What one soldier thinks of PMCs

"These guys [private military contractors] run loose in this country and do stupid stuff. There's no authority over them, so you can't come down on them hard when they escalate force.... They shoot people, and someone else has to deal with the aftermath. It happens all over the place."

- Brig. Gen. Karl Horst, 2IC, Third Infantry Division

Source: Jeremy Scahill, Tender Mercenaries: DynCorp and Me, http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20051102084930721

But then on the other hand, he would say that, wouldn't he? Soldiers hate mercenaries, their competition. Look at how the PNG military reacted when the PNG Government hired Sandline to do what the military couldn't.

Further, as Scahill touches on on his article, one of the reasons PMCs are so useful is that they can behave badly where it would be politically inconvenient for a regular soldier to do so. Who's to say whether this is always such a bad thing?

Soldiers also hate special forces for much the same reason [I forget the source]: they leave big messes that someone else has to clean up, messes that can be bigger than the problem the special forces were called in to deal with in the first place.