Defining Warlords

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John Mackinlay
Centre for Defence Studies, London

Published in Monograph 46, Building stability in Africa: Challenges for the new millennium, February 2000

Warlordism is an ugly, pejorative expression, evoking brutality, racketeering and the suffering of civil communities. In this article, the term ‘warlord’ refers to the leader of an armed band, possibly numbering up to several thousand fighters, who can hold territory locally and, at the same time, act financially and politically in the international system without interference from the state in which he is based.1 In crisis zones around the world, where civil war and humanitarian disasters accompany the struggles of societies in transition, the warlord is the key actor. He confronts national governments, plunders their resources, moves and exterminates unco-operative populations, interdicts international relief and development, and derails peace processes. With only a few exceptions, the modern warlord lives successfully beyond the reach and jurisdiction of civil society. His ability to seek refuge in the crisis zone and the lack of international commitment to take effective action together ensure his survival.

Although the warlord is a principal factor in today’s war zones, international military forces, humanitarian relief and development agencies and international civil administration units involved in stabilisation and restoration spend little effort in defining and isolating this shadowy figure who will, in some form, be certain to impact negatively on their agenda. There is certainly a flourishing genre of writing under the banner of the ‘economy of civil war’ which explains many aspects of the warlord’s economic survival and his exploitation of the resources of a failing state, and is an important step towards understanding the warlord syndrome. However, warlordism implies a diversity of activities and cultural structures, and a definitive picture must also involve other actors, including anthropologists and military experts in addition to the humanitarians who are at the epicentre of the ‘economy of civil war’ approach. This article sets out to show the warlord in more general terms, suggesting that warlordism is derived from a culture that predates its manifestations in the 20th century, explaining his predatory status in the conflict zone, his military capabilities and the sociology of his personal controlling devices. It is suggested that, besides spending more effort on defining warlords, the international community should take a more targeted and determined approach towards dealing with them.

WARLORDS AND CIVIL SOCIETY

Before the tribes of Europe achieved statehood, they were subdivided among local rulers or barons and their tenants. A baron was more than a landlord. He might pay homage to a king, but on his own territory he was autonomous, collecting revenues, raising armies and enforcing his version of the law. In return for paying taxes, his tenants and kinsmen expected his protection while they remained within his territory. The itinerant chieftains whose clans lived in poorer areas as herdsmen were less able to enjoy the settled lifestyle of a cultivator. They extorted money from traders whose caravans passed below their fortified keeps in the mountain passes. The relationship between the baron, with his rich agricultural territory, and the clan chieftain, with his herds on the mountain pass, was that their autonomy and power to act freely in their own territory rested on their ability to protect it by force of arms. Despite their abuse of power and, at times, unattractive behaviour, local rulers also performed important social functions, supporting religion and culture, and encouraging some aspects of a primitive form of civil society. The warlord, in contrast, was a negative phenomenon.2 Although his power rested on the possession of military forces, like the baron and the chieftain, the warlord occupied territory in a strictly predatory manner and his social activities seldom enriched the lives of the civilian families in his grasp. Warlordism involved the use of military force in a narrower, more selfish way than that of the baron or the chieftain. It implied protectionism, racketeering and the interception of revenues, without any mitigating cultural or religious commitments, and was not a concept that became intellectually developed in our culture.

John Keegan’s analysis of the Mongols, Huns and Buminid Turks sets them apart from the agricultural European races as the ‘horse peoples’, a nomadic culture that lived by war alone. Their failure to survive as a society was linked to their inability to translate conquest into permanent power. Their presence was "... extractive not stabilising, designed to support the nomad way of life, not to change it."3 The horse people of Genghis Khan were ultimately defeated. Very little of their culture and lifestyle survived in civil society today. Their pursuit of warfare as a way of life also fell beyond the comprehension of Clausewitzian writers and communicators whose only concept of violence was as an instrument of policy. In this manner, warlordism and the nomad raiders arouse similarly negative responses, existing at the dark edges of history, mercifully failing to make much cultural impact on social development, but also failing to attract intellectual attention or any exploratory effort to understand them as a phenomenon. Even if barons and chieftains were warlords in a sense, it was not in this role that they survive in the fabric of people’s lives today and it is possible to speculate that the longstanding dissonance between warlordism and civil society is such that it is almost impossible for the one to deal intuitively with the other.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CHINESE WARLORDS

