Despite the straightforward analytic conclusions that the DRV had a deep reservoir of will to fight, without a definition or model of will to fight the CIA assessments came across as subjective.
As a result — despite persistent warning to policymakers — the United States and General William Westmoreland sought to break the will of DRV leaders through measured escalation and by inflicting casualties. By , U. The life or death of a hundred, a thousand, tens of thousands of human beings, even our compatriots, means little. Westmoreland was wrong to count on his superior firepower to grind us down.
There is no way to accurately quantify will to fight or delineate its precise value. But will to fight can be more clearly understood and practicably applied.
RAND's research offers a starting point. As a first step to understand will to fight, the RAND team undertook a literature review of more than published works, reviewed U. The RAND team found that there is no generally accepted American or allied definition, explanation, or model of will to fight. This means that the U. Definitions don't necessarily solve problems, but they are a useful and necessary starting point for mutual understanding.
RAND offers definitions for both military and national will to fight. Soldiers and the units they form develop the disposition to fight or not fight, and to act or not to act, when fearing death. Disposition is essentially likelihood : Soldiers are more or less likely to fight or run, to fight aggressively or passively, to follow orders or break, run, or surrender. Influenced by this disposition, soldiers make critical decisions on the frontline, or even while far removed from the battlefield, where dedication to the mission can be in question.
The purposes of the military will to fight report and the military unit-organizational model are to improve understanding of disposition to fight. While we cannot predict human behavior or decisions, we can significantly improve our understanding of will to fight by assessing and analyzing disposition, which allows for an estimation of overall military unit effectiveness and forecasting of behavior.
Wars rarely end simply because one military destroys another. Government leaders determine how and when wars end, and they may have to decide many times during a conflict whether their country should continue enduring risk and sacrifice or whether it is time to stop fighting. Tangible factors, such as remaining numbers of weapons and troops, are obviously part of the decision calculus, but it is often less-tangible political and economic variables that ultimately determine what might be called national will to fight.
Although the range of actors relevant to national will includes citizens, military leaders, media, and foreign officials, we focused on governments and, in the process, accounted for the interplay of these and other actors. Ultimately, governments make the decisions about war. Their will is reflected in the political decisions they make during a conflict to either continue or stop fighting. At the national level, we define fighting to include not only military force but also the use of all aspects of national power to achieve particular political objectives.
The nine-part multimethod research effort provided the foundation to develop two will-to-fight models that are explanatory, exploratory, and portable. They can explain and help forecast will to fight. They can be used to explore various aspects of will to fight, and in turn be improved through new learning.
Portability means that the models must be applied using a unique approach for each case, providing for flexibility. The will-to-fight models — described in more depth on pages 10—13 — are a starting point to provide military and civilian leaders, planners, advisers, and intelligence analysts with a common starting point for deeper understanding of military and national will to fight.
The models are essentially a tool to open the door for better planning, operations, advising, intelligence, wargaming, simulation, and, with further research, improved training and education of U. Computer simulation, tabletop exercises, and wargames can help bring clarity to complex issues and concepts, such as will to fight. Results from our analysis of 62 existing wargames and simulations, interviews with designers and program managers, and game and simulation testing showed that will to fight is inadequately represented in official military models.
If will to fight is one of the most important factors in war, and if it is absent or poorly represented in military gaming and simulation, then there is a dangerous gap in existing military games and simulations.
It is possible that results from official military games and simulations are misleading, and have been for quite some time. Existing commercial examples, experimental models, and the new RAND Arroyo Center model can help fill the gap in short order. The team integrated the RAND military unit will-to-fight model and a trait-state psychological behavioral model into the U. Instead of always obeying orders, and never feeling fear, hiding, or running, the supersoldiers now could experience anxiety, anger, and visceral reactions to gunfire.
The results were unsurprising. Sometimes soldiers fought hard, but sometimes they took cover or ran away. Human behavior went from unfailingly predictable to uncertain, bringing the simulation one step closer to reality.
