Abstract

The Middle East and the global security architecture are undergoing rapid transitions that will change the future of war and conflict. In the first podcast of the series, Dr Sean McFate explains his theory of the world returning to a state of “durable disorder” and how private actors and mercenaries are replacing uniformed soldiers on the ground.

This series is presented by Dr Alessandro Arduino, principle research fellow, and Dr Ameem Lutfi, research fellow, at the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore.

Listen to the full podcast here:

Full Transcript:

Alessandro: Welcome to the first episode of the National University of Singapore, Middle East Institute’s podcast series titled “Boots on the Ground: Security in Translation from the Middle East and Beyond”. In this podcast, we look at the future of warfare. We will see uniformed soldiers, or boots on the ground, being replaced by private military companies, autonomous weapon systems and cyber weapons. My name is Alessandro Arduino and I will be the co-host for the series along with my colleague.

Ameem: Hello, I’m Ameem Lutfi. I will be the co-host and we’re very excited today to start off our series with Dr Sean McFate!

Alessandro: Dr Sean McFate is a man of many talents: veteran, novelist, foreign policy expert, academic, national security strategist and also a former private military contractor. Let’s say, he has done it all. Currently, he is bunkered down as a Professor of Strategy at the National Defence University and at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. We are very enthusiastic to have him with us today to talk about his latest book, New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder, and more broadly, about the market for force and the changing matter of war. Sean, thank you for joining us today.

Sean: It’s great to be with you.

Alessandro: So let’s start with the first question, Sean. We are living in extraordinary times characterised by a fast changing world. The Middle East and the overall global security architecture is in transition and going through transformation. In your book, you talk about this future — let’s say you have a little durable disorder — can you tell us a little bit about what that means? Is it a, let’s say, a temporary moment in history, or is something that we are in for the long run?

Sean: It’s a great question. So many of us, when we think about the world that we learned about in grade school as children, we learned that nation-states ruled the world. Only their militaries can fight wars, only they can make international laws, and this has been universal, and timeless forever. But that’s not true. Most of the history of world order is not with states; it’s with a variety of players, and they fight wars in a variety of ways, including mercenaries, which is the oldest — some would say the second-oldest — profession.

The idea of nation-states as the ruler of the world and world order is a very recent concept, only about two or three hundred years old. Some would say it started after the Thirty Years’ War in Europe that ended in 1648 and the world that followed had nation-states with national armies ruling over everything. The idea is that world is ending, and we’re going back to — I would say, normal — what happened before that period of time.

What does that look like? It looks like durable disorder. Think of the Middle Ages in Europe, or much of Africa or South Asia in their history. It was not nation-states, ruling the world; it was a lot of them — like aristocracies, city-states and empires, which are not nation-states. It was a variety of things.

And the world is going back to what I called durable disorder — because it’s not the order of nation-states. But it doesn’t flows like anarchy; it’s not Mad Max and the Thunderdome, which is sometimes how it’s portrayed as pure chaos anarchy. It’s something in between, and that’s called durable disorder.

Ameem: I’m glad you brought it up, this idea of a chaotic world. Because there are other people who’ve talked about this idea, that this 20th century age of rule-based order is over, and we’re now in this new age of disorder. Where your work kind of sets apart is that you said: “Look, there will be disorder, but it won’t be completely chaotic.”

Then what you set out to do in your book is you give out the set of rules. And you suggest that rulers of states or leaders, as long as they take them into consideration, can keep their head above the water even in these times of chaos. But these rules that you set out, they’re not anything like what we think of in the 20th century, of international law; these are something else. These are more guiding principles. Can you tell us more about what these mean? And can you really have any sets of rules in time when things are changing so rapidly? Especially when there are wars that are almost endless?

Sean: There’s a lot there to unpack. Well, first of all, in the world of durable disorder, all I’m saying — I’m not saying that states are going to disappear — I am saying that they’re contracting. In many parts of the world, states are states in name only, like in sub-Saharan Africa, parts of the Middle East. Also the borders of a lot of states, they were not natural evolutions of colonies on the ground. They came from European 19th century imperialists — whether it’s the Sykes–Picot in 1916 or the Berlin African scramble in the late 19th century — a lot of these states that we see are completely artificial. And they’re just imploding.

But there are a lot of places that will remain strong: East Asia, North America, West Africa, other parts in between. But here’s the deal: as states, as we think about them, start to regress, much of the world, the global environment, is changing. It’s no longer states in control now, the world stage is very crowded with the super-rich, super-powerful, very large non-state actors — not just terrorists, but the Fortune 500 are more powerful than most states in the world. So this is going to change international politics, and its changing warfare as we know it.

