<human>: Ok, first of all I understand this is an entirely impossible situation. I am obviously not looking into fielding my own army, but I'm wondering how feasible it would be in some alternate world where money is no object.

I started thinking about this when I read [this] article on a Royal Navy aircraft carrier "going up for sale". I thought to myself "Heh, it would be pretty cool to have your own fully functional aircraft carrier." (Yes, I understand it's not being sold for further military use.) 

This lead me to expand the scenario in my head; "What if (assuming I'd won the lottery, invested it awesomely and had more money than god) I bought the aircraft carrier and bought all the equipment/aircraft for it and hired personnel to run it!" At this point I'm floating on my own self-delusional fantasy of sailing the seven seas and exploring the world in my own aircraft carrier like some kind of Captain Nemo.

After that little ego indulgence, I took the thought experiment further. Can you legally own and use private military equipment and subsequently hire the necessary personnel? (Mercenaries?) I'm guessing you'd need a permit, but when you're in a ship that can cross international sea-borders it gets a bit more complicated. And then what if you wanted to hire out your military resources, say deploy aircraft/marines from the ship to fight in some civil war? I'm guessing that would have wider international repurcussions as you could be convicted of war crimes.

If that's the case, then how do Private Military Corporations ("PMCs", made famous by game franchise Mercenaries) get about it? I did a little light reading (i.e. read the wiki article) on them and I see the majority of their work comes from actual governments, but they can't be their only clients? (Yes, I also understand that there aren't hordes of evil mega-corps with private armies waging war across the world unlike what most video-games portray.)

Overall I just thought this was an interesting little piece of speculation and thought I'd ask for people's opinions!

Give me a shortened version of the text
<bot>: Could you buy your own aircraft carrier and use it to deploy mercenaries as part of some private military corporation? What would the international implications/requirements be?