Articles: David Isenberg

Two steps behind him, Tim Palast shuffled in like a man carrying the weight of every war he’d ever read about. Rumpled. Tired. The kind of tired that doesn’t sleep off. He’d written the book on private military companies, literally, and he’d spent years trying to warn people that the mercenary was back—just wearing a better tie this time.
They didn’t shake hands. In this business, you saved your grip for the things that mattered. Continue reading →

The cheapest, fastest, least politically costly way to do violence — to guard a pipeline, patrol a border, put down a riot, garrison an embassy, run a prison, fly a strike package — was to buy it from someone else, and that someone else had, over a century, gotten very good at selling it. Continue reading →

“The future you’re describing,” Kessler said, “is one where rich countries fight through proxies, where nobody answerable to a voter ever pulls the trigger, and where peace and war blur together until neither word means anything. The politics of that is the death of oversight. The culture of it is treating an armed guard as a permanent fixture of ordinary life. And the economics of it always, somehow, work out fine for the man standing at this podium.” Continue reading →

Diane: “The suit’s a holding company now,” she said, not looking up from the pad. “That’s the difference. A firm like Constellis buys up half the old Blackwater-Xe-Academi lineage and turns it into a portfolio company — logistics here, training there, a maritime security line somewhere else, all under one umbrella so the State Department can write one check and not think too hard about which subsidiary is doing what this week. That’s not Sandline. Sandline was fifty guys and a fax machine. This is private equity.”
Kate: “Private equity with a security clearance,” Kate said, and finally cracked a small smile.
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