Let’s say a gay US dot.com billionaire sees this article"The ISIS Hug of Death for Gays" and decides these ISIS guys have got to go. He is a US citizen and has a fortune of 30 billion dollars in tech stocks.
Assuming he’s not an idiot and wants to inflict maximum damage on ISIS without being arrested or killed himself what’s the best game plan? Does he need to get out of the US to coordinate this? Can he get the heavy weapons he needs without being a state entity? How far will 30 billion (or whatever equity he can squeeze out in relatively short amount of time) get you in building an effective mercenary army? How do you build an effective mercenary army? Does he keep his mouth shut about avenging the gay murdered men being his motivation?
How much hurt can an non-state sponsored individual inflict on ISIS with their own resources? The US got bogged down fighting Islamic rebels with the world’s most powerful and advanced army and orders of magnitude more military horsepower than even a billionaire could dream of. How does he get the maximum bang for the buck in his mission to wipe out ISIS? A regular mercenary army? Assassins? Ninjas?
He doesn’t need to wield a huge army. All he needs to do is offer a reward in gold for named individuals alive or dead, or specific groups to be delivered alive to the relevant authorities.
For instance a Kilo of Gold for every live Chechen. 200 kg of Gold alive or dead for Al-Baghdadi.
Plus perhaps free settlement in the country of the deliverer’s choice?
The US was offering 25 -50 million for Bin Laden’s location and very substantial amounts for his lieutenants for years and no one in country made a peep.
Yeah, but it did work for Saddam’s scumbag sons, and eventually him too*!*
As to the OP, there is an incalculable legal quagmire you’d have to sort thru. But even ignoring all that, I doubt even $30 billion would be very cost effective in modern warfare. It’s really, really expensive. And complicated. Taking all the logistics into account (transportation, training, let alone hardware) you could probably burn thru $30 billion in about two, three weeks…
But that’s basically trading one head of state for another with fairly similar but somewhat different policies. The head of state didn’t usually take precautions from foreign assassination, and the mechanisms of goverment were unchanged. Now, you’re trying to fight a terrorist organization that can fade into the desert and the civilian population at a moment’s notice and build a government basically from scratch. Things have changed.
Which one? There are so many! Frederick Forsyth needed £100k in The Dogs of War and he had already worked out the details IRL. It’s hard to imagine the CIA doing it cheaper.
Would it be permitted, by the OP, to just use the $30 billion as bribes for the officials of one or more governments to put together a military force to attack ISIS?
I mean, if you paid the president of Elbonia $500 mil, and he launches a $10 billion military offensive backed by Elbonian taxpayer dollars, that’d be quite a return on your investment.
(I’m also assuming it’d be cheating to bankroll an “ISIS terrorist cell” that would perform acts so grand and horrible—like, I dunno, kidnapping the Pope, and raping him to death with a nuclear fuel rod, on live TV—that the world would almost certainly be provoked into intervening?)
Thanks for the feedback and insight. It’s interesting that having access to billions will apparently not get you very far in terms of buying the ability to wage a serious war. You’d think that being a billionaire would let you wield awesome power but in reality there are serious limitations on one person’s ability to unilaterally pursue a military campaign.
somebody in the US Government is going to decide the billionaire is supporting terrorism, in this case anti-ISIS terrorism, freeze the bank accounts and leave the billionaire with no money facing 20 years in the federal pen. Remember there is no appeal or challenging the asset freezes, one call does it all and the billionaire is ex. Gov’ts don’t like competition-and really don’t like people playing soldier in any significant way. I don’t see this ending well for the (ex)-billionaire.
Where would you send them? ISIS commanders are already hiding from the 500 billion/yr US military to avoid airstrikes. I doubt your measly 30 billion is going to uncover them.
Plus, while I’m hardly an expert, my impression is that special forces need a lot of infrastructure. Even putting aside the money needed to get intelligence about where your targets are, I think you’d need more than “millions” to actually equip one.
Honestly, I think the only way you’d have a hope of getting anywhere with 30 billion would be some variation of the Cecil Stategy. Try and pay-off enough ISIS folks to go away. This is arguably what the US was doing via the “Sunni Awakening” strategy, which worked for a while,until the Iraqi gov’t bungled its relationship with the Sunni.
Ross Perot organized a rescue of his people thirty-five years ago. The rescue team was led by retired U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel Arthur D. “Bull” Simons.
Reminds me of the plot to the movie, ‘The Billion-Dollar Brain’ (which isn’t quite as silly as its title suggests) from the 1960’s where an eccentric US billionaire plans an invasion of the Soviet Union.