Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror

Pelton has a gift for getting people who should really know better to open up, like Chechnyan terrorists, Afghan warlords, ex-Special Forces mercenaries, and 21st century violence entrepreneurs like Erik Prince. Pelton also has a gift for getting in and out of dangerous places alive, pioneering the practice of “solo” journalism where one person does the writing, images, sound, etc. In Licensed to Kill, Pelton traces a journey through the shadowy world of the private military contractor, asking who these people are, and what this means for the future of warfare.

First, a little background. Mercenaries are about as old as warfare. The Carthaginians depended on mercenaries for their armies. Italian city-states warred with bands of paid soldiers called condottieri, literally meaning “contractor”. Privateers and private adventurers and officers seconded to local powers have a long history. The 21st century version comes from the spread of valuable corporate property into violent and loosely governed areas, and the push to privatize non-core governmental functions. Someone has to guard the oil rigs in disputed zones. Someone has to escort local politicians and supply convoys, and it isn’t going to be the US army. But where is the line between security and warfare?

One of Pelton’s key experiences is with the Mamba squad, a Blackwater unit that regularly transits the notorious Route Irish from Baghdad’s Green Zone to the Baghdad International Airport and back. Route Irish at the time was undoubtedly the most dangerous road in the world, with regular snipers, IEDs, and car bombs. The Blackwater team had three Mamba MRAPs and a soft-skinned cargo truck. Rules of engagement follow a four step process: hand signals, warning shots, shots to disable a vehicle, and then lethal fire. Every step beyond the first involves firing a machine gun in a populated area, and there’s no accountability or legal consequences for bullets fired. Contractors in Iraq had formal legal immunity, and then de facto legal immunity. Of course, getting it wrong means a violent death for you and your entire squad.

The frontline of Blackwater and similar units is typically former military. ex-Delta Force and SAS are at the top of the internal contractor pecking order, with other special forces, regular army and Marines, and ex-cops at the bottom (but cops know how to drive, and SEALs are notoriously trigger happy meatheads). A westerner at the time could earn perhaps $600 a day, which at the typical 90-on 30-off cycle and three deployments a year comes to $162,000 annually. The flipside is the risk of death or serious injury, with compensation of $68,000 to your survivors if that happens. Pelton mentions, but does not spend much time with, the third-party nationals Gurkhas, Chileans, and South Africans who take many of the same risks for a fraction of the cost, or local “campaigns” who bear arms against insurgencies composed of their fellow countrymen, which is the single major oversight of the book.

Contractors have a certain macho style, but by and large they’re depicted as ordinary dudes who want to make money and go home. By comparison, the leadership, Erik Prince and Simon Mann and Tim Spicer, of the British Executive Outcomes/Sandline, are legitimate freaks, with a vision of Western imperialism and corporate profit. Private Military Companies serve to do what the government needs done, but mushy and morally muddled liberal democracies are unwilling to do directly.

One open question is where exactly the money goes. Hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in poorly supervised contracts have gone to PMCs for services in Iraq and Afghanistan, at prices that the companies argue have saved the US taxpayer an immense amount, while also making the owners and investors immensely wealthy. Likely, the savings come from cutting corners. In the infamous Blackwater Bridge incident in Falluja, a convoy escorting commercial kitchen equipment was sent into town without a risk assessment, proper briefing, without armored vehicles, and with half the gunners promised. Four Blackwater contractors died trying to move an oven.

Politically, PMCs have been involved in coup attempts in the 3rd world, with Equatorial Guinea and Papua New Guinea having attempted regime changes spearheaded by a mercenary group. No local country wants heavily armed and unaccountable foreigners roaming around. The shadowy and deniable world of contractors creates space for outright scam artists, like Jack Idema, who set up a private prison in Afghanistan and started kidnapping and torturing random Afghans while claiming he was working for the CIA.

Pelton tells a thrilling story, and mostly lets the subjects speak in their own words. He got closer than typical journalistic ethics allow (he later edited and substantially rewrote Erik Prince’s autobiography), but this neutrality favorably contrasts to say, P. W. Singer, who was writing about PMCs at the same time and pointedly not going to Iraq. From the distance of two decades, Pelton notes that the contractors remind him a lot of the Mujahideen of the 1980s Soviet-Afghan War, and he wonders what will happen when the violent men return home.

It’s nightmarish, but the converse is that while Blackwater and other PMCs likely killed a lot of Iraqis, they didn’t run Abu Ghraib, they didn’t level Fallujah, and direct government employees are handling plenty of 2025 era crimes against humanity. Somehow events turned out worse than Pelton’s worst case scenario.