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Comment by harperlee | Hacker News Reader

Although I believe that you are right, you are jumping here from "this particular mercenaries are criminals" to "the use of mercenaries is treason and should never be allowed", an that is a big jump.

In my opinion, if there are adequate mechanisms for the control of mercenaries (such as not allowing them to have more power than the public army, or the restriction to / of particular capabilities), having mercenaries in particular situations (such as people with a high degree of specialization) could be feasible.

The problem here is that they were given ample independent power with adequate supervision, again imho.

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While i do agree that they could exist, is that its really hard to control. Who polices the police? Of course this happens in the government controlled armies as well. However, in small private firms, at least to me it feels like it would be a lot harder to report something, or to refuse something.

So if there is a need for these forces, they need to be a lot more open about their operations with the government. With more oversight then even the regular troops and accountability up to CEO level of the company for actions performed by their armies.

Well actually that's a good point. Who polices the police? It's the other forces of the government, which ultimately rely on the army forces. If you get a rogue police department that revolts, you need the army. If you get a rogue mercenary that needs to be controlled, you will need the army. And even if you get a section of the army revolting, you will of course need the rest of the army.

None of that precludes that some parts of that structure to be private. You just need to have a structure that is resilient to non-compliance.

So I actually agree with you: if the United States want to use mercenaries, they should improve how they do it. But then again, there might be a way to do it that works.

The concepts of police, laws, courts are concepts that make sense within a country. There seems to be a drive toward treating the world as a sort of country where universals laws, courts and police have some authority globally, usually dictated and controlled by the permanent members of the UN security council.

I do not think this is practical or even desirable.

When people in Germany get their bank accounts seized by the FBI because they bought Cuban Cigars from a shop in Denmark, and it's justified with "US Embargo of Cuba", it becomes easily noticeable that it's not the laws of the UN governing the world.

Instead, more and more, the US is trying to become a world government, with 6.7 billion people affected by their choices, indirectly taxed by their choices (US corps replacing local companies and transporting the profit out of the country), without any representation.

This is a very unbalanced situation, and is just asking for a revolution. Which will end up making life worse for almost everyone.

We need a fair world government if we want to do these things, and that means representation of all people.

Obviously, the US, which would lose the most from this, objects.

That's actually I meant by permanent member of the UN security council. A club of 5 members which list will never be revised and who aspire to rule the world.

> A club of 5 members which list will never be revised and who aspire to rule the world.

Until next war.

Cockroaches will rule the world after the next world war...

Or apes ;-)

> When people in Germany get their bank accounts seized by the FBI because they bought Cuban Cigars from a shop in Denmark, and it's justified with "US Embargo of Cuba", it becomes easily noticeable that it's not the laws of the UN governing the world.

Or the weakness of those countries towards US that can be explained by recent history.

If you need an army of supervisors to oversee your mercenaries, you might as well just train more troops.

The efforts might not be the same.

Yeah, but considering your core competency is "kill the bad guys" rather than "manage and police subcontractors", you're more likely to get good results by sticking to what you know.

I'm not sure I understand you correctly. Neither a government in general nor particularly its army have only one core competency, and surely it's not "kill the bad guys". I'd actually say management is closer to their core competency. Which percentage of the army's personnel is shooting bullets, and which percentage of them are managing putting the bullets (and the troops) on the ground, analyzing where to put them, policing that they comply with what the government wants, recruiting, overseeing, intelligence, managing subcontractors and providers (gasoline, tanks, fences, uniforms, building construction, IT equipment, etc.)?

These ancillary skills in management are developed in order to achieve well-defined objectives: overpower (i.e. shoot) the bad guys and conclusively win conflicts. You cannot apply them to mercenaries; even if you replicate the chain of command down to sergeant level or whatever, their incentives are fundamentally different: mercenaries have a fundamental interest in keeping the fighting going as long as possible, because they are paid to fight.

A regular army is supposed to go out, win a conflict ("shoot the bad guys"), go home, get decorated, enjoy pensions and glory; that's the core mission, and its core competency is (or rather should be) to get that done in the shortest possible amount of time (or even not getting engaged in the first place). A mercenary only gets paid as long as there is an ongoing conflict involving a wealthy-enough client. He's not interested in ending the conflict; thinking you can police him in seeing it some other way is just deluded.

I agree with you on the conflict of interest that the mercenaries have, but I think that it extends to regular armies also.

An army that doesn't fight is a budget that is claiming to be cut, and you can see that discussion taking place in several european countries. In the United States, however, they have wars to fight, and so the army and its space is a huge industry, with one client, the US government; and if there are no wars to fight, it will quickly collapse.

There are in fact a lot of accusations that the military industry in the United States instigates action for that specific purpose. So they don't only keep alive the fire, as the mercenaries - they also push to start new ones! And I can tell you, the Army has more political force than mercenaries to do this.

I'm not disagreeing, but at least with regular armies those problems are indeed identified as problems. With mercenaries, it's just what they do.

Merceneries aren't bound by the same rules. If they want a specific weapon, they don't follow government procurement rules, you think black water/xe reaches out to minority and women owned businesses first? They don't have a VA. They don't don't have public pensions. They don't have congressional oversight.

It's a gimmick to create "littler government" and circumvent the incredible beaurocracy that the military itself has helped create. It's also a jobs program and wealth distribution channel for a very specific class of people. At the end of it all, it also serves some specific military needs, in Iraq black water didn't follow the same rules of engagement that the military did and military leadership wanted that.

In war everything goes. So if you introduce people like these into war, expect them to be put in situations sooner or later where they can do anything any other soldier can do with a similar if not greater level of impunity. It's naive to think you can control the social and business aspect of these sorts of things with just a bit of policy.

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