America Doesn't Wage War. Government Institutions Do.

In February of 2020, automobile executive Erik Charles Maund received a series of text messages from his lover’s boyfriend, threatening to expose Maund’s extramarital affair if he didn’t pay up. According to a federal indictment, Maund contacted the private security firm Speartip Security, and Speartip reached out to two former U.S. Marines to deal with the problem.

The indictment states that the two surveilled the lover and the boyfriend, determining the best place to strike. In the parking lot of an apartment complex, they shot the boyfriend several times, shoved his corpse in a car and then drove the undoubtedly terrified woman to a construction site in west Nashville. There they shot her several times, killing her, before leaving both bodies at the site.

After the murders, Maund wired $750,000 to Speartip Security, and, in a bizarre, modern twist, wrote a stellar review for their services under their Google profile, stating, “They get the job done in an expedited time. Couldn’t imagine using anyone else!!” Speartip’s account responded to the review: “Thank you for the kind words Always a pleasure working with you.” Maund was indicted on murder-for-hire charges, and last December, Gilad Peled, the owner of Speartip Security, pled guilty to three counts of murder for hire, conspiracy to kidnap with death resulting, and kidnapping resulting in death.

This would seem to be a straightforward local crime, mixing the farcical and the monstrous, its relation to war overseas only tangential. But as we mark the 20-year anniversary of the Iraq War approaches, this week I find myself thinking more and more about such tangents. We’ve endlessly debated the stupidity of the initial planning for the war, the incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure, the mixed results of the 2007 “surge” of troops, the “end” of the war when President Barack Obama pulled troops out of Iraq, the reinsertion of troops to fight ISIS, the legal arguments that Obama had authority to do so based on a Congressional authorization of military force from before ISIS even existed (and that has since been used as we kill people around the world), the lethal strikes in Iraq such as the Soleimani strike, our continuing obligations toward the country and the importance of our presence there and in Syria. Even my rage about this state of affairs feels stale. So as the Iraq War nears 20 years old (the combat mission ended in 2021, but we’ve still got about 2,500 military advisers and trainers there, as well as close to 8,000 contractors in Iraq and Syria according to a 2022 Department of Defense report), I find myself thinking less about the familiar, though still-relevant debates, and more about offshoots of the war. Like a robust global mercenary market.

I like to keep a tally of incidents involving murderous, amoral, U.S.-trained contractors, operating in places far from where we first used their services. Consider, for example, the recent assassination of the president of Haiti, Jovenel Moise. It was allegedly carried out by private actors who hired Colombian mercenaries, with the funding and vetting allegedly coming through foreign companies, including a Miami-based private military contractor (the owner, arrested last February, is pleading not guilty). And Haiti is hardly the first attempt at regime change, or assassination, that private military contractors have carried out recently. In 2015, a Delaware company called Spear Operations Group reportedly led an assassination campaign against political figures in Yemen. According to a UN Security Council report, in 2019 the Australian Christiaan Durrant, a friend and former aviation specialist for American mercenary businessman Erik Prince, sent a group of mercenaries into Libya on behalf of General Khalifa Haftar in an alleged scheme to violate arms embargos and work their way through a hit list of Haftar’s enemies. (Durrant claims the UN accusation relies on “false documents,” and that he is not a mercenary.) And in 2020, Silvercorp USA, led by former U.S. Special Forces soldier Jordan Goudreau, initiated a bizarre and doomed effort to infiltrate Venezuela and overthrow Nicolas Maduro. (In an interview with Rolling Stone, Goudreau disputes the characterization of Silvercorp USA as a mercenary outfit. “We’re just trying to solve problems,” he said.) Some of these schemes were absurd from the get-go (Durrant allegedly tried to procure weapons for Libya under a name borrowed from a Mel Gibson character but failed to do so; his men had to flee Libya and Haftar’s wrath, according to the UN report), but it was only a matter of time before something like the assassination in Haiti would go successfully.

The political benefits of mercenarism are obvious. The public doesn’t really count mercenary deaths as a serious concern, and since mercenary outfits owe no obligation toward public transparency, it’s very difficult for journalists and watchdog groups to track what those units are doing.

All that is troubling, but consider the second-order effects as well. In practice, we have large numbers of mercenaries, including significant numbers of foreigners (in 2021, a majority of the armed contractors working for U.S. Central Command were foreign nationals) fighting for the United States on one job, and then for another high bidder on another.

As Sean McFate, a former U.S. soldier and then mercenary who now teaches at National Defense University, a Pentagon-funded training ground for national security leaders, puts it, “What is significant for the future of the industry is that these foreigners have gained valuable trade knowledge that can be exported around the world, in search of new clients once the United States does not renew its contract.” So not only mercenarism, but highly skilled mercenarism spreads around the world. This is obviously a problem for countries whose poverty and instability make them vulnerable to highly trained outside military forces. In Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis warned of a globalized world war “fought piecemeal,” in which opportunists and non-state actors increasingly prey on the weak amid weakened nation-states.

