary Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order by Sean McFateis a highly provocative and enriching addition to the literature on the private military industry and stands apart from much contemporary scholarship on the subject... McFate does a good job interweaving a rich and easy-to-read historical analysis with his overall thesis, drawing fascinating parallels between our medieval past-complete with mercenaries, military entrepreneurs and privatized warfare-and their post-modern contemporaries in an emerging neo-medieval present. The Modern Mercenary will reward anyone looking for a deeper understanding of market-driven contemporary conflict. What McFate does best in this book is to add structure and sobriety to the discussion by classifying different types of mercenary services and firms, and to carefully and dispassionately lay out the arguments for and against a 'free market for force.
Table of Contents
List of Table and Figures
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Peace through Profit Motive?
Understanding the Private Military Industry
A Codependency Problem
How Did We Get Here?
Why Private Armies Have Returned
The Murky Side of Private Force
The Modern World Order: A Brief History
Neomedievalism
Neomedieval Warfare
Military Enterprisers in Liberia: Building Better Armies
Mercenaries in Somalia: A Neomedieval Tale
Medieval Modernity
Annex A: IDIQ Contract
Annex B: Contract Amendment
Annex C: Liberia Military Program Timeline
Notes
Bibliography
Index