Because if you have non state-centric warfare, what does that look like? Capitals of big countries cannot fathom this; like Washington, DC, cannot fathom this; London cannot fathom this. But you know, CEOs can fathom this. Terrorists can fathom this. So what this war would look like in a post state-centric century, that’s what the book The New Rules of War lays out. It offers 10 new rules of war; this is how war will be fought and won in the future, and it will make a conventional warrior’s head explode.

Alessandro: Thank you, Sean. You just mentioned that the mercenary is the second-oldest profession. I’m not going to ask you what is the first. Let’s say, in your book, one suggestion that you have for winning wars, among these 10 rules that you just mentioned in this new war, is forming a kind of foreign legion on the same line of the French Foreign Legion, but for countries that have purely defensive stances, let’s say like Singapore, is there any role for private military security?

Sean: Well, the second-oldest profession, mercenaries — frankly, the most private history is private military history, from the Bible to the Romans to Middle Ages in Europe, to you name it — never was there a stigma attached to hiring what Game of Thrones would call “sellswords”, right? And, that’s a recent thing, where states by 1850 drove mercenaries underground.

They never disappeared. They started to re-emerge after the Cold War and now they’re back in full swing. And we’re once again in a world, just like most of world history, in durable disorder with private warfare.

Think of private warfare this way: it’s like Clausewitz, the military theorist who is the king of conventional war like the Second World War or First World War, meets Adam Smith, the theorist of capitalist economics. And when you blend military strategy with market strategy, that’s mercenary warfare. And our four stars [generals] are absolutely not ready. They don’t understand this. It’s like explaining colour to an earthworm, they don’t understand.

So, here’s a look at the United States. They’ve experienced this in Iraq and Afghanistan. They’ve leaned heavily on what they call private military contractors, which are really just mercenaries for the most part. I mean, they’re armed civilians in foreign war zones who work for profit, and they’re trigger pullers, right? And the US, here’s what they learned: if you’re a rich country who wants to wage war but doesn’t want to bleed, doesn’t want to bleed with your own citizens, what do you do? You have a couple of options, and they’re all terrible options.

One is look at the United States and Iraq. They have an all-volunteer army, and when they realised that this war in Iraq would not be short and easy as Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of Defence, promised, they could have either left Iraq and conceded defeat to the terrorists al-Qaeda, which was unthinkable. They could have forced the United States population to serve in the war like Vietnam by having a Vietnam-like draft, which is also politically untenable; or they could hire contractors to fill the billets. And that’s what they did.

And that leads to all sorts of problems because it creates a labour pool. I was in this industry; most of the people in this industry were not Americans; they were foreigners fighting American wars for money.

And now we’ve gotten to a point where if America wants to wage war abroad, they either have to have boots on the ground like Iraq, which nobody wants to do; or they have proxy militia, which are unreliable because they have their own self-interest; or they hire contractors. And that’s what we have today in Afghanistan — there’s a three to one ratio of contractors to troops.

So what I suggest — this is not good for a lot of reasons, because if you hire contractors, if a contractor kills a family of Afghanis someplace and those contractors are from Uganda (I’m making this up) — where are they tried? Are they tried in Afghanistan? Probably not. Are they tried in Uganda? Probably not. Are they tried in the United States? Probably not. They’re tried nowhere. The same is even more so for proxy militia when they commit human rights violations.

So what I suggest in my book — this is a very long answer to your good question — is that if we have a foreign legion, we could have accountability. Let me back up: when you think of a foreign legion, what do you think about? You think about French mercenaries and Jean-Claude van Damme right? But the French Foreign Legion are not mercenaries. What the French Foreign Legion are, they’re an element of the French army that answers only to Paris, with French chain of command, French officers and French doctrine, but they’re enlisted from all over the world.

If they enlist and if they serve a career, they get French citizenship and their interests are forever united with France. There’s accountability for French legionnaires under French military law. So there you get the benefits of having what contractors brain meets the reliability of a national army.

The United States of America needs the same thing. If they want to project power abroad, and they don’t want to have US Marines coming back in body bags, then they should think about the idea of a French Foreign Legion because it gives you the punch of contractors and mercenaries, but gives you the control of the US Army, US Marine Corps. That’s why I suggest we should think about an American Foreign Legion.

