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

Gregory XI was infamous for lack of payment during the War of Eight Saints and drove Hawkwood and half of the Breton companies to defect to his enemies. As in the Middle Ages, there are at present few options for PMCs whose customers have backed out of their contracts. The market for force is inherently a distrustful environment that encourages both principal and agent to behave in treacherous ways, which is dangerous in the context of war.
Weak Contract Enforcement
    Doug Brooks, president of ISOA, once made a case for the privatization of warfare this way: “write a cheque, end a war.” 13 While appealing, it is obviously simplistic, even if there are some examples, such as Executive Outcomes’ involvement in Sierra Leone. Generally, contract warfare is fraught with difficulties, especially in contract enforcement. According to military historians Jurgen Brauer and Hubert van Tuyll, the challenge of holding parties to contractual promises eventually put the
condottieri
out of business. 14 There was not—nor is there today—an effective judicial system to enforce contracts in the market for force.
    Weak contract enforcement is a central flaw in the market for force, because it allows both the client and the mercenary to double-cross each other, leading to traitorous outcomes. Private military force operates in places with little governance, such as fragile states or war zones, where it is difficult to enforce contracts; there are no war police, judiciary, or prisons for deceitful employers or private armies.
    Even superpowers such as the United States have trouble disciplining errant PMCs. When Blackwater personnel killed seventeen Iraqi civilians at Nisour Square in 2007, they were simply sent home without punishment. Or, as Erik Prince, then CEO of the firm, said during congressional testimony, “they have one decision to make: window or aisle” on their return flight home. 15 Other than being fired, PMC personnel face little, if any, punishment for mistakenly killing civilians, whereas members of the US armed forces or Iraq security forces could be court-martialed and imprisoned.
    For contracts to work without law enforcement, there must be trust between the seller and the buyer. But trust is a rare commodity in the market for force. As fourteenth-century Italian novelist Franco Sacchetti put it, in mercenaries, “there is neither love nor faith.” 16 The principal-agent problems in contract warfare breed treachery and tragedy for consumers, providers, and bystanders alike in the market for force.
    Conspicuously absent from the list of concerns is the question of legitimacy, which presupposes that only states and international organizations such as the United Nations can rightfully wield military force. This is a modern bias that demands exposure. To understand this prejudice, we must first delve into the origins of the contemporary world order and its special antipathy toward mercenarism.

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Neomedievalism
    There’s never a new fashion but it’s old.
    —Geoffrey Chaucer
    Life at the court of King Roger II of Sicily (1095–1154) might prove surprising to modern readers, who perhaps associate the Middle Ages with ignorance, violence, and suffering—the proverbial “Dark Ages.” Life in medieval Sicily was comparatively safe, urbane, and globalized. The architecture of the king’s Palazzo Reale in Palermo, like the society surrounding it, was infused with Norman, Arab, and Byzantine influences. Upon entering its doors, a time traveler would hear French, Latin, Greek, Arab, and Hebrew freely spoken on topics ranging from the international silk trade, to the latest news from the distant Levant of the Second Crusade, to the protection of minorities under Roger’s laws, which blended Christian Norman law, sharia, and Justinian Roman code. Courtiers swapping scuttlebutt at the portcullis might include Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, Greek historian Nilus Doxopatrius, and the archdeacon of Catania, who