Guns for hiring and firing Mercenaries are no longer just guns for hire but the employees of businesses out to make a profit, reports Ian Bruce

and license disciplined companies of

soldiers-of-fortune to ease the global strain on the UK's overstretched and shrinking regular forces.

The argument runs that the United Nations moves too slowly to intervene in potential flashpoints. The humanitarian disasters of Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone are damning indictments of a distant and fatally flawed bureaucracy putting too few boots on the ground too late to prevent mayhem.

With a deft flourish of FO double-speak, the chaps in Whitehall even claim that licensing paid proxy fighters would help eliminate the ''bad eggs'' who give the calling a bad name.

Mercenaries have been around for 2500 years, but the days when they were simply guns-for-hire with better hardware than the native opposition are fading fast. In the new millennium, the hireling is as likely to wear a Savile Row pinstripe as camouflage tiger-stripe.

Commercial companies providing military assessments and training programmes for third-world cannon fodder are the fast-growing and lucrative sector of the business. And in an era of instant satellite news, they have become a

useful and deniable tool of unofficial

government policy.

When the US finally decided to take a hand in the wholesale slaughter of the Bosnian war, the White House could not be seen to support one faction against another, even though the Serbs had by then alienated international opinion.

The solution was to employ Military Professional Resources Incorporated, a Virginia-based ''civilian'' contractor whose senior executives were generals with combat command experience and whose lower-rank employees were

mainly Vietnam veterans.

The ragtag, murderous, and usually drunken militias which passed for a Croat army were taken to islands off the Dalmatian coast and taught from the basics up. Within a year, they were formed into disciplined units under a central command.

In 1995, they launched Operation Lightning Storm, a counter-offensive which combined tanks, artillery, and infantry in an unstoppable assault which drove the Bosnian Serb army out of the Krajina region and marked the beginning of the end for Serb domination of

the Balkans.

It was a textbook demonstration of the possibilities of military privatisation. It involved minimum risk in casualties and potential embarrassment for the sponsoring government and still produced the desired strategic result.

Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer,

the former Scots Guards officer at

the heart of the 1998 Sandline

''arms for Africa'' scandal in Sierra Leone, epitomises the new approach. ''We do not run a mercenary out-

fit. We provide regulated, professional military assistance to established governments.''

He adds: ''We have standards to maintain and we do not want 1960s-style freebooters or psychopaths. This is not a game for bandits.''

It can be a fine dividing line when that government, particularly in Africa, may be in dispute with the bulk of its own population, but it allows discreet - and expendable - application of a little surgical muscle when more conventional diplomatic routes fail.

It is a far cry from the heyday of the classic mercenary in the 1960s, when a few hundred unemployed soldiers and a lot of thugs and would-be Rambos from Britain, America, South Africa, Rhodesia, Belgium, France, and Germany

rampaged across the war-torn Congo, cutting a swathe through rebel tribesmen with second-hand assault rifles and columns of beat-up Second World

War Jeeps.

The English-speakers called themselves the Wild Geese, a romantic allusion to the Irish and Scottish soldiers-of-fortune who preceded them two centuries before. The French contingent saw themselves as the White Giants, rescuers of nuns and missionaries and unbeatable super-troopers.

The Katangese and Congolese vic-tims of their flying columns knew them more realistically as Les Affreux, the

terrible ones.

It was the era of Colonel ''Mad Mike'' Hoare, an ex-British officer who enforced strict discipline by personally shooting off the big toes of rapists and looters under his command. A man's balance and mobility depend on retention of that particular digit, and it amounted to a death sentence in the merciless hinterland of the Belgian Congo.

It spawned the French legends Bob Denard and ''Black Jack'' Schramme, commanders of mobile units recruited from disillusioned veterans in the backstreet bars of Brussels and Paris. They were men who had fought and lost in Indochina and Algeria as colonial empires imploded.

They craved action and some form of closure for defeats beyond their control. United in discontent, they formed a network of killers for hire. In an Africa fragmenting along tribal fracture lines, they were seldom short of work.

When the Wild Geese staged daring and dangerous raids over hundreds of miles of muddy jungle track to snatch white women in remote mining camps from rape and butchery at the hands

of the Simba insurgents, it made

headlines worldwide.

There was less coverage of the one-sided battles along the way, when genuine rebellion against continuation of colonial control of the region's vast mineral wealth was suppressed without mercy. Forty years on, that ''blood stones'' war is still raging amid the diamond mines of Shabaa province. Only the protagonists have changed.

