Daniel's been thinking about mercenaries — not the Hollywood version, but the modern corporate kind. He's asking three things. One: how significant are these groups in actually perpetuating conflicts, not just fighting in them? Two: if the whole idea is guns for profit, why isn't there a global ban on for-profit warfare? And three: how do you regulate people who wage war but aren't soldiers of any country? He points out that even Western intelligence agencies have trained and used mercenary groups for regime change with plausible deniability. So this isn't just a Russia problem.
It's a statecraft problem. Every major power has its fingerprints on this.
The mercenary archetype has been around forever — Greek hoplites who fought for Persian gold, the condottieri who ran Italy's wars in the Renaissance. But the modern version is fundamentally different. These aren't lone swords-for-hire. They're publicly traded corporations with shareholders, quarterly earnings calls, marketing departments. The scale and structure have shifted completely.
And that shift is what makes Daniel's question about regulation so sharp. The old mercenary was an individual you could hang. The new mercenary is a limited liability company.
So let's start with what we're actually talking about when we say mercenary in twenty twenty-six.
The term the international community uses is Private Military and Security Companies — PMSCs. In theory, private military companies do combat operations, and private security companies guard things — embassies, supply convoys, oil infrastructure. In practice, the line is blurry and often deliberately so. A company hired to guard a convoy that comes under fire is now in a firefight. Is that security or combat?
Depends which lawyer you ask.
And that ambiguity is the product, not a bug. The global private military and security industry was valued at roughly two hundred and forty billion dollars in twenty twenty-four. Projections have it exceeding four hundred billion by twenty thirty. This isn't a fringe activity — it's a major sector of the global economy, and its primary clients are states.
Two hundred and forty billion. That's not mercenaries in the shadows. That's an industry larger than the GDP of quite a few countries.
And it's growing because states have discovered something. They want deniable force — the ability to project power without the political cost of deploying national troops, without casualty counts that register at home, and without the legal obligations that come with uniformed soldiers under the Geneva Conventions. But that same deniability creates a regulatory black hole. The thing that makes PMSCs useful to states is exactly what makes them impossible to control.
So the billion-dollar gap between what international law says and what states actually do — that's not an accident. That gap is where the industry lives, and states engineered it deliberately.
Let's dig into Daniel's first question, because it's the one that sets up everything else. How significant are mercenary groups in actually perpetuating conflicts?
Not just fighting in them — keeping them going.
Right. And the clearest modern case is the Wagner Group, now rebranded as Africa Corps after Prigozhin's death in August twenty twenty-three. In the Central African Republic, Wagner forces effectively served as the presidential guard for Faustin-Archange Touadéra. They secured mining concessions — gold, diamonds — in return for propping up his government. In Mali, they operate alongside the junta, with documented human rights abuses. Reports indicate over a thousand Wagner casualties in Mali in twenty twenty-four alone.
A thousand casualties in one year, in one country.
And here's the perpetuation mechanism. These groups don't just participate in conflicts — they become stakeholders in their continuation. Wagner's business model in CAR is resource extraction. They get mining rights. A peace deal means the end of the mining contract. The conflict isn't a problem to be solved; it's the condition that makes the revenue possible.
So the incentive runs the wrong direction. A national army wants the war to end so their soldiers can go home. A PMSC with a mining concession wants... more mining.
And more security required for that mining, which means more contract renewals. It's a self-reinforcing cycle. They provide the muscle for resource extraction — gold, diamonds, coltan, oil — which funds the conflict, which justifies their continued presence, which produces more resources to extract.
It's not just Wagner. Look at Sudan.
The Rapid Support Forces — the RSF — grew out of the Janjaweed militias. They've been accused of acting as a de facto mercenary force for external powers. Leaked intelligence reports have documented UAE support for the RSF. And Sudan's civil war has gold. The RSF controls significant gold mining areas. Again, the resource funds the fighting, the fighting secures the resource.
The UAE is interesting here because they've been one of the most sophisticated users of PMSCs. They hired the company formerly known as Blackwater — it's been through several rebrands, Academi, then Constellis — to train and command proxy forces in Yemen.
And the US itself. At the peak of the Iraq War in twenty eleven, there were roughly a hundred and fifty-five thousand private contractors on the ground, against about a hundred thousand US troops. More contractors than soldiers. The CIA has used contractors in drone operations and what are called signature strikes — targeting based on patterns of behavior rather than identified individuals. That's deniable force at multiple removes.
A CIA contractor running a drone strike from a base in Djibouti, targeting a pattern of cell phone signals in Yemen.
And the contractor's employer has a contract with the government. That contract has liability caps, indemnification clauses, arbitration provisions. The whole thing is structured as a business arrangement, not a military operation — even though people are dying.
