The official records of private military and security work, in one place.
Mercenomics is an independent research initiative on the business of force for hire, from private military and security companies to mercenaries and protection markets. It collects the public records of that trade, documents them, and explains what they do and do not show.
Status, April 2026. Mercenomics has just opened. No dataset has been published yet. The first one, a long table of United States Defense Base Act injury and death claims, is in preparation. The Data page says what each dataset will contain and where every figure comes from.
The problem
Governments and companies pay private firms to fight, guard and supply wars. The official records of that trade exist, but they sit in scattered PDF reports and web tables written for specialists, and some of the series have now stopped.
The United States Department of Defense counted its contractors in the Central Command area every quarter for roughly eighteen years and published the counts as dozens of separate reports. That series ended with the report for the second quarter of the 2025 financial year.
When a contractor is killed or injured overseas, the event is recorded as an insurance claim under the Defense Base Act and reported by the Department of Labor, in a format that has changed several times and under a privacy rule that hides small numbers. Federal spending on guard and security services is public, and buried among millions of other contracts.
Researchers have assembled pieces of this before, and Mercenomics credits their work on the Sources page. What is missing is one documented, machine-readable copy of each series that anyone can download, cite and check.
What Mercenomics does
- Collects the public records: contractor counts, injury and death claims, and contract spending, from the agencies that publish them.
- Documents them, so every file carries its sources, the date each was collected, the definitions used, the known gaps, and an honest note on the limits of what the numbers can be used to say.
- Preserves them. A series that is no longer updated is archived as a versioned file with a permanent identifier, so it stays available and citable.
- Explains them in short, sourced pieces, so a reader who is not a specialist can understand what a figure means and what it does not.
What it does not do
Mercenomics does not make accusations. It repeats what official bodies and established investigations have published, with a source for every figure. It takes no money from the firms it covers. Anyone named may reply or ask for a correction.
Who it is for
Journalists, researchers, students, and organisations that need to understand this market before writing about it or buying from it.