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

The relationship between mercenaries and their employers is always fraught. The hosts tend to regard
their employees as a bunch of unprincipled, armed thugs who are leeching off them in their moment of
greatest need and whose loyalty is suspect. After all someone, possibly the enemy, might come up with a
better employment offer and business is business. It has not been unknown in history for mercenaries to
change sides at a critical moment.

For their part, the mercenaries tend to treat their employers with open contempt. After all, if they had
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any balls they wouldn't need to hire troops. This attitude is not helped by the fact that the only locals most
of the troops are likely to meet are the hustlers and the whores who hang around the army camps.

However, the real problems arise when the fighting ends. It occurs to the civilians that the mercenaries
are now the strongest power in the land and it occurs to the mercenaries that the civilians might think their
pay now an unnecessary expense. The situation can be even worse if the mercenaries' side lose. Any
armistice deal is unlikely to include clemency to foreign mercenaries, let alone back pay.

In the late 3rdMillennium, mercenary warfare was so prevalent that it was commercially viable to set up
a Bonding Authority of merchant banks to oversee mercenary contracts. The Authority grew out of
Felchow &Sohn inBremen , the first merchant bank to see the lucrative opportunities of war as a
business. The system worked by clients depositing a bond of money at the Authority which was released
to the mercenaries provided they satisfied their contract, which was to fight not necessarily to win, or if
the client broke their end of the deal. The Authority itself prepared and enforced the contracts,
mercenary units that reneged were declared outlaw and hunted down and destroyed.

In the short term, the Authority 'civilised' the endless bush fires across the galaxy, sharply reducing the
incidence of atrocities either by or to the mercenaries. In the long term, by making war just another form
of acceptable business, albeit a highly profitable one, the Authority had a devastating effect on galactic
development. The whole commercial system was winding down as resources were diverted from
infrastructure development into weapons and soldiers. In many ways this was more devastating then the
wars themselves as planet after planet spent the bulk of its GNP on servicing military debts.

The Great Crash was entirely predictable.


Extract from War and Finance, a history of merchant banking SarahLoyd



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