I was brought up to hate mercenaries.

However, an article in Uganda’s Daily Monitor about the record 10,000 Ugandans who work as American guards in Iraq got me thinking if we could hold our noses long enough, to imagine a world where mercenary armies are necessary.

There are several thousands of other Ugandan guards working in Afghanistan, hired by American security contractors to do jobs that the US army does not think it’s profitable to deploy its soldiers to do.

Whichever way one looks at it, these guards are mercenaries.

By the same token, even United Nations peacekeeping forces, if you think of it, are mercenaries because they are paid to carry out security tasks in foreign countries.

The classic mercenary used to be the soldier of fortune hired to overthrow the president of a banana republic.

What has happened is that the mercenary business has both gone upmarket, which is the segment Ugandan and other guards operate in Iraq; and been ennobled, which is what UN peacekeeping is.

The problem with the notion that it’s wrong for a country to hire an army composed of soldiers who are not its nationals to do either honest or dirty work for it, is that it sounds out of place in an age of outsourcing.

Big companies outsource billing, paperwork, customer care calls; publishers’ outsource editing and manufacturers outsource production to Asia, why should fighting wars and keeping security — especially abroad — not be outsourced?

The second thing is that the criminalisation of mercenary armies made it difficult for successful small countries to project the power commensurate with their economic weight.

Take countries like the United Arab Emirates and Botswana; they are very wealthy nations, yet their influence in international politics is almost zero.

The reason for this is that the global power system rewards countries with large armies, and large armies are a function of large populations.

Small countries like the UAE and Botswana have too small populations to field large armies, but they have the money to buy them.

In a world in which it is possible to rent whole brigades, the UAE and Botswana would have louder voices in international affairs.

The most powerful argument for mercenary armies, though, is the most politically incorrect.

If you think of it, it is irresponsible for countries like the US and the UK to use citizens of their own countries to fight wars in places like Afghanistan.

A government’s first responsibility is to preserve the life of its citizens.

Therefore, if a government can hire foreigners to fight its wars and enable it to achieve its strategic goals, it is the right thing to do. Pay others to die for you.

This approach would reverse the problem Ugandan guards face in Iraq.

In the last four or so years, they have seen their wages drop by nearly 50 per cent because of competition from other poor countries to provide guards.

The real reason mercenary wages are falling, though, is that it is cottage industry.

If the US had to pay a country to fight its war in Afghanistan, it would turn this into a seller’s market.

To get to hire 100,000 soldiers from a country, you would have to pay very, very good money.

The wages in the mercenary industry would, therefore, shoot up considerably.

In reality, one suspects we are still many years from the rent-an-army era.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is executive editor of the Nation Media Group’s Africa Media division; [email protected]