The secret world of the professional private soldier

century, had a 260,000-strong private army by 1803.

In the 1990s and 2000s, there were private contractors at work in conflicts in Angola, Sierra Leone, Croatia and the Congo.

Infamously, in 1994, the private soldiers of Sandline International – operated by former British Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer – fought and repressed the independence movement in Bougainville on behalf of the Papua New Guinea government.

But the Circuit itself really came alive as a result of the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. The US Army fought the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in response to the attack, but private soldiers did almost everything else – guarding bases, installations and supply lines, negotiating disarmaments, election security, and guarding key ‘‘clients’’ from companies who’d won lucrative contracts for the economic rebuild of both countries.

By December 2006, one estimate suggested there were at least 100,000 contractors working directly for the US Department of Defense in Iraq. It’s thought another 130,000 or so were employed in Afghanistan.

Historian Peter Singer estimated that in the 1990s there were 50 enlisted military personnel for every private operator; now it’s about 10 to 1.

The Circuit grew alongside a generation of New Zealand soldiers who’d only experienced peace, not war. Private work was plentiful, well-paid and offered the chance of military action.

‘‘You don’t want to sit at home all your life doing the ‘what ifs’,’’ says Monty Gurnick Jr, one former New Zealand Army soldier who spent four years on the Circuit. ‘‘[Otherwise] all you are seeing is tussock [at Waiouru military camp].’’

It’s difficult to quantify, but anecdotal evidence suggests those with New Zealand military experience have been especially in demand on the Circuit.

A tide of them departed for work overseas, with many hundreds finding work in Iraq, Afghanistan, and then even further afield.

‘‘In the heyday, the chance of running into a Kiwi in Baghdad was pretty high,’’ says Soldier X, who estimates 250 to 300 New Zealanders worked there in the years they were most in demand.

It began to bleed the New Zealand Army of its best men.

For her book The Hidden

Economy, which studied the role of Ma¯ ori on The Circuit, Massey University academic Maria Bargh gained access to an unpublished masters’ dissertation written by the former commander of the SAS, Jim Blackwell.

Blackwell surveyed 24 former SAS soldiers who left to go private between 2000 and 2005. All had gone primarily for the money.

Those we talked to put the usual daily rate at the peak of the private military contractor (PMC) circuit at US$500 a day. At a mid-2004 exchange rate, that was about NZ$800 a day.

There was a tiered system: tier one, usually ex-us Special Forces, might command US$1200-$1500 a day. Soldiers ranked staff sergeant and above might earn US$350-$500 a day. And those ranked section commander or above might earn a little less. In the early days, at least, soldiers below that rank need not apply.

To compare wages from those heady days, here’s what a Kiwi soldier would have been earning at the time: the average salary of an infantry private was $37,519, while an SAS trooper earned $37,986.

The SAS salaries rose like