
Originally Posted by
Watchman
By my definitions they are, because pretty much the whole US military is essentially a mercenary outfit. The same goes for any professional army.
You see, I divide armies to about three categories based on their recruiting method. Mercenaries are those whose soldiers have no external obligation to serve, but are rewarded for their services in some fashion by their masters (that professional national armies serve only a single, fixed paymaster is of no consequence here). Conscripts are those serving due to external obligation to their masters, and usually also salaried - but this is by no means automatic. The final category aren't really armies at all (proper, organized armies fall to either of the previous categories) but irregular forces, whose members are neither obliged nor paid by their masters to fight but do so purely for their own reasons.
Of course, the above categories are by no means set in stone or final - conscript armies invariably have a corps of salaried full-time professionals, mercenary armies may find themselves obliged to become conscript armies due to circumstances (think the British in WW1), and irregulars may fill their ranks by forcibly recruiting new members or hiring people or get established enough to "graduate" into either of the two categories. And of course badly mauled mercenary or conscript armies may dissolve into irregular forces - this at least partially happened in Iraq, for example.
Obviously what motivates (or doesn't) individual soldiers in any army has no part in this typology, due to the simple fact that it can A) be externally manipulated B) comes in such a dizzying number of permutations as to be a functionally meaningless mess; the criteria is the primary source of new recruits.
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