- All
- David Isenberg
-
October 19, 2026 - NINETY DAYS IN PORT SABINE
My name is Pieter Lourens. I was a colonel once, in an army that no longer exists under a flag that no longer flies. These days I’m the founder, chairman and only permanent employee of Meridian Advisory, which sounds like a firm that does your taxes. It does something else. It sells the one thing African governments can’t get from the people who lecture them: a man who has done the work and doesn’t need to be thanked for it. Continue reading
-
October 16, 2026 - THE LICENSE TO FIGHT
Marchenko tapped his pen against the folder. “Colleagues, the President has instructed us to produce a framework consistent with the Constitution, our defense and intelligence legislation, and the Geneva Conventions. We are not here to legalize private armies.” Sokolov smiled. “Then we should be careful what we call them.” “That,” Marchenko said, “is precisely why we are here.” Continue reading
-
October 12, 2026 - FLAG OF CONVENIENCE
The advertisement ran under the name Meridian Oil Logistics, and it asked for men with “maritime security experience” and “a calm temperament under pressure.” Grachev answered it from a hotel room in Rostov-on-Don, three months after his contract in Bakhmut had ended the way most contracts there ended — with a payment, a silence, and a number he was told not to call again. Continue reading
-
October 9, 2026 - KHASHAM: The River Between Them
Sergei had learned that Wagner was easiest to understand from the bottom. You knew your section commander, then the platoon, then the assault unit above it, which the men called the Fifth Storm; above that came reconnaissance, tank crews, gun crews, signals specialists, medics, and an operations department run by men who were never seen in boots. Tonight the contractors shared the road with Syrian regulars of the 4th Division, tribal militiamen of the Baqir Brigade, the ISIS Hunters, and Shia volunteers of the Fatemiyoun and Zainebiyoun brigades, each with its own radios and its own version of the plan. From a distance it looked like an army. Up close it was several organizations trying to share one road. A rumor ran down the column that the plan had been cleared in Moscow; another said it had been cleared in St. Petersburg, in the office of a man who had made his fortune in catering. Both were delivered with equal confidence, and neither could be checked. Continue reading
-
October 5, 2026 - A DEATH IN SYRIA, A CLAIM IN DELAWARE
When the wooden box arrived in eastern Nepal, it weighed less than a sack of rice. Inside was Ram Bahadur Thapa — what remained of him after a concrete form collapsed on a bridge outside Homs, Syria, crushing three men in an instant. He was thirty-eight. He left a wife, five children, and a debt his family could not name. The box came with a check: $7,500. Ex gratia, the Kuwaiti logistics firm called it. A gesture of compassion. Not an admission. Not a debt. A gesture. Continue reading
-
October 2, 2026 - THE ZEROING LINE
"Two rules before you decide," he went on. "First: this isn't the colony. In the colony you can be a coward and just get beaten for it. Out there, if you drop your rifle and run for the rear, the men behind you have a machine gun and orders. We call it obnulenie. Zeroing. There's no report written. There's no board that reviews it. You go home in a bag addressed to nobody. Second rule: don't get taken prisoner thinking it buys you anything. It doesn't buy you anything out there, and it doesn't buy anyone else anything either. Continue reading
-
September 28, 2026 - THE SHELL GAME
The contract ran eighty-three pages. Buried on page forty-six, in the particular gray prose that law firms reserve for their most dangerous sentences, sat the clause that mattered more than all the others combined: all intelligence products are advisory in nature; final operational decisions rest exclusively with the client. Simon Chesterman has written about the accountability gaps this kind of drafting creates — gaps wide enough, in practice, to lose a body count inside. Continue reading
-
September 25, 2026 - THE VERMAAK ADDRESS
Danie Vermaak was seventy-one years old and had not worn a suit voluntarily in a decade. He wore one now, badly, the way a man wears a uniform he's proud of but no longer fits into. He had founded Sable Dynamics in Pretoria in the dying light of apartheid, staffed it with men who'd fought a bush war nobody in this room had bothered to understand, and used it to turn the tide of two African civil wars in under eighteen months each. He had been called a mercenary, a war criminal, a stabilizing force, and a cautionary tale, sometimes by the same journalist in the same article. He had outlived most of his detractors and all of his imitators, and he had been invited here, he suspected, because the organizers wanted a photograph of the industry's founding father shaking hands with its current billionaires. Continue reading
-
September 21, 2026 - THE CONTRACT CENTURY
To see this in its full graphical glory click on below title link. THE CONTRACT CENTURY A Synthesis Dossier — Lagos, Mombasa, the Arctic Corridor, and Geneva, 2051 AI-written fictional scenario, projected twenty-five years forward SATIRICAL FICTION Table … Continue reading
-
September 18, 2026 - THE CORDILLERA PROTOCOL
The pitch was simple and, in its way, honest. A foreign war was hiring. Contracts ran through cutouts and shell logistics firms that made the money look like consulting fees. Men like Aurelio — former soldiers, former guerrilla fighters, men whose only marketable skill was violence performed competently — were worth more on a battlefield eight thousand kilometers away than they were guarding a coca lab in Cauca. "You go, you learn something nobody in this hemisphere knows yet," the man said. "You come back a different kind of asset." Continue reading
