1968
Sean McFate
Former U.S. Army paratrooper (82nd Airborne) turned Executive Outcomes / DynCorp contractor in Africa in the late 1990s and early 2000s, turned professor at the National Defense University and Georgetown School of Foreign Service. McFate is one of the few academic voices on private military force whose biography includes substantial time inside the industry — most of the canonical PMC literature is written from the outside, often with a normative posture against the form.
Stake§
McFate writes from a position broadly sympathetic to the PMC industry and to the broader thesis that the Westphalian state monopoly on force is dissolving into a neomedieval order. He argues for normalising rather than restricting the practice, on the ground that the form will exist whatever the regulatory posture and is better managed under explicit legal frameworks than under denial. Critics of the PMC literature read this as a brief for the industry; sympathetic readers read it as a corrective to academic moralism that fails to engage with how the industry actually works.
McFate's main contribution to the chartered-violence literature is the revival of neomedievalism as the operative analytic frame for the early- twenty-first-century international order. The thesis was originally Hedley Bull's (in The Anarchical Society, 1977); McFate sharpens it and ties it specifically to the PMC question. Read alongside P.W. Singer's Corporate Warriors and Mary Kaldor's New and Old Wars, McFate sits as the inside voice of the three.
His later book Goliath: Why the West Isn't Winning Wars and What We Need to Do About It (2019) extends the argument into a broader strategic critique of Western military doctrine. For the chartered-violence corpus, The Modern Mercenary is the relevant text.