Results from RAND's force-on-force combat simulation experiments suggest that adding a will-to-fight component always, and sometimes significantly, changes outcomes. Can the United States really tell Russia not to use private military troops in Syria? No, it cannot. New consumers are appearing everywhere, seeking security in an insecure world: oil and mining companies guarding their drill sites against militias, shipping lines defending their vessels against pirates, humanitarian organizations protecting their workers in dangerous locations, oligarchs who need professional muscle, countries that want to wage proxy wars, regimes fighting civil wars, guerrillas fighting back, and the super rich for any reason you can think of, no matter how petty.
The mercenary trade is growing because mercenaries offer what clients want. It is simple supply and demand. When you want to keep a secret, sometimes the private sector is murkier than government agencies. In the United States, for example, researchers possess tools to investigate public sector actors, such as the military and CIA, using the Freedom of Information Act or public hearings on Capitol Hill.
Leakers are ubiquitous in Washington and rarely held accountable. Not so in the private sector. These firms fire employees who talk to the press, and sometimes large firms threaten media outlets with multimillion-dollar lawsuits to chill free press.
Government agencies do not do this, as evidenced by the landslide of military memoirs of secret operations during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. DOD did nothing. At least, not immediately. Government, but Owen was not tried as a felon for releasing classified information. If you want to keep a government secret, sometimes the private sector is better than the Pentagon or CIA.
This is attractive to some officials and a way of circumventing democratic accountability of the Armed Forces. For example, take the problem of mission creep. By , that number creeped to 9, troops, supported by more than 26, contractors—nearly a 3 to 1 ratio. Plausible deniability is another reason why the industry is flourishing.
When a job is too politically risky, contractors are sometimes used because they can be disavowed if the mission fails. Not so with the CIA or military. Special operations forces and CIA operatives do not get left behind, and this can be embarrassing for a nation caught running covert operations. Contractors can be abandoned with minimal political fallout. Americans do not fuss over contractor casualties, unlike dead Marines. Tellingly, Senator Obama sponsored a bill in to make armed contractors more accountable, a bill that President Obama later ignored.
Nigeria initially repudiated media reports of them employing mercenaries against Boko Haram, until it became too difficult to deny. Contractors are invisible people, making them a stealth weapon in more ways than one. Contractors are also cheaper, just as they have been for thousands of years. The cost of these savings may come at a high price.
Mercenaries are not like army reservists, to be used only when you need them. Military contractors do not reintegrate into the civilian workforce after a war but instead look for new employers because they are profit-maximizing entities.
Worse, linking profit motive with killing encourages more war and suffering, making another Nisour Square incident inevitable. There are many reasons why private military contractors are a growth industry, but most of them are dubious. Forty years ago, the idea of using armed contractors was anathema to policymakers.
Now it is routine. This is not a Democratic versus Republican issue, but an American one. Since the s, Presidents of both parties have used military contractors.
More disturbing, others around the world are imitating this model, and it is evolving into a global free market for force. Little is publicly known about the cagey world of mercenaries. Government intelligence agencies ignore them. Reporters are rarely able to interview mercenaries and can only record events surrounding the industry. Academics depend almost entirely on the work of journalists for their analyses and too often contort their findings with inappropriate theory.
What follows is an optic into the mercenary world. It is not comprehensive, but such a study is not feasible. Mercenaries are an illicit economy, like drug-traffickers and terrorist networks, and they resist investigation. Mercenaries are not the caricatures depicted in movies. They are complex people, like all people. It is true that some seek the lifestyle because they want to go rogue, but most do not.
When I was in the field, I met guns for hire with all sorts of stories: some wanted adventure, others needed a paycheck, a lot were more comfortable with war than peace, a few wished to help others amazing but true , and many just did not have a life plan. Being a military contractor has its practical appeals, too. A lot of American troops were deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, their home life was imploding: wife living with another man and filing for divorce, kids not recognizing their dad, personal bankruptcy, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Rates of suicide, divorce, and domestic violence spiked among Servicemembers during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. A lot of American contractors I met signed up because they wanted their life back. Almost all mercenaries have military or national police backgrounds. There are no mercenary basic training camps, so everyone starts somewhere else, usually in a national army. Some of the larger military companies are associated with particular military units.
In the U. A lot of military firms embed dog whistles to signal their credentials to attract high-end troops. Modern soldiers of fortune have a choice between overt or covert mercenary groups, and it is uncertain which one will dominate. This is important because it may influence future war, specifically who, how, and why people fight.
