"David Drake - The Hammers Slammers Handbook" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

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The Mercenary Regiments

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
but we've proved it again and again,
that if once you have paid him the Dane-geld,
you never get rid of the Dane

тАУ Kipling



It's a truism that human beings have never needed much in the way of technology to kill each other but it
is equally true that it never hurts to have better weapons than one's potential opponents provided, and
here is the rub, one knows how to use them. Many of the bush wars that burned across the galaxy
occurred in impoverished,disorganised , politically corrupt, class structured colonies. Where armies
existed, the troops wereundertrained , badly armed anddemotivated . The officer class tended to be, if
anything, even worse, commissions and promotions being generally dependent on political or family
connections.

Few colonies possessed the resources to manufacture anything but the most basic military equipment. Of
course, better equipment could be purchased, often at some economy-breaking percentage of a colony's
GNP, but was then handed to troops who had little idea how to service it, let alone use it in combat.
Peasant communities were littered with immobile and inoperable prestigious military toys. There were a
number of examples of low-tech armies slaughtering nominally superiorly equipped forces; a machete that
cuts has many advantages over a laser rifle that fails to fire because the owner did not know to keep the
mirrors clean. The classic example was on Sargon's World where the Bushmen massacred the beautifully
tailored and equipped army of the Third Prophet before sacking his city. Grass still grows in the streets of
what wasTempletown .

A better solution was to hire professional soldiers who brought and operated their own equipment. A
peasant community could, by putting itself in a debt that their grandchildren would still be paying, hire an
elite regiment for a matter of weeks or months. But at least this way they would have grandchildren,
losing meant impoverishment, cultural annihilation, economic slavery or even genocide.

Mercenaries can be defined as military units that are hired for a limited period of time and come
complete with their own officers and equipment. This rules out situations where foreigners are co-opted
either voluntarily or forcibly into a national army and armed and officered by national citizens. Other than
that it is rather difficult togeneralise about the mercenary regiments. Some were regular military units of a
Terran or Colonial state hired out for political or financial gain. Others, although recruited primarily from a
single state, especially the officer cadre, wereorganisationally and financially independent of that state's
government. At the other extreme were cosmopolitan units that had no connection with any particular
state or world.