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Is the mercenary business on the brink of another boom?
Private military companies come in many different stripes.
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Five hundred years on, the business of private military companies is thriving.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The Economist
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The mercenary, wrote Niccolo Machiavelli, was “useless and dangerous”. He was “unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies”. A private soldier would turn and flee when trouble arrived. “They have no other attraction or reason for keeping the field than a trifle of stipend, which is not sufficient to make them willing to die for you.”
Yet, 500 years on, the business of private military companies (PMCs), to use the modern euphemism, is thriving.
