The world watched as the beaten and burned bodies of four American contractors from a private military company, then known as Blackwater, swung from a bridge over the Euphrates River in Iraq.
It was March 31, 2004. Iraqi fighters had ambushed the U.S. mercenaries, proving beyond doubt the deadly seriousness of an insurgency that the U.S. government did not anticipate when it invaded Baghdad and deposed Saddam Hussein a year earlier. The episode sparked the first and then second battles of Fallujah, which resulted in over 120 U.S. Marines and upwards of 1,500 civilians killed and entire neighborhoods bombed out after extensive block-to-block fighting with insurgents.
Fast forward to today as the world watches images of beefed-up American contractors hailing from opaque companies called UG Solutions and Safe Reach Solutions shooting off guns at a security perimeter in one of the most nightmarish hellscapes on earth: the Gaza strip. They reportedly make $1100 a day after a $10,000 signing advance. The fact that they are there at all raises a host of questions, not least of which is what happens when one of them shoots into a crowd and kills a civilian, or when one of them is attacked—maybe dragged away, hung off a bridge.
The Trump administration has been virtually silent on the deployment of mercenaries to Gaza—first to help secure checkpoints in Gaza as part of a “multinational consortium” in February, and more recently to provide perimeter security for the U.S.-based Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the controversial outfit (conceived of and backed by Israel and the U.S with its own CIA link) serving as the primary channel for food aid to starving Palestinians. Over 500 civilians have been killed at these desolate aid centers, reportedly by IDF fire, in the last month.
Gazans are walking for miles to four Mad Max-like facilities at the borders of the strip in the South and at the Netzarim corridor, which splits the north and south in half and has been occupied if not fortified by the IDF since the war began in October 2023, shortly after the Hamas attacks on Israel.
The AP reported last week that two of the U.S. contractors from Safe Reach Solutions came forward as whistleblowers under the condition of anonymity and accused colleagues of shooting into crowds with live ammo, stun grenades, and pepper spray. Videos show Gazans forced like cattle into narrow, trench-like lines bordered by tall metal fences to queue up for food. There is mayhem. In one video, as machine-gun fire is heard in the vicinity, one American voice says, “I think you hit one.” Another yells, “hell yeah, boy!”
Safe Reach Solutions and the GHF have both denied that the hired guns were shooting into the crowd, though Safe Reach has acknowledged that live ammo has been used “in scattered incidents” away from crowds “to get [civilians’] attention.” The GHF said the gunfire in the video was coming from IDF soldiers and not directed into the crowds.
Several military and contracting experts who spoke with The American Conservative (TAC) say the U.S. is at a dangerous crossroads. The war privatization trend—which exploded during the post-9/11 conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and North Africa—has metastasized and morphed into a situation in which mercenaries are used as an extension of the U.S. government to directly advance a foreign nation’s war policy. The “humanitarian” justification, they say, is a fig leaf.
Western media and analysts have maligned Russia’s state-funded private military company (PMC), the Wagner Group, for fighting on behalf of but not officially for Moscow in Syria, Ukraine, and Africa. Now, it’s becoming clear that American companies, like UG Solutions and Safe Reach, run and staffed by ex-U.S. military and CIA paramilitary, may be smaller than Wagner but are similar in organization. While there is currently no overt federal funding trail to the contractors, both of which appear to have sprung into existence recently (and have not returned TAC’s calls for comment), the State Department rushed $30 million in USAID funds to GHF in the last month, waiving audits to do it.
“A colleague and I used to ruminate at times on the coming ‘Wagnerization’ of U.S. security policy, noting that Wagner offers a flexible, quasi-deniable, and politically expedient policy instrument to the Russian government,” said Richard Hinman, retired foreign service officer with the State Department as well as a retired Army officer who served in several U.S. conflict zones.
“The immediate advantages are just too compelling for a U.S. administration looking at a four-to-eight-year run,” Hinman told TAC. “It may be a bad idea, but it has a pretty slick selling point. So we can see GHF as a step on the path toward a U.S.-style Wagnerization.”