Warlordism became more relevant after the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 when China was devastated by a series of civil wars between competing provincial rulers. The term achieved a sensational connotation when foreign correspondents used it to describe the violent and rapine behaviour of the provincial rulers. The warlord period in China from 1911 until the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese war in 1937 was a time of chaos and rapid change. According to Diana Lary, the violence was pervasive, soldiers fought each other constantly in an average of eight full-scale wars a year, in addition to the innumerable small-scale clashes. In 1923, there were sixteen separate campaigns.4 To a society, which had followed the Confucian ethic of brush over sword for centuries, the rude invasion of rampaging militarism was a calamity. The Chinese upper classes were paying the full price of their failure to acknowledge the importance of military power. For centuries, they had disdained the attributes of the warrior and all that went with it, including physical entertainments, prize-fighting and team sports. The military were not only despised by the Chinese élite, but also by society at large.5

By the time China’s effete society woke up to the realities of military power, it was too late and the conditions which were to encourage the rise of the local warlords already prevailed. During the declining Qing dynasty in the mid-19th century, there had been a devolution of power to provincial level. According to Franz Michael, China’s 20th century warlords began life as provincial military commanders. The weakness of the Qing rulers and their reluctance to concentrate military power in a central command structure encouraged fragmentation. They believed that a dispersal of interests would protect them from the possibility of a widespread military uprising. However, as the provincial force commanders’ power increased, they expected a greater freedom to administer their own territory and began to organise their own revenues. While the reach of the Qing court diminished, provincial commanders grew more assertive. When the dynasty finally collapsed in 1911, the autonomous military commanders were already poised to fill the political vacuum that had enlarged in the final years of the dynasty. An environment which encouraged warlordism had begun to emerge in the preceding thirty years of gradual collapse as the state-wide military structure devolved to a more personalised regional system.6 There were also qualitative differences in the military forces that developed during this period. Some provincial armies, such as Yunnan, were organised on the lines of modern military formations based on the prevailing European doctrines, whereas many of the provincial forces were individually organised around the personality of the new local commander.

The violent struggle which followed, is well-documented by both Chinese biographers of the warlords and foreign analysts.7 The characteristics of the violence and the behaviour of the armed bands are relevant to our understanding of modern civil conflict. Despite the longstanding contempt of the literati and upper classes for the military profession, Chinese society became pervasively militarised at a surprising speed. In the chaotic circumstances of the civil wars, volunteering for the military offered a chance for the down-trodden peasant to escape from the drudgery of rural serfdom. For them the military offered the possibility of wealth and unaccustomed power. Belonging to a military band and possessing a gun appealed to a barely suppressed instinct that was older and possibly stronger than the effete cultures of the outgoing regime. In many cases, it was enough to carry a weapon, there was no need for ammunition or a proficiency in its use, the breech loading rifle itself was the symbol of new power. Armed in this manner, a force in occupation could requisition buildings, seize war materials, conscript labour and levy taxes. At a much lower level, beyond the restrictions of army discipline, small groups of soldiers could use the threat of their weapons to loot personal property, to rape, to steal harvests and commit casual acts of terrible violence without fear of reprisal. In this way, the warlords destroyed much of China’s social and cultural heritage. The marauding bands which detached themselves from warlord armies were "... more dangerous as groups than as individuals, because the group gave its members the courage to behave badly. The real horror was the unpredictability."8

On the whole, Chinese analysts rationalised the brutality of the warring militias by explaining that the men involved were from the lowest order of society, poor blank creatures, so stupid that they lacked any sense of self-preservation, who were simply acting in accordance with the expectations of society. Lary shows that some Guomintang leaders, however, took the more sophisticated view that the raw material of the militia was not cruel and violent by nature.9 They had been brutalised by the army where they were routinely beaten, abused and physically endangered by careless leadership. This constant assault by their immediate superiors removed their normal sensitivities and reasoning faculties. Lary’s conclusions about this newly emerging, fragile military regime have much relevance to the power structures of the modern warlord. She observed with some accuracy how a personalised gang culture replaced, or emerged in place of the formal military command structure, and how this acted as a spur and a licence to the gratuitous violence of the subgroups within the faction.

