The Profession
But when the first legions and armatures were put together in 2021—meaning brigade- and division-sized airmobile fighting units—under van Arden and, later, under Salter, it became necessary to have basing, manning, and staffing of a far more professional and permanent basis. Intelligence, communications, and logistics arms were added—outsourced but full-time—along with artillery and antiarmor, medical, air defense, satellite, drone elements, and so on. A command and logistical architecture evolved, based loosely on a Marine Expeditionary Force—in other words a force designed to project power across oceans, into theaters in which basing and resupply could not be counted upon.
An armature was constituted of three primary maneuver elements, called legions, each roughly the size of an army brigade or a Marine Regimental Combat Team. These were commanded not by colonels, as a conventional formation of that size would be, but by former one- and even two-star generals. The saying in the profession was “Step up in pay, step down in rank.” Within the mercenary corps, the billet of sergeant was filled by a former staff or gunnery sergeant; captains served in lieutenants’ posts; if you had been a lieutenant colonel, you stepped down to major.
Each legion was constituted of three battalions—two infantry and one weapons. Battalions were divided into three centuries—the equivalent of reinforced companies—and platoons. Each legion was supported by its own armored brigade, called a maniple; its own artillery arm, called a ballista; and a dedicated air wing called a corvo, or crow. The air wings were unique in that their command and control elements beneath armature staff level, as well as equipment, organization, training, and operation, were outsourced to private contractors. This was Wild West Central. Individual aircraft and crews were brought on board in one of three ways—as OOs, owner-operators (in which the pilot himself or a syndicate of investors supplied its own plane or helicopter and hired it directly to the company); straight hire (where the company itself owned or leased the plane and contracted with the pilots and crew to fly it); or the “sillidar” system, in which a single firm or investor supplied a number of planes and leased them to the contracting company as units—with or without flight teams.
Service crews and equipment maintenance were also outsourced. What made the system even more colorful was the manifestation—overnight, it seemed—of a middleman apparatus of hiring reps and lawyers, many of whom were female and at least half of whom were either married to or sleeping with the individual contractors whose deals they were negotiating. The verb was “bitch.” “Who’s bitching you?” meant “Who’s your hiring agent?” To be “bitched over” was to get double-crossed or screwed. By and large, the reps were honest and they worked hard. Standard commission was 15 percent for an individual and 10 percent for a package, meaning a team that signed up collectively, as a unit, with 20 percent for bonuses and incentive pay. Some reps would work free for the individual contractor, taking their commission from the hiring entity or its employer. There were other firms, called “slop shops,” run by paunchy ex-campaigners working out of their basements that scoured the docket for cheap and last-minute openings. The system sounds nuts, I know. But in Georgia and in San Tome and Principe in ’21 and in Yemen and Angola in ’22, these jury-rigged schemes were put to the test and passed with all banners flying.
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 battlespaces were owned by the appropriate arms of the conventional military. The dirt belonged to the mercs.
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 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 se
curity 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 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.
But what of my team now? What’s our mission? Chow time comes and goes. A call from Petrocelli informs us that Salter has been delayed. Ten minutes later a text says he won’t get here for two more days. Patience is the prime virtue of the warrior. Still, my guys are hot for action. They want to know what our job is. Will we reinforce Salter’s armatures in southern Iraq? If so, in what capacity? Where? When? Why has Salter specified this particular crew, in these numbers, under this leadership, in this configuration? And what’s the connection to Tim Hayward?
The two days pass; Salter’s still hung up in Basra and Umm Qasr. A third day. Still no orders. More troops fly out of PSAB. Thousands more fly in.
We train. Fourteen hours a day I rehearse the team and myself. The men are eager and ready. Everyone is excited. Salter has left one top sheet for me—a hand-scrawled Concept of Operation that lists the evolutions he wants us to train in.
Helo infil and exfil
SSE day/night
DA
Use of AT-7, C-6, Chinese RRM
SERE, mounted and dismounted
Night/mt/winter/riverine
SSE is sensitive site exploitation. Raids. DA is direct action. Snatch-and-grabs and assassinations. SERE is escape and evasion. An AT-7 is a shoulder-fired antitank missile; C-6 is a new, super-powerful explosive; an RRM is the latest generation of portable surface-to-air missile.
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.
