The history of conflict has often married innovation with tradition. Through centuries past and present, kings, queens, rebels, merchants, war lords and city states have looked to retain, usurp, control, conquer and defend their interests using military might. One such example is that of the Private Military Company (PMC), often referred to simply as mercenaries. From the ferocity of the Swiss Companies in the 16th century - "Where are my Switzers? Let them guard the door"- to the British East India Company's own forces, PMCs have been a feature, not a bug, of most warfare throughout history. Rather than their increased use and deployment since the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns of the early 2000s being an anomaly, this marks a return to how nations and groups have fought wars for the better part of human history.
Why then has Britain forgotten this? Mercenaries have weaved in and out of British history for over a thousand years, yet the use of PMCs by successive British governments has flatlined. Why?
On a bracingly cold February morning two decades ago, Britain's Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs shuffled around his office overlooking St James Park. His team ran over the details one final time in hushed voices, and then it went live: a landmark British assessment of the arguments for and against regulating PMCs. The issue had been forced upon Jack Straw primarily thanks to a dragging multi-year scandal around British PMC Sandline International. Led by two former British soldiers, Sandline was caught selling weapons to Sierra Leone while the nation was under a United Nations embargo. Embarrassingly in theory for the British state, the intelligence services and Foreign Office appeared to have been aware - and even endorsed - the whole affair. As is typical in British politics, much hand wringing and finger pointing ensued, with core lessons ignored rather than innovated upon.
Driven by heavy criticism and a demand for clarity from Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee before the turn of the millennium, the Foreign Office eventually published an examination of PMCs. Opening the 50-page offering with Tolstoy's analysis that "war is not polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand and not play at war", the Foreign Secretary made good on his promise not to "propose a policy." This was simply an exercise in mapping out Britain's options: none of which the Government enacted upon.
Having outlined the history of PMCs, the report made some salient points on the future of these companies. It observed that "on the demand side, a number - perhaps a growing number - of countries will continue to have legitimate needs but inadequate capabilities. If recent trends persist we may expect there to be a number of weak governments who will have to deal with problems of internal instability." In other areas, it read the future incorrectly, estimating that "there is little risk of a return to the circumstances of the 17th and 18th centuries when privateers were hard to distinguish from pirates, and Corporations commanded armies that could threaten states." The Green Paper then delved into a number of different nuanced operations for regulation.
And that was it. In the two decades since, the British Government has remained reluctant to utilise PMCs innovatively, despite a long history of the state deploying these cohorts to protect their interests at home and abroad. Constrained by legal frameworks, scarred by the behaviour of American outfits during the War on Terror, beholden to international agreements which other major powers chose not to sign, and underpinned by a core belief that the international liberal alliance would work in its favour for the coming decades, Britain's foreign policy entrepreneurship stagnated. Rather than applying a level of situational awareness, it ceded ground to Russia's Wagner Group and the United States' Blackwater in the grey areas between kinetic warfare and state implementation across vital countries that matter to the UK's economic security, while its defence budget was neutered at home.
The war in Ukraine has sharpened Parliament's attention on PMCs for the first time since the War on Terror. For months, Wagner Group and its exploits and atrocities littered the speeches of politicians and front pages of Westminster's usually parochial foreign affairs coverage. Sanctions were levied, inquiries initiated. In a Foreign Affairs Committee examination of the group, politicians again explicitly noted the PMC sector is "likely to be a growth industry, with more Governments seeking to create PMCs to secure their geopolitical and economic interests."
This analysis mirrors that found in a rather useful document spawned from the deepest caverns of the Ministry of Defence in late 2024. Over nearly 500 pages, its internal team of analysts tried to loosely forecast what the world could look like by 2055. While the usual themes of climate change, technology, and trade were covered at length, they noted: "The impact of powerful private military and security companies, being tools for influence and power projection, is likely to increase, and they will potentially play independent roles with growing geopolitical shaping power in their own right." Furthermore, "Private military and security companies are likely to continue to expand further and may even replace traditional defence and law enforcement entities in some states." In other words: this is a growth sector which allows countries to extend their geopolitical and economic interests and influence. The proof of this has already been borne out. As McFate notes, the Afghanistan war was the first in recent history where contractors outnumbered deployed American soldiers on the ground. The future pondered in this MoD report is already the past.
Yet despite these obviously correct observations, the British elite's proposed answer was simply to push for more regulation and monitoring. Such intellectual laziness on the value of creating conditions for successful PMCs potentially stems from several factors: perceived embarrassment over Sandline International, a 'good chap' approach to foreign policy that relies on so-called 'international rules and norms' dated before the invention of Facebook, an ignorance as to what PMCs do, and a heavy dose of cognitive dissonance. Beyond being a dereliction of basic duty, this represents a total failure to objectively analyse why these groups get access in key markets that have shut the door on British interests, and then to ask how Britain could muscle them out.
