SATIRICAL FICTION 

Isenberg Institute of Strategic Satire  •  Noir Fiction & Investigative Dossier Series

A Work of Fiction

This document is a work of AI generated satirical fiction produced by the Isenberg Institute of Strategic Satire. Dr. Ana Bregović Marić is a fictional composite character; she is not a portrayal of any living scholar, and no statement attributed to her, or to any Member of Congress herein, should be read as an actual quotation or position. Institutional names, hearing dates, and procedural detail are invented for narrative purposes. The underlying legal and historical material referenced — the Montreux Document, the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers, MEJA, the Nisour Square prosecution, and related instruments — reflects the real regulatory landscape as background texture for the story, not legal advice.

 

Testimony of Dr. Ana Bregović Marić Before a House Subcommittee on the Regulation of Private Military and Security Contracting

Table of Contents

Preliminary

Opening Statement

Question and Answer Session

Preliminary

The hearing room in the Rayburn House Office Building smelled of industrial carpet and impatience — a Tuesday morning session, half the members’ seats already filled, staffers ranged along the back wall balancing coffee against briefing binders someone had wheeled in against protocol. Dr. Ana Bregović Marić had flown in from Porto the previous evening, trading the Douro’s damp August heat for Washington’s version of the same thing at a worse latitude. Two other witnesses sat to her left — a retired Marine general who now consulted for a mid-sized security firm, and a legal scholar down from Georgetown — but the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Operations had summoned her specifically for the fifteen years she had spent tracing the shadow economy of private force: from the mercenary companies of 1960s Congo to the cyber contractors now guarding Arctic data cables.

A former OSCE colleague had warned her, over a late dinner in Lisbon, that American subcommittees moved faster than European ones, interrupted more, and cared less for theoretical nuance than for practical bottom lines. She had prepared accordingly.

“Dr. Bregović Marić,” the chairman said, tapping his gavel once. “You have ten minutes for your opening statement. The floor is yours.”

She adjusted the microphone. Her accent carried the clipped cadence of someone who had learned English in Belgrade classrooms, refined it in Lisbon lecture halls, and hardened it in enough conference rooms to know when persuasion mattered more than precision.

Opening Statement

“Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member, members of the Subcommittee.

“I want to begin with an observation that sounds like a provocation but is merely a fact: the private military and security industry is not a post–Cold War invention. It is closer to the historical norm than the standing national army is. The nation-state’s monopoly on force — what we academics ritually cite from Weber — is a relatively recent and geographically limited experiment. Kings borrowed armies from bankers. Popes hired condottieri. The East India Company maintained a private army larger than most sovereign states. What changed after 1648, and more decisively in the nineteenth century, was not the practice of private force. It was the normative claim that the state should hold a monopoly on it — a claim never fully realized, but one that became the organizing fiction of the international system. The modern PMSC industry is not a rupture with this history. It is a return to an older pattern, dressed in twenty-first-century corporate form. I raise this because it bears directly on feasibility: if this committee imagines it is regulating something entirely new, it will miscalibrate the tools. It is not inventing rules for a novel industry. It is reasserting public control over a market that has always existed, but that modern technology and globalization have made both invisible and indispensable.

“Second, the evolution of the normative framework. In the late 1990s, as state structures collapsed across West Africa and the Balkans, the international community confronted what I call the regulatory vacuum. The United Nations’ existing mercenary conventions had been drafted for an identifiable villain — a foreign fighter, motivated by profit, operating in an armed conflict, usually wearing a uniform two wars out of date. The modern private security contractor is none of those things. She may be a former Navy SEAL protecting a diplomat, a Ugandan national guarding a copper mine in Afghanistan, or a cyber operator in Tallinn monitoring election infrastructure for a Gulf state. The old conventions did not become obsolete because mercenaries disappeared. They became obsolete because the category grew too narrow to capture the reality. The response — the Montreux Document of 2008, the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers in 2010 — did not create new law so much as clarify that international humanitarian law and human rights law already applied to this industry. But I want to be direct with the Subcommittee: soft law of this kind was designed as a floor, not a ceiling. Montreux binds states to reaffirm obligations they already had. The ICoC created an oversight association — the ICoCA — that is dues-funded and dependent on the cooperation of the very companies it is meant to oversee. Neither instrument can compel a non-signatory to do anything at all.

