The Useful Brute: How States Create Loyal Enforcers and Learn to Fear Them

There is a moment in nearly every political crisis when the formal instruments of state power prove insufficient. The police are stretched thin, the army is politically complicated to deploy, and the situation on the ground demands bodies — warm, motivated, locally knowledgeable bodies willing to do things that uniformed officers either cannot or will not do.

In that moment, governments reach for the same solution they have been reaching for since the first city-states of Mesopotamia: they recruit someone else's people and hand them a version of official sanction.

The arrangement is almost always described as temporary. It is almost always described as a partnership. And it almost always ends the same way.

The Roman Template

The Romans called them auxilia — auxiliary forces drawn from the provinces and allied territories, fighting under Roman command but organized along their own tribal or ethnic lines. At their peak, the auxiliaries outnumbered the Roman legions themselves. They were essential. They were also, from the perspective of Roman political culture, permanently suspect.

The suspicion was not irrational. The auxiliaries were effective precisely because they operated by different rules. They knew terrain the legions did not. They maintained loyalties the Roman chain of command could not fully monitor. And they had been recruited, trained, and organized around the assumption that their particular skills — which is to say, their particular willingness to use violence in ways the formal military found inconvenient — were valuable.

When those skills were no longer needed, or when their exercise became politically embarrassing, the Roman state's response was consistent: distance, then disavowal, then, where necessary, prosecution. The auxiliaries who had done exactly what they were recruited to do found themselves recast as the problem.

This is not a Roman idiosyncrasy. It is a structural feature of the relationship between formal state power and informal enforcement.

The Cycle, Enumerated

The pattern has enough historical consistency that it is worth stating plainly.

First, the state faces a crisis it cannot address through its formal institutions — a rebellion, a labor dispute, an insurgency, a political threat that requires deniable action. Second, it recruits informal actors: paramilitaries, local strongmen, civilian informant networks, ethnic militias, private contractors, or neighborhood watch organizations granted quasi-official authority. Third, these groups prove effective, and their effectiveness depends entirely on their willingness to operate outside the constraints that govern formal institutions. Fourth, the crisis passes, or the political cost of association rises, or the informal actors begin pursuing their own interests with the tools the state gave them. Fifth, the state withdraws its sanction, investigates its former partners, prosecutes selected members, and publicly reframes the informal enforcers as rogue elements.

The Freikorps in Weimar Germany were recruited by a Social Democratic government desperate to suppress a communist uprising. They succeeded. The government then found itself unable to disband them and increasingly threatened by the very forces it had armed. The militiamen who had saved the republic became the vanguard of the movement that destroyed it.

The Contras in Nicaragua were funded, trained, and directed by the United States government as an instrument of policy. When that policy became legally and politically untenable, the same government that had created them found ways to characterize their actions as independent, unauthorized, and regrettable.

The Janjaweed in Darfur were armed and deployed by the Sudanese government as a cost-effective solution to a regional insurgency. When the International Criminal Court began examining the resulting atrocities, the Sudanese government's official position was that it had never controlled them.

Why Governments Keep Making This Choice

The question worth asking is not why governments abandon their informal enforcers. The abandonment is predictable enough that it barely requires explanation. The more interesting question is why governments keep creating these relationships knowing, at some level, how they end.

The answer is that the calculus at the moment of recruitment is genuinely different from the calculus at the moment of abandonment. In the crisis, the informal enforcer solves a real problem at a fraction of the cost and political exposure of formal deployment. The state gets the outcome it needs — order restored, opposition suppressed, territory held — without the accountability that attaches to uniformed action.

The future costs are real but deferred. The present benefit is immediate. This is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of institutional incentive structures that reward short-term problem-solving and distribute the long-term consequences to future administrators who had no role in the original decision.

It is also, at a more basic level, a failure of imagination — specifically, the failure to take seriously the perspective of the people being recruited.

The Enforcer's Miscalculation

The informal enforcers in these arrangements are not passive victims. They enter the relationship with their own calculations, and those calculations are often reasonable given what they know at the time.

They receive official sanction, resources, and the backing of state authority. They are told they are essential. They are often told they are patriots. They do dangerous work under conditions of genuine stress, and they do it with the understanding that the state's approval is real and durable.

What they consistently underestimate is the contingency of that approval. The state's endorsement is a function of the state's current needs, not a permanent recognition of the enforcer's value. When those needs change — when the crisis passes, when the political winds shift, when an election produces a government less sympathetic to the original arrangement — the endorsement evaporates.

The enforcer who believed most completely in the legitimacy of their role is often the most vulnerable. They took official sanction at face value. They documented their activities because they believed they were acting lawfully. They maintained organizational structures that made them easy to identify and prosecute.

In American history, this dynamic appears with uncomfortable regularity. The Red Scare-era informant networks recruited by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI; the anti-Castro paramilitaries whose activities later required congressional investigation; the private military contractors whose conduct in Iraq became a diplomatic liability — each case follows the template. Recruited for utility, deployed for effect, disowned for convenience.

The Accountability Gap

There is a structural reason why this cycle persists beyond the obvious short-term incentives: the accountability gap between those who authorize informal enforcement and those who carry it out.

Formal military and law enforcement institutions are, at least in theory, embedded in chains of command that create documentary records, legal accountability, and institutional memory. When formal institutions commit abuses, there is at minimum a framework for assigning responsibility upward.

Informal enforcers exist precisely to avoid that framework. The deniability that makes them attractive during deployment makes the question of accountability genuinely murky after the fact. The government officials who authorized the arrangement can credibly argue they did not control the specifics. The enforcers who carried out specific acts cannot claim they were acting under orders that anyone will officially acknowledge.

The gap between these two positions is where prosecution tends to land — on the people who did the work, not the people who commissioned it.

The Constant

Five thousand years of this pattern suggest that no amount of institutional reform eliminates the underlying dynamic. As long as states face crises that formal institutions cannot address efficiently, and as long as informal actors are willing to provide the missing capacity in exchange for official sanction, the arrangement will be made.

The variable is not whether governments will create informal enforcers. The variable is how long it takes them to disown them, and how completely.

The enforcers who survive are generally those who understood from the beginning that the sanction was conditional — and who built their own exit strategies accordingly. The ones who believed the partnership was real are the ones history tends to remember as cautionary examples.

They believed what they were told. That has always been the most dangerous thing an informal enforcer can do.