Let us imagine that the British state begins to see the strategic advantage of having one or more new PMCs emerge for this new era of geopolitics and conflict. What, broadly speaking, are the arguments for and against this strategic choice? In his seminal book on PMCs, former mercenary Sean McFate notes that much of what is written about these groups, from the supposed salaries of their employees through to the casualty count they accrue in conflict, is factually incorrect or exaggerated beyond use; a point Straw's report raised two a decade earlier, stating "Information about private military activity abroad is, perhaps not surprisingly, hard to obtain and is often unreliable. One man's volunteer is another man's mercenary." McFate splits PMCs into two rough categories: mercenaries and military enterprises. The former "can conduct autonomous military campaigns, offensive operations, and force projection", while the latter "raise armies rather than command them…this type of conflict entrepreneur trains equips and fields whole regiments to fight for their clients." He argues that most PMCs fall into this latter category.
For as long as the ability to raise a small private force has existed, critics - most famously Nicollò Machiavelli - have warned of the possibility of these forces turning on their employer if the moment arises. McFate acknowledges this in his work, but argues that while a small number of these instances have occurred, the market principle for a PMC is to generate sustained long term business. As he notes, "in an open market for force, mercenaries are incentivised to honor their contracts in order to build a positive professional reputation and attract future business." Likewise, the allegation that mercenaries are bloodthirsty thugs "is unfair", McFate claims. Throughout history, "the marketplace tends to discipline bad mercenaries," he notes, citing examples including Blackwater's Nisour Square incident leading to the firm's contract with the State Department not being renewed. Finally, there are clear risks around the incentivises for a PMC to prolong conflict (or even threaten to start one in order to extort payment, as the condottieri did in Italy in the 14th century) to keep a profitable contract being renewed, the possibility that the corporation may profit information asymmetry, and that the leadership may exaggerate the reality to the employer in a bid to raise the total costs of the operation. These risks are all valid, but none are new.
So what about the other side of the ledger? Here, the British state must invoke realpolitik in its assessment. First, what sort of conflict does the UK believe it will potentially have to be caught in over the coming decade? Will they be traditional wars with British troops on the ground or in the seas and skies? Or could they be in grey areas where a level of plausible deniability can protect political capital and a hedge in the event of a failure? When considering this, strategists should keep one eye on Taiwan, but another on the Sub-Saharan belt in Africa, which seems likely to be the next spawning point for radical Islamist attacks on British near and far security interests. As McFate notes, "hiring contractors in domestically unpopular wars also allows the government to dodge national political debates over whether the wars should end." Second, PMCs can help add physical bulk to deployment regions at a time where Britain's military is trying and failing to recruit. While politicians discuss the concept of forcing young Britons to join compulsory national service, a parallel effort to identify gaps in the defence posture and where PMCs could aid should be initiated. Third, and worth thinking about from an industrial point of view, is the ability to potentially integrate new defence technologies into a PMC, allowing them to test products in conflict zones. British defence companies are already producing autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons that would have looked like sci-fi dreams 20 years ago: how could they be integrated into a PMC overseas?
With the above in mind, and without endorsing its appalling behaviour, Britain's political and military elite should be dissecting the workings of Wagner. The group's success lay not merely in its military capabilities and close links to Russian leadership, but in its integrated approach, which combined kinetic operations with political consultancy, media manipulation, and resource extraction. For example, Wagner consultants were drafted to help Madagascar's incumbent President Hery Rajaonarimampianina's re-election campaign. Seeing his unpopularity, they switched sides several times, settling on winning candidate Andry Rajoelina, with the partial aim of winning mining contracts. Further inland on the continent, Wagner brokered what would become a UN-supported Central African Republic peace deal. As John Lechner notes in his book on Wagner, 'Death is Our Business', this was obtained thanks to its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin giving out bribes including $60,000 in cash, a box of Turkish pistols and 200 Android phones to key officials, tallying up to $1 million or so in total.
Like Wagner, a new British PMC could maintain specialist consultancy wings to advise on election strategies, governance reform, and commodity extraction. Unlike Wagner, it would operate with a higher level of integrity and transparency, under the arms length guiding remit of the British state. This legitimacy would be a strong asset in competing for contracts with governments wary of Wagner-style rogue operators.
The strategic case for taking a new look into British Private Military Companies should combine three powerful assets to exert leverage in key theatres around the world: strategic gravitas and direction, private-military innovation, and access to the Commonwealth. Going off the British establishment's own assessments alone, three observations can be extrapolated.