The selling point? Trump doesn’t have to put “boots on the ground.” Rather, he just farms out assistance to further the Israeli government’s plan for Gaza, which according to reports this week, is to continue to make the rest of the strip uninhabitable while shifting hundreds of thousands of half-starved and homeless Gazans into a giant camp with the Orwellian name “humanitarian city,” built on the ruins of Rafah in the south. Next, the Palestinians will have a “free choice” to migrate out of Gaza, says Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Having Americans manning checkpoints and the inner ring of the GHF centers puts a “multinational” face on what is essentially an IDF operation.
Josh Paul, a former military affairs official in the State Department who resigned his post in 2023 in protest of Biden’s policies of transferring weapons to Israel, told TAC that the U.S. contractors in Israel, like all hired guns, allow “a degree of separation” in that they “don’t imply (U.S.) national involvement.” Still, Paul says, “it is clear they are there with U.S. approval and a deep complicity” in what is taking place at these aid centers, including the deaths of hundreds of civilians.
While this is worrying on several different levels, the actual hired guns don’t seem too concerned. They were hired to do a job, said Morgan Lerette, a former PMC and the author of Guns, Girls, and Greed: I Was a Blackwater Mercenary in Iraq. In the Iraq war, contractors “draped themselves in the flag” and insisted they weren’t mercenaries because they were serving as bodyguards for the State Department, he said. “The Gaza contract has changed the entire paradigm. They try to say they are trying to get food to people, but this is 100 percent mercenary work.”
The contractors don’t care about “the strategy or the politics or anything but surviving another day to make their $1500,” he said. “But what you are doing is putting people in situations where they have to make snap judgements, and there is so much legal ambiguity of what they can do or can’t do,” he told TAC.
“This feels like a huge step in private military contracting. It was one thing to work under the State Department, but it is a whole different to work for a foreign government entity in a foreign land in an active combat.”
Of course, American PMCs have been working across the globe for decades now to help fragile governments raise and train armies and to engage in humanitarian and rescue missions. In many ways, the proliferation of mercenaries—what former contractor and author Sean McFate calls “neomedievalism”—is the direct result of their overuse by the U.S. in the Middle East to this day. There is a supply—a lot of ex-soldiers and contractors with training—and a demand—fragile states in conflict with leaders willing to spend the coin.
Gaza has accelerated the trend for Washington, which supports Israel’s assault on the strip but governs a population with red lines about putting American men and women in a warzone. The Israeli government surely welcomes any help it can get. Its military—mostly reserves—is stretched thin, and the Netanyahu government needs to manage optics while sustaining a crushing military operation on the ground. U.S. mercenaries aren’t (yet) fighting in Gaza, but in a way the political decision to use them is not dissimilar from Moscow deploying Wagner in Ukraine or bringing in North Koreans to fight in the Kursk region of Russia.
“Though we are not quite there yet, the trend that we are observing seems to be moving toward the outsourcing of certain types of military activities and operations to private companies, often staffed with veterans, to get around rules and limits placed on the use of U.S. military forces,” Jennifer Kavanagh, military affairs analyst for Defense Priorities, tells TAC. “Gaza is the next iteration.”
The “rules and limits” are indeed fuzzier for contractors. They are working ostensibly for the GHF, not the American government, but what is the chain of command on the ground? TAC’s call to the State Department went unanswered. Lerette says the biggest risk, setting aside civilians getting killed, is that contractors come under attack and Washington, in reaction, deepens its involvement.
“This is where I think World War Three is actually going to start if it does kick off,” Lerette said. “If anything has proven it can change war policy, it’s to have civilians die in the battle space. Now that we have contractors there, as we move them closer to the front lines, if one of them gets hurt, killed, or drug through the streets, that will change the war strategy.”
The post In Gaza, U.S. Mercenaries Advance Israeli War Aims appeared first on The American Conservative.
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