Overt private warriors seek legitimacy and wish to work in the open. They rebuff the mercenary label and call themselves private security companies, advocating full transparency and accountability according to the International Organization for Standardization ISO and ISO 39 business standards.
Another facilitating organization is the International Code of Conduct Association ICOCA , a Swiss initiative that establishes industry standards that comply with human rights and international law. Government and big oil companies are more likely to hire you. However, overt actors may disappear. Or, put another way, it is busywork good for public relations and little else.
A few CEOs confided in me their frustration with the certification process as too much burden for too little reward. Like corporate social responsibility, companies will abandon these efforts if the cost-benefit ratio turns negative. The overt business model is struggling, as marquee clients do not seem more likely to hire certified security providers. This is driving the entire industry underground, as it seeks new opportunities from clients not interested in transparency.
War could get medieval. The only way to prevent this future is counterintuitive. Governments, international organizations, NGOs, and other clients who claim they want a responsible private security sector should consider employing overt actors, rather than let them literally slip to the dark side. Customers can pool their market power, like a cartel, to enforce their best practices. This would shape the industry in fundamental ways, but this opportunity is fading.
The covert side of the market for force is far more dangerous. Mercenaries are hired for plausible deniability and therefore operate in the shadows. Few know the identity of the mercenaries operating in Syria, Ukraine, Nigeria, Yemen, and elsewhere. Fewer still know who exactly retained them and what they paid. Underground soldiers of fortune are employed for many reasons.
Some consumers, like oil companies, want mercenaries because they have no security forces of their own and renting them may be preferable to relying on corrupt and incompetent host nation forces. Others, like Nigeria, have security forces but need a niche capability, such as Mil Mi Hind attack helicopters or special operations forces teams. Still, others hire mercenaries to do things they do not want their own people doing, like human rights abuse.
Historically, plausible deniability has always been a strong selling point of soldiers for hire. How do you hire mercenaries? Overt actors seek public channels, such as their Web site and Internet job sites. Covert operations are a word-of-mouth business. Mercenaries form informal networks of shared military background, contacts, cultural identity, language, and so forth. When you make a deal with a client and initiate an operation, you recruit by tapping your network. Trusted colleagues also recruit and vouch for their hires.
Contrary to Hollywood depictions, reputation is the primary currency in the mercenary world, with money second. Those who forget this get burned.
In , mercenaries attempted a takeover of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea. Known as the Wonga Coup, it failed because of poor operational security. An individual recruited for the coup told South African, British, and American authorities of the plan, leading to the arrest of most of the mercenaries. A key problem in a word-of-mouth business are charlatans, and the mercenary world has many.
Good recruiters can spot them with a few qualifying questions, such as: What unit were you in? What years? Who was your commander? What operations did you conduct? Did you know Sergeant Bill Smith? What was he like? Also, detailed questions about training works well.
For example, if someone claims they graduated from the U. You cannot fake it. However, this method does not scale well for large recruitment drives. There are two ways to find work as a covert mercenary.
When you make a deal with a client and initiate an operation, you first recruit by tapping your network. Mercenaries form informal networks based on shared military background, contacts, cultural identity, language, and so forth. China has a small market share but could dominate the industry by sheer numbers should it grow into an active network. Alternatively, a lone soldier of fortune could show up at a conflict market war zone and look for vacancies.
Some hope Latin America might open up, given the drug wars, or the UN might hire peacekeepers. Unfortunately, the UN suffers a bad reputation as a delinquent payer. However, this can be a dodgy way to find work. It is better to be pulled into a contract by a trusted associate than submitting to happenstance.
Worse, you could be mistaken for a journalist going undercover for a story. Covert mercenaries hug the darkness and may thump those who threaten to expose them. Conflict areas are not known for their rule of law, and few ask about people who disappear.
Outside observers often assume mercenaries get paid huge sums of money. This is inaccurate. Overt actors pay less than covert ones but offer steadier work. During the Iraq War, contractors typically made about twice their old military salary, which is not much if you think about the risks. For example, wounded contractors get immediate first aid but are otherwise sent home to fend for themselves. Nor do contractors enjoy retirement or veteran benefits.
