Opinion

What it means when the mercenaries appear

My friend reached behind his desk and pulled out two overhead surveillance photographs. When congressional leaders had asked about the CTPT’s performance vs. that of the Afghan National Army, the CIA had shown them these photographs. “That’s a photo of the last Afghan army flight out of Kandahar,” my friend explained about the image of panic and chaos. He then showed me the second image, taken a few hours later, also at Kandahar Airfield. In it, the C-17 transport plane is in the exact same position, except the soldiers loading into the back are in neat, disciplined rows. “This is a photo of the last CTPT flight out of Kandahar.”

The Afghan National Army, which had systemic issues with discipline and graft, was deeply dysfunctional, while the CTPT was as effective as many elite U.S. infantry units. Unlike the Afghan National Army, the CTPT reported not to the Afghan government but, rather, to the U.S. government through its CIA handlers. It was a private army.

The CTPT’s mission evolved from being a small counterterrorism force used to hunt down al-Qaeda to a counterinsurgency force used to capture and to kill the Taliban leadership, to, eventually, a border security force used to hold the country together, at least as long as it could.

Private armies have played a critical role in virtually all wars; the CIA-funded CTPT in Afghanistan and the Wagner Group in Ukraine are only the most recent examples. Broadly speaking, they serve two distinct purposes: They act as a force multiplier that expands the regular military’s capacity, and they create political deniability for both a domestic and an international audience. Private armies remain a tool used by democratic leaders and authoritarians alike. Mercenaries are as old as war itself.

In the game of empire, expansion fuels prosperity and war sustains expansion. Except war is a dirty business, one that citizens of most wealthy and prosperous nations would rather avoid. Yet someone has to fight these wars and, afterward, secure the peace. Whether it’s Pax Americana, Pax Britannica or Pax Romana, pax imperia isn’t really peace; it is the illusion of peace sustained by the effective outsourcing of war. This doesn’t impugn an imperial peace — I certainly would have preferred to live in Pax Romana as opposed to the medieval turbulence that followed — but, rather, shows how these periods of political and economic stability are sustained.

During the Roman Republic — before Pax Romana — conscription was conducted through a draft of male citizens, but this contract frayed and then tore apart under the burden of imperial expansion. In 49 B.C., one of Julius Caesar’s first decrees as dictator for life was the granting of Roman citizenship to those occupying the farthest reaches of the nascent empire. Changing the preconditions of citizenship altered the composition of the army, which had profound effects on Rome, the army being its most important institution. Service in the legions would increasingly fall to nonnative Romans who never saw Rome and never spoke Latin, and whose loyalty was often more to their native-Roman officers than to the abstraction of a Rome they barely knew.

This dissolution of Roman identity within the ranks proved fatal in the empire’s final years. The mercenaries who fueled its expansion became its undoing. This is not to say the outsourcing of military service away from Rome’s center was ineffective, even if it culminated in the dissolution of Rome itself. Indeed, few nations can boast a military that conquered and garrisoned an empire over a period of nearly 1,500 years. For this reason, it comes as no surprise that other empires appropriated many of the techniques Rome pioneered.

None more so than the British. Their empire connected their small island nation to a broader world, delivering it outsize wealth, influence and power. And the jewel in the crown of the British Empire was, of course, India. The imperial era was a period of significant reform and expansion for the British military, to include a rebalancing of the empire’s reliance on regular vs. private armies.

Like the Romans, the British increased their reliance on non-British soldiers as their empire expanded. Unlike the Romans, the British did not extend rights of citizenship to the diverse array of cadres that composed their forces; instead, they incorporated their imperial charges into the empire as subjects of the crown. The British East India Company fielded the largest of these private armies, which it paid for with company proceeds. Indian sepoys (a term, derived from Persian, for a native soldier serving under foreign orders) filled the ranks while native-British officers led them, but those officers held commissions inferior to those in the regular British army.

The mission of the East India Company’s army was, simply, to secure the interests of the company on the subcontinent. The governance of colonial India is a remarkable example not only of military privatization but also of the privatization of empire. Company rule extended until 1858, after those same sepoy regiments revolted in what became known as the Indian Mutiny.

