Is the mercenary business on the brink of another boom?
THE MERCENARY, wrote Niccolò 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…