The money on the covert side is bigger, but so are the risks. An elite mercenary can earn four figures a week—usually in U. One of the oldest problems of the trade is contract enforcement. In other words, getting paid. There are no courts to sue in, and consequently mercenaries and their masters swindle each other. The Middle Ages and early Renaissance were full of such scandal, as Machiavelli attests.
Today, some mercenaries and clients overcome the problem of trust by forming joint ventures in mutual business interests. This may sound odd but it aligns their profit motives. More recently, the Syrian government offered oil and mining concessions to Russian oil companies and their mercenaries, such as Wagner Group, on the condition that they liberate them from IS.
Going into business together creates a sticky bond that helps guarantee good behavior all around. In truth, the distance between overt and covert actors is minimal: If you can do one, then you can do the other. The qualifications are similar and the core personnel swappable. The main difference between them is the nature of contract and market circumstances.
Few have heard of private intelligence companies, and that is by design. They offer investigative services for corporate due diligence or litigation support. However, a few are agents of plausible deniability, providing rare skills and acting as cut outs for clients. Because of this they shun publicity and advertise by word of mouth with a minimal Web presence.
These are not Ph. Who needs their own CIA? Anyone dealing in dangerous places where everyone lies to you—for example, oil companies operating in the Middle East or multinational corporations working in Africa. The financial services industry hires them for tough due diligence investigations in places such as Nigeria or Russia, where corruption is endemic. Insurance companies use them for political risk analysis, especially regarding foreign country stability, nationalization of client assets, and likelihood of armed conflict.
Law firms retain them for litigation support, and the super wealthy hire them for whatever they want. They are sometimes hired to spy on competitors and perform dirty tricks. Governments are the one client this industry will refuse. Private intelligence companies support commercial diplomacy that minimizes official involvement, and accepting government contracts would cost them private-sector customers.
In terms of staff, most private intelligence agencies are small. Many are founded by ex-spooks, but their core staff often includes former journalists, FBI investigators, corporate lawyers, ex-military, and fresh college graduates. Stringers can range from a retired CIA chief of station to an overseas journalist to a street urchin.
Fees are expensive; a monthly retainer will cost you four to five figures and sometimes more, not including expenses. What private intelligence companies can accomplish is impressive and disturbing in equal measure. Like military companies, private intelligence firms shroud their offerings in euphemisms such as competitive intelligence, risk consulting, security management, strategic advisory services, exotic due diligence, and risk avoidance.
Needless to say, these firms operate in the moral and legal gray areas of world affairs, similar to mercenaries. Perhaps this is one of the gravitational pulls between the two industries. What little the public knows about private intelligence comes from their failures, which often makes national news.
While not the best metric of success, it does provide insight into what these firms do:. These are the failures of private intelligence; their successes are impressive and terrifying. Expect both the mercenary and private intelligence industries to grow commensurately with wealthy nonstate actors in the coming decades. The global 1 percent is evolving into a new class of world power as military and intelligence capabilities are privatized and available in the marketplace. Already they are more powerful than most states.
Can anyone really argue that Gabon is more influential in world affairs than ExxonMobil simply because it is a state? Now ExxonMobil can have its own intelligence service and army too, making it even more powerful. This introduces the possibility of wars without states—private wars—a concept inconceivable to most national security leaders. This is the danger.
You cannot win wars you do not understand. Privatizing war distorts warfare in shocking ways. If conflict is commoditized, then the logic of the marketplace and the strategies of the souk apply to war. A souk is an Arab open market, and it is a good analogy for how private wars work. In a souk, everything is up for sale and must be bartered. Anything goes. Fraud, deception, deceit, and hard bargaining are the watchwords. But so are value, rare finds, and exotic merchandise.
Treasures are to be had, and for cheap—if one knows what one is doing. If not, expect to be scammed; this unregulated space is not for amateurs. There are no refunds, returns, or exchanges.
Privatizing war changes warfare in dangerous ways. First, private war has its own logic: Clausewitz meets Adam Smith, the father of economics. For-profit warriors are not bound by political considerations or patriotism, one of their chief selling points. They are market actors and their main restraint is not the laws of war but the laws of economics. The implications of this are far-reaching. This introduces new strategic possibilities known to CEOs but alien to generals, putting us at risk.
