Mercenaries
Subtitle: The Scourge of the Third World
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: October 29, 1999
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 214
ISBN-13: 9780312222031
Subjects: Military Organization And Administration; Technology & Engineering; History - Military / War; History: World; Science/Mathematics; Military - Other; Revolutionary; History / Military / Other; History-Revolutionary; Political Science / Political Freedom & Security / General; Military Science; World - General; Developing countries; Mercenary troops
Description: "Mercenaries have been employed as auxiliaries in war since earliest times but in the post-1945 world they have operated, almost exclusively, in weak third-world countries. From Colombia to the Congo, Angola to Papua New Guinea, Cambodia to Nicaragua, they have appeared: training the drug cartel armies, assisting rebellions or civil wars, acting as the agents of the major powers.

In the Congo crisis (1960-65) they earned an especially unsavoury reputation for greed, brutality and racialism; it is a reputation that has stuck to the mercenary and on the whole justly. During the 1990s a new phenomenon has emerged in the form of the mercenary corporations such as Executive Outcomes or Sandline.

These corporations offer a range of military expertise and weaponry, have the covert support of governments in the countries from which they come and are rapidly becoming a power to themselves, ultimately far more dangerous than the individual freebooters of the past."--BOOK JACKET.