# Private Military Company A **private military company** (PMC) sells armed force — combat, protection, training, logistics — under contract. The term covers everything from guards on a convoy to an army that storms cities. The political point of a PMC is rarely efficiency. It is that a government can use force without owning it: the casualties don't count as soldiers, the contracts don't go through a legislature, and the abuses belong to a company. Two cases dominate this vault — the American [[Blackwater]] and the Russian [[Wagner Group]] — and they show the same tool used by a democracy and by an autocracy. ## Two models | | American model | Russian model | |---|---|---| | Legal status | Legal, licensed, contracted by the State and Defense Departments | Technically illegal: the Constitution bars private armed formations, and the Criminal Code punishes mercenarism (Art. 359) and illegal armed groups (Art. 208) | | Purpose | Fill manpower gaps in wars the state fights openly | Fight wars the state wants to deny | | Paid by | Taxpayer contracts | State funds plus mining, oil and gas concessions abroad | | Signature case | Nisour Square, Baghdad, Sept 16, 2007 — Blackwater guards killed 14 to 17 Iraqi civilians (accounts differ) | [[Moura Massacre]], [[Mali]], 2022 — at least 500 killed by Malian troops and foreign personnel | | Accountability | Four guards convicted in 2014; all four pardoned by [[Donald Trump]] in December 2020 | Wagner designated a transnational criminal organization by the US in January 2023; no Russian prosecution | | End state | Blackwater renamed Academi; [[Erik Prince]] now sells security directly to governments | Wagner absorbed into the state as [[Africa Corps]] after its mutiny | ## Why Russia kept PMCs illegal Keeping PMCs outside the law was a feature. It left the state free to disown its contractors — as at the [[Battle of Khasham]] in 2018 — and free to prosecute them if they turned. A bill to legalize PMCs was rejected by the government in March 2023 as unconstitutional, three months before the [[Wagner Group Mutiny]] demonstrated what an independent private army can do to its patron. Wagner was not the only one: PISM and BBC Russian have documented **Redut** (linked to the GRU and reportedly sponsored by [[Gennady Timchenko]] and [[Oleg Deripaska]]), **Convoy** (Crimea, Cossack-affiliated), **Patriot** (linked to [[Sergei Shoigu]]'s ministry), and Gazprom-funded units such as Potok and Fakel. In the Ukraine war they were relabeled "volunteer detachments." ## International law - **Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, Art. 47 (1977)** defines a mercenary through six cumulative tests — specially recruited, taking a direct part in hostilities, motivated mainly by private gain, neither a national nor a member of a party's forces, and not sent by a third state. Almost no contractor meets all six. - **UN Mercenary Convention (1989, in force 2001)** — neither the United States nor Russia is a party. - **Montreux Document (2008)** — a non-binding Swiss–ICRC restatement of states' obligations toward private military and security companies. ## The current market [[Erik Prince]], Blackwater's founder and a [[Donald Trump]] ally, has since 2025 sold security packages directly to governments: anti-gang drone operations and tax collection in Haiti (described by his firm as a ten-year agreement), police and military training in Ecuador, and a mineral-security deal in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Reports in early 2025 described a proposal to use private contractors for mass deportations from the United States. On the Russian side, the trade in protection for mining concessions continues under [[Africa Corps]] — the [[Security-for-Minerals]] model that Wagner built. ## See Also - [[Wagner Group]] · [[Africa Corps]] · [[Blackwater]] · [[Erik Prince]] - [[Plausible Deniability]] · [[Proxy War]] · [[Hybrid Warfare]] · [[Security-for-Minerals]] - [[Battle of Khasham]] · [[Moura Massacre]] · [[Wagner Group Mutiny]]