The Indian Mutiny was the result of an accumulation of social and economic resentments, as opposed to a single cause. The fighting continued for a year, with garrisons of sepoys across the country killing British officers and their families. By the end of that year, the British had regrouped and, along with sepoys loyal to the East India Company, defeated the rebels. Still, the Indian Mutiny was a debacle for the empire. It caused British leaders to question the composition and quality of their military forces. Between 1868 and 1874, a series of reforms implemented by British Secretary of State for War Edward Cardwell would transform the British army from a force of gentleman-soldiers to a professional army with a robust reserve that could be mobilized in a time of war.

If the Indian Mutiny revealed the dangers of relying on private armies, it was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, in which the precursors of the German Empire routed the Second French Empire, that proved the importance of having a military reserve that a nation could rapidly mobilize.

After the Napoleonic Wars, British soldiers served brutally long 20-year enlistments. Often, these soldiers would spend many of those years far from home in various colonies and, upon retirement, older and weakened by prolonged active service, they would be of little military use as reservists. This left Britain without a pool of soldiers to mobilize in wartime. The Cardwell Reforms shortened enlistments to as little as six years, allowing soldiers to return to civilian life but remain in the reserve at reduced pay. This new policy granted British leaders access to a large reserve army, should they need it.

Prior to the Cardwell Reforms, officers in the British army didn’t earn their commissions; they purchased them. Cumulatively, British families invested millions of pounds in the purchase of commissions. Those who could not afford them served as officers in colonial regiments, which held inferior standing within the army. By the time Cardwell began implementing his reforms, this had created a dysfunctional tiered system. The army was the opposite of a meritocracy. The resulting incompetence of the uniformed aristocrats, immortalized in Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” was disastrously proved on the battlefields of the Crimean War. The era of the gentleman-soldier in the British army was coming to an end, as was a reliance on private armies such as those deployed by the East India Company.

An empire, once acquired, must be maintained. It requires the control of territory, and this requires — to use the distinctly American term — boots on the ground. A question naturally follows: Whose boots? The reforms that Julius Caesar made to Rome’s legions, along with the ones that Cardwell made to the British army, were efforts to answer that question.

After World War II, when the United States was called “to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle” against communism, as President John F. Kennedy put it in his inaugural address in 1961, the question of whose boots became foremost in the mind of U.S. military strategists. Each of the two superpowers had acquired an empire at the end of the war, and these empires needed to be garrisoned and defended against the other.

Kennedy framed the nature of that defense in a speech at West Point in 1962, in which he emphasized a new military challenge: “another type of warfare, new in its intensity, ancient in its origins — war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him.” At the time Kennedy delivered this speech, he had already authorized a significant expansion of Special Operations forces within the U.S. military. In an official White House memorandum on guerrilla warfare in 1962, in which Kennedy would forever require members of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces to wear the green beret, he declared: “Pure military skill is not enough. A full spectrum of military, para-military, and civil action must be blended to produce success.” His commitment to unconventional warfare as a pillar of national defense was a strategic pivot as profound as those that took place in Britain and Rome.

This “other type of warfare” became a reality in Vietnam and a doctrine of American warfare into the next century. Strategic concepts such as “foreign internal defense” and “counterinsurgency strategy,” the latter first seen in the Philippines in the early 20th century and then further developed in Vietnam, appeared again in Iraq and Afghanistan. They rely on the U.S. military to train a partner force that eventually takes responsibility for the conduct of the war, requiring far fewer American “boots.”

This was the strategy of “Vietnamization,” which sought to bolster the South Vietnamese military. In Iraq, this was the “surge” and the “Sunni Awakening,” in which U.S. forces doubled down on training the Iraqi military while co-opting Sunni militias once loyal to al-Qaeda. In Afghanistan, it was a second surge and reinvestment in the Afghan National Army. What these examples all have in common is an American method of warfare that shifts the burden to an indigenous force, allowing American troops to withdraw. It also shifts the conditions of victory, which is less defined by conditions on the battlefield. Victory today is defined — this is an extraordinary development — by outsourcing the prosecution of a war and bringing our troops home.

In Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, this strategy yielded mixed results. Vietnam and Afghanistan were wars that America unequivocally lost. With Iraq, it is difficult to argue that the United States won, but it is equally difficult to say we lost. The Iraqi government that was created after the U.S. invasion endures, and the security services that the United States helped train have successfully carried the burden of their own security, in recent years defeating the Islamic State with little aid from American boots. When President Biden announced the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, he emphasized that “our diplomacy does not hinge on having boots in harm’s way — U.S. boots on the ground. We have to change that thinking.”

The war in Ukraine began as a mercenary war. When Russia invaded Crimea in February 2014, the invading soldiers wore no Russian military insignia, causing many to refer to them as “little green men.” The explicit appearance of Russian soldiers would have cost Russian President Vladimir Putin more politically than he was willing to accept. In the eyes of the international community, as well as in the eyes of his citizens, there was value in deniability. Putin needed to launder his activities in Ukraine. Mercenary armies are very good at such laundering.

To lead this mercenary venture, Putin made an unlikely choice: Yevgeniy Prigozhin, a coarse former restaurateur known as “Putin’s Chef.” Backed by cadres of battle-tested field commanders, Prigozhin helped found the Wagner Group in 2014 and presided over its rapid expansion. Between 2014 and 2021, Wagner mercenaries delivered many thousands of Russian boots on the ground in places where no Russian boots should have been — Libya, Ukraine, Sudan, Mali, Venezuela, the Central African Republic and directly against American troops in Syria in February 2018. All this while the Kremlin denied Wagner’s involvement and, in some cases, its existence.

The Wagner Group was an effective military force that Putin could deploy anywhere in the world without political embarrassment. When Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Wagner Group contributed about 1,000 soldiers to the invasion, but it never assumed the lead. That job would fall to the regular Russian military, which hadn’t taken on an operation of this scope in more than a generation.

Only months into the war in Ukraine, however, the Russian military was in crisis. It was swiftly exposed as a mediocre and confused force, proving the dangers of might without competence. After sustaining heavy losses, Putin needed to replenish his ranks. But how could he sell the Russian people on a mobilization for a war that wasn’t even a war but, rather, “a special military operation”? There is no more dire threat to a political leader’s power than a failed war. So he enlarged his reliance on the Wagner Group, increasing its size and allowing its cadres to recruit in Russia’s prisons.

Like the Romans and the British, Putin would learn the dangers of vesting military power in private hands. Prigozhin began feuding with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov and other senior commanders, characterizing them as incompetents. For his army of mercenaries, Prigozhin became a charismatic populist leader, airing their grievances against Russia’s military establishment. Prigozhin gave Russia a sorely needed military victory in the battle of Bakhmut, and no achievement vests a leader with political power more quickly than battlefield success. This is one of the great dangers of placing military power in the hands of private military leaders.

This was a lesson Putin learned early on the morning of June 24, 2023, when Prigozhin marched his Wagner Group soldiers off the battlefield and back into Russia.

Prigozhin’s mutiny (which might have turned into a coup) failed, with his cadres largely absorbed into the regular Russian army or banished to private wars in Africa, and with Prigozhin’s apparent assassination two months later. Yet the uprising serves as another example of the dangers that exist when a nation uses private armies. Sometimes the only thing more dangerous than a state’s monopoly of force is the lack of such a monopoly.

We should be extremely cautious of wars fought with this indirect approach, designed mainly to insulate a domestic constituency from the costs of war. Proxy wars have long been elements of strategy in great-power competition, but a war fought under our flag by mercenaries is different from a proxy war. A nation that requires private armies to sustain popular support for wars is likely fighting those wars for the wrong reasons. The “good wars” — wars that must be fought and are typically fought for the right reasons — seldom rely on private armies. Beware of the nation unwilling to do its own fighting.