In a war zone, even a staging area like this, I can never sleep. I need pills to close my eyes and pills to pry them open; I gobble tabs to shit and capsules to stop shitting. I take steroids. I drink. The cargo pockets of my trousers are a one-man Walgreen’s. I’m stocked with Percocet, Vicodin, Demerol, OxyContin; Dexedrine, Methedrine, Ritalin. I’ve got reds, white, blacks; Ambien, ephedrine, and a cocktail of my own—Valium, Inderal, and atropine: the first keeps you calm, the second blocks adrenaline to the heart, the third keeps your hands from sweating; you’re so calm, you can cruise a lie detector test. Quality liquor is wasted in a combat zone. My body likes the cheap stuff anyway. Early Times, Carstairs, any kind of rye or Irish whisky. I shower in it. I brush my teeth with it. We all do.
How do you motivate warriors for hire? You don’t. They’re geeked already. They fight for pay, yeah—but in the shit, money means nothing. They’ve gone way beyond that—past country, past pride, beyond even love for their brothers. They have reached the place, these play-for-pay-ers, where they don’t give a damn about anything and they still give their all.
A civilian might ask, Why do you need to train? Aren’t these professionals prepared already? Yes, they are, but still a thousand and one mission-specific skills and individual and team procedures must be defined and rehearsed. Remember, we are no longer U.S. military with unlimited resources and standardized protocols. We’re privateers, we’re gunslingers. What gear do we have for night operations, for land navigation, for IPB (Intelligence Preparation of the Battlespace), for communication by FM, VHF, low satellite and high; for ordnance use and disposal? What weapons, rations, medical gear? What’s our casualty treatment and evacuation scheme? If heliborne CASEVAC is out of the question where we’re going (and it probably is), what are our scenarios for mass casualties, for severely wounded individuals, for dead? Communications. Will we have American comm gear or Chinese or Bulgarian or some shit we’ve never heard of? Iridium phones, supersats, IMBTTRs, PSC-8s, and PRC-220s? Task organization. Timeline planning. Under-fire TTP—Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures.
The team and every member have to master drills for Driver Down, Team Leader Down, Break Contact drills, Close Quarters Battle drills, Emergency Assault drills. What tech gear have we got? Will we be supported by drones, Ravens, Dragonflies? Have we got handheld BF Trackers, “confetti” surveillance pods, Falconview imagery software to plan our missions? What’s our flyaway package? What’s the equipment? What are the protocols? What host nation units or individuals will we be working with? What indirect fires can we call on, if any? What air assets? Who brings us in, who gets us out, where the hell are we going in the first place, how do we find it, day or night, and what do we need to know once we get there?
Mission planning: what’s our primary scenario, alternate, contingency, and emergency? What weapons will we have? These all need to be zeroed, laser PESQ-3s and -7s locked down, and the same for night and thermal sights and surveillance gear. What about foreign weapons? Is every team member up to speed on Soviet-era RPKs, PKMs, AKs, and anything else we might stumble onto and have to use? Will we be crossing rivers, deserts, mountains? Mounted or dismounted? Will we be conducting reconnaissance, assaults, or assassinations? Will we be breaching fortified compounds? Will we need greenbacks, gold, interpreters? And when we’ve finally trained for every contingency, what happens when the shit hits the fan and we’re on to Plan B, Plan C, and Plan Z? Combat is a team sport.
We have to drill. We have to practice. We have to rehearse.
The final factor we train for is the unexpected. What if we’re snugged down in a hide and innocent children or shepherds stumble onto us? This ethical nightmare has screwed special operators again and again. What if we hook up with our host-country nationals and they turn against us? What if they test us, demand money or the performance of some abhorrent act? What if some grinning, gap-toothed chief puts a pistol in our hands and demands that we execute a luckless local that the leader claims is a traitor? What if he insists that we compromise our security? Leave one of our men with him alone? What if an HC entity tries to make us take some of its booger eaters as part of our team? What if we consent and one is wounded or killed? If we’re captured ourselves, what’s our story?
The team comes together fast. They’re like thoroughbreds at the gate. My only concern is delay. Day seven: the group has reached fighting pitch. I e-mail Salter. He’d better use us fast before we start going dull or worse.
Salter always answers promptly.
See you next stage, w/in 72 hrs. S.
BOOK
FOUR
LORD JIM