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You have to lead men sometimes. As unit commander, you have to put
words to the bonds of love they feel but may be too embarrassed to speak of—and
to the secret aspirations of their hearts, which are invariably selfless and
noble. More important, you have to take those actions yourself, first and
alone, that they themselves know they should take, but they just haven’t
figured it out yet.
Read more at location 366
What Westerners call corruption is just life in 75 percent of the
world. Americans still don’t understand this. We think the rest of the planet
is like us, or would be if it had the same advantages. We live in a bubble in
the States. We make decisions and establish policy based on dream conceptions
of the wider universe. We think everyone is the same as we are. We think they
want the same things we want. They don’t. They’re not like us at all.
Read more at location 394
As with most technical revolutions, the rise of mercenary forces
came about with virtually no legislative or regulatory oversight. The world
woke up one day and merc armies were everywhere. Force Insertion quelled one
revolt in Nigeria, then another in Mali. The company did it with
half-brigade-sized forces that were in and out in ninety days. By August of
2023, I myself had signed up for a tour. My first check was $92,500 for 110
days in the Pankisi gorge in Georgia, protecting the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline. The
employer was a consortium of energy companies, including BP, ChevronTexaco, and
ConocoPhillips, as well as the governments of Turkey and Azerbaijan, but the
actual check came from Force Insertion, drawn on the National Bank of Capetown.
You signed a contract two pages long that said you had never been a Communist,
Fascist, or Islamist; you waived all rights to compensation for death or
dismemberment and repatriation of remains to your country of origin, and you
indemnified and held blameless Force Insertion for any acts committed by you or
contractors serving beneath you, which might render Force Insertion liable to
prosecution before a state-founded or transnational court of law. You had to
buy your own clothing, gear, and weapons and provide your own transportation to
and from the front. In-theater you received the same medical care as Force
Insertion’s highest operatives (which was outstanding), but once you got home
you were on your own. It worked. The pipeline stayed safe; the gas went
through. Legal and ethical objections were raised, as they should have been.
But the shit worked. No one could argue with it. When the crisis in Guinea
broke out in ’26, the solution was a no-brainer. U.S. DoD, with the approval of
the president and Congress, contracted with Force Insertion for a one-year fee
of $11.7 billion to “secure, stabilize, and pacify” the northern four provinces
and to “dismantle and disarm” the Amal tribal and AQWA, al-Qaeda in West
Africa, and related militias operating with them. Aerial, satellite, and drone
Read more at location 1388
battlespaces were owned by the appropriate arms of the
conventional military. The dirt belonged to the mercs.
Read more at location 1403
Salter commanded. What made these merc forces so effective? In the
conventional military, three of the four most dysfunctional operational
elements are OPCON, OPFUND, and ROE—Operational Concept, Operational Funding,
and Rules of Engagement. The fourth element, OPTEMPO—meaning the speed with
which a field unit can execute an operation once it conceives it—is a product
of the other three. Force Insertion streamlined all four and made them work.
Gone were the eleven levels of clearance that a captain or lieutenant on the
ground had to negotiate before he could pull the trigger. One phone call
brought the green light—and brought close air support and drone or ground-based
fires. Better yet, the definition of an engageable target expanded
dramatically. If a suspected enemy stuck his head up, you were cleared to blow
it off—man, woman, or child; armed or unarmed. In the realm of funding, Force
Insertion operators were supplied with bags of cash and given the latitude to
spread it around. Commanders had Lexuses and Range Rovers to pass out as gifts
of honor; we could send tribal chieftains’ sons to Atlanta and Houston for
surgical operations, get their daughters into Florida State, or set their wives
up in condos in Dubai or Miami Beach. On the home front, the single most
powerful attraction tool for Force Insertion was the lump-sum million-dollar
payout for CDD, Combat Death and Dismemberment. At one stroke, this grant
eradicated 99 percent of all family-based risk aversion—and it cut out the
weeping widow shot on the evening news. When the conventional military used
nukes on Natanz, Kashan, and Anarak in Iran in 2019 in retaliation for the
11/11 dirty-bombing of Long Beach (for which the Iranian Revolutionary Guard
supposedly supplied the radioactive bomb-wrapping material), casualty aversion
made it impossible to send regular U.S. troops tramping through the
contaminated dust of the No-Go Zone. Force Insertion put two centuries on the
ground in forty-eight hours. The mercs didn’t care if their nutsacks glowed in
the dark; they lined up by the hundreds for the bonuses and incentive pay. Long
Beach and the nuclear counterstrike against Iran were what finally made
mercenary forces preeminent. After that horror show (and the massive
anti-American riots and demonstrations that were ignited in response around
Read more at location 1404
the globe), the conventional U.S. military withdrew all but token
forces from the Middle East and Central Asia. Homeland defense became the new
Core Mission. A hybrid strategy of counterterrorism (much of it outsourced) and
“stand-off containment” replaced counterinsurgency, nation building, and all
expeditionary or occupational adventures. The American public had had a
bellyful. From now on, power would be projected by naval, air, satellite, and
drone technology. The troops would stay home. Into this vacuum flowed mercenary
forces. Ground occupation became outsourced, funded at first by DoD in the
interest of national security but before long by corporations or consortiums
seeking to secure their investments, exploit contracted-for resources, or
protect their personnel and infrastructure. Rates of pay became market driven;
overnight, salaries shot to double and triple those of the conventional
military. Incentives and bonuses made the sign-up packages even more
attractive. The exodus from the army, navy, and Marines was spectacular.
