From “An Army of One’s Own,” which appeared in the February 1997 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 174-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/archive.
Eeben Barlow lives on a quiet, tree-lined side street in a wealthy suburb of Pretoria, the city that was once the headquarters of South Africa’s apartheid military establishment. Set behind well-tended grounds and a swimming pool, guarded by surveillance cameras and stone lions at the portico, Barlow’s stately mock-Tudor villa could easily belong to a corporate exec in Greenwich, Connecticut. His interior design would make Martha Stewart proud. Everything is elegant, orderly, and civil, including the corporate brochure he hands his guests upon arrival. It’s glossy, with multicolor graphics describing the confidential “training” and “equipment” services that his company, Executive Outcomes, provides: clandestine warfare, combat air patrol, advanced battle handling, sniper training.
The corporation, the brochure says, prides itself on its flawless and unequaled record of success and its above-average growth rate, declaring that it is one of the largest businesses of its kind in the world—but that is an easy boast. It is, so far, the only incorporated private mercenary army on earth that will wage full-scale war on a client’s behalf. But Barlow bristles at the word “mercenary.” He prefers to view Executive Outcomes as a team of corporate troubleshooters marketing a strategy of recovery to failing governments around the world. In exchange for millions of dollars, the company offers to do what the United Nations’ blue helmets cannot and will not: take sides, deploy overwhelming force, and fire “preemptively” on a designated enemy. But when people speak of what Executive Outcomes provided its onetime client Sierra Leone during that country’s civil war, the term that repeatedly arises is not “national defense” but “security.”
One of the preeminent war theorists of our time, Martin Van Creveld, posited that just this shift in the nature of war, in which the state no longer has a legal “monopoly over armed violence,” would characterize future armed conflict worldwide. His 1991 book The Transformation of War argues that conventional wars waged by nation-states are fading from the map and that future “war-making entities” will resemble those of the premodern era—tribes, city-states, private mercenary bands, commercial organizations. In such an environment, Creveld predicts, “much of the day-to-day burden of defending society against the threat of low-intensity conflict will be transferred to the booming security business.”
Outfits like Barlow’s give shape, then, to one of the latest entries in the lexicon of conflict analysis: the “privatization of violence.” The phenomenon is as old as the first hit man, but the coinage reflects a new trend. In Colombia, for instance, British Petroleum has hired a battalion of Colombian soldiers to guard against guerrilla attacks, and the drug lords have done the same thing. In Haiti, former soldiers are consigned by the wealthy to form private family forces. In Liberia, foreign corporations employ industrial gangs to extract natural resources. And at the urging of the United States, Croatia hired a private firm of retired U.S. generals, based in Virginia, to prepare the Croatian army for a counteroffensive against the Serbs in the summer of 1995.
Even in Washington foreign-policy circles, where people feel compelled to limit their on-the-record commentary to expressions of disapproval at the idea of private armies running amok around the globe, Executive Outcomes commands a certain respect. When the U.S. National Security Council deliberated establishing a humanitarian corridor for fleeing Rwandan Hutu refugees this past November, someone suggested using the services of Executive Outcomes. The idea was dismissed when the question was raised of who would foot the bill. Nevertheless, Washington analysts do not hesitate—off the record—to tally the enormous costs of the United Nations’ failed peacekeeping operation in Angola against Executive Outcomes’ quick success there. “It was the best fifty or sixty million dollars the Angolan government ever spent,” one defense expert told me.
“Executive Outcomes,” he added, “is the small wave of the future in terms of defense and security.” As he saw it, privatized defense on the international scene is not so different from a similar trend at home. In the United States, he said, “you already see more and more people hiring private-security firms to keep the Third World away from suburban America.”
