Articles: David Isenberg

The contract ran eighty-three pages. Buried on page forty-six, in the particular gray prose that law firms reserve for their most dangerous sentences, sat the clause that mattered more than all the others combined: all intelligence products are advisory in nature; final operational decisions rest exclusively with the client. Simon Chesterman has written about the accountability gaps this kind of drafting creates — gaps wide enough, in practice, to lose a body count inside. Continue reading →

Danie Vermaak was seventy-one years old and had not worn a suit voluntarily in a decade. He wore one now, badly, the way a man wears a uniform he’s proud of but no longer fits into. He had founded Sable Dynamics in Pretoria in the dying light of apartheid, staffed it with men who’d fought a bush war nobody in this room had bothered to understand, and used it to turn the tide of two African civil wars in under eighteen months each. He had been called a mercenary, a war criminal, a stabilizing force, and a cautionary tale, sometimes by the same journalist in the same article. He had outlived most of his detractors and all of his imitators, and he had been invited here, he suspected, because the organizers wanted a photograph of the industry’s founding father shaking hands with its current billionaires. Continue reading →

To see this in its full graphical glory click on below title link.   THE CONTRACT CENTURY   A Synthesis Dossier — Lagos, Mombasa, the Arctic Corridor, and Geneva, 2051 AI-written fictional scenario, projected twenty-five years forward SATIRICAL FICTION Table … Continue reading →

The pitch was simple and, in its way, honest. A foreign war was hiring. Contracts ran through cutouts and shell logistics firms that made the money look like consulting fees. Men like Aurelio — former soldiers, former guerrilla fighters, men whose only marketable skill was violence performed competently — were worth more on a battlefield eight thousand kilometers away than they were guarding a coca lab in Cauca. “You go, you learn something nobody in this hemisphere knows yet,” the man said. “You come back a different kind of asset.” Continue reading →

Sierra Leone is the same shell game with real chips,” Kinsey said. “Executive Outcomes, two hundred and twenty men, drives the RUF ‘to the point of defeat’ for under forty million dollars. His own footnote three concedes most sources say thirty-five or thirty-six, plus mining concessions that don’t fit cleanly under any dollar sign. Then he sets that against UNAMSIL — eleven thousand troops, ninety million, a peacekeeping and stabilization mandate with a different scale and a different decade entirely. He’s pricing the cost of winning a fight against the cost of keeping the house from burning down afterward. And the war didn’t end when EO left in 1997. It ran on through coups and Sandline and British intervention until a formal close in 2002 — which his own 2000 footnote all but concedes.” Continue reading →