Alessandro: I see, and as you mentioned, I’m looking at the terms that you use that come more from corporate headquarters than from a battlefield — you use the term industrial, the industry labour pool. So following up on this, I think that in the near future, if every strategist is looking at having a French Foreign Legion-kind of army, is this going to ignite a race, let’s say a competition, between countries trying to poach the best and highly trained soldiers?

Sean: That is a great question, and that’s the type of strategic thinking we need to think about. Right. First of all, I don’t think that any country should rely exclusively on a foreign legion; the foreign legion should augment national forces. But there are examples of the UAE which rely heavily on contractors slash mercenaries right now. And yes, it will ignite a market for force, where the richest will get the best troops.

But can money buy loyalty? Safety and accountability have always been the bane of private warfare, not just for employers, but also for mercenaries. You know, both mercenaries and their masters have a history of ripping each other off, and this creates problems because as you will know, mercenaries historically are incentivised to start and elongate wars for profit. So a world with more mercenaries is a world with more warfare.

Ameem: To follow with a related question, about something you have mentioned [in your book as well], about control — maybe controling is bad question — about let’s say setting the boundaries. Law might not be the best way to do it. A better way would be through the market itself, this idea of super buyers that you said that once you have some super buyers in this mercenary market, then you can also weed out some of the bad characters from the good ones. Can you tell us more about that?

Sean: Yeah, so I think like the United States, for example, when it was the apogee of the Iraq and Afghanistan war, it was the sugar-daddy client in town, it had market power The United States could have dictated the norms of the private worker, but it didn’t. It did not.

And now when the US left Iraq and Afghanistan, then suddenly, all these private military contractors who used to wear the US flag now seek new clients. And that’s, you know, the problem is the United States thinks of private military contractors as second class reservists, they don’t think of them as actual, you know, profit-maximising entities. And that’s the problem.

So, you know, if we’re trying to try to curb the market for force, which is emerging rapidly in the 21st century, well, I don’t think international law is going to do anything, because who’s going to go into Yemen or Nigeria or Syria or Venezuela to arrest all those mercenaries? Not the United Nations. Not the US military. Nobody’s going to do it. And if anybody does do it, the mercenaries can shoot your law enforcement dead.

When you commodify conflict, it’s the one commodity that can resist law enforcement. They can shoot your law enforcement dead. So the better way to control this emerging market is one, stop denying that it exists, it’s here, it’s resurrected, and it’s as old as history itself, as the history of warfare itself.

Second, if you want to shape it, you have to use market mechanisms. You have to incentivise good behaviour and disincentivise bad behaviour, and how do you disincentivise it? You bankrupt those bad mercenaries. But right now, it’s the Wild West in American literature, it’s like cowboys and Indians right now. And this is the worst case trajectory we can be on in the early 21st century.

Alessandro: You just mentioned that you will need to use market rules to, let’s say, not coordinate or constrain mercenaries but at least make them more viable, then that takes me to the issue of cost. You argue that mercenary armies are economically efficient for states. If I recall correctly, there was an Italian chap who was saying that mercenaries were an unnecessary cost during peacetime but they are prone to flee just when the real danger hits and that guy is Niccolò Machiavelli.

Sean: Yes, well, first of all, Machiavelli, whom I’m a big fan of, has, as we’d say in America, had sour grapes. He was burned horribly by his mercenaries because he was such a poor manager of mercenaries. In Florence’s wars against Pisa, a much smaller city-state in 1500 and 1506, he was a senior sort of defence diplomat and they were so bad, the Florentines were so bad at managing their mercenaries that the Pisans bought out 10 of the mercenary captains who showed up on game day and defected. That eventually led to the Florentine Republic’s demise in 1512. Because idiotic Machiavelli, whom I love, but in some sense he’s idiotic, because he’s like: “We can have our own militia who are loyal only to us.”

You know, fair enough, in 1509, his Florentine militia farmers had some tactical victories, but when they started to stand up against a ton of true, Spanish in this case, mercenaries, they got obliterated. And that’s one of the reasons why their free republic of Florence fell, it was because of Machiavelli’s complete inept militia.

So the point of the story is this: when you want specialised skills, you can turn to a market that can offer you specialised skills. And it can be cheaper in the short run. It’s like renting a car is cheaper than owning one, right, in the short run. But if you use a car every day, it makes sense to own your own car.

More importantly, the thing about mercenaries is this, look at America in Iraq and Afghanistan, they sort of helped catapult the current mercenary market for force, not deliberately, by overusing these mercenaries in the short run, it gave them some operational advantages — they could have a surge of boots on the ground who were not American, which is politically expensive, shall we say.