“Third, regulatory evolution here in the United States, which presents something of a paradox. America is simultaneously the most heavily regulated and the least transparent PMSC market in the developed world. The Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000 extended federal criminal jurisdiction to contractors accompanying the armed forces overseas — a necessary but narrow fix, prompted by accountability gaps that became visible in the Balkans and, catastrophically, in Iraq after 2004. Nisour Square remains the case every student of this field returns to: seventeen Iraqi civilians killed by Blackwater contractors in 2007, and a prosecution that took more than a decade to resolve, hampered at every stage by jurisdictional ambiguity and evidentiary contamination. Congress responded — the 2007 UCMJ amendments, revised FAR clauses, better contract-management requirements after the Commission on Wartime Contracting’s 2011 report. Each was a genuine improvement. None, individually or together, constitutes a comprehensive regime. The Department of Defense knows who carries guns on its contracts. The State Department knows who protects its embassies. No single authority knows both. The regulatory evolution here has been horizontal, not vertical — more rules, not more coherence.

“Fourth, international law and the private use of violence. Under the law of state responsibility, a state remains answerable for private actors exercising governmental authority on its behalf. But international law was built around the state as the primary subject and object of regulation, and PMSCs are transnational by design — a company incorporated in one jurisdiction, contracted by a second, operating in a third, staffed by nationals of a fourth. That is not a hypothetical. It is this industry’s ordinary operating model. Attribution becomes genuinely difficult in these configurations, and individual criminal responsibility under humanitarian law depends on classification questions — combatant, civilian, mercenary under Article 47 of Additional Protocol I — that the industry is specifically structured to keep ambiguous. This is not a criticism of any one company. It is a description of an industry that has spent three decades learning to route around the seams of the international legal order.

“Finally, and I will close on this, because I believe it is the point this Subcommittee will find most uncomfortable: the lack of transparency is not a government failure. It is a private-sector business model. Shell companies registered in Delaware. Subsidiaries in Cyprus. Insurance underwritten in Bermuda. Contracts classified for ‘operational security’ that has nothing to do with operations and everything to do with liability. This opacity is not an accident of market complexity. It protects clients from political embarrassment, companies from liability, and operators from scrutiny — and it prevents the very accountability that would make regulation credible. So: is regulation feasible? Yes. The frameworks exist. The precedents are accumulating. But efficacy requires something I suspect this committee understands better than most institutions in this city: oversight without visibility is a fiction. Regulation, if it is to mean anything, must be paired with mandatory beneficial-ownership disclosure, contract-level reporting, and — I will say this plainly, because half-measures have not worked — personal liability for the executives who write the rules of engagement their employees carry into the field. If we treat this industry as a utility, we must regulate it like one. If we treat it as an extension of the military, we must hold it to the standard of one. Anything less, and Congress is not regulating violence. It is merely subsidizing it.

“Thank you. I look forward to your questions.”

Question and Answer Session

The chairman removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Thank you, Doctor. We’ll begin five-minute rounds. The gentleman from Arizona, Mr. Holloway, is recognized.”

REP. HOLLOWAY (R-AZ):

“Dr. Bregović Marić, you mentioned the Montreux Document. My understanding is that it’s non-binding — seventy-some signatories, no enforcement mechanism. If I’m a CEO in Houston and I violate every good practice in that document, what happens to me?”

“Nothing,” Ana said. “Which is precisely my point.

“The Montreux Document restates existing obligations; it does not create a new enforcement regime. It is pedagogical, not punitive. For a CEO in Houston, the binding constraints are not international soft law — they are the Federal Acquisition Regulation, the Arms Export Control Act, and, in theory, civil liability under the Alien Tort Statute, though that door has narrowed considerably since Kiobel and Jesner. Montreux is useful for states that lack regulatory capacity of their own. The United States is not such a state. Its problem is not an absence of rules. It is the fragmentation of enforcing them — and I would note, since the Chairman may raise it, that the U.S. was one of the seventeen original states that negotiated Montreux in 2008. This is not a foreign framework being imported. It is a floor the United States helped build, and has, in places, declined to stand on.”

Holloway frowned. “So you’re saying more international treaties won’t help?”

“I am saying that before this committee pursues new international instruments, it might consider enforcing the ones it already has and routinely ignores.”

A ripple of laughter moved through the staff rows. Holloway did not smile, but he nodded and yielded.

“The gentlewoman from California, Ms. Delgado, is recognized.”

REP. DELGADO (D-CA):

“You called opacity a business model. That’s a strong accusation. Can you give this committee a concrete example?”

Ana reached for her water glass.