Applicants queued by the thousands. And these were quality troops—Airborne,
Special Forces, SEALs, Rangers, the cream. Average age was thirty-two. Majors
were competing for postings as O-2s. Nor was this groundswell limited to grunts
and trigger pullers; staff officers, planners, intelligence, tech, and
logistics specialists were throwing elbows, greedy to get in the door. Merc had
ceased to be a four-letter word. In those most overextended, underresourced, and
grimly anti-American times, the president and Congress had at last found a
means of projecting U.S. power that was (a) mission-effective, (b)
cost-effective, and (c) did not run afoul of the extreme risk aversion of the
American people. Were these new for-hire forces alien, treacherous, or
unreliable? Hell, no—they were just our same guys, in upgraded uniforms,
finally getting paid what they deserved. The final stroke that made the idea of
mercenary forces acceptable to the American public was the inclusion of foreign
volunteers. The Probst-Avenal Act of 2021, which provided a path to U.S.
citizenship for overseas nationals who had served thirty-six months in for-hire
combat billets, brought in the cream of veteran warriors from every army on the
globe and meant that homegrown U.S. casualties would remain low low low. How
good were these contracted forces? Could a mercenary army hold its
Read more at location 1421
own in a straight-up fight with the conventional U.S. military?
Never. Force Insertion, for all its quality of personnel and latitude of
maneuver, couldn’t begin to match the technology and transport; the aerial,
naval, satellite, and drone capabilities; the intelligence apparatus or the
heavy (read, nuclear) weapons systems that could only be funded by entities on
the scale of nation-states. Head to head, a private versus national army clash
was a no-go. But in certain arenas, in failed-state warfare, in tribal and
ethnic conflicts, in contests where restrictive rules of engagement hamstrung
conventional operations … in these areas, a merc force could shine.
And since these were the areas an empire needed, pay-to-play forces came to be
seen in a fresh, new light. The idea of mercs achieved respectability.
Read more at location 1440
Fourteen hours a day become sixteen and eighteen for me. It is no
easy chore to mold a unit, even of mature, proven professionals. I do it the
only way I know how: by working twice as hard as everyone else. I’m awake
before the first team member opens his eyes, and I don’t knock off till the
last one gets his head down. I know every man’s weapons, IADs, SOPs, and TTPs
more thoroughly than he does; I can do every job as well as or better than the
man assigned to it—and he knows it. Every operator except the Englishman Coombs,
Chris Candelaria, and the UAE Special Forces guys has served with me on
multiple deployments. They know I will eat my own liver before I will let them
down, and they know I will eat their livers if they give me or the team any
less than their high-end max. I love them and I tell them. I tell them over and
over.
Read more at location 1462
What enterprise exists is either subsistence farming or narcotics.
Cash comes in from outside, not as capital investment—because no First World
bank or corporation is reckless enough to take such a risk—but in the form of
humanitarian aid, military support, or poison-pill loans from the IMF and the
World Bank to fund well-intentioned but artificial projects such as
infrastructure construction and rehabilitation—roads and wells, power stations
and water purification plants that look great on paper but on the ground are
nothing but sinkholes of corruption, with the outside cash flowing into the
pockets of whatever tribal or criminal despot lords it over the region. The infrastructure
project itself is abandoned halfway through, when the foreign workers bolt
because they can’t stand conditions any longer, with only the shell left
standing after every item of value has been looted by the locals.
Read more at location 1991
These countries are often called “failed states,” but the truth is
they’re not states at all. There’s no source of revenue sufficient for the
central government to pay for police or security forces (if these could even be
created, which they can’t) to protect the simple, hardworking villagers in the
provinces. So the warlords do it, as they have for the last ten thousand years,
by extorting money from the locals and shaking down any outside entity via
tolls or road or river taxes (and nowadays pipelines), either in the form of
institutionalized patronage from whatever Western or Asian buccaneering entity
is ripping off the natural resources, or informally by checkpoints and
roadblocks at the muzzle end of AK-47s. The regional lords extract protection
money from the narco traffickers (most in fact are indistinguishable from narco
traffickers) and use this revenue to recruit and fund their militias. The real
currency of the nation is hopelessness. If a young man of courage and vision
arises, he has two choices: join the gangs or bolt the country. The rare honest
man, the stand-up politician, the crusading editor gets his few column inches
in the Western press and then is shot, hanged, poisoned, or “detained for his
own protection” and never heard from again.
Read more at location 1998
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