The twentieth century was supposed to mark the end of mercenaries. Mass mobilization, nationalism, and the laws of war all pointed in the same direction: warfare was now the exclusive business of states. Volume 3 of Blood for Gold examines how thoroughly that prediction failed.
The volume opens with the forces that temporarily suppressed private warfare — the World Wars, the ideologies that replaced money with nationalism as the primary motive for military service, and the emerging international legal framework that tried to define and prohibit mercenaries. But it also traces what never disappeared: the French Foreign Legion, the colonial Askari forces of East and West Africa, the Flying Tigers hired by China to fight Japan, and the diverse partisan forces of the Second World War who operated in legal territories the 1977 Geneva Protocols still struggle to describe.
The Cold War brought mercenaries back in full. Congo in the 1960s became the laboratory of the modern soldier of fortune — Mike Hoare’s 5 Commando, the chaos of decolonization, and the emergence of a generation of veterans for whom war was a profession, not a civic duty. Bob Denard took that model further, staging coups across Francophone Africa for three decades with quiet support from French intelligence. Angola, Biafra, and Rhodesia attracted mercenaries from a dozen countries, creating networks that would eventually become the modern private military industry.
The post-Cold War era produced the corporate military. Executive Outcomes, staffed by South African veterans, defeated the RUF in Sierra Leone in weeks — doing what United Nations forces had failed to do in years — and was shut down by international pressure almost immediately. Blackwater scaled that model into a multi-billion-dollar industry during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, with consequences that included the 2007 Nisour Square massacre and a decade of unresolved legal questions about who actually controls private contractors in a war zone.
The Wagner Group represents the most recent evolution: a quasi-private force deployed by the Russian state in Syria, Africa, and Ukraine, explicitly designed to provide deniability that regular military forces cannot offer. Its June 2023 mutiny exposed both the power and the structural limits of the model.
The volume concludes with the emerging frontiers — Colombian veterans hired across three continents, the world’s first jihadist PMC marketing its services on Telegram, hackers-for-hire as the digital evolution of the mercenary trade, and the question of what autonomous weapons systems mean for the future of hired warfare. The question that has followed this entire series — who controls men with guns — does not become easier when the guns are drones and the men are algorithms.