“In 2019, a firm operating in Yemen — call it Gulf Shield Solutions — was involved in a checkpoint incident that killed three civilians. The company was registered in the British Virgin Islands. Its operating subsidiary was licensed in the UAE. Its insurance was held by a Lloyd’s syndicate. Its trainers were Serbian nationals. Its client was a Saudi conglomerate. When investigators sought accountability, they discovered that Gulf Shield Solutions had dissolved six weeks after the incident and reconstituted under a new name with the same directors. No police force had jurisdiction. No regulator had authority. No court had a defendant. I have documented fourteen similar restructurings following lethal incidents, Congresswoman. This is not an anomaly. It is a business practice.”

Delgado’s pen moved quickly across her legal pad. “Would a beneficial ownership registry solve that?”

“It would strip away the first layer of camouflage. But ownership alone is not enough. An oversight body needs three things to make a registry useful rather than decorative. First, the natural persons who actually control an entity — not the contracting shell, but the humans behind it, including through nominee arrangements, which is where most opacity is deliberately engineered. Second, the full subcontracting chain for any contract above a materiality threshold, updated as it changes, not filed once at close-out, because subcontractors are routinely swapped mid-performance — and that is exactly when accountability disappears. Third, incident-level reporting, not just fatality counts. The near-misses are usually the earliest and most honest signal of a firm’s actual culture in the field, long before it produces a headline. Much of this data already exists inside the Department of Defense’s own contractor-tracking systems, Congresswoman. The problem has never really been the absence of data. It is that the data is fragmented across a dozen agencies and unavailable to anyone positioned to act on it.”

“That’s more specific than I expected,” Delgado said. “I’d like your office to submit that language for the record.”

“You will have it within the month.”

“The gentleman from Ohio, Mr. Kowalski, is recognized.”

REP. KOWALSKI (R-OH), a gruff former Marine, didn’t wait for the chairman to finish:

“Doctor, with respect — you’re an academic. You’ve never had to call in a QRF at zero-two-hundred hours. You’re describing criminal liability for a company’s board of directors. You think some CEO in a glass tower in Reston is going to make the split-second call on whether to engage a vehicle approaching a checkpoint? That’s absurd. You’re asking for a level of oversight that would paralyze people in the field.”

Ana met his gaze without flinching.

“Colonel, I respect your service, genuinely. But you’ve misunderstood my argument, and I want to correct that directly. I am not asking the CEO to pull the trigger. I am asking him to be legally responsible for the rules under which that trigger gets pulled. If a training manual instructs personnel to fire on any vehicle that approaches a convoy without stopping, and a school bus is destroyed as a result, the man who wrote that policy should face consequences — not only the man who fired. Why? Because that policy was a business decision, made in an office, to minimize risk to the company’s assets. It was not a battlefield decision made under fire to minimize harm to civilians. Your Marines have the Uniform Code of Military Justice. They have a chain of command that can court-martial a general. In the private sector, there is no chain of command above the CEO. He is the top of it, and as things currently stand, he is untouchable. That asymmetry is not a technicality, Colonel. It is the entire moral hazard this industry runs on.”

The room was very quiet. Kowalski’s jaw worked once, but he said nothing further, and the chairman moved the clock along.

“The gentleman from Florida, Mr. Bassett, is recognized.”

REP. BASSETT (R-FL), younger than the others, carried the clipped energy of a former prosecutor:

“Dr. Bregović Marić, isn’t there a risk that tightening the rules here just pushes the contracts to Dubai, or Moscow, or wherever the rules are looser? Don’t we lose transparency rather than gain it?”

“This is the regulatory-arbitrage argument, Congressman, and it is not without merit — but it becomes self-fulfilling if this committee accepts it uncritically. The United States is not a price-taker in this market. It is the price-maker. American government contracts represent the single largest revenue stream in the global industry. If Congress mandates transparency as a condition of doing business here, serious operators will comply, because they cannot afford to lose access to this market. The firms that flee to Dubai were never planning to comply with anything, in any jurisdiction. Let them go. The operators your constituents actually work for — the ones with something to lose — will stay and professionalize.”

Bassett tapped a pen against his desk. “One more, if I may, Mr. Chairman. The efficiency argument — the Pentagon uses contractors because they’re cheaper and faster than standing up new force structure. Doesn’t heavier oversight erase that advantage?”

