Money For Mayhem: Mercenaries, Private Military Companies, Drones, and the Future of War

C/O Futures Book Review

Lisa J. Campbell

5 March 2026

Allesandro Arduino is an affiliate of the Lau China Institute and King’s College London, a fellow at the China Africa Research Initiative at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a member of the advisory group for the International Code of Conduct Association (ICoCA). He is a longstanding China expert, including being a known Belt and Road Initiative security expert. He focuses on cybersecurity, combat UAVs, and China’s political economy in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. His studies of Africa’s security affairs have focused on private military companies and other guns-for-hire across the continent, notably the rise of Russia’s Wagner Group (now Africa Corps) and the increasingly pervasive Turkish private military outfits.

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Book Review | Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos

Pamela Ligouri Bunker

Small Wars Journal

23 June 2025

Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos. By Candace Rondeaux. New York: PublicAffairs, 2025. 480 Pages. ISBN-13: ‎978-1541703063.

Published in 2025, Putin’s Sledgehammer, by Candace Rondeaux, is one of the most recent and most comprehensive works to address the phenomenon that was Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group and the impact it ultimately had on the Russian way of war. The author, who had a notable career as an investigative journalist and foreign correspondent, is eminently qualified in this arena, having firsthand experience since the mid-1990s with Russia’s use of narrative and deflection to obscure its political positioning along with the political maneuvering among its shifting cast of characters. Per the author, the book grew out of a joint project between Arizona State University and the New America Foundation on the future of proxy war in the 21st Century. Rondeaux currently directs New America’s Future Frontlines program (with a global view to the digital transformation of our times) and its Planetary Politics Initiative (connecting academic research to real world action in ecology, ethics, and law) along with being a professor of practice at Arizona State University’s Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies and the Future Security Initiative.

To read the entire book review goto: https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/06/23/putins-sledgehammer-candace-rondeaux-review/

Will a Rebranded Wagner Group (as Africa Corps) Establish Operations in Niger?

C/O Futures PMC/Mercenary Research Note Series

Lisa J. Campbell

11 March 2024

In July 2023, a coup in Niger returned the country to indefinite authoritarian military rule. The pro-Russia, anti-west coup, which followed a decade of steady progress under democratically elected civilian governments, presents a regional threat to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law in the Sahel. Trendlines had shown substantial improvements in Niger over the last decade while under democratic rule, in areas of the economy, security, corruption, and human development.[1] That period followed 35 years of military rule and four coups between 1974 and 2010, which brought stagnation, negative growth rates, contracted per capita income, and political instability. Considering documented trendlines, the 2023 coup was unjustifiable. The success of the coup is due in part to at least three complex information warfare campaigns that took place as early as 2020 in Niger, some or all of which were sponsored by Russia and likely orchestrated by its pseudo-private military company (pseudo-PMC), the Wagner Group.[2] It is likely that multiple successful disinformation campaigns led to the series of coups from 2020-2023 in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger resulting in a region-wide geopolitical shift away from the West, and in favor of Russia. Russia and the Wagner Group already have a well-established operational presence in Mali. Africa Corps, said to be a re-branded Wagner Group, is in the process of deploying to Burkina Faso.[3] With a new defense alliance having formed between Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, a Wagner Group/Africa Corps presence in Niger seems likely to occur in the near term.

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