"The Chinese military world of the warlord was too new and too fragmented to have established formal standards of behaviour. Soldiers learned how to behave in an ad hoc fashion. They became predatory towards the civilian world , not as a matter of policy, but in imitation of the way their commanders treated them ..."10

An unrelated but important issue to emerge from the later period of the Chinese civil wars was the fundamental distinction between the modus operandi of the warlord and the insurgent. Mao’s approach to this same chaotic period reveals a military force with radically different objectives and survival ethics. The Chinese warlord, on the one hand, had established himself from the power base of a former provincial leader and, thus endowed, could afford to take a rapine attitude towards the local population in the short term. In stark contrast, Mao’s forces, if they were to survive tactical defeat, had to rely on widespread popular support. Mao had to woo his constituency, they must want to feed him, to hide him and to act as his eyes and ears. The population were unlikely to do this if his soldiers acted violently towards them. Mao’s army was therefore sternly disciplined in its relationship to the local population. As a result, in contrast to the warlord, Red Army fighters were welcomed because they were regarded as part of the local constituency. It is also interesting that, unlike his Mandarin masters, Mao also had no illusions about the importance of military power. In particular, during his later efforts to stabilise China, he entertained no soft options for a negotiated settlement. The party, he insisted, must possess the gun, "... war can only be abolished through war, in order to get rid of the gun we must first grasp it in our hand."11

The Chinese experience of warlords is important and provides a reliable perspective. The obvious lessons are perhaps now less interesting. The conditions which encouraged the growing power and opportunities for the warlord (the weakening state, for example) are widely understood and have been exhaustively analysed.12 It is Lary’s minutiae on the sociology of the warlord gang and the dislocation of its individual members which may need to be rediscovered and hopefully progressed into a new chapter of understanding. Lary seemed to be on the threshold of explaining some of the behavioural logic of the faction fighters, collectively and individually. Her version of the abandoned military code of conduct and the adoption of ad hoc rules, based on personal controlling devices of a much more primitive kind, seem to explain some of the cruelty and passion of the Chinese civil wars and today’s modern violence. The violence and destruction of the Chinese experience reinforce the pejorative sense of the earlier definition of warlords, it distinguishes the warlord as a negative phenomenon, a scourge on the population that seemed to offer no mitigating benefits.

A NEW STRATEGIC ERA

The Chinese warlord phenomenon was a response to a pattern of decline within the state. The warlords were reactive, they did not try to seize power from the hands of a thriving government as an insurgent might and, with few exceptions, they acted only when the state had become terminally weak. If the determining factor of their existence was the environment, why should the warlords of the 1990s resemble the early Chinese version? Are there not likely to be important differences dictated by the circumstances of Qing dynasty China that were far removed from the 1990s world? In her effort to define the new strategic era, Mary Kaldor compares the ‘new wars’ of this decade to the ‘old wars’ of the Clausewitzian paradigm.13 ‘Old wars’ were conducted between states. In her model, the state was strong, it had achieved a monopoly of violence within its territory, it and had eliminated private wars, private armies and civilian militias. There was a separation between war and peace, military and civil, public and private. The armies were professionally officered and raised under the provisions of the state. The armed soldier was distinguished from the civilian by his uniform. There were rules for combat which governed the relationship of the officer to the soldier, the treatment of wounded, the custody of prisoners and the protection of non-combatants. Violence was impersonal, the soldier pressing the trigger did not recognise his target as an individual. After the passion of physical contact in battle was over, there was seldom an overriding desire to continue in a cycle of revenge killing. The conflict was contained in time and space.

However, the ‘new wars’ of this decade are an antithesis in every respect. The state has become terminally weakened, its monopoly of violence has disintegrated, state power has declined, its reach has shrunk back to the enclaves around the capital. The professional armies have broken apart and are replaced by private security forces, civilian militias and bandit gangs that recruit child soldiers. The rules and distinctions have disappeared. The vast majority of the casualties are civilians. The armed man no longer wears a uniform, there are no frontlines, no separations between civil and military, state and private, and war and peace. To some extent, the civil wars in China reflected these conditions. Many of the characteristics of ‘new wars’ flowed from the weakness of the state and, in the case of China, the failing Qing dynasty had also collapsed with plenty of evidence of the same pervasive violence that overwhelmed the separations of war from peace and civil from military. The difference between the 1911 warlord and the 1990 warlord was dictated by the environment beyond the local conflict zone, it was the difference between the 1911 world and the 1990 world.

