Washington Post reporter Steve Fainaru has extensively covered the "parallel army" of private security contractors. His book Big Boy Rules: America's Mercenaries Fighting In Iraq, details the tens of thousands of "mercs" who arrived in Iraq in the absence of sufficient levels of U.S. troops.
Fainaru wrote Private Armies, a series of articles about private security contractors, which was published in The Washington Post.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.