Hired Muscle Has Been Betraying Empires Since Before Rome Had Walls
In 376 AD, a large group of Visigoths asked the Roman Emperor Valens for permission to cross the Danube into Roman territory. They were fleeing the Huns, they were desperate, and they were offering something valuable in return: military service. Rome would let them in; they would fight for Rome. It seemed like a reasonable transaction.
Two years later, at the Battle of Adrianople, those same Visigoths killed Emperor Valens and destroyed two-thirds of the Eastern Roman army. It was one of the worst military defeats in Roman history, and it set in motion the chain of events that would end with the sack of Rome in 410 AD.
The Visigoths didn't betray Rome because they were uniquely treacherous. They betrayed Rome because Roman officials had extorted and abused them after letting them in, because their incentives had never actually aligned with Roman interests, and because when the moment came, fighting for themselves made more sense than fighting for an empire that had treated them as a resource to be exploited.
This story has a lot of sequels.
Why Empires Outsource in the First Place
The move toward hired or proxy military force isn't random — it follows a recognizable pattern in imperial development. Early-stage empires fight with citizen soldiers who have a direct stake in the outcome. Roman legions of the Republic were farmers who went home after campaigns and had land to defend. Athenian triremes were rowed by citizens. The early American military was built on the same citizen-soldier concept.
As empires expand and stabilize, two things happen simultaneously. First, the wars move farther from home, making the direct connection between citizen and defended territory more abstract. Second, the empire gets rich enough that the citizens who matter politically — the ones with property and influence — can afford to pay someone else to handle the fighting. This is not a moral failure. It's a rational economic response to changed incentives. It just happens to be a rational response that consistently produces catastrophic long-term results.
By the late Roman Empire, the legions were staffed primarily by Germanic foederati — allied tribal fighters who were paid in land and money to fight under Roman command. They were often excellent soldiers. They were not, however, Roman soldiers in any meaningful sense. Their loyalty was to their commanders, to their tribal identities, and to whatever arrangement was currently paying. When the arrangements changed, so did the loyalty.
The East India Company Is the Template Everyone Forgot
The British East India Company is one of history's most instructive case studies in outsourced imperial enforcement, and it deserves more attention than it gets in American political discussions.
The Company wasn't a government agency. It was a for-profit corporation given a trading monopoly and, eventually, the authority to raise its own armies, make its own treaties, and govern territories directly. At its peak, the Company's private army was larger than the British Army itself. It administered most of the Indian subcontinent on behalf of British imperial interests — which it interpreted primarily as Company profits.
The results were exactly what you'd expect when you give a profit-motivated entity the power of a state without the accountability of one. The Company's management of Bengal in the 1770s produced a famine that killed somewhere between one and ten million people, partly because Company policy prioritized tax collection over famine relief. The Company fomented wars when wars were profitable. It maintained stability when stability was profitable. Its incentives and Britain's long-term imperial interests overlapped sometimes and diverged catastrophically at other times, and there was no reliable mechanism for forcing alignment.
The British government eventually nationalized the Company's territorial holdings after the 1857 Indian Rebellion — a rebellion triggered in part by Company mismanagement of its own sepoy soldiers. The cleanup cost was enormous. The reputational damage to British imperial legitimacy was lasting. The lesson was clear.
The lesson was not retained.
The Contractor Economy of Modern American Power
The United States has, over the past thirty years, built an outsourced military and intelligence apparatus that would have been recognizable in structure — if not in technology — to a Roman logistics officer of the fourth century.
Private military contractors like Blackwater (later Academi, later whatever it's called this week) operated in Iraq with a legal status that was genuinely unclear for years. They were armed, they used lethal force, they operated in American-controlled territory, and they were accountable to neither the Uniform Code of Military Justice nor the Iraqi legal system. The 2007 Nisour Square massacre, in which Blackwater contractors killed seventeen Iraqi civilians, took years to prosecute and resulted in convictions that were later overturned and then reinstated through a legal process that required multiple acts of Congress to resolve.
This is the contractor incentive problem in its clearest modern form. Blackwater's contract gave it financial incentives to maintain a presence in Iraq. It had no institutional incentive to preserve the relationships with the Iraqi population that American counterinsurgency strategy depended on. Its interests and American strategic interests overlapped when the shooting was happening and diverged badly when the shooting stopped.
The broader contractor economy in American defense and intelligence is harder to quantify but follows the same logic. By the mid-2000s, roughly 70 percent of the US intelligence community's budget was going to private contractors. The contractors employed many of the same people who had previously done the work as government employees, often at significantly higher cost to the government. The institutional knowledge, the long-term relationships, and the mission continuity that define effective intelligence work don't transfer cleanly to a workforce whose primary loyalty is to contract renewal.
What the Pattern Predicts
The historical record on outsourced enforcement isn't subtle. The contractor's incentives have never once aligned with the empire's long-term interests, and the misalignment has consistently produced one of three outcomes: the contractor becomes powerful enough to dictate terms (the late Roman foederati commanders who made and unmade emperors), the contractor pursues its own interests at the empire's expense (the East India Company), or the contractor simply stops showing up when the money gets tight (every mercenary army in history at the moment the payroll slips).
None of this means that proxy forces or contracted services are never useful tactical tools. Rome's Germanic allies won real battles. The East India Company did build infrastructure that lasted. American contractors have performed genuine services in genuinely difficult environments. The problem isn't the tactic. The problem is the institutional logic that drives empires toward it — the logic that says paying someone else to handle the hard stuff is cheaper and easier than maintaining the capacity to handle it yourself.
It's cheaper in the short run. It always is. The invoice arrives later, and it's always larger than the original estimate.
Human psychology hasn't changed in five thousand years. The Roman official who decided foederati were a cost-effective solution to the empire's military staffing problem was running the same mental calculation as the Pentagon procurement officer signing a private security contract in 2004. The technology is different. The incentive structure is identical. The historical data on how it ends is extensive, consistent, and sitting right there in the record.
We just keep deciding it'll be different this time.