For the commander of a warring band who had to move and operate freely beyond the reach of the government of the host state in which he was based, the most significant change was that the world had become increasingly harnessed to the purposes of organised society. It was impossible for the new warlord to be in isolation, there was no longer a space or a wilderness which could also be a refuge. In a physical sense, there were fewer wild and unreachable areas within a state and, in an intangible sense, there was less cultural space, less separation between states. Another dimension of global compression in the last thirty years has been the intensive developments in electronics, transport technology and the use of space. There are more than 200 communications satellites in the sky today.14 The warlord in the war zone in Zaïre is only a telephone call away from the broker on Wall Street. The voters in Islington can see what is happening in the streets of Pristina on a daily basis. A surge of communications of every kind seemed to be dragging individuality away from the state, away from the distinct communities and ethnic groups towards a global culture, at its worst an American culture, personified by the Marlboro cowboy in his blue jeans. Some saw particularism and identity politics as a local reaction to these stresses.15 The physical nature of the land and the dynamics of urban development were also changing. In the conflict areas of sub-Saharan Africa, there has been a general migration of the displaced population towards the township areas.16 Densely populated cities expanded to become conurbations which continued to grow, crossing borders and spanning waterways as they have in the Niger delta, in the Hong Kong-Shenzen-Canton economic zones and in the convergence of European populations in urban areas from Southampton to Essen.

During the 1970s, many newly emerged nations fell into debt. In some cases, their already fragile economies were disrupted by civil conflict, while others were weakened by the collapse of the price of their exports. Debts attracted huge loans which had to be repaid on a regular basis. It is impossible to explain, in a complete sense, the enormous importance of these developments in this article, except to emphasise the most significant results as they relate to the understanding of warlords. The combination of loan repayment obligations and the diminishing value of state assets removed executive power from the governments of nation-states. National institutions such as trade unions, parliaments and the media were supplanted by international influences exercised by transnational corporations, international broadcasting agencies, the global currency market and international development agencies. Even the most intimate responsibilities of the state for law and order, welfare, education and health were now subjected to international scrutiny. Another consequence of this crisis was the widening of the gap between rich and poor. In sub-Saharan Africa, gross domestic product decreased from an average of 14 per cent of that enjoyed by most industrialised states, to between 5 and 8 per cent.17 It was now possible for a more globalised society to see with great clarity the scale of inequality, the enormous wealth of the rich nations and the wretchedness of the poor. The concept of a global marketplace touched the warlord and his immediate environment. The speed and volume of capital flows from one country to another had no antecedent in the old strategic paradigm. Electronic money at the rate of more than a trillion dollars each day now passed from one side of the world to another at the click of mouse, destabilising the solid economies of one state in favour of a market trend in another.18 Some felt that a global community which condoned the inequality that resulted from free markets, which exposed the weakest to the mercies of volatile economies must also expect that the most deprived elements of that society would find a way of striking back in due course.19

THE NEW WAR ZONE

The new manifestation of the warlord emerged gradually before the end of the Cold War as local faction leaders adapted their role in longstanding conflict areas such as Burma, Colombia, Cambodia, Afghanistan and parts of sub-Saharan Africa to meet the changing environment. The dramatic end of the bipolar strategic era and the swift collapse of the Soviet empire accelerated these changes. New states such as Georgia, Tajikistan and Moldova were sickly bodies from the outset, weakened by identity politics and collapsing infrastructures. Yugoslavia, already growing weaker and weaker in the late 1980s, now fell apart under the stress of Milosovic’s messages of violence and sectarianism. In sub-Saharan Africa, extreme poverty and the removal of superpower interest accelerated the collapse of terminally weakened states. Each of these conflict zones had its individual characteristics, its own versions of humanitarian disasters and the collapse of power. But in most cases, there were also the common factors of extreme poverty, massive civil displacement, huge civilian casualty figures and a state government whose writ had gradually shrunk back to the capital city. It was in the spaces created by this withdrawal of power — in the no-go areas — that the new warlords appeared. The 1990s warlord was responding to a new field of global pressures, opportunities and stresses. Broadly speaking, his traditionally negative role in society remained largely unchanged, he was still the hyena of the conflict zone, lacking the courage or the long-term commitment to confront the strong and, instead, preying off the weak and sickly, ensuring his survival by living within a territory that he could secure in a military sense. But in his new environment, he could no longer ignore the attractions of global compression and its tendency to reach into the sanctuary of his territory.