So to Daniel's first question — how significant are these groups in perpetuating conflicts? The answer is they're not just participants. They're structurally invested in continuation. The business model requires the conflict.
And that's before we even get to the question of whether they're effective at fighting. Some are, some aren't. But the perpetuation isn't about military effectiveness. It's about the incentive structure.
Which brings us to Daniel's second and third questions. If this is the situation — for-profit warfare with built-in incentives to keep wars going — why isn't there a global ban?
There is. Sort of.
That's not the ringing endorsement I was hoping for.
There are two major international instruments. The first is the Montreux Document, from two thousand eight. It's a set of good practices for states that contract with PMSCs. It affirms that PMSC personnel are civilians under international humanitarian law unless they're formally incorporated into a state's armed forces. Fifty-eight states have signed on as of twenty twenty-six. The International Committee of the Red Cross was a key promoter.
Fifty-eight out of a hundred and ninety-three UN member states.
And here's the thing — it's not a treaty. It's non-binding. There's no enforcement mechanism. No penalties. No court. It's essentially a gentleman's agreement about how to hire mercenaries properly.
A voluntary code of conduct for something that is, by its nature, about operating outside normal codes of conduct.
The second instrument is the actual treaty — the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries, from nineteen eighty-nine. This one bans mercenary activity outright. It entered into force in two thousand one.
How many countries have ratified it?
Thirty-seven.
Thirty-seven.
And none of the major powers. Not the United States, not Russia, not China, not the United Kingdom, not France. The countries that actually use PMSCs haven't signed the ban on using PMSCs.
So the treaty is a dead letter.
It's worse than a dead letter, because its definition of mercenary is so narrow that even if every country signed it, most modern PMSC activity would fall outside it. The convention defines a mercenary as someone specially motivated by private gain, who isn't a national or resident of any party to the conflict. So if you hire contractors who are citizens of your own country, or if they're motivated by anything other than money — ideology, say — the convention doesn't apply.
Wagner recruited heavily from Russian prisons. Were those men motivated by private gain? A pardon and a salary? Or were they motivated by patriotism and the chance to clear their records? Depends how you frame it, and either way the convention probably doesn't touch them.
And most PMSC employees are nationals of the hiring state. A British firm providing security in Iraq, staffed by British citizens — the UN convention's definition doesn't catch that. The thing was written for a world of solitary gunslingers, not corporate HR departments.
So why no real ban? Why hasn't the international community closed these loopholes?
Because states don't want one. The United States uses PMSCs to bypass troop caps and avoid political blowback from casualties. When a contractor dies, it doesn't make the evening news the way a soldier's death does. Russia uses them for plausible deniability — Wagner operated in Crimea and eastern Ukraine years before the full invasion, and the Kremlin could say those weren't Russian soldiers. The UK uses them for embassy security and training missions. A binding treaty would require every major power to give up a tool they find extremely useful.
The Montreux Document is the compromise. Enough regulation to claim you're doing something, not enough to constrain actual behavior.
It's performative regulation. And the accountability gap is where this gets truly grim.
Walk me through it. A contractor commits a crime in a war zone. What happens?
In theory, under US law, contractors fall under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. In practice, prosecutions are vanishingly rare. The most famous case is Blackwater's Nisour Square massacre in two thousand seven. Fourteen Iraqi civilians killed at a traffic circle in Baghdad. The contractors were convicted in twenty fourteen after years of legal battles — and then President Trump pardoned them in twenty twenty.
So fourteen dead civilians, and the final legal outcome is a pardon.
In Russia, Wagner fighters who committed documented atrocities in Ukraine and Syria faced no legal consequences whatsoever. The companies themselves face no liability under international law because they're not states — they can't be parties to the Geneva Conventions. They exist in a legal void.
And the contract itself creates perverse incentives. You mentioned liability caps.
A typical PMSC contract with the US government includes indemnification clauses. If the company does something that results in civilian casualties, the government — meaning the taxpayer — covers the legal costs and damages. The company's financial exposure is limited. The contract also typically defines the scope of permitted activities in ways that give the company wide discretion.
So the thing that's supposed to control them — the contract — actually insulates them from consequences.
Contract law is not designed for armed conflict. A contract is a commercial instrument. It governs the exchange of goods and services. When the service is lethal force, the contract's mechanisms — arbitration, damages, breach of contract — are absurdly inadequate. You can't sue a dead civilian back to life.
The people writing these contracts know that. The ambiguity is the point.
