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The deaths last summer of Frederick Forsyth and Simon Mann felt like the closing of a chapter in history that many assumed had been relegated to fiction. Forsyth, whose The Dogs of War imagined a band of mercenaries staging a coup in Africa, produced what became both a literary classic and, in some quarters, a how-to manual. Mann, a former SAS officer and entrepreneur of risk, attempted precisely that, only to find himself shackled in a Zimbabwean prison, mocked as a would-be buccaneer caught in the act. Yet he deserves more respect than ridicule. Few men in our age of risk aversion attempt anything so audacious. He was among the last of the modern condottieri, soldiers of fortune whose loyalty was measured in courage rather than contracts.
And that same audacity animates today’s renewed talk of Letters of Marque and Reprisal. Congressman Tim Burchett has introduced the Cartel Marque and Reprisal Reauthorization Act of 2025; Sen. Mike Lee has expressed sympathy; even Elon Musk has applauded. With cartels now officially designated as “foreign terrorist organizations” by President Trump’s executive order, the idea is simple: Empower private citizens, licensed and bonded, to strike cartel assets directly, privateers for the 21st century.
It sounds quixotic, even archaic. But history suggests otherwise. Medieval kings, too weak to fund proper navies, deputized merchants to wage war at sea. A letter legalized what would otherwise be piracy: Attack enemy shipping, seize goods, and split the spoils. In the Elizabethan age, men like Francis Drake were celebrated national heroes. The young United States embraced the practice with enthusiasm. During the Revolutionary War, American privateers outnumbered the Continental Navy many times over, cheaper than frigates and far more effective at harassing the British.
“Better, perhaps, to unleash a few bold men with vision than to drown quietly in bureaucracy.”
Privateering declined only when professional navies grew large enough to render it obsolete. The 1856 Declaration of Paris abolished it, though the United States, ever pragmatic, refused to sign. For centuries, nations fought wars on the cheap, harnessing daring and enterprise in the service of national aims. The logic remains unchanged: When enemies operate beyond the reach of law, nations must find instruments that operate beyond the habits of peacetime.
That logic applies now. The cartels are no longer gangs but multinational syndicates of violence. They control swathes of Mexico, maintain arsenals rivaling small armies, and rake in billions from narcotics flooding across the U.S. border. Their cousins in Colombia, Venezuela, and beyond have built similar shadow empires, complete with jungle airstrips and paramilitary wings. These are not “gangs” in any useful sense; they are private armies in all but name, and they will not be defeated by filing another report in Washington. Traditional policing has failed, while military intervention would amount to war with Mexico, a country with a long memory of U.S. incursions. But sovereignty is not merely the absence of foreigners; it is the presence of authority. Where criminal syndicates tax, govern, and patrol, a parallel state has taken root. When that hostile para-state shapes life on both sides of the border, history suggests the neighbor eventually acts.
Traditional policing has failed, and open war with Mexico is unthinkable. Letters of Marque offer a third way: deputizing the bold to strike where the bureaucratic cannot. Burchett’s bill would allow the President to authorize private actors to seize cartel property and personnel. The details are intentionally vague; who counts as “linked” to a cartel is left to executive discretion. Critics call that dangerous; proponents call it flexible. The objections are predictable: liability, sovereignty, the risk of vigilantism. Yet none are new. The same protests greeted Drake and the Continental Congress alike. Statecraft has always involved risk; the real danger is paralysis.
What this proposal represents is not folly but imagination. It asks whether America still possesses the capacity to sanction audacity, to trust private initiative when state machinery grinds too slowly.
Here we come back to Simon Mann. Shackled in Harare, he was easy to caricature, the failed mercenary, the last of the adventurers. Yet his venture, like Forsyth’s fiction, represented something rare in modern public life: vision. He was willing to risk everything to challenge the accepted order. That his plot failed is almost beside the point. History is not moved by committees drafting position papers. It is moved by men who dare, and, as the regiment that trained him reminds us, Who Dares Wins.
And Mann was hardly alone in seeing the potential of small, well-trained private forces. Executive Outcomes, founded by the South African Eeben Barlow, was in many ways a 20th-century condottieri company, disciplined, ruthless, and briefly indispensable. It routed rebels in Angola and Sierra Leone with a few hundred men, proving that discipline, equipment, and audacity could outmatch insurgent armies many times their size. They succeeded in weeks, where the United Nations had spent years issuing press releases. Meanwhile, Erik Prince, America’s best-known soldier of fortune, built Blackwater (now Constellis) into a global empire of contractors. Prince is less Drake than Drake with an MBA, a man who discovered you could turn derring-do into a Delaware-registered corporation and bill the Pentagon for it. States sneer in public, but in private they dial men like Prince and Barlow when the crisis hotline rings.
In our time, most politicians speak in the dull tongue of management consultants. Everything is “stakeholders,” “frameworks,” “deliverables.” Against that backdrop, the idea of Letters of Marque shines like a cutlass. It cuts through platitude and paralysis, daring to suggest that perhaps the way to fight lawless cartels is to harness a disciplined version of lawless energy. There is danger, yes. There always is when the state arms private men with license. But risk is the price of initiative. The safer alternative is the slow, grinding failure of the status quo: fentanyl deaths, border chaos, cartel impunity. Better, perhaps, to unleash a few bold men with vision than to drown quietly in bureaucracy.
Skeptics point to the Paris Declaration or U.S. legal precedents and insist that the age of privateering is over. But international law has never been more than the will of the strong dressed up in Latin. States break rules when it suits them and then write new ones. The question is not whether Letters of Marque conform to 19th-century treaties, but whether they serve America’s interest in the 21st. The Constitution explicitly grants Congress the power. If the world objects, let it. It has done precious little to stop the narcotics or the bodies piling up.
What would it look like? Licensed firms operating with drones, helicopters, cyber tools, and strike teams, modern Drakes with satellite phones and crypto wallets. Their quarry: not galleons laden with silver, but convoys of fentanyl precursors, safehouses stuffed with cash, and the private jets of cartel lords. Patriotism and profit once again entwined.
Yes, there are risks of abuse and corruption. But the greater danger lies in timidity, in assuming bureaucracy can answer the violence of cartels. Sometimes survival requires boldness. Sometimes history calls for privateers.
Forsyth is gone. Mann is gone. But their spirit lingers in the novels that dreamed of mercenaries toppling regimes, and in the real men who tried. As Washington debates whether to revive Letters of Marque, we stand again at the edge of imagination and risk. To scoff is easy; to dare is harder. Yet it is the daring who make history. Privateering against the cartels may fail, or it may succeed beyond expectation. Either way, it would show that America has not entirely lost its capacity for boldness, that it still knows how to license vision, reward risk, and arm audacity with legitimacy.
Perhaps that, in itself, would be a victory.