Its contacts run from military and intelligence agencies to the upper echelons of the White House; it has a military base, a fleet of aircraft and 20,000 troops, but since September 2007 the firm has been hit by a series of scandals that, far from damaging the company, have led to an unprecedented period of expansion.

This revised and updated edition includes Scahill's continued investigative work into one of the outrages of our time: the privatisation of war.