Sean McFate: Private Armies & Mercenary Wars

Sean McFate is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington DC think tank, and a professor of strategy at The National Defense University and Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He served as a paratrooper and officer in the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division under Generals Stan McChrystal and David Petraeus and was a private military contractor raising armies for U.S. interests abroad. McFate is also the author of "The New Rules of War: How America Can Win Against Russia, China, and Other Threats" (which was named a “Book of the Year” by The Economist) as well as "The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order." He also writes military thrillers, his latest novel, High Treason, had the #1 New York Times bestselling author James Patterson announce that: “Sean McFate just might be the next Tom Clancy, only I think he’s even better," and he's been lauded as a new Sun Tzu by the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Admiral Jim Stavridis.

In his books, "The Modern Mercenary" and "The New Rules of War," McFate makes a compelling case for the demise of state hegemony, and his treatise lays bare a disturbing reality, the world order that has existed since the end of the 30 years war and the Peace of Westphalia is in its final days as 70% of the world's nations teeter on the brink of imploding, at risk of descending into fiefdoms run by warlords, terrorists or narco-criminal mafias, in the very least these states are incredibly fragile and although many will not descend into anarchy, most will likely simmer with conflict, yet be kept from being torn asunder by competing domestic and foreign interests, a controlled chaos that Sean McFate refers to as "durable disorder."

The Westphalian order has given way to a smoldering entropy across much of the world, according to McFate "the number of armed conflicts has doubled since World War II, and of approximately 194 countries in the world, nearly half are experiencing some form of war." The fall of the Berlin Wall, the defeat of communism, and the collapse of the Soviet Union brought with it an end to conventional warfare, and an intractable turmoil, a world populated by unstable nations where non-state actors are plunging the globe into a form of neo-medievalism, and a return to a free market for force rife with expeditionary conflict enterprisers and private military contractors (PMCs).

Durable disorder is dramatically changing the way in which conflicts are being fought, with wars of the future being waged in the shadows via mercenary armies, cyber warfare, and influence operations. Economic warfare, lawfare, and the weaponizing of information will all be outsourced and executed by PMCs. Furthermore, the most opportunistic expeditionary conflict entrepreneurs will fight at the behest of rogue regimes, warlords, billionaires, and corporations, as nations give up their monopoly on the use of force. Currently, even the wold's largest, most powerful, and technologically advanced military on the planet, the United States Armed Forces, can no longer go to war without the overwhelming support of PMCs. Up to 50% of U.S. military support, security, and services in Iraq were carried out by contractors, and up to 75% of military-related personnel in Afghanistan have been sourced from the private sector, a reality that would have been unthinkable just two decades earlier.

The global war on terror, the increasing economic, political, and cultural instability of much of the world's nations, and the exponential quickening of the globe's descent into durable disorder demands that we plan, purchase, and prepare to manage conflicts and win wars with a completely new set of rules, a fresh strategy that recognizes that the wars of the last few hundred years, especially the world wars of the 20th century, are a relic of the past, and that the stealth wars of tomorrow will be ignited and exacerbated by non-state actors, and exploited by the likes of Russia and China with all sides leveraging private armies, contract warfare, and modern-day mercenaries.

Links:

Sean McFate: https://www.seanmcfate.com
The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order: https://amzn.to/32vQTyw
The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder: https://amzn.to/2RxxZ3S