They could have turned to the market. But when they were done with them, what they created in the long-term was a labour pool of mercenaries who are now showing up in Yemen and the Middle East, in West Africa and Somalia.

So in the short run, it might be cost-effective to use mercenaries and it kind of is. But in the long run, it creates problems not just for that country, but for the entire region and for security at large, that destabilise entire regions and create sort of an arms race of mercenaries, in the worst-case scenario.

Ameem: You speak of all these from a closer perspective, I think than most people can offer. I was reading your book, and you mentioned what you did during one of your summers during grad school. And it immediately reminded me of when I was in graduate school; I would wake up in the summer doing fieldwork, trying to call all my contacts. Some would say no, some would say yes, finally.

You had a different completely different experience. You went from raising an army in Liberia to stopping almost a genocide in Burundi. Can you tell us more about that side of your career? And how does that even play into your academic work? Does that gives you a kind of critical insight into the field?

Sean: I actually do a lot more than that, but I totally write about some of it right. So like, I’m not your typical academic. I went to Brown University, an Ivy League university in the United States, but I left, I graduated and went to the 82nd Airborne Division. I was a US Army paratrooper and an officer in a coveted unit of the US military. My commanders were Stanley McChrystal, David Petraeus way before they became generals, and I left, and I sort of, what some would say, went to the dark side. I became a private military contractor.

But there was a time in between where I did two very interesting things. One, I worked for Amnesty International, an NGO working for human rights in Washington, DC. Not many people knew about my actual military background. My interest was that there’s a lot of commonality on the ground between what the military wanted to do, what human rights people want to do, and naively, I was trying to bring the headquarters, if you will, into better ideological alignment. And that was ridiculous.

So then, I went to Harvard for graduate school. I was there for about three months and I realised I had made one of the worst mistakes of my life. I went there to learn about the dark secrets and arts of war. Instead, I was doing economic problem sets and statistics and Bayesian theory, and I was like, “this is crazy.”

I was obviously a bit older. When I left, I was a captain in the army. Most of my students were much younger than me and very smart. And then I got a phone call one day. I was running across the Harvard Yard to go to a study group. And it was literally like this: “You don’t know who we are, but we know who you are. We have a project in Africa that we think are the right man for. And we want you to drop out of your graduate programme to help us do it. We will fly you to Dallas tomorrow to brief you on what we want to do if you’re interested.”

I was thinking: well, I could do two more years of statistics on one hand, or I could go off and do this really cool thing on the other. So I dropped out of Harvard. And long story short, they were a US company that was a private military company like Blackwater, but not Blackwater, which wanted me to help them raise a small army in Africa for the US, which I did. Then I became their man in Africa and I did other things too, like including stopping an imminent genocide in the Great Lakes region, like in Rwanda and Burundi, and did some other things in the continent and around the continent.

Then I left that and did some other things entirely for like US oil companies and some other things like that. I got to this point where I realised that there are no old people in my business. And I asked myself what was I doing with my life? So I decided, I talked my way back into Harvard. I finished up my graduate programme there.

And I went to think deeply what does it mean when a lot of things that the CIA and Special Forces used to do are now outsourced to the private sector, who are in many ways much better at it than the CIA or Special Forces are? And where is that leaving the world because it wasn’t just the US, others were doing it too, including non-governments.

So I ended up going to do a PhD in level economics. This became my book, The Modern Mercenary. The truth is if you really want something secretly done now, you don’t have the CIA do it, you turn to the private sector because there are laws that journalists can use to try to get CIA documentation unclassified, same with the military, but the private sector has none of that.

They use this idea of proprietary knowledge, business secrets, as a curtain to keep back journalists, researchers, anybody who wants to know what they’re doing. So if you really want to keep a secret, you go to the private sector. Whether it’s the United States of America doing stuff with me or other countries or other people; look at how Russia is using the Wagner Group.

The reason why this is catching on is not just because it’s cheaper in the short run, as Alex asked about, but because we live in an information age. And in an information age, weapons that give you plausible deniability like mercenaries are more powerful than raw firepower. I mean, look at the way Putin took over Crimea. He could have Blitzkrieged into Ukraine and taken it, they had a stronger military than Ukraine. But no, what did he use? He used mercenaries like the Wagner Group, he used special forces, he used little green men, he used astroturf you know, Russian freedom fighters which are completely fake. And he used propaganda and accurate measures.