Britain's most famous veterans-for-hire firm was Keeni-Meeni Enterprises, a brotherhood of ex-SAS soldiers who offered bodyguard services for foreign VIPs and discreet training teams for fledgling armies.

Keeni-meeni is a Swahili expression which describes the sinuous movements of a snake through grass and has come to be equated with special forces' clandestine operations. That company, too, became a handy extension of British foreign policy in the more unsavoury parts of the world.

The biggest British mercenary organisation is Defence Systems Ltd. It is run from a plush headquarters office opposite Buckingham Palace and claims to have 4000 potential operatives with a wide range of military skills on its books.

It can supply guards and security advisers for oilfields in South America or Nigeria, ''bullet-catcher'' bodyguards for overseas dignitaries, or ready-made combat teams to fight someone else's local war. And all with the discreet blessing of the Foreign Office.

Freelance soldiering, for those who run the show, is big business. Colonel Spicer's company was paid (pounds) 22.5m to use white South African mercs to instruct local forces in counter-insurgency techniques in Papua New Guinea in 1997.

Harry McCallion, a Glas-wegian who served with the Parachute Regiment and the SAS, and then fought with South Africa's elite raiding teams during the long, bitter frontline states' conflict in the 1980s, says the

ordinary merc usually fares rather badly by comparison. ''An ex-SAS trooper can make (pounds) 30,000 to (pounds) 40,000 acting as someone's minder, but it's bloody boring babysitting VIPs. Most find themselves craving some action and chasing the next war, signing up with anyone who'll get them into a fight.''

He adds: ''That's a course of action which usually ends up as a one-way ticket. The genuine guys are going for the adrenalin rush of combat. Some might even fancy the cause. But it's a dicey game for old soldiers. The retirement plan is usually metal-jacketed and travelling at 3000ft a second.

''There are too many cowboys around these days, blokes you cannot depend on in a firefight. Bosnia proved that, when every kid who had ever gotten high on a Hollywood shoot-'em-up movie or computer game arrived claiming to be Falklands veterans or ex-Paras. Many of them are still there, buried in shallow graves. There were some who had never fired a weapon before and did not know how to change magazines or slip off the safety-catch on their assault rifles. It's a good way to get yourself killed for a couple of hundred dollars a month.''

Using freelancers to shoulder the risks of military action is not a novel concept. In the Crimean War, a company was set up to tender for the capture of the Russian-held city of Sebastopol, holding out stubbornly under siege while British soldiers died of disease in the trenches beyond its walls and the media of the day began to demand government action or resignation.

The enterprising directors of Siegebreakers Inc even inserted a penalty clause in their proposal, promising to stump up an agreed sum for every day that passed beyond a deadline for successfully storming the ramparts. The scheme finally foundered on nineteenth- century illusions of fair play in war.

For sheer brass-necked effrontery in matters military, no-one has yet surpassed the condottieri mercenary bands who ravaged Italy in the fifteenth century. They were, however, businessmen first and warriors second. They saw no percentage in slaughtering each other needlessly.

In one famous battle, no-one was killed as the opposing armies played out a carefully choreographed dance of manoeuvre and counter manoeuvre before one side graciously conceded defeat.

In another skirmish, there was only one fatality when a man fell off his horse and was accidentally trampled by his comrades. War without tears. It'll never catch on.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF the world's second oldest profession

THE mercenary trade is as old as the history of organised warfare itself.

Hannibal of Carthage's entire army

was composed of spears-for-hire

from Gaul, Spain, and Numidia.

His sworn enemies, the Romans,

followed his lead when Italy

could no longer fill the ranks

of the legions needed to police an expanding empire. Before them,

Persia used Scythian horse-archers

and Greek hoplite heavy infantry to conquer Asia and press to the frontiers

of Europe.

Britain employed Hessian and Brandburg German infantry in an abortive effort to suppress rebellious American colonists in the late 1770s. Scots and Irish ''Wild Geese'' fleeing English persecution had served Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and the kings of France for several hundred years before that as elite bodyguards.

Africa became the mercenary playground of the 1960s, when tribal and mineral resource wars tore through the Congo

and Angola. The soldiers-of-fortune

fighting there were mainly ex-Second World War veterans who missed the adrenalin kick of combat.

Loot figured largely in mercenary

rewards through the ages, though

usually top soldiers earned top

fees, often payable in two parts

- half payable up front, with the remainder paid when the job was done - if the mercenary survived.