Free The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order by Sean McFate Page B

become a public menace by preying on the populace it was tasked to protect, and even federalists such as Alexander Hamilton acknowledged the danger. 13
    The relative security of mercenaries, of course, relies on the ruler and the mercenaries both honoring their contracts. Princes who do not pay their bills may become victims of their own mercenaries, and greedy mercenaries may treacherously wish to renegotiate their contracts with violence. Although praetorianism by PMCs is not a real risk for the United States today, despite the frenzied forebodings of Pulitzer-winning journalists and Hollywood, it remains a threat for fragile states that dabble in the market for force.
    Fourth, mercenaries provide specialized military skills and services that are too expensive for ordinary public militaries to sustain. Like all market actors, private military organizations seek out gaps between supply and demand and attempt to fill them, taking advantage of economies of scale to develop capabilities such as armor-piercing crossbow soldiers known as
balestrieri
in the fourteenth century and Mi-24 heavy attack helicopters flown by Executive Outcomes in the late twentieth century. The costs associated with equipping, training, and sustaining these specialized military units are too great for all but the wealthiest public armies, making it more efficient to outsource these capabilities when needed.
    In addition to exotic military units, private military organizations also provide rare skill sets. The
ninja
and
shinobi
of feudal Japan were uniquely trained in unorthodox warfare, and MPRI has specific expertise in restructuring modern armed forces in developing countries. As T. X. Hammes, a retired US Marine Corps officer, affirms, “contractors can execute tasks the United States military and civilian workforce simply cannot.” 14
    Private force has reentered the arena of world politics owing to a constellation of factors: market thinking in policy circles, the post–Cold War security vacuum, the desire to humanize war, and the high utility of private force. By the time the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the market infrastructure was already in place to support the private military industry. The industry holds many timelessbenefits, including the essential fact that on-demand force remains an attractive option for rulers, from King George III to President George W. Bush. The United States has opened the proverbial Pandora’s box, releasing mercenarism back into international affairs. Now that the industry is back and unlikely to go away anytime soon, the next chapter explores some of its dangers and risks.

6

The Murky Side of Private Force
    The sinews of war are unlimited money.
    —Cicero
    On April 27, 1522, two armies faced each other at dawn across a soggy field ready for battle at a manor park of Bicocca, a small town six kilometers north of Milan. On one side stood the combined forces of France and Venice, numbering more than twenty thousand troops, including the mercenary captain, or
condottiero
, Giovanni de’ Medici’s Black Bands and sixteen thousand dreaded Swiss mercenaries. For two centuries, Swiss companies were the scourge of the European battlefield, overtaking superior forces with deadly twenty-one-foot steel-tipped pikes and precision formations that could run down heavily armored knights—as the doomed duke of Burgundy could attest to—making them the most sought-after private armies on the market. 1
    Opposing the combined army were the comparatively meager Spanish imperial, Milanese, and papal forces, which numbered only sixty-four hundred but included
landsknechts
, or German mercenary pikemen. The Swiss companies and
landsknechts
were more than mere business rivals and held special contempt for each other. Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I had formed the first
landsknechts
regiments several decades earlier and patterned them after the Swiss companies, which regarded them as cheap copies purloining their brand.