The Modern Mercenary — Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order

Sean McFate (b. 1968) wrote The Modern Mercenary out of a biography that no other major author on the subject shares: a former U.S. Army paratrooper (82nd Airborne) who then worked as a contractor for DynCorp International and Executive Outcomes-style operators in Africa in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before moving into academic positions at the National Defense University and Georgetown's School of Foreign Service. The book reads partly as analysis and partly as testimony — the chapters on Liberia and Somalia draw on his own contracting work — and that mix is its principal strength and its principal vulnerability.

Oxford University Press published the book in 2014 as an academic-trade title (paperback edition 2017). The editorial filter is OUP-standard and the prose is accessible to a policy and graduate audience. Reviews were mixed-positive: praise for the rare insider-academic combination and for the readable historical analysis, criticism aimed at the way the historical and theoretical chapters lean on selectively-chosen parallels. The H-Net and Project MUSE reviews note that the case chapters are valuable as primary-source accounts while the quasi-historical chapters are the weakest part of the argument.

McFate's central analytic move is to revive neomedievalism — Hedley Bull's 1977 thesis in The Anarchical Society that the international system was fragmenting into overlapping authorities, multiple loyalties, and non-state actors competing with the state for the legitimate use of force — and to use it as the operative frame for the early twenty-first-century PMC industry. Where Bull offered the picture as a speculative possibility, McFate argues it is the present condition, and that private military companies are not an aberration to be regulated out of existence but the institutional form a post-Westphalian order will increasingly take. The book is mid-secondary in standing: synthesis-plus-testimony on the analytical side, with the case studies edging toward primary material.

McFate's stake is the most explicit of the three canonical PMC books. He is openly sympathetic to the industry, argues for normalising rather than restricting it, and reasons that the form will exist whatever the regulatory posture and is better managed under explicit legal frameworks than under denial. Critics read this as a brief for the industry by a former practitioner; sympathetic readers read it as a corrective to the academic moralism that fails to engage with how the industry actually operates. Both readings are available in the text, and both deserve acknowledgement.

For this corpus, McFate is the third corner of the canonical academic triangle alongside Singer and Kaldor. Where Singer's Corporate Warriors describes the firm and Kaldor's New and Old Wars describes the conflict landscape, McFate provides the explicit neomedieval frame that links the PMC to a broader thesis about the dissolution of the Westphalian state monopoly on force. He is also the inside voice of the three, which makes him the most useful on the texture of the industry and the one to read most carefully on the normative claims.