What's the worst aspect of hiring mercenaries?

[ColbertWatcher]

Poll question: What's the worst aspect of hiring mercenaries?

[napoleon_in_rags]

1. Definitely the whoredom, and the military consequences.

Namely the fact that they can switch sides in the middle of a conflict if it looks like their side is going to lose and they won't get paid, while real soldiers will fight to the death.

[ColbertWatcher]

2. Real soldiers take an oath to fight for something.

And yes they fight to the death for it.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

3. I think a lot of them sign up for college money.

Or they just can't find work elsewhere.

:shrug:

[ColbertWatcher]

9. True, but they do take an oath.

And they do receive training to uphold that oath and they are held accountable for their behavior. None of which is true for mercenaries, who have no oath, are trained only to kill/fight, etc, and are accountable to no one.

The college money is a promise from the government to the soldier/sailor/Marine/Airman/Coast Guardsman, etc that if they meet their obligation they will be rewarded.

No such agreement exists for mercenaries. They are in it for the cash and certainly not for an oath.

[rollingrock]

12. That's rather like saying

robbing someone at gunpoint is justified because you can't find work.

the ends does not justify the means. it's never okay to kill someone just because you need the money.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

13. I'm not justifying anything.

I'm just saying regular soldiers are mostly in it for the money. And not much of it.

[rollingrock]

14. You are justifying murder for hire

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

16. I am?

Where?

[Occam Bandage]

17. I absolutely hate this type of logic. It is nothing short of toxic.

Explaining the reason people do things does not justify their doing it. If I say, "Osama bin Laden commissioned the 9/11 attacks because he thinks aggressive American cultural imperialism is an immediate threat to the existence of Muslim society," that is not justifying bin Laden. That is explaining him. If I say, "Neoconservatives want to forcibly democratize the Middle East, believing that will make the region stable and open enough to fully integrate with the global economy, leading to enormous benefit to the entire world," that is not justifying them, that is explaining them. If I say, "Many Catholics believe that abstinence is the only way to prevent STDs, since they believe condom availability encourages promiscuity while not providing commensurate protection from STDs due to either misuse, lack of use, or flawed design," then I am not justifying Catholic views on condoms and AIDS, but rather I am explaining them.

I hate--I absolutely hate--the idea that we cannot even attempt to understand things we do not accept. It represents nothing short of murdering thought.

[Posteritatis]

21. You are justifying the murder of thought!

*ducks and runs*

;)

[Occam Bandage]

5. Perhaps during the Napoleonic wars.

Not so much with the way modern combat works.

[Occam Bandage]

4. It depends on the situation, obviously.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with mall cops, in my mind, but yet I think those are just part of a continuum that includes bodyguards, military base security guards, auxiliary detachments, independent patrols, frontline combat troops, and covert military operations.

[napoleon_in_rags]

15. Its mostly about the people maintaining control of the military.

We the People have no control over what say, Coca-Cola does with its employees, its up to shareholders and management. But the military, as a government entity, answers to the people, like cops do. That's why we have mall guards call cops rather than do the arresting. The issue is basically that the mercenary structure creates sort of a proxy through the government, where the entities concerned with national security answer less directly to the people, like you saw with the interrogations. Its part of a much larger global trend, but I don't think its necessarily a positive one. Things are getting awfully concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.

[Occam Bandage]

18. That I think is the general problem with many mercenaries:

that they are given many of the legal protections of soldiers and freedoms to operate in a combat zone that soldiers are given, but that they are not bound by the same responsibilities nor watched by the same accountability systems that soldiers must accept.

[napoleon_in_rags]

19. Yeah exactly, and we don't hear much about who the shareholders in control are either...

...my question: How many of them are foreign? I don't know, but it would really be something to see how much of our "armed forces" is having decisions made for them by foreign shareholders.

[Echo In Light]

6. 3rd and 5th options

Can't be held accountable ...and not that the wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians is every really a moral obstacle addressed by the military in general, however, mercenaries are even less likely to be held accountable.

And #5, such people likely come from the military in many instances, and are obviously beholden to the corporate/state/military nexus, and its ideology and aims.

[Occam Bandage]

7. As for #5, well, could they really be a greater part of the MIC than the actual, you know, military?

[Echo In Light]

8. Unsure what context you're implying "greater," but I'm generally against militarization, period

[Occam Bandage]

11. The poll is about what the worst aspect of hiring mercenaries is, right?

"They're nearly as militaristic as actual soldiers" is actually a reason to hire them from an anti-militarization standpoint, as that would therefore mean that they are less militaristic than the alternative.

[ColbertWatcher]

10. Yes, they could. They could be a part of the "industrial" part.

Which I take to mean, private corporate defense contractors, etc.

[Posteritatis]

20. The questionable status of their military discipline/authority/etc

If insert-country-here was hiring some mercenaries for something and they (A) had a clear position in the command structure making clear who they took orders from and who they gave them to, (B) were subject to most* of the same laws and responsibilities as the armed forces for which they were working, and (C) had a very specific contract as to where they'd be, what their duties would be, for how long, etc, then I'd have a harder time objecting to the notion on anything other than economic grounds. (Even then I might not, e.g., if spending extra cash on private companies for logistics would free up frontline troops, or some other situation where manpower was critical. Or, y'know, if the (throws dart at wall map) massed hordes of the Albanian army landed on the east coast, or something.)

Most of the mercs employed in Iraq fail hard on those, from what I know, and those failures are what bother me, not the mere fact of their being mercenaries.


* - I'm not familiar with the full spectrum of military regulations and laws, but I'm assuming there'd be at least a few that wouldn't make sense in a merc context, even if the bulk of them would.

[omega minimo]

22. the chalky aftertaste

[Blue_Tires]

23. all of the above, plus the death of the notion that

America is supposed to be above all this...That notion used to carry weight instead of being an empty saying...But after the mercs and legalized torture and the other shit, nothing seems to be out-of-bounds anymore...