“The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction would dispute the premise before I do, Congressman. Its own audits repeatedly found that administrative markups, subcontracting layers, and outright fraud erased whatever savings contracting was supposed to deliver. The cost-efficiency argument is frequently an accounting illusion — real in year one, invisible by year five, when the investigations start. Oversight is not the expense here. Its absence is.”

“The gentlewoman from New York, Ms. Okafor, is recognized.”

REP. OKAFOR (D-NY), without looking up from her tablet:

“Dr. Bregović Marić, you mentioned cyber operators in your opening. This industry isn’t guns-for-hire anymore. We’re seeing private firms run offensive cyber operations, influence campaigns, intelligence analysis. Does existing international law even reach that?”

This was the question that kept Ana awake on transatlantic flights.

“Not adequately, Congresswoman. Montreux was drafted with kinetic force in mind — guards, convoys, static security. It says almost nothing about a private company conducting network intrusions on behalf of a state, or scraping social media for counter-insurgency targeting. The law of armed conflict applies if a cyber operation occurs within an armed conflict. Peacetime offensive cyber is a different country entirely — the UN Group of Governmental Experts, the Tallinn Manual process, all useful, none of it binding. I would ask this committee to consider whether the licensing regime for defense services under the Arms Export Control Act should be extended to certain categories of offensive cyber capability sold by private vendors.”

Okafor finally looked up. “You think we’re behind?”

“I think the technology is roughly five years ahead of the regulation, and the industry has every incentive to keep it that way.”

The Ranking Member, known on the committee for a dry, unhurried style that unsettled witnesses more than shouting would have, took her turn next.

RANKING MEMBER CASTELLANO:

“Doctor, I want to press on something specific. You called MEJA ‘necessary but narrow.’ In your professional judgment, is the core problem here a gap in the law, or an enforcement problem with the law we already have?”

“Both, Ranking Member, but I would weight it toward enforcement, with a caveat. MEJA has real jurisdictional gaps — it applies most cleanly to contractors ‘accompanying the armed forces,’ and there has been litigation over whether personnel working for other agencies, or several layers removed from the Department of Defense, fall within its scope. That gap is genuine, and this committee could close it in a single amendment. But even in cases squarely inside MEJA’s scope, prosecutions have been rare, slow, and dependent on cooperation from foreign governments for evidence the Department of Justice does not reliably receive. So: fix the statutory gap, yes. But recognize that fixing it will not, by itself, fix the outcome. The deeper problem is investigative and evidentiary capacity in extraterritorial cases, and that is a resourcing problem, not a drafting problem.”

“The gentlewoman from Washington, Ms. Whitfield, is recognized.”

REP. WHITFIELD (D-WA):

“Doctor, isn’t some opacity simply necessary for operational security? These firms argue that publishing patrol routes or force posture gets people killed.”

“There is a real difference between operational security and structural opacity, Congresswoman, and this industry has spent two decades blurring it deliberately. Operational security means not telling an adversary your patrol routes in advance. Structural opacity means the American public cannot learn how many civilians died in a drone strike that a contractor’s targeting algorithm helped select — after the fact, when no operational value remains in secrecy at all. The first is security. The second is obscurity dressed as security. And there is a second cost people rarely name: when a soldier makes a fatal error, the Army investigates. When a contractor makes the same error, the company’s own legal department investigates. That is not oversight, Congresswoman. That is a conflict of interest with a badge pinned to it.”

Whitfield made a note. “You’ve also written about accountability gaps for foreign nationals harmed by U.S.-contracted firms operating abroad. Walk us through that.”

“It is one of the least resolved corners of this entire field, Congresswoman. A foreign national injured or killed by a U.S. contractor abroad faces two doors, and both are mostly closed. Domestic courts in the host country frequently lack jurisdiction or functioning institutions to hear the claim at all. U.S. courts are available in theory, but sovereign immunity doctrines, the political question doctrine, and the narrowing of Alien Tort Statute claims since Kiobel have closed most of that door as well. What remains is civil litigation at the margins — occasionally successful, always slow, entirely dependent on plaintiffs’ counsel willing to litigate for years against a defendant with more resources than the plaintiff’s home government. I would not overstate how well this channel functions. I would say only that it currently functions better than criminal prosecution does, which is a low bar.”

The chairman leaned into his own microphone. “Doctor, you’ve spoken about real-time reporting. That’s a significant technological and security lift. Are you proposing body-camera feeds from every contractor go up on a public website?”

A ripple of nervous laughter crossed the room. Ana did not join it.

