Or call them "mercenaries" if you prefer.
The farther into the twenty-first century I live, the more it seems the cyberpunk critique of capitalism was the most honest literature of the eighties. In other words, you can't say we weren't warned.
John Shirley wrote about the privatizing of lethal force in Eclipse. He emphasized how such a deal also privatizes those atrocities which we used to call murder - and justifies them in the name of profit and the ideology of security. Further, the ways in which his characters react to limited nuclear war (or talk about their reactions, because we should be perfectly willing to accept that some of them are not being wholly truthful for whatever reasons) mirror many American reactions to the destruction of the World Trade Center.
Bruce Sterling wrote about a united world being "serious" about terrorism in Islands in the Net. That seriousness is all artifice and media relations, a lullaby for good citizens, while politically powerful multinationals consort with dark powers to promote their profits and cripple or coopt government intervention. And there are mercenaries here too, fighting against the "terrorists" and using any means necessary.
Just to mention two that strike me as relevant reading after reading the weekend's papers and pixels.
Posted by Martial