Mercenaries in the Honorverse:Manticore's hypocrisy?

Phalanx wrote:Manticore has taken a tough line on Mercenaries.

In Manticore's view, Mercenaries are used by smaller nations as "rent-a-thugs" to harass shipping or attack other systems outright.

However, a smaller Star Nation might say "Well, not everyone has a Navy and Merchant Marine that can cover most of its commercial traffic. Some of us smaller Star Nations would like to protect ourselves without depending on larger states.Furthermore, we object to being told how to allocate our own defense spending."

Is this policy justified, or a bias generated from Manticore's experience with mercenaries.

csantana183 wrote:Wasn't Gustav Anderman a Mercenary commander when he moved in to save Postdam (forgot the original name of planet) and then became the Emperor and if I remember correctly the first successful export that the Andermani had were Mercenaries.

Weird Harold wrote:

SCC wrote:I'm pretty sure we've only seen mercs once, those guys the Peeps used to employ to guard the president, other then historical Andemarian

Those are the only reputable mercenaries we've see, and I had forgotten about them. Thandi Palane's "Amazons" were also "good" mercenaries, but I wouldn't call them "reputable."

Your point does illustrate part of the problem: just what counts as a "mercenary."

Roguevictory wrote:I don't know what SEM policy on mercs is but I could swear that I read somewhere that the SKM tried on multiple occasions to get interstellar law rewritten to ban privateers but they've failed because too many smaller powers see privateers as a good way to boost their effective military strengths in a crisis, and some other powers believe the law would be primarily serving the Star Kingdom/Star Empire's interests due to the size of the Manticoran merchant marine.

Roguevictory wrote:I don't know what SEM policy on mercs is but I could swear that I read somewhere that the SKM tried on multiple occasions to get interstellar law rewritten to ban privateers but they've failed because too many smaller powers see privateers as a good way to boost their effective military strengths in a crisis, and some other powers believe the law would be primarily serving the Star Kingdom/Star Empire's interests due to the size of the Manticoran merchant marine.

Ms Midshipwoman Harrington wrote:It didn't take much of a warship to make a successful pirate cruiser. Aside from a few specialized designs, like the Hauptman Cartel's armed passenger liners, merchantmen were big, slow, lumbering and unarmored targets, helpless before even the lightest shipboard armament. By the same token, no sane pirate-and however sociopathic all too many of them might be, pirates as a group tended to be very sane where matters of survival were concerned-wanted to take on any warship in combat. Even here in Silesia, regular navy crews tended to be better trained and more highly motivated. Besides, a pirate's ship was his principal capital investment. He was in business to make money, not spend it patching the holes in his hull . . . assuming he was fortunate enough to escape from a regular man-of-war in the first place.
But privateers were different. Or they could be, at least. Like pirates, the financial backers who invested in a privateer expected it to be a money-making concern. But privateers also possessed a certain quasi-respectability, for interstellar law continued to recognize privateering as a legal means of making war, despite the strong opposition of nations like the Star Kingdom of Manticore, whose massive merchant marine made it the natural enemy of any legal theory which legitimized private enterprise commerce raiding. As far as Bachfisch and Layson were concerned, there was little if any practical difference between privateers and pirates, but smaller nations which could not afford to raise and maintain large and powerful navies adamantly resisted all efforts to outlaw privateering by interstellar treaty. Oh, they attended the conferences Manticore and other naval powers convened periodically to discuss the issue, but the bottom line was that they saw privateers as a cost-effective means by which even a weak nation could attack the life's blood of a major commercial power like the Star Kingdom and at least tie down major portions of its navy in defensive operations.

achfisch and Layson could follow the logic of that argument, however much they might detest it, but privateering as practiced in the Silesian Confederacy was a far cry from the neat theories propounded by the practice's defenders at the interstellar conferences. Breakaway system governments and an incredible variety of "people's movements" proliferated across the Confederacy like weeds in a particularly well-rotted compost heap, and at least half of them issued-sold, really-letters of marque to license privateering in the names of their revolutions. At least two-thirds of those letters went to out and out pirates, who regarded them as get-out-of-jail-free cards. Whereas piracy was a capital offense under interstellar law, privateers were legally regarded as a sort of militia, semi-civilian volunteers in the service of whatever nation had issued their letter of marque in the first place. That meant that their ships could be seized, but that they themselves were protected. The worst that could happen to them (officially, at least) was incarceration along with other prisoners of war, unless they had been so careless as to be captured in the act of murdering, torturing, raping, or otherwise treating the crews of their prizes in traditional piratical fashion.

Roguevictory wrote:

csantana183 wrote:Wasn't Gustav Anderman a Mercenary commander when he moved in to save Postdam (forgot the original name of planet) and then became the Emperor and if I remember correctly the first successful export that the Andermani had were Mercenaries.

Yeah can't believe I didn't think about that.

I don't know what SEM policy on mercs is but I could swear that I read somewhere that the SKM tried on multiple occasions to get interstellar law rewritten to ban privateers but they've failed because too many smaller powers see privateers as a good way to boost their effective military strengths in a crisis, and some other powers believe the law would be primarily serving the Star Kingdom/Star Empire's interests due to the size of the Manticoran merchant marine.