A characteristic of the post-Cold War era was the greatly increased civilian presence and involvement of every kind. Statistics since World War I showed a steady inversion from a vast majority of military to civilian casualties, to the present era, where civil casualties are proportionally enormous in comparison to those of the military20 (except in the isolated statistics of the Iran-Iraq war). To a much greater extent than before, the control of the civilian population was a primary objective of the warlord. He would remove the element of the population that might succour his opponents and surround himself with friendly communities. The forcible removal or extermination of the opposing elements of the civil population institutionalised the casual violence which had been so destructive in the Chinese context. There was also a greatly increased international presence. On the whole, the new warlords (as opposed to their rank and file) were remarkably astute in their relations with international military organisations. They were usually smart enough to sense the possibility of retribution even if they molested apparently unarmed but uniformed observers. Apart from the fairly well-known and highly attributable cases where international observers were taken and beaten or executed, there were few incidents of physical conflict between warlords and international military observers.21

Another dimension of the new conflict zone was the hugely increased involvement of international emergency relief and long-term development programmes. The warlords had less respect for international agencies that had to operate in the territory which they controlled. Not only were they extremely adept at seizing the cargoes that were useful, but they did it in many cases in a way that encouraged the flow of relief to continue. In the Horn of Africa warlords even organised subunits of their factions to interface with the aid communities which were "... versed in the aid-speak of empowerment, capacity building and civil society."22 This rapacious approach towards international relief and development agencies included sacrosanct organisations like the Red Cross and the UN. The humanitarian community which, to some extent, had emerged from the Cold War traditions of a regulated battle field where armies respected non-combatants, was initially shocked and caught off guard by this development. It confronted their neutral status and moral position which had previously elevated them from the military imbroglios and protected their activities. The warlord had involved them, their options for neutrality were reduced, they were not only a key element of the solution, but now also part of the problem.

Another distinction of the new warlords was the nature of their military activities. In China, where there was a great deal of intensive warfare between armed factions and government forces, the threat of combat meant that, if a warlord wished to survive, he had to organise his faction as an effective military unit. The more successful warlords had understood this and adopted the benefits of the European military reforms and technology. As a result, in the documentation and photography that survived, they had the appearance and structure of military forces that could engage effectively in combat.

However, post-Cold War irregular forces do not have uniformly developed warfare capabilities. At the ‘exceptionally professional’ end of a spectrum could be the rebel forces of the Eritrean civil war whose military organisation was legendary. However, they barely fit the definition of a warlord’s faction. The majority of the warlord forces of sub-Saharan Africa lie at the opposing end of the spectrum and do not have the attitude or structure of effective military units. They rely instead on their frightening behaviour and appearance, and their combat effectiveness is largely symbolic. They are organised around the magnetism of their leaders, which implies that they do not have to rely on a rigorously maintained warfare capability for their survival. Why not? — perhaps because the forces at the lower end of the spectrum spend little time in a posture of military deployment, or on force engagements with the intensity of ammunition and logistic expenditure that would approach the definition of warfare. To trained military observers that were involved locally, they did not have the organisation or demeanour of units determined to take part in serious fighting. Their appearance and aggression were in the style of a force that did not expect to be contested.23 Certainly, they were menacing and killed many people, but very seldom in the heat of a conflict with another armed force. In many cases, a warlord conceded to the presence of a challenging warlord by withdrawing out of harm’s way rather than be engaged in the mutual destruction of combat. Observers have suggested that this careful avoidance of a mutual engagement was dictated by a mutual recognition of each other’s territory and resource exploitation interests.24

Western politicians and communicators, however, often failed to see that the warlord could nevertheless be very dangerous in other ways and was unlikely to expose himself to intervention forces in a confrontation. The warlord has many other options for the use of force. Firm military action by international forces against warlord bands has had mixed results. A well-organised warlord was capable of absorbing a defeat in one district and executing his revenge at another venue. General Rose explained the problem in the Bosnia context. He maintained that, unless there was a uniformity of purpose right across all the elements of the international presence, it was dangerous for the military to go on the offensive against a particular faction while other agencies in the same area were still operating under fragile neutrality arrangements. Furthermore, Aideed’s offensive in Mogadishu25 and Taylor’s campaign against ECOMOG troops in Liberia proved that, in some cases, warlords were capable of concerted military action against intervention forces.

