Mercenary news

[Joni Virolainen <joni.virolainen@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

I have been following an interesting thread about mercenaries in
wargaming Africa mailing list. It seems to me that the whole business is
somewhat changing in Britain...


http://www.theherald.co.uk/perspective/archive/19-2-19102-22-7-39.html
 
Guns for hiring and firing 

Mercenaries are no longer just guns for hire but the employees of
businesses 
out to make a profit, reports IAN BRUCE 


BY definition, mercenaries have always been a dying breed. Yet from the 
battlefields of ancient Greece to the killing fields of Kosovo, the
world's 
second oldest profession remains ready to fight someone else's war and
to 
risk extinction for dollars rather than ideals. 

Their trade may even experience a resurgence if proposals put forward by
Britain's Foreign Office last week find favour. The gameplan is to
legitimise 
and license disciplined companies of soldiers-of-fortune to ease the
global 
strain on the UK's overstretched and shrinking regular forces. 

The argument runs that the United Nations moves too slowly to intervene
in 
potential flashpoints. The humanitarian disasters of Bosnia, Rwanda, and
Sierra Leone are damning indictments of a distant and fatally flawed 
bureaucracy putting too few boots on the ground too late to prevent
mayhem. 

With a deft flourish of FO double-speak, the chaps in Whitehall even
claim 
that licensing paid proxy fighters would help eliminate the "bad eggs"
who 
give the calling a bad name. 

Mercenaries have been around for 2500 years, but the days when they were
simply guns-for-hire with better hardware than the native opposition are
fading fast. In the new millennium, the hireling is as likely to wear a 
Savile Row pinstripe as camouflage tiger-stripe. 

Commercial companies providing military assessments and training
programmes 
for third-world cannon fodder are the fast-growing and lucrative sector
of 
the business. And in an era of instant satellite news, they have become
a 
useful and deniable tool of unofficial government policy. 

When the US finally decided to take a hand in the wholesale slaughter of
the 
Bosnian war, the White House could not be seen to support one faction
against 
another, even though the Serbs had by then alienated international
opinion. 

The solution was to employ Military Professional Resources Incorporated,
a 
Virginia-based "civilian" contractor whose senior executives were
generals 
with combat command experience and whose lower-rank employees were
mainly 
Vietnam veterans. 

The ragtag, murderous, and usually drunken militias which passed for a
Croat 
army were taken to islands off the Dalmatian coast and taught from the
basics 
up. Within a year, they were formed into disciplined units under a
central 
command. 

In 1995, they launched Operation Lightning Storm, a counter-offensive
which 
combined tanks, artillery, and infantry in an unstoppable assault which
drove 
the Bosnian Serb army out of the Krajina region and marked the beginning
of 
the end for Serb domination of the Balkans. 

It was a textbook demonstration of the possibilities of military 
privatisation. It involved minimum risk in casualties and potential 
embarrassment for the sponsoring government and still produced the
desired 
strategic result. 

Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer, the former Scots Guards officer at the
heart 
of the 1998 Sandline "arms for Africa" scandal in Sierra Leone,
epitomises 
the new approach. "We do not run a mercenary outfit. We provide
regulated, 
professional military assistance to established governments." 

He adds: "We have standards to maintain and we do not want 1960s-style 
freebooters or psychopaths. This is not a game for bandits." 

It can be a fine dividing line when that government, particularly in
Africa, 
may be in dispute with the bulk of its own population, but it allows
discreet 
- and expendable - application of a little surgical muscle when more 
conventional diplomatic routes fail. 

It is a far cry from the heyday of the classic mercenary in the 1960s,
when a 
few hundred unemployed soldiers and a lot of thugs and would-be Rambos
from 
Britain, America, South Africa, Rhodesia, Belgium, France, and Germany 
rampaged across the war-torn Congo, cutting a swathe through rebel
tribesmen 
with second-hand assault rifles and columns of beat-up Second World War 
Jeeps. 

The English-speakers called themselves the Wild Geese, a romantic
allusion to 
the Irish and Scottish soldiers-of-fortune who preceded them two
centuries 
before. The French contingent saw themselves as the White Giants,
rescuers of 
nuns and missionaries and unbeatable super-troopers. 

The Katangese and Congolese vic-tims of their flying columns knew them
more 
realistically as Les Affreux, the terrible ones. 

It was the era of Colonel "Mad Mike" Hoare, an ex-British officer who 
enforced strict discipline by personally shooting off the big toes of
rapists 
and looters under his command. A man's balance and mobility depend on 
retention of that particular digit, and it amounted to a death sentence
in 
the merciless hinterland of the Belgian Congo. 

It spawned the French legends Bob Denard and "Black Jack" Schramme, 
commanders of mobile units recruited from disillusioned veterans in the 
backstreet bars of Brussels and Paris. They were men who had fought and
lost 
in Indochina and Algeria as colonial empires imploded. 

They craved action and some form of closure for defeats beyond their
control. 
United in discontent, they formed a network of killers for hire. In an
Africa 
fragmenting along tribal fracture lines, they were seldom short of work.

When the Wild Geese staged daring and dangerous raids over hundreds of
miles 
of muddy jungle track to snatch white women in remote mining camps from
rape 
and butchery at the hands of the Simba insurgents, it made headlines 
worldwide. 

