A Better Description of 4GW Could Not Have Been Written

The American Conservative has an article entitled "A Blackwater World Order" which discusses the impact of the privatization of war. From the article:

“Now that the United States has opened the Pandora’s Box of mercenarianism,” McFate writes in The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What they Mean for World Order, “private warriors of all stripes are coming out of the shadows to engage in for-profit warfare.” 

It is a menacing thought. McFate said this coincides with what he and others have called a current shift from global dominance by nation-state power to a “polycentric” environment in which state authority competes with transnational corporations, global governing bodies, non-governmental organizations (NGO’s), regional and ethnic interests, and terror organizations in the chess game of international relations. New access to professional private arms, McFate further argues, has cut into the traditional states’ monopoly on force, and hastened the dawn of this new era. 

McFate calls it neomedievalism, the “non-state-centric and multipolar world order characterized by overlapping authorities and allegiances.” States will not disappear, “but they will matter less than they did a century ago.” He compares this coming environment to the order that prevailed in Europe before the domination of nation-states with their requisite standing armies [i.e., before the Peace of Westphalia].

Drug cartels, gangs and activist organizations will be able to participate as well, to some extent or another. As I observed yesterday, the hacking group Anonymous is engaging in cyber warfare with ISIS, and the conflicts between the Mexican drug cartels are well beyond simple inter-gang conflict.