At the lowest level of the warlord gang, in the group of ten to twenty faction fighters, the gang culture of the post-Cold War era was not vastly different from its Chinese antecedents. The faction fighters had the same predatory lifestyle, preying on the weak so long as there could be no threat of reprisal. There was also the same brutality in their relationships with each other and with civilians. In 1993, Professor Delvin Walker, an agriculturist, found himself trapped in the NPFL-held town of Gbarnger in Liberia. Here he watched the new recruits being indoctrinated and brutalised at the NPFL training centre. His observations provided the basis for UNOMIL’s rehabilitation strategy.26 The effects of this treatment were similar to those observed by Lary in China, where the brutality of their superiors licenced the young recruits’ own brutality towards civilians. Recruits in some West African factions were also forced to reject the influence of their traditional family and village hierarchy. In some cases, indoctrination required them to commit atrocities against their own communities. In many instances, recruits had to be renamed as if to throw off the ties of family tradition and adopt warrior names.27 This detachment from their social context probably made them more effective as fighters, but less responsible for their terrible conduct. The new warlords also committed the same atrocities, rape, vandalism and serial looting as the Chinese warlords before them.

So far, there have been two assessment phases of the 1990s version of warlordism. In the first phase, the world media — using a similarly sensational approach as the correspondents in China 80 years before them — reacted with outrage to the activities of warring factions around the world. "Must it go on?", demanded Time Magazine in red letters on its front cover across the photograph of semi-naked Muslims behind the wires of a Serbian detention camp.28 The initial response was that the warlords were mostly mindless barbarians bent on dragging the population which lived in the areas they controlled back to a dark age of tribalism. West Africa was reverting to the Africa of the Victorian atlas, its governments withering away, replaced by the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease and the growing pervasiveness of war.29 This first phase of assessment was, not surprisingly, fairly superficial. It was largely an emotive response to the horrible images of warlordism that were widely used, not only by the media, but also by the relief agencies as a funding expedient on the media.

The second phase of assessment, which continues to unfold, is led by a group of mainly humanitarians, writing under the banner of the ‘economy of civil war’.30 In some cases, individuals had direct experience of the subject, having had to work with, survive and reconcile their humanitarian agenda with the activities of the warlord operating in his own environment where he could disregard almost all the pressures and negotiating ploys of the international community. It is hard to do justice to the writers focusing on the ‘economies of civil war’ in the space of this article which aims to a wider canvas. Perhaps, because of the comparative homogeneity of their experience, they largely agreed on several key issues. Firstly, the warlord was not a mindless barbarian returning an ungoverned population back to a tribal phase in their evolution. The warlord might be a negative phenomenon, perhaps even evil, but there was nothing mindless or irrational about his behaviour. He followed a ruthless logic in his activities. He was a product of his time and of his environment, intensely modern, not regressive or backward looking.31 Secondly, the warlord was above all exploiting the same global marketplace and universal culture that increasingly dominated organised society in the world at large. It was this overwhelming commercial motive, this international dimension of his operations that distinguished the new warlord from his Chinese antecedents. The proposition that warlords were not (using Keegan’s definition32) true warriors who would stand and fight in a disciplined, Clausewitzian manner, but real warriors who followed a Cossack fighting tradition and saw war as an opportunity for profit and as a way of life, was not new. What was new about these new warlords, and was exhaustively reported by the second phase of writers, was that their commercial agenda had become extremely sophisticated, in some cases involving huge international trading accounts. The warlord was still an extractive presence within his territory, his fighters continued to loot in a physical sense for personal and logistic purposes. However, in many cases, an additional dimension of a warlord’s wealth was derived from much larger deals in which the state’s natural resources — gold, diamonds, gemstones, hardwood timber, fisheries, latex, even bananas and coffee — were traded on international markets. The new warlord was now able to gain wealth far in excess of the day-to-day spoils that were the expectations of a traditional plunderer. Warlords were not alone in exploiting these resources. Private security companies, elements of international forces and even rulers of weak states were also involved. The value of these unseen trading accounts and the relative ease with which most of these commodities could be removed and transacted, influenced the size and configuration of a warlord’s warfare needs and dictated his priorities for survival.