There was less coverage of the one-sided battles along the way, when
genuine 
rebellion against continuation of colonial control of the region's vast 
mineral wealth was suppressed without mercy. Forty years on, that "blood
stones" war is still raging amid the diamond mines of Shabaa province.
Only 
the protagonists have changed. 

Britain's most famous veterans-for-hire firm was Keeni-Meeni
Enterprises, a 
brotherhood of ex-SAS soldiers who offered bodyguard services for
foreign 
VIPs and discreet training teams for fledgling armies. 

Keeni-meeni is a Swahili expression which describes the sinuous
movements of 
a snake through grass and has come to be equated with special forces' 
clandestine operations. That company, too, became a handy extension of 
British foreign policy in the more unsavoury parts of the world. 

The biggest British mercenary organisation is Defence Systems Ltd. It is
run 
from a plush headquarters office opposite Buckingham Palace and claims
to 
have 4000 potential operatives with a wide range of military skills on
its 
books. 

It can supply guards and security advisers for oilfields in South
America or 
Nigeria, "bullet-catcher" bodyguards for overseas dignitaries, or
ready-made 
combat teams to fight someone else's local war. And all with the
discreet 
blessing of the Foreign Office. 

Freelance soldiering, for those who run the show, is big business.
Colonel 
Spicer's company was paid £22.5m to use white South African mercs to
instruct 
local forces in counter-insurgency techniques in Papua New Guinea in
1997. 


Harry McCallion, a Glas-wegian who served with the Parachute Regiment
and the 
SAS, and then fought with South Africa's elite raiding teams during the
long, 
bitter frontline states' conflict in the 1980s, says the ordinary merc 
usually fares rather badly by comparison. "An ex-SAS trooper can make
£30,000 
to £40,000 acting as someone's minder, but it's bloody boring
babysitting 
VIPs. Most find themselves craving some action and chasing the next war,
signing up with anyone who'll get them into a fight." 

He adds: "That's a course of action which usually ends up as a one-way 
ticket. The genuine guys are going for the adrenalin rush of combat.
Some 
might even fancy the cause. But it's a dicey game for old soldiers. The 
retirement plan is usually metal-jacketed and travelling at 3000ft a
second. 

"There are too many cowboys around these days, blokes you cannot depend
on in 
a firefight. Bosnia proved that, when every kid who had ever gotten high
on a 
Hollywood shoot-'em-up movie or computer game arrived claiming to be 
Falklands veterans or ex-Paras. Many of them are still there, buried in 
shallow graves. There were some who had never fired a weapon before and
did 
not know how to change magazines or slip off the safety-catch on their 
assault rifles. It's a good way to get yourself killed for a couple of 
hundred dollars a month." 

Using freelancers to shoulder the risks of military action is not a
novel 
concept. In the Crimean War, a company was set up to tender for the
capture 
of the Russian-held city of Sebastopol, holding out stubbornly under
siege 
while British soldiers died of disease in the trenches beyond its walls
and 
the media of the day began to demand government action or resignation. 

The enterprising directors of Siegebreakers Inc even inserted a penalty 
clause in their proposal, promising to stump up an agreed sum for every
day 
that passed beyond a deadline for successfully storming the ramparts.
The 
scheme finally foundered on nineteenth- century illusions of fair play
in 
war. 

For sheer brass-necked effrontery in matters military, no-one has yet 
surpassed the condottieri mercenary bands who ravaged Italy in the
fifteenth 
century. They were, however, businessmen first and warriors second. They
saw 
no percentage in slaughtering each other needlessly. 

In one famous battle, no-one was killed as the opposing armies played
out a 
carefully choreographed dance of manoeuvre and counter manoeuvre before
one 
side graciously conceded defeat. 

In another skirmish, there was only one fatality when a man fell off his
horse and was accidentally trampled by his comrades. War without tears.
It'll 
never catch on. 

A brief history of the world's second oldest profession 
THE mercenary trade is as old as the history of organised warfare
itself. 
Hannibal of Carthage's entire army was composed of spears-for-hire from
Gaul, 
Spain, and Numidia. 

His sworn enemies, the Romans, followed his lead when Italy could no
longer 
fill the ranks of the legions needed to police an expanding empire.
Before 
them, Persia used Scythian horse-archers and Greek hoplite heavy
infantry to 
conquer Asia and press to the frontiers of Europe. 

Britain employed Hessian and Brandburg German infantry in an abortive
effort 
to suppress rebellious American colonists in the late 1770s. Scots and
Irish 
"Wild Geese" fleeing English persecution had served Gustavus Adolphus of
Sweden and the kings of France for several hundred years before that as
elite 
bodyguards. 

Africa became the mercenary playground of the 1960s, when tribal and
mineral 
resource wars tore through the Congo and Angola. The soldiers-of-fortune
fighting there were mainly ex-Second World War veterans who missed the 
adrenalin kick of combat. 

Loot figured largely in mercenary rewards through the ages, though
usually 
top soldiers earned top fees, often payable in two parts - half payable
up 
front, with the remainder paid when the job was done - if the mercenary 
survived. 

- Feb 19th

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// J