The whole system is built on ambiguity. Is this person a civilian or a combatant? The Montreux Document says civilian, unless they're incorporated into the armed forces. But incorporation is a bureaucratic act — a piece of paper. On the ground, the contractor is carrying a weapon, engaging targets, making lethal decisions. To the person on the receiving end, the distinction between a US soldier and a US contractor is meaningless.
But to the lawyer, it's everything.
To the state, it's the whole reason for using contractors in the first place. If you incorporate them into the armed forces, you lose the deniability. So you keep them in this gray zone deliberately.
Let me pull on something Daniel mentioned. Western intelligence agencies training mercenary groups for regime change. That's not a hypothetical.
It's not. The Bay of Pigs was essentially a CIA-trained mercenary operation, and that was nineteen sixty-one. More recently, you've got the CIA's involvement with various proxy forces across the Middle East and Africa. The pattern is consistent: find a local armed group, provide training and funding, point them at a regime you want gone, and maintain enough distance to deny responsibility.
The legal framework for that is... what, exactly?
There isn't one. Covert action is governed by domestic law in the sponsoring country — in the US, that's the National Security Act and the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which require presidential findings and congressional notification. But those are procedural requirements for the sponsoring state, not international legal frameworks governing the mercenaries themselves. The group on the ground exists in the same legal void as any other PMSC, except they're even less visible.
Because there's no public contract. No quarterly earnings report. No shareholders.
Just cash and weapons and a nod.
To summarize the legal landscape for Daniel: there is a non-binding set of good practices that about a third of countries have endorsed. There's a binding treaty that almost nobody relevant has signed, which defines mercenary so narrowly it misses most of the industry. And there's a web of commercial contracts that actively insulate both the companies and the hiring states from accountability.
That's the picture. And the reason it persists is that the states with the power to change it are the states that benefit most from keeping it this way.
Which brings me to something I think is underexplored in most coverage. Everyone focuses on the accountability gap for the contractors. But there's an accountability gap for the states too. If a country sends uniformed soldiers into a conflict, there are political consequences. Bodies come home. Votes are lost. If that same country sends contractors, the political cost is dramatically lower. So the PMSC industry isn't just enabling deniable force abroad — it's enabling reduced democratic accountability at home.
That's a really sharp point. The contractor becomes a buffer between the electorate and the war. The war happens, but the costs are diffused — borne by contractors who are often foreign nationals, whose deaths don't trigger the same political response.
It's not just deaths. It's oversight. A military operation has a chain of command, rules of engagement reviewed by JAG officers, after-action reports. A contractor operation has... the contract. Which may or may not require reporting, and which the public will never see because it's proprietary.
Proprietary warfare. That's the phrase.
The confidentiality clauses in these contracts are often more restrictive than military classification. A member of Congress can get a classified briefing on a special forces operation. Can they get a copy of a PMSC contract with the State Department? Maybe, maybe not — and even if they can, they can't discuss it publicly.
You've got warfare that's less transparent, less accountable, and less politically costly to sustain. That's the structural incentive for states to keep using PMSCs, and it's exactly why they won't sign a binding ban.
It's why the industry keeps growing. That two hundred forty billion isn't peaking.
The projections to four hundred billion by twenty thirty are probably conservative. Every new conflict creates new demand. Ukraine has seen an explosion of PMSC activity — not just Wagner on the Russian side, but Western firms providing training, logistics, and intelligence support to Ukrainian forces. The line between contractor and combatant gets blurrier every year.
The legal frameworks aren't evolving to keep pace. The Montreux Document is nearly two decades old. The UN convention is approaching forty years. Neither has been meaningfully updated.
Because updating them would require states to clarify the very ambiguities they rely on. Any new treaty would have to define what counts as a mercenary in the age of the LLC, and that definition would either be so broad it catches things states want to keep doing, or so narrow it's useless.
Catch twenty-two, by design.
Hilbert: I worked for Aegis Defence Services in Baghdad. Two thousand four to two thousand five.
What did you do for them?
Hilbert: Risk analyst. I mapped IED incidents. Convoy ambush patterns. Spreadsheets, mostly. But I was embedded with armed contractors. I wore a polo shirt with the company logo and carried a sidearm I was never trained to use.
A civilian in a war zone with a gun you didn't know how to fire.
Hilbert: I knew how to fire it. I just wasn't trained. There's a difference.
That's... a distinction I hadn't considered.
Hilbert: Everyone talks about the legal framework and the accountability gap. The thing I remember is the boredom. Ninety percent of the job is sitting around waiting. And when you're sitting around waiting with armed men who are getting paid ten times what the soldiers next door make, you start to understand why things go wrong. It's not malice. It's a structural mismatch. The soldiers have a chain of command, rules of engagement, a code of conduct. The contractors have a contract. And a contract is only as good as the lawyer who wrote it.
