The Rise of Mercenary Companies: Risking Real Lives for Money

(Seoul=News 1) Reporter Cho Yoon-hyung = There are office workers who risk their ‘real lives’ to work. Mercenaries are those who are hired by private military companies and serve for monetary compensation.

The mercenary industry took off in earnest in the late 1980s when the Cold War ended. At that time, the United States and the Soviet Union started to reduce armaments, and unemployed former soldiers poured into the streets. This became an opportunity for people and weapons to flow naturally into mercenary companies.

Small-scale wars broke out in Africa and South America instead of the ‘great powers’, the United States and the Soviet Union, and private military companies did not miss this opportunity.

Of course, there are also domestic mercenary companies that participate in dangerous areas such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. Compared to foreign mercenary cases, the reason why they are different is that the safety of their own citizens comes first.

Meanwhile, as the ‘mercenary business’, such as military training and operational advisory services, is rapidly spreading, soldiers hired by private military companies are flowing into armed conflicts around the world.

In 2014, Dmitry Utkin, a former member of the Russian special forces unit “Spetsnaz”, and Yevgeny Prigozhin, an aide to President Vladimir Putin, founded the Wagner Group, a mercenary company. Skilled in the business of conflict, they carried out operations for Russia’s forcible annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and participated in battles to help the al-Assad dictatorship in the Syrian civil war.

The Wagner Group also used prisoners who committed serious crimes such as fraud and robbery as well as rape and murder as mercenaries during the war in Ukraine. It is a message from an escaped prisoner that he could become a mercenary unconditionally as long as it was confirmed that he could walk properly. About 5,000 of them were said to have been pardoned after the contract expired.

The United States, a self-proclaimed world police state, is reportedly contracting with a global private military company to hand over rear support services such as combat, transport, and medical care.

A representative company that has grown in the Iraq war is Blackwater of the United States. Founded in 1997 by former members of the Navy SEALs, Blackwater started as a business to protect CIA agents and grew in size.

As the size increases, the ransom price is also increasing day by day. What is the size and revenue of mercenaries worldwide? More information on this can be found in the video.