Yale should adapt its international security education to reflect the realities on the ground in 21st century warfare.
46 Hillhouse Avenue, where Yale’s International Security Studies program is housed. (Credit: Buckley Institute)
Shailen Sharma
Contributor, The Buckley Beacon
In April 2023, Sudan collapsed into open gunfighting in the streets as the state authority evaporated. The U.S. State Department embassy in Khartoum announced that, “Americans should have no expectation of a US government-coordinated evacuation at this time.” Around 16,000 American nationals were left stranded in the gray zone: a lawless space where territory is controlled by armed gunmen, and the U.S. government is incapable or unwilling to intervene.
Over two years later in October 2025, satellite imagery confirmed that an entire hospital staff in El-Fasher, Sudan had been massacred: 460 patients and other civilians were reported killed. In other parts of El-Fasher, the blood-soaked ground was visible from space. In Sudan, there are no U.N. peacekeepers to stabilize the region and no U.S. military rescue missions; just the hopeless cries of the victims of the gray zone. This is the reality of regions where states collapse faster than Western institutions can respond.
The fall of Afghanistan in 2021 offers another picture of how modern warfare functions. Military analysts point to the departure of contractors as the decisive factor in the collapse, stating that “it was [contractors’] departure that led to the erosion of the capability of the Afghan Air Force elements, which were critical.” As one former defense official put it, the entire Afghan army itself had been built with contractors as the “backbone.”
In February 2022, while Washington was debating whether to send troops, private teams were already running evacuation missions in Ukraine. In the first weeks of the war, a single security firm called Global Guardian evacuated more than 6,500 people without Washington’s mandate.
In Afghanistan and Ukraine, private teams have already run evacuations, provided personnel security, and kept logistics moving when the state couldn’t keep up. They’re not replacing the state; they’re doing what the state can’t or won’t do.
The issue isn’t force; the United States already has that. The problem is sustaining presence in gray zones without committing permanent military deployments. Private contractors fill this gap by maintaining security, managing logistics, and providing continuity without the political and operational cost of a standing military presence.
Yale still treats the reality of private actors like a theoretical or niche issue instead of something actively shaping modern conflict. If students are being trained for global affairs, then ignoring how power actually works in these environments is a failure of preparation.
This disconnect was evident in a discussion hosted by Yale College Republicans last semester featuring Erik Prince, founder and former CEO of the private military company Blackwater. The conversation pointed to a clear reality: in crisis zones like Sudan, non-state actors—private military contractors, security firms, and logistical operators working outside of formal state command—are increasingly being tasked to take on serious roles once reserved exclusively for governments.
Despite this, Yale still approaches private military contractors through a framework built over a decade ago. The last time Yale seriously engaged with this topic was in a 2010 article published in the Yale Journal of International Affairs. The article approaches the roles of non-state actors almost entirely through the legal oversight developed during the Iraq War. The analysis is thorough, but it is dated and falls short of grappling with how these actors are shaping events on the ground in 2026.
This gap becomes even more obvious when you look at current course offerings that reveal a focus on public-private partnerships only in technology, such as space, surveillance, and AI. While these are important topics, what’s clearly missing is attention to private companies as operational actors across security, logistics, and personnel protection in contemporary conflict zones.
Even within the lauded Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, private military contractors are barely treated as a serious subject of national security. On the occasions where they do appear, it’s almost entirely through the lens of criticism. Will Barbee, a recent alumnus of the 2025 cohort, said that the program “talked mainly about how the strategies and systems implemented by these private entities missed a lot of the nuances that were necessary for a project of state building.”
More tellingly, not much time was spent “talking about them as a necessary or productive part of our military’s arsenal.” This framing treats private actors as a problem to critique, rather than a reality of modern conflict to understand and shape.
The question is not whether non-state actors should operate in these environments, but whether the United States will develop the institutional capacity to engage, direct, and manage how they already do. Whether one works in public policy, tech, or national security, the collapse of state capacity and the rise of private actors in areas of crisis has already shaped our world. Students deserve more than abstract debates when these realities will define the world they are entering.
Yale’s Jackson School and other international security classes should develop curricula to accurately reflect reality: when the state can no longer act, responsibility migrates to whoever does. Preparing students for modern conflict means confronting how power actually works.