What he did was he created the fog of war and exploited it for victory. That is modern war. And that’s what The New Rules of War discusses, it is how you win today. It’s not Second World War-style warfare. It’s completely different. And there are some things that conventional lawyers, think Second World War, will not even recognise in this war. That’s the secret of success.

One of those things are mercenaries, because people, conventional lawyers and four star generals, think of mercenaries as caricatures, villains of Hollywood. But that’s not what they are. You know, in 2018, mercenaries almost obliterated America’s Delta Force and Rangers in eastern Syria with the United States’ best aviation B-52s, F-15s and stuff like that.

Now the American forces won, after a four-hour fight, but the point is, that was against 500 mercenaries. What if it were 5,000 mercenaries and not against Delta Force, but against like a regular military unit. Mercenaries are a lot more sophisticated, a lot more lethal than most people think.

This idea that there’s an emerging trend of privatised warfare in the 21st that nobody’s paying attention to, this is one of the biggest insecurity trends of our century. And this is why we’re vulnerable to it. That’s what I’m trying to do, as a former private military contractor myself who’s gone, you know, into the light, if you will, and trying to publicise it. I know stuff that researchers cannot get access to and that’s what I’m trying to bring forth in my writing for both fiction and non-fiction people.

Alessandro: You just mentioned Blackwater, CIA, Russian little green men and Russian private military, I’m sure among these you encompass Wagner, Slavonic, Moran, and I think if I start to ask you a question about Blackwater, we will need another couple of podcasts to fill the gaps. But please allow me the last question, the question that we are planning to ask all of our guests: in your opinion, the future of warfare and security in a complex environment, what is it going to look like in the coming 30 years?

Sean: Well, that’s a great question. It depends who you ask. I’m in Washington, DC, and here’s the problem in Washington, DC, Washington and the whole, the quote unquote West, has victor’s curse.

What is victor’s curse? You’ve heard this truism, you’ve heard the saying, perhaps that generals always fight the last war, especially if they want it. And this truism happens to be true.

Think about after the First World War, the French had a bad case of victor’s curse; they had won and they thought the next big war would look just like the last big war, which was the First World War. And the First World War was trench warfare. So what did the French invest in as their superweapon? It was the Maginot Line, which was basically the biggest, most sophisticated trench warfare system in history.

But then warfare had changed. They stood still, the Germans created a new type of warfare called the Blitzkrieg, which could easily outfight the national line. And what the French could not do in four bloody years of First World War, the Germans achieved in 46 days in the Second World War Two — they seized Paris.

In some ways, I think the West is stuck in its victor’s curse. They think the future of war is going to look like the Second World War, with better technology. Think of Tom Clancy, think of the third offset strategy in the Pentagon. Think of what the US is doing. The US is buying nothing but conventional weapons.

But the problem is we live in a post-conventional warfare era. The future of warfare, as I laid out in my book, The New Rules of War, it’ll be won in places like the information domain. In the old rules of war, battlefield victory gave you, you know, winners and losers. But the new rules of war are about influencing what people think strategically.

When was the last time for example, anybody saw a Hollywood movie with China as a villain? Right? Nobody can remember that. Well, one of the reasons is that China has influence in Hollywood. They buy studios like Legendary Pictures. If you make a movie they don’t like, they say you can’t show it in China, which is one of Hollywood’s biggest partner markets, and they’re building their own Hollywood in China filming movies like Wolf Warrior I and 2, which are major movies.

Controlling the strategic narrative of conflict is tantamount to victory, just like Napoleonic warfare or Clausewitz was 150 years ago, 20 years ago. The work’s becoming epistemological now, determining truth from lies determines winners and losers now, way before the first shot is fired, and in some ways warfare is moving from a Clausewitzian paradigm of force-on-force to a Sun Tzu-ian paradigm of trickery and cunning. And those who embrace that will win. Unfortunately, the West, and especially the United States of America, is stuck in the past with victor’s curse, and that’s what concerns me most. That’s why I wrote the book, The New Rules of War.

Alessandro: Sean, thank you very much. Please allow me to thank you for this opportunity to start our podcast. We want to start with a bang and we are really grateful to have you here today.

I would now to present to our audience who our next guest will be. That is Jamie Williamson. He is the executive director of the Secretariat of the International Code of Conduct Association (ICOCA). ICOCA’s Code of Conduct promotes the responsible provision of security service and respect for human rights and national and international law.

Also, please allow me to thank Eugene Lim from the MEI Events team, and especially Carl Skadian, MEI associate director, for his support. That’s all for today. Thank you for being with us.

This transcript was prepared by Carina Lee, Intern, Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore.