Executive Outcomes was a private military company (PMC) founded by Eeben Barlow, a former lieutenant-colonel of the South African Defence Force in 1989. Basically, at the end of the South African Border Wars in Angola and Namibia, the apartheid regime in South Africa was beginning to lose it’s grip on power in politics in the area.
The South African Defence Force began cutting it’s personnel due to no funding being available. Furthermore, African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela issued demands to than South African President Frederik Willem de Klerk to dismantle some of the forces specifically units such as the 32 Battalion and Koevoet. Another unit was the Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB) which was a unit that carried out covert missions including assassinations of governments and also assisted in bypassing the UN apartheid sanctions by setting up overseas front companies.
Eeben Barlow saw this as an opportunity and partnered with Michael Mullin who was formerly in charge of a section of the CCB. Together the two established Executive Outcomes in 1989 with an aim to provide training to special forces members. Executive Outcomes was almost immediately awarded a contract by Debswana to train members to infiltrate and penetrate the illegal diamond trade in Botswana. Ironically, Executive Outcomes also trained the Angolan Armed Forces (FFA) at the same time. Quickly Executive Outcomes began attracting many former coworkers of Barlows and at one point employed about 2,000 employees.
Executive Outcomes began to expand past training when it took on a fighting contract with the Angolan government to fight against UNITA. This led to other contracts such as the hiring of Executive Outcomes to fight in Sierra Leone against the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). This was a bigger contract for Executive Outcomes as they were also tasked with capturing the diamond fields which they did successfully. Near the end of the conflict, Executive Outcomes displayed an enormous amount of force for a private military company by deploying a MI-24 Hind helicopter, 2 MI-8 Hip helicopters, BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicles and a T-72 main battle tank.
However things began to crumble in 1998 when South Africa introduced legislature which would ban the company from operating in 1998. As a result of the Regulation of Foreign Ministry Assistance Act in 1998, Executive Outcomes lost their fight and were dissolved.
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