The way war is waged is evolving quickly—igniting the rise of private military contractors that offer military-style services as part of their core business model. Arduino unpacks the tradeoffs involved when conflict is increasingly waged not by national armies, but by professional outfits that thrive on chaos. This book charts the rise of private military actors from Russia, China, and the Middle East using primary source data, in-person interviews, and field research amongst operations in conflict zones around the world. Individual stories narrated by mercenaries, military trainers, security businessmen, hackers, and drone pilots will be used to introduce the beginning of each chapter. The book ends by considering today’s trajectories in the deployment of mercenaries by state, corporations, or even terrorist organizations and what it will mean for the future of conflict. The book follows private security contractors that take on missions in different countries with a variety of challenges. These include a former Singaporean commando working with a Chinese company in Kabul, a former British Royal Marine leading a Kurdish private military company in Erbil protecting BP’s oil, and a former Russian Spetsnaz defending commercial vessels from the Somali coast to the Gulf of Guinea. Aside from the human component, the book closely follows the trends in the adoption of unmanned lethal weapons and it peeks into the future of weapons that can decide autonomously to kill humans. One chapter is dedicated to loitering munitions, better known as suicide drones, used by Israel and the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard for remote-controlled assassination. ISIS’s reengineered Chinese DJI commercial drones that are used for propaganda operations or as advanced artillery spotters complete the picture of the range of threats the world will routinely face in less than a decade. First-hand data and intimate knowledge of the actors involved in the market for force allow a fully grounded narrative with personal input. Through this prism, the reader gains an understanding of the human, security, and political risks that are part of this industry. The book specifically reveals the risk that unaccountable mercenaries pose in increasing the threshold for conflict, the threat to traditional military forces, the corruption in political circles, and the rising threat of proxy conflicts in the US rivalry with China and Russia. In a nutshell, the book gazes into the crystal ball to forecast what the future might look like in a world ruled by private armies.

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 Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, similar scenarios are playing out daily. The United States can no longer go to war or carry out covert operations without contractors. In 2010, the Pentagon's budget for private contractors was seven times the entire U.K. defense budget. How did this state of affairs come to be? How does the shadowy world of military contracting actually operate? And what do trends suggest about the future of war and international relations? We simply don't know much about the structure of the industry, how private military companies operate, and where this industry is heading. Typically led by ex-military men, such firms are by their very nature secretive. Even the US government-the entity that actually pays them-knows relatively little. In The Modern Mercenary, former industry insider Sean McFate lays bare the opaque world of private military contractors, explaining the economic structure of the industry and showing in detail how firms operate on the ground. As a former 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. A decidedly non-polemical account (a rarity in this field), 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.

EVERYTHING YOU THINK YOU KNOW ABOUT WAR IS WRONG. We are living in an age of conflict: Russia's resurgence and China's rise, global terrorism, international criminal empires, climate change and dwindling natural resources. But while the West has been playing the same old war games, the enemy has a new strategy. The rules have changed, and we are dangerously unprepared. Former paratrooper Sean McFate has been on the front lines of conflict, and seen first-hand the horrors of battle. As a Professor of Strategy, he understands the complexity of the current military situation. In this new age of war: * Plausible deniability is more potent than firepower * Russia has become a disinformation superpower, twisting the West's perception of reality * Sanctions are blunt instruments that starve only the masses, not the elite * Victory will belong to the cunning, not the strong * New types of world powers will rule Learn how to triumph in the coming age of conflict in ten new rules. Adapt and we can prevail. Fail, and size and strength won't protect us. This is The Art of War for the 21st century. __________ 'Some of what he says makes more sense than much of what comes out of the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence' Max Hastings, Sunday Times 'Thought-provoking' Johnathon Evans, Former Head of MI5 'Fascinating and disturbing' Economist