The lawyer's not in the convoy.
Hilbert: The lawyer's in an office in Virginia. Our contract had a clause prohibiting engagement in offensive combat operations. But the definition of offensive was left to the company's discretion. I remember a convoy that came under fire — small arms, probably a single shooter — and the lead contractor decided to pursue the attackers into a residential area. Three vehicles, into a neighborhood. That was defensive, apparently.
Pursuing someone into a residential area.
Hilbert: They fired into houses. I don't know if anyone was hit. I was in the rear vehicle, writing it up as an incident report. The report went to our project manager, who sent it to the contracting officer at the Department of Defense. I never heard about it again.
The accountability chain just... stopped.
Hilbert: The accountability chain was a PDF attachment. The soldiers we were supposed to be supporting had no authority over us. Their lieutenant came over afterward, furious. Wanted to know who gave the order. The lead contractor told him it was an internal matter. The lieutenant couldn't do anything. We weren't in his chain of command.
The contract that defined offensive at the company's discretion — that was written by the US government?
Hilbert: Written by the government, negotiated by the company's lawyers. The ambiguity was in both parties' interest. The government could say they prohibited offensive operations. The company could interpret offensive however they wanted in the moment. Everyone gets what they want except the people in the residential neighborhood.
That's the gap between the Montreux Document and the ground. The document says contractors are civilians and should follow good practices. The contract says don't do offensive operations. On the ground, a man with a gun decides what offensive means while driving into a neighborhood.
Hilbert: I quit after fourteen months. The money was good but I couldn't look at another incident report that was just going to disappear into a SharePoint folder. I took a job fact-checking for a travel magazine. Less shooting, more copy editing.
The detail that sticks with me is the lieutenant who couldn't do anything. You've got a uniformed officer, trained in the laws of war, responsible for the conduct of forces in his area of operations, and he has zero authority over armed men who just pursued a shooter into civilian housing.
That's not a flaw in the system. That's the system working as designed. The separation of the contractor from the military chain of command is the whole point. It gives the state deniability and it gives the company autonomy. The lieutenant's frustration is a feature.
The people in those houses — they don't know the difference between a soldier and a contractor. They just know armed men came into their neighborhood and fired weapons. The legal distinction that matters so much to the lawyers is invisible to the person on the receiving end.
Which is the fundamental problem with the entire regulatory approach. The Montreux Document and the UN convention both try to draw lines between civilians and combatants, between security and military functions, between defensive and offensive operations. But those lines only exist on paper. In practice, armed force is armed force.
Where does this leave Daniel's questions? The mercenary is not an aberration in the international system. It's a feature. States have deliberately created a regulatory void because they benefit from it. The industry perpetuates conflicts because its business model requires instability. And the legal frameworks we do have are performative — they exist to claim action without constraining behavior.
The open question — the one I keep coming back to — is whether anything changes this calculus. You mentioned AI and autonomous systems earlier. A drone doesn't need plausible deniability in the same way a human contractor does. If the future of warfare is autonomous systems, does the PMSC industry become less relevant, or does it just shift into providing autonomous force as a service?
Mercenaries as a service. The subscription model comes for everything eventually.
I'm serious, though. If a state can deploy a swarm of autonomous drones that are deniable by their very nature — no human pilot, no nationality markings, purchased through a shell company — the PMSC model might evolve rather than disappear. The legal void is already there. The technology just makes it deeper.
Daniel's question about banning for-profit warfare — the answer is that we could ban it tomorrow, on paper, and it wouldn't matter because the states that enforce international law are the same states that use PMSCs. The ban would be the Montreux Document all over again. Signed, praised, ignored.
The only thing that changes the calculus is if the costs of the current system start landing on the states that benefit from it. If a PMSC's actions in some future conflict create a political crisis that can't be deflected by saying they were contractors, not soldiers. If the deniability fails.
Or if the industry grows so large that it starts dictating terms to states rather than the other way around. A four hundred billion dollar industry has political power of its own.
It already does. The lobbying footprint of the major PMSCs in Washington is significant. They're not passive tools of state policy — they're active participants in shaping that policy.
The question isn't whether we can ban for-profit warfare. It's whether we're willing to admit that states are the primary customers of that profit, and that the regulatory vacuum is a choice, not an oversight.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop.
If you want to dig deeper into any of the cases we discussed — the Montreux Document, the UN convention, the Wagner Group's operations in Africa — we'll put links in the show notes at my weird prompts dot com.
Send us your own prompts. Email the show at show at my weird prompts dot com. We read everything.
We'll be back soon.
