Re: Merc Guild

On Wednesday, January 2, 2002, at 08:23 PM, Don M wrote:

>      Yes but there are two factors that you over look one,
> They will be paid far more then a few coppers for their
> services.Like any other business success drives the market.
> Two, the great powers will find the deniability  aspect
> impossible to resist, and may be willing to pay in equipment
> ect.

I gave this a little thought, and while I certainly can't predict the 
future any better than the next bloke...

Take a look at mercenaries today vs. even as little as 200 years ago. 
The units are smaller, more independent, and in many cases as little as 
1 man, a situation which never would have come to pass in earlier times.

It would seem to me that technology has shrunken their organizational 
size.

There is no reason, as you point out, that this might not reverse due to

increased demand in the future. However, deniability would become less 
and less of a factor as size increased. The payment would become 
correspondingly larger and easier to trace as the unit's size increased.

Likewise, payment by equipment would also be fairly easy to trace.

It's possible that mercenary companies could be supported by a 
government and become valuable for their skill, as has been suggested by

many sci-fi authors, but I can't imagine that they would be allowed to 
grow too large, as then they would clearly be seen as a threat to the 
major powers and eventually eliminated of subsumed.

My 2 cents.

Schoon