"Mercenaries have been employed as auxiliaries in war since earliest times but in the post-1945 world they have operated, almost exclusively, in weak third-world countries. From Colombia to the Congo, Angola to Papua New Guinea, Cambodia to Nicaragua, they have appeared: training the drug cartel armies, assisting rebellions or civil wars, acting as the agents of the major powers.

In the Congo crisis (1960-65) they earned an especially unsavoury reputation for greed, brutality and racialism; it is a reputation that has stuck to the mercenary and on the whole justly. During the 1990s a new phenomenon has emerged in the form of the mercenary corporations such as Executive Outcomes or Sandline.

These corporations offer a range of military expertise and weaponry, have the covert support of governments in the countries from which they come and are rapidly becoming a power to themselves, ultimately far more dangerous than the individual freebooters of the past."--BOOK JACKET.