The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order by Sean McFate Read Free Book Online

they posed to their employers. What was needed was a public army of systematically trained and disciplined professionals, maintained in peace and war, winter and summer, with a regular means of obtaining supplies and replacements. Critically, this military force would be paid by and loyal to the state, unequivocally. Following the Thirty Years War, the Great Elector of Brandenburg-Prussia retained four thousand soldiers and increased that number to twelve thousand after the Northern War (1655–1660). Wurttemberg, Hesse, Saxony, and Bavaria undertook similar efforts.
    France formed a standing army by absorbing most of Louis XIV’s officers into the
gendarmerie
and establishing six standing infantry units that endured after the Peace of the Pyrenees (1659). These regiments enabled the Sun King to mobilize his armies swiftly in the War of Devolution and overrun the Habsburg-controlled Spanish Netherlands and the Franche-Comté, encouraging him to create an evenlarger standing army at the end of the war in 1668. Concurrently, in England, Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army was a prototype standing army, and after the Restoration of 1660, Charles II was permitted to retain five regiments from this force, totaling about three thousand men, to garrison his fortresses as royal guards.
    These early efforts were the germ of the large national militaries centuries later. As military historian John Mears explains, “the nature of military conflict in the seventeenth century provided a further impetus for the creation of permanent armed forces … giving them an appearance which men in the twentieth century can recognize as being distinctly modern.” 9
    Technological improvements in weaponry helped make public armies possible. Previously, mercenaries provided not only on-demand military services but also highly specialized ones. The Swiss Guard delivered precision tactics in the heat of battle that required extensive training. Similarly, the heavy crossbow known as the
balestrieri
, with armor-piercing bolts, required a significant investment of time and training to use with any skill in combat, especially against moving or ranged targets.
    The cost of developing similar in-house capabilities for states was simply too high, which is why they outsourced these needs in the Middle Ages. However, the need to outsource began to change with the advent of the musket, which allowed relatively unskilled infantry to punch holes in the armor of highly skilled knights, killing them from a safe distance. Also, the declining price of gunpowder made training musketeers cheaper and less time-consuming, giving rise to the possibility of the citizen-soldier. Combining this with the practice of conscription, rulers discovered that they could muster large national armies without the risks associated with mercenaries.
    Napoleonic reforms also helped consolidate the states’ monopoly of force. The armies that swept across Europe under Napoleon’s command were mostly made up of French citizens, mustered under
levée en masse
, rather than professional soldiers. With the decisive French victory over and occupation of Prussia following the twin battles of Jena and Auerstedt in 1806, Prussia quickly adopted a citizen-soldier model and rejoined the campaign later to help defeat the French forces. As the Napoleonic wars continued, this model of national conscription eventually became the norm for all powers, and it survives today, as demonstrated by the modern draft.
    Administrative changes also helped put private armies out of business. Sustaining a large standing army is complicated and expensive, requiring a considerable bureaucracy to collect taxes and administer revenue. Over time, large centralized state bureaucracies replaced feudal lordships in the machinations of governance and especially military administration. Louis XIV established a sophisticated bureaucracy to manage state affairs at the expense of the estatesand the great nobles. Influenced by