First, the PMC sector has already extended the geopolitical interests and leverage of other countries, including in ways detrimental to British interests; Second, this is a growth sector, where countries can use PMCs to further their own interests geopolitically and economically; Third, Britain still wants to play an active role in the world, even under constrained fiscal requirements.
So how could Britain utilise PMCs to achieve tangible results under these three conditions?
To answer this, we must ask: what is Britain's unique advantage? Here, Britain has what Washington, Moscow, nor Beijing do not: a Commonwealth. This collection of 56 nations spreads across the globe, covering some of the most essential chokepoints relevant to British trade and security interests. Britain already has existing security partnerships with many of them and deeply developed commercial and diplomatic relations with many more.
Initially, Britain should focus on producing the conditions to create a PMC that focuses on one specific and largely overlooked issue: illegal fishing. Many Commonwealth countries are plagued with "illegal fishing in [their] exclusive economic zones [EEZ] [and] lack the ability to monitor or police their maritime claims effectively." Every year these developing countries lose hundreds of tonnes of catch and hundreds of millions of dollars of cash flow to illegal fishing, most of which is undertaken by fleets from three or four major nations, led by China. This is going to increase as both a source of tension and income for illegal fishing, as the MoD's report notes, "Illicit activities, including illegal fishing in exclusive economic zones, will increase in frequency, particularly where states lack the ability to monitor or police their maritime claims effectively. Some states may resort to technology, big data and partnerships with external actors, including states and private military and security companies, to support them where their own domestic monitoring capabilities are lacking."
Next, the PMC should be integrated into the UK's current private sector defence ecosystem, and must begin to acquire autonomous and semi-autonomous water-borne vehicles, staffed and overseen by former British naval teams. In doing so, it should be supported with a loan underwritten by the British Government, or through AUKUS Pillar II funds. As it grows, this PMC should focus on building proprietary designs in Britain's historied and legendary shipping hubs with current British defence firms.
This PMC should initially be leased to Commonwealth nations at a fraction of the amount it currently costs them to patrol their own EEZs. Maritime and coastal patrols with the sign off from the leaders of those countries furthers Britain's interests: protecting key trade routes, bringing money in from leasing the PMC and on debt repayment, and on the ground (or water) data on movements of other groups in the area. It is worth noting that many of these countries want things from Britain: access to our economy, education system, partnerships, immigration carve outs, technologies, and so on. Each of these represent a point of leverage to help smooth the PMC's entry into their markets and territories. Want to avoid sanctions being placed on your leadership for not taking back illegal immigrants? Consider contracting the PMC to work with your coastguards, building resilience and preserving jobs, in turn limiting the source of economic migration in the first place.
This modest start would build trust with local governments whilst demonstrating capability, strengthening Britain's ties with its Commonwealth partners in the process. Over time, the mandate could expand to include counter-narcotics operations, anti-piracy patrols, and eventually more complex stabilisation missions in failed states where Britain has interests but cannot risk political capital on direct military intervention. The PMC itself could build depth across its bench, bringing on political consultants and in-house scientists, aimed at working on topical issues in contracting countries.
On conflict and training, no fewer than four Commonwealth countries currently border nations that have seen coups since 2020, with many now serving as furnaces for radical Islamist groups. Here, a British PMC could begin to fill the vacuum left by French forces leaving the region. The PMC could be utilised in areas where the UK lacks full authority to send military forces directly, but where British assets, supply chains, or strategic interests require protection - again, at the invitation of the host nation.
Beyond the raw commercial argument for leasing the PMC to Commonwealth governments are ideas deeply rooted in Britain's naval history. In 1911, prominent naval historian and strategic thinker Sir Julian Corbett published Some Principles of Maritime Strategy. If Carl von Clausewitz's work can be thought of as strategy for land war, Corbett presented a sophisticated maritime partnering vision. Among other concepts, Corbettian thinking stressed the power of forcing an enemy into strategic choices they would otherwise avoid. He demonstrated this through the example of the 1809 Walcheren expedition, which was often dismissed by historians at the time as a costly failure. While the expedition itself failed tactically, riddled by disease among other calamities, Corbett's assessment was that its strategic threat was so significant that it forced Napoleon Bonaparte to completely reconsider his coastal defence arrangements. As Corbett quotes the French leader himself as saying: "With 30,000 men in transports at the Downs, the English can paralyze 300,000 of my army, and that will reduce us to the rank of a second-class Power." The mere possibility of British amphibious operations compelled Napoleon to divert enormous resources to coastal defence, demonstrating how maritime powers could achieve strategic economy by using minimal forces to create maximum enemy dispersion. What diversions could a British PMC achieve if utilised in a similar strategic fashion?