Last month, it seemed briefly that a mercenary group was going to overthrow the Russian government. The Wagner Group, led by a businessman named Yevgeny Prigozhin, drove his army within two hours of Moscow, before backing down, with Prigozhin claiming he was simply trying to make a point. He was furious at the Russian military and its defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, for intentionally killing two thousand Wagner Group fighters in a missile strike. As of this writing, Prigozhin is in Belarus…maybe. Given the tendency of the enemies of Russian president Vladimir Putin to fall from open windows, he is likely sleeping with one eye open.
When all this began, I could not understand how Prigozhin was marching on Moscow, given the fact that he had lost two thousand men. When I think of soldiers of fortune, I think of the A-Team. And a crack squad of elite former commandos should be able to fit in a single van, right? Who, I wondered, could possibly have been left to overthrow Russia? The answer was quite a few people. The Wagner Group, as I learned, employs as many as 50,000 mercenaries who are fighting Russia’s wars not only in Ukraine, but in hotspots around the world. Prigozhin himself claimed that he and 25,000 soldiers were headed for Moscow “to figure out why chaos is happening in the country.” For comparison, there are only 15,000 soldiers (approximately) in the 82nd Airborne Division.
HOW TO BE A MERC
There is a lot of money to be made in war. Thirty years ago, Prigozhin was a hot dog vender. (He had spent the decade prior in prison for gang-related crimes.) Today he is waging war on three continents, fully funded by the Russian government in a deal worth more than 80 billion rubles. That’s a lot of rubles! So how can you, an American combat veteran or intelligence specialist or really good paintball player get some of that cash?
Though there are over 60,000 job listings in the ClearanceJobs database, “mercenary” is not one of them. The generally accepted term of a mercenary army is a “private military company.” (The Wagner Group is officially “PMC Wagner.” The name of the company comes from the callsign of one of the group’s co-founders, Dmitriy Valeryevich Utkin. The callsign comes from the musician, and one of the group’s amazing nicknames is “the Orchestra.”)
The U.S. military makes extensive use of contractors, as any Iraq or Afghanistan veteran can attest. At its height, there were as many private contractors in Iraq as there were soldiers. Most were cooks, mailmen, and such, but (officially at least) even contractors hired to carry a rifle and run convoys were only handling security or training, and that remains the case for U.S.-based military contractors around the world.
FIGHTING FOR FOREIGN POWERS
If you are an American, you should first know that it is not illegal, strictly speaking, to be a mercenary and fight for a foreign country in a foreign conflict, but it’s not exactly legal, either. Basically, if you are going to (private) war against a country with which the United States is at peace, you are running up against, among other things, the Neutrality Acts, which forbid carrying out your own foreign policy. Still, the United States government would have to prosecute you, which given its generous support of Ukraine, seems unlikely.
You should also know that working as a mercenary does not mean you’re going to be part of a well-oiled machine. Last month, the Wall Street Journal published a harrowing account of Daniel Swift, a former Navy SEAL who went off to kill Russians in Ukraine. It wasn’t that he had a patriotic fervor for the Ukrainian cause, or a seething hatred of the Russians. The accounts of Swift’s life, and final days (he was killed in Ukraine), suggest he was simply good at combat, could no longer serve in the Navy, and was haunted by his experiences in the Global War on Terror.
DO NOT EXPECT STORMIN’ NORMAN TO LEAD YOU
What most struck me in that story was how competent Swift was in firefights, and how incompetent everyone else was. If a country is hiring you to fight its wars, or even if you volunteer and they accept you, chances are, you should not expect George Patton to be leading the campaign.
(The United States does work with third country nationals, and Special Forces does raise armies from indigenous populations, but that’s not the same as Uncle Sam recruiting Spanish guns-for-hire to kill the Taliban, or whatever. And though the U.S. and American companies make heavy use of private security, again, it’s not like they are using them in lieu of 10th Mountain Division. The Wagner Group has its own Air Force. It’s just not the same thing.)
As a mercenary, you are not protected by the Geneva Conventions, and international law is not on your side. In short, you are taking money to kill people, so when you are caught by whichever side you are being paid to kill, do not expect things to go well for you, and do not expect the U.S. State Department to work overtime to save you. And since the whole reason you are in that situation is because a weak military needs help and will take anyone, expect to be caught, at a minimum.
BUT WHAT ABOUT BLACKWATER
Companies whose profiles rose during the Global War on Terror—those like Blackwater, Academi, Triple Canopy, and Xe (these are all the same company, now)—do important work, and their American combat arms employees have seen combat, and will see it again. Such security companies are likely the closest you can get to being a mercenary as an American and be both on the right side of the law, and also part of a competent organization. If you hold a security clearance, all the better, because these companies interact often with Defense Department and intelligence agencies.
Before you try to get a job for a foreign PMC and try to overthrow Russia, though, you might want to wait to see how things work out for Prigozhin. The ending to that story, either way, will be enlightening.