What I am describing is one small portion of a system of warfare. In confronting the world made by the Iraq War, the story of Maund and his lover isn’t an isolated morality play, but exists at the intersection of individual evil and something far more complex, related to geopolitical realities, new technologies, political calculations, entrenched bureaucracies and cultural shifts in relation to war-making. The ways we chose to make war over the past decades shifted how violence is done around the world, and the story of Maund is simply one of the more outrageous examples of an individual taking advantage of the structures our wars put in place.

That’s why the “lessons” of the Iraq War, even when they’ve been assimilated into public consciousness, don’t always have much of a cash out in terms of policy. In Iraq we “learned” the limits of the use of military power. In practice, we understaffed the State Department while developing the most sophisticated military targeting operation the world has ever seen. We “learned” the dangers of an overextended military, voting in an isolationist president who promised to sweet-talk adversaries like Russia and North Korea rather than treat them as axis-of-evil-style adversaries. In practice, we put a persistent special operations presence in nearly every European country on Russia’s borders to “deter or respond to aggression,” as General Raymond Thomas later testified to Congress.

Americans “learned” to be wary of overseas entanglements and with Donald Trump voted in a president who would buck Republican orthodoxy by promising an end to our “ridiculous & costly Endless Wars,” a pledge with such bipartisan popularity Joe Biden would later adopt a version of it. But that, too, hasn’t really happened. Our military presence in Syria started in 2014, without explicit authorization from Congress. Obama promised there would be “no boots on the ground.” But in 2018 we had 2,500 troops in Syria, and an unknown number of contractors. Trump ordered a withdrawal, but eventually agreed to keep around 200 troops to “protect the oil,” a number that was well exceeded (by the middle of 2020 there were a reported 500 U.S. troops). “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” the former U.S. Special Representative for Syria Engagement, Jim Jeffrey, later admitted. “What Syria withdrawal?” Jeffrey asked Defense One in 2020. “There was never a Syria withdrawal.”

What’s notable here is that some of these outcomes are easy to feel happy about, while others pose obvious dangers, but all are happening outside the realm of democracy politics which are supposed to determine the state’s employment of lethal force. I’m glad we prepared countries bordering Russia for possible aggression and developed relationships with local military units — every town Ukrainian forces were able to prevent going under Russian control is a civilian population that wasn’t subject to murder, torture, forced deportations and rape, and the U.S. role in helping equip those forces and providing them with actionable intelligence is honorable and good. Likewise, I’ve visited refugee camps in Northern Iraq and spoken with Syrian Kurds who feel betrayed by Trump’s decision to withdraw our forces from their region, and I have no illusions about the importance for tens of thousands of other Kurds in the regions of Syria by the continuing U.S. presence there. “They’re ‘protecting the oil,’” I heard a Kurd say, wryly, back in 2019. “I don’t care what they’re supposed to be protecting, as long as they stay there.” It’s a perspective I appreciate.

And yet. And yet. What are the long-term implications of America privatizing and professionalizing war? These days, America does not wage war, institutions within the American government wage war, along with external institutions propped up and financed by America.

A member of Congress skeptical of reforming this system once suggested to me that this state of affairs is preferable. There are military missions, like the one in Syria, which seem to have obvious benefits for the United States and for the people in the region, but which might not survive the demagoguery of Congressional debate. Easier to have a private war, managed by the adults in the government, without consulting the yahoos in Congress, or exposing it to too much public scrutiny.

But the adults in the government don’t have a great track record when unchecked by an engaged democratic populace, and private wars don’t always stay private. In 1962, two years before winning the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, journalist David Halberstam wrote about one such war, and the disconnect the military “advisors” he profiled felt between themselves and their mission and the country that had sent them:

They find their fellow Americans ignorant of what is going on here — worse, perhaps, indifferent — and it continues to disturb them that no one seems to know where Vietnam is. … Perhaps, said one American officer here (a West Pointer and a combat veteran of World War II and Korea), it is not really a bad thing — just another step in the sometimes painful business of becoming a professional soldier and part of a professional army.

We’ve come several further steps in that painful business in the years since we launched the Iraq War, and we’ve built the infrastructure and institutions to match it. In a world where war is disconnected from politics and integrated into business, praise and blame become more diffuse, easier to pass around. That poor woman in West Nashville, in the back of a car, terrified, desperate and doomed — that’s not about Iraq. But the world of mercenaries out there waiting for anyone, even the Erik Maunds of the world, to put out a contract — that is an Iraq story.

Which is why I start with it. Because part of responding to the damage wrought by the Iraq War means tackling things that are not about Iraq at all, or are no longer about Iraq, but about the relationship between violence and the state which was developed over the course of the Iraq War, and which continues to bedevil us, to our general indifference.