The Mercenary Code

Why does this place see mercenaries as heroic?

One of the strangest things about Inner Sphere society is the place of mercenary soldiers. It’s not surprising that these sellswords exist. What’s really odd, when you think about it, is that mercenaries are generally seen as not much worse than any other soldier. Sure, there are exceptions – the great and the good of the Draconis Combine have a legendary disdain for mercenaries and their propaganda pushes that outlook down the social ladder, while the people of the Free Rasalhague Republic were often suspicious of private military contractors – but for most of the Sphere the mercenary soldier is more of a romantic figure than a target of contempt. This is one of the sharpest differences between the outlook of Earth people today and Spherers in BattleTech’s imagined future. I thought about giving you examples of infamous private military contractors in the 21^st century, but there are so many it’s hard to choose. So instead, let’s just reflect on our language. Saying “thank you for your service” to a mercenary soldier who’d never been part of one’s national armed forces would be… strange. On the flip side of the coin, being told that one has a “mercenary attitude” is somewhere between insulting and unflattering.

Granted, BattleTech fans are often positive about mercenaries in the setting, partly thanks to the freedom of painting up models (and perhaps inventing a story) for one’s own mercenary outfit, but partly due to the feeling of the setting. So, let’s pass the buck to the writers: what are they up to here? As far as the novels are concerned, I don’t think we need to over-complicate it. A likable point of view character is easier to hang out with through the story. A very different BattleTech could have told tales viewing mercenary characters from other perspectives (and maybe there’s something to that), but especially in the early days of the franchise going the heroic route worked well. Of course, we can’t make that move with the sourcebooks, so my hunch is that it was a bit of social commentary. Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books described the degenerate city of Lankhmar and showed the city’s low character by having even the thieves organized in a guild. (The import of that trope into Dungeons and Dragons has dulled that point to later readers, but at the time it had a sharp edge.) In the same way, BattleTech seems to show ordinary people being well-disposed to mercenary soldiers as a comment on Inner Sphere society: regular armies are so badly-behaved that mercenaries attract no special fear or disdain.

That’s a longer-than-usual introduction. Let’s get into some lore and talk about the standards that mercenaries were being held to around the time of the Wolf’s Dragoons’ arrival. For the next section, I’m mostly relying on the account in the ComStar sourcebook.

The Board

Let’s start by talking about who held mercenaries to account. The Inner Sphere had recognized no laws of war for centuries, so it wasn’t the Great Houses. Instead, like a lot of what was tolerable about the Succession Wars era, Jerome Blake was deeply involved.

There’s some controversy over who come up with the idea of a regulatory body for mercenary soldiers in the wake of Kerensky’s Exodus, but it doesn’t really matter. Only ComStar could handle the task. The order had already established itself as a neutral broker and had significant information that the Great Houses did not. In the early days of the First Succession War, veterans from the Star League Defense Force were highly sought-after – and while impersonating a full regiment or division might be impractical, many smaller mercenary units were putting themselves about as former SLDF companies. Star League records inherited by ComStar played an important role in verifying some of these stories. Testimony from trusted sources, whether mercenaries that ComStar had already vouched for or Lauren Hayes’ remnant SLDF on Terra, could help verify others. In time, ComStar’s monopoly on interstellar communications added to, and eventually surpassed these early sources. Throughout the Succession Wars, nobody knew as much about the state and reputation of mercenary soldiers as ComStar.

It didn’t hurt that Blake’s heirs had the reach to provide credit services and even observers throughout the Inner Sphere. Thanks to ComStar, a mercenary unit could accept a contract at the famous “hiring hall” on Galatea in the Lyran Commonwealth, have funds deposited for them by employers from the Federated Suns, complete a raid on the Capellan Confederation, and receive payment on the way back to Galatea. Less happily for soldiers of fortune, ComStar kept a close eye on their performance and maintained records of mercenary units prone to “creative interpretations” of their orders or outright criminal actions. Surveillance could go beyond reports from ComStar staff stationed at a nearby HPG station. It wasn’t unheard-of for acolytes of the order to be openly attached to mercenary units lacking a proven track record and there were always rumors about secrets agents.

Understandably, ComStar’s influence over the mercenary trade could lead to friction and there were attempts to break the order’s grip. During the Succession Wars, the most prominent move was made by the Mercenaries Guild (2956-68). Deep in the grinding misery of the Third Succession War, several prominent mercenary leaders formed the Guild to secure their profession independence from ComStar. The organization seems to have favored a decentralized approach with multiple hiring halls scattered across the Human Sphere, probably in the hope of reducing dependence on the interstellar HPG communications network. It also seems to be an open secret that ComStar muscled the short-lived Guild out of the market to secure their monopoly.

The Rules of the Game

There’s no doubt that ComStar did more than just monitor the terms of contracts. But how much more they did is somewhat up for grabs. The old Mercenary’s Handbