Lessons on Mercenaries from Wagner

As of writing, Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Russian Wagner Private Military Company, launched and aborted a coup attempt against Vladimir Putin. Before aborting his coup attempt, he made massive gains in southern Russia, having seized the city of Rostov-on-Don, the 11th-largest city in Russia.

To put that into perspective, that would be the equivalent of an American PMC (private military company) like Blackwater seizing Austin or a large section of territory close to Washington DC because the United States Armed Forces was losing a war in Canada or Mexico.

It appears that Prigozhin is angry with Putin for causing heavy losses for his organization for little gain. Typically, Wagner is used to fighting significantly weaker opponents and taking light losses at best. Its record in the Central African Republic and Syria show this pattern quite nicely.

Based on the limited information I have as of writing, Prigozhin was foolish to abort his coup attempt. Now, based on what I know, he is a dead man walking.

To be clear, there will be no good guys in this situation. Both Putin and Prigozhin are mass murderers who deserve to die for their crimes. Both factions are made up of war criminals who deserve no mercy.

If they want to kill each other either now or some other time, I will happily encourage them to do so. My recommended course of action is to keep the civil war going for as long as possible so as to weaken Russia.

But this episode has taught me a valuable object lesson, albeit one that many people have tried to drill into my head.

Relying on PMCs is a really bad long-term strategy.

What Are PMCs?

Private military companies are organizations that provide—for profit—the services of a traditional military.

Much of the time, this includes doing logistical, maintenance, and intelligence work, work that regular militaries often outsource to the private sector if they don’t have the competency or staff to do themselves.

If PMCs do enter combat, it’s because they are either doing security work in high-risk regions for governments or other wealthy clients or they are fighting an opponent that is far weaker.

When you think about it, PMCs are mercenaries by any other name.

Before I get into the three big problems with relying on mercenaries, it is worth noting that they can be useful in certain situations.

If you are a large corporation, a nongovernmental organization, or a government that has weak capacity (due either to corruption or having no trust in your own security apparatus for one reason or another), then PMCs can be a useful tool to accomplish tasks like crushing an insurgency, providing protection, or completing any other tasks you don’t have the capacity to do yourself. In addition, a PMC can be useful if you want to accomplish security or military objectives but need plausible deniability.

Oftentimes, mercenaries are more combat capable than are regular militaries, assuming the bulk of the fighting force is made up of combat veterans or ex special operations personnel. But if that’s not the case and instead are made up of violent criminals with basic training. . . .

But as I said previously, PMCs have three big problems that make relying on them long term an unviable strategy.

The Three Big Problems with PMCs

1. These organizations have a relatively low tolerance for casualties compared with traditional militaries. Keep in mind that a significant motive for Prigozhin is that his forces have been taking heavy losses in Ukraine for months while doing a disproportionate amount of the killing of Ukrainian soldiers. Rumors have even emerged that the Russian government forces shelled Wagner forces in Ukraine. Keep in mind that for a PMC, heavy casualties are very bad for business. I suspect that Prigozhin’s actions were motivated in part by the heavy losses Wagner sustained in Ukraine.
2. PMCs are difficult to control in a war zone. To be fair, atrocities happen in war all the time no matter the form of the fighting force. Soldiers will steal, torture, burn, rape, and murder civilians if they are not tightly controlled. I imagine this is part of the reason most militaries place such a heavy emphasis on discipline and chain of command, the other main reason being to maintain cohesion and combat effectiveness in a highly chaotic situation. Otherwise, your fighting force will get massacred. But the special problem with PMCs is twofold. Many of them are only fighting for a paycheck (or to stay out of prison), and a good number of mercenaries will have no problem looting and stealing in a war zone. Many of these mercenaries are violent criminals, and they will commit atrocities against civilians. Wagner is notorious for the atrocities it commits against civilians (including mass murder and rape), not only in Ukraine but also in Syria and Africa. In the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, however, the Russian war machine has looted Ukraine at a systemic level and has committed the same war crimes against Ukrainian men, women, and children. But the United States had a similar problem with its PMCs when it occupied Iraq, specifically with Blackwater. That leads to the second reason. PMCs as a general rule operate outside of the chain of command; they are difficult to reign in when they get out of line. This can cause serious problems with operations and has caused blowback. But these two problems are relatively minor compared to the biggest one of all.
3. PMCs will turn on you if they suspect they are not going to get paid or if they are convinced the operation is going to destroy them or at the very least carry unacceptably heavy losses. To be fair, I don’t know a single military in the world that likes heavy casualties, but in some conflicts, high losses are inevitable. Sadly, the Ukrainian people find themselves in such a conflict. Machiavelli, a highly influential renaissance political theorist, states in The Prince that relying on mercenaries is a bad idea for precisely this reason. Prigozhin saw that the war in Ukraine was going badly and through his actions demonstrated just how unstable Putin’s hold on power really is—even if Prigozhin’s own foolish actions in halting his march on Moscow gets him killed.

PMCs can have some uses, but you must be careful when using them. Putin grew dependent on Wagner because his own military was in such a dilapidated state that it had trouble with a task that any reasonably competent military could have easily pulled off.

I imagine our own Colin will have more to add on this subject and Russia’s failed invasion of Ukraine as someone who honorably served in the United States Navy.

In my opinion, the best outcome would have been a civil war between Putin and Prigozhin.

But we all must continue to support the Ukrainian Armed Forces in their heroic fight to liberate their country.

Slava Ukraini!