MERCENARIES, THEN AND NOW

MERCENARIES, THEN AND NOW

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Submitted for SSC 105 World Civilization

Research Project Number: 05023800

Mercenaries, Then and Now

Introduction

A mercenary is a private soldier who is trained to take part in armed conflicts for private organizations. In most cases the mercenary is not a nationalist but a foreign agent who provides security to the private individual or company through armed combats, he has the ability to use ammunitions for the defense of the company. Mercenaries are volunteers who work for private companies for a contractual wage and the contract of their wage is equivalent to or more than the wage of an army officer of the same rank. The official security by mercenaries is not a trending phenomena and it existed long ago when the French and British employed Indian sepoys as mercenaries for their private companies and now they are present in the fo0rm of black water to conduct operations in the regions of Iraq and Pakistan.

Private Military Companies have transformed the conventional meaning of mercenaries as they seek the responsibility of training volunteers to fight and defend the companies for which they are recruited. These mercenaries are paid high wages and they are not considered as legal war combatants because of their roles as mostly they are not nationalist and the only mean of defense they seek is by killing. Mercenaries in recent times have impacted the global political situation dramatically as the Black water mercenaries were involved in the war of Fallujah in Iraq in the year 2004. However, we are concerned with the similarities between the recent activities of mercenaries and the mercenaries of the European domination (Sekunda, 2013).

Discussion

As we investigated the works of “The Military revolution abroad” we can identify that the writer defines various factors for the domination of the European colonists all over the world where they shifted their territorial control of the world from 35% to 84% globally within a century. The reasons of dominance were not only confided in the qualities of British and French colonists but an inability of the opposing nations such as India where their armies did not posses the qualities to fight and defend their territories against the European colonists were evident.

European nations had a quality of maintaining discipline in their armies and with this ability they had the technological edge of superior quality ammunitions to fight in the colonies in which they entered for the purpose of trade. It is of vital importance that they initially hired mercenaries to ensure that the trade they are conducting in the zones of Asia and Africa is not looted at the sea or their trade partners shall not cheat them in the process by not delivering them material after taking the cash. Mercenaries were hired initially to protect themselves from internal violence in the conservative states in which they were conducting trades. British men were clever analysts and when they lost a war in Nepal identified the unique quality of Nepali sepoys who were committed and unchallenged by any ...