“No, Mr. Chairman. I am proposing an encrypted, independently audited database, accessible to a non-partisan oversight body — a civilian inspectorate with subpoena power and the clearances to match. We already do this with nuclear materials. We already do this with intelligence-sharing among allies. There is no technological reason we could not do it with private force. What is missing is not the technology. It is the political will — because transparency of this kind would reveal the actual cost of this industry, not in dollars, but in what it has quietly done to the state’s own claim to moral authority. It is, for almost everyone involved, simply easier not to know.”

“The gentleman from Indiana, Mr. Pritchard, is recognized.”

REP. PRITCHARD (R-IN), the subcommittee’s most senior member, spoke in the deliberate cadence of someone weighing each word against a future campaign ad:

“Dr. Bregović Marić, you’ve said regulation is feasible, and you’ve also said our system is fragmented. If you had to pick one reform — just one — that would actually move the needle, what would it be?”

Ana took off her glasses. She had been asked some version of this question in The Hague, in Geneva, and once in a basement pub near Porto’s São Bento station by a journalist who never filed the story. She gave the answer she always gave.

“A single federal registry, Congressman. Not another licensing scheme — those already exist in fragments. A registry of operations. Any PMSC contract with a U.S. government entity, and any contract performed abroad by a U.S.-based company, gets reported to a central database: location, services rendered, estimated personnel, any use-of-force incident. Classified work can be reported to the intelligence committees under existing protocols. The database need not be public, though I would prefer it were. But it must exist, and it must be visible to inspectors general, to Congress, and to law enforcement. Right now this committee is attempting to regulate an industry whose scale it does not actually know. That is not regulation, Congressman. That is guesswork with a hearing room attached.”

Pritchard grunted. “And you believe the industry would comply?”

“They would comply the moment compliance became a condition of doing business with the United States government. The federal government is this industry’s largest client, by a wide margin. That is your leverage. I would simply ask this committee to use it.”

The chairman checked the clock. “Dr. Bregović Marić, your time has been generous, but we have a vote approaching. Final question — the gentlewoman from Michigan, Ms. Chen.”

REP. CHEN (D-MI), with a small, tight smile:

“You’ve been critical of nearly everyone today, Doctor — states, companies, international bodies alike. Is anyone getting this right?”

Ana allowed herself a small laugh, the first of the morning.

“Switzerland has an interesting certification model, precisely because it has to — it hosts the Montreux process and cannot afford to be seen ignoring its own document. The United Kingdom’s Modern Slavery Act has forced some disclosure of labor practices within security supply chains. New Zealand’s outright prohibition on armed PMSC operations is admirably clean, if limited in its global reach. But if you want an honest answer, Congresswoman — no. No one is fully getting this right, because getting it right requires admitting that the privatization of violence is not a temporary outsourcing arrangement to be managed. It is a permanent feature of the international system that has to be governed as one. Most governments, including this one, are not yet politically honest enough to have that conversation in public.”

“That’s uncomfortably clarifying,” Chen said.

“Then may I close with the practical version, Congresswoman, since I suspect that is what will actually survive contact with legislative drafting. You do not need to solve the whole architecture tomorrow. Tomorrow, you pass a law requiring every PMSC contracting with this government to disclose its full ownership structure, its subcontractors, and its insurance coverage for civilian harm. That is not radical. That is basic corporate hygiene — the kind any vendor selling office furniture to a federal agency already has to provide. It does not stop a single bullet. But it makes the bullet traceable, back to a person, not a shell company in the Caymans. You start with the paper, because the paper is the one thing this industry actually fears. It is not afraid of your outrage. It is afraid of your subpoenas. Give it something to fear.”

The gavel came down. “The witness is excused. Dr. Bregović Marić, the committee thanks you for your testimony, and your candor.”

Ana gathered her papers. In the front row, a young staffer with a Portuguese surname on her badge — Ramos, or Ribeiro; she couldn’t quite read it — caught her eye and mouthed obrigada. Thank you.

In the hallway, a lobbyist from one of the trade associations intercepted her with a business card and an invitation to a “more balanced conversation” over dinner on K Street. She declined politely, stepped out into the wet Washington heat, and walked toward the Metro. A 7 p.m. flight from Dulles waited, and a seminar in Porto on Tuesday, and the familiar, faintly exhausting sense that she had not persuaded anyone so much as reminded them, briefly, what honesty sounded like.

That, she thought, descending into the Capitol South station, would have to be enough for today.