Second, private war lowers the barriers to entry for war. Mercenaries allow clients to fight without having their own blood on the gambling table, and this creates moral hazard among consumers. Mercenaries are rented forces, and clients may be more carefree about going to war if their people do not have to bleed. Mercenary leaders might not care either if they do not have to fight themselves and instead order others into combat. Private warriors are expendable humans, and this emboldens recklessness that could start and elongate wars.
Third, private war breeds war. It is simple supply and demand as mercenaries and their masters feed off each other. The marketplace works like any other: Mercenaries and clients seek each other out, negotiate prices, and wage war for private gain.
This prompts other buyers to do the same in self-defense. As soldiers of fortune flood the market, the price for their services drops and new buyers hire them for additional private wars. Clausewitz observed that the nature of absolute war is escalation; privatized warfare exemplifies this because it is fueled by the profit motive.
On the supply side, mercenaries do not want to work themselves out of a job. Instead, they are incentivized to start and elongate conflicts for profit. Out-of-work mercenaries become marauders, preying on the countryside for sustenance and artificially generating demand for their services. Sometimes they engage in racketeering and extortion of the defenseless. There is abundant historical evidence for this.
On the demand side, the availability of mercenaries means buyers who had not previously contemplated military action can now do so. The world has already seen multinational corporations, governments, and millionaires hire mercenaries in the past decade; that was not the case two decades ago.
The availability of private force lowers the barriers of entry into armed conflict for those who can afford it, tempting even more war. Fourth, private war creates a security dilemma.
In such a dangerous environment buyers retain mercenaries for purely defensive purposes, but this can backfire. Other buyers watch this and suspect the worst, namely a surprise attack, and procure twice as many mercenaries for protection. This prompts the first buyer, who also assumes the worst, to buy even more mercenaries, and soon an arms race ensues. The danger is when all sides escalate and they unleash their forces.
This lateral escalation creates a security dilemma because people who do not wish to fight end up doing so anyway. More belligerents are possible in private wars compared to public ones, and therefore there is more chance of this happening. Fifth, weak contract enforcement and double-crossing is the bane of private warfare. When mercenaries and their masters have a dispute, there are no courts of law to sue for breach of contract. Instead, things are settled by blood and treachery.
Buyers who do not pay their bills may become victims of their own mercenaries unless they hire a bigger mercenary outfit to chase them off. But this also invites bigger problems. Since there are no laws of war in private warfare, market failure in this context means savagery.
Wars without states is the antithesis of conventional warfare and why modern militaries are unprepared for it. Private warfare has been with us for millennia, even though it is forgotten by modern strategists.
In a free market for force, business strategies meld with military ones. In other words, private wars are driven less by politics than by political economy. Owing to this nuance, the conventional strategic thinker will have problems identifying private wars, much less devising strategies to defeat them.
Not all wars without states will be marketized, but many will. Some wars will be political, fought by national armies or insurgents, but they might turn to mercenary help as it becomes available. Modern strategic thought has no logic or grammar for private war; its goals might not even be political in nature.
This must be remedied because private warfare is an emerging trend. In terms of strategy for private war, the Italian Wars — are instructive. They were dominated by mercenaries since no one could afford their own standing army. Machiavelli tried this and Florence paid for his imprudence in blood.
The Italian Wars represent private warfare in extremis , but maximal examples make phenomenon more transparent. Still, the parallels between then and now are striking. Both modern and early contractors sold their services to the highest or most powerful bidder for profit and operated in military units rather than as lone wolf mercenaries often depicted by Hollywood.
Both filled their ranks with professional men of arms drawn from different countries and loyal primarily to the paycheck. Both have functioned as private armies, usually offering land-based combat skills rather than naval or aerial capabilities and deploying force in a military manner rather than as law enforcement or police.
We use words like acceleration , constant speed and stationary to describe motion. Forces acting on a body cause the motion of that body to change. Newton's First Law and Second Law explain the different types of motion. The motion of all objects that are speeding up, slowing down or changing direction is governed by Newton's Second Law of Motion.
In Physics, we use Newton's Second Law to explain different types of motion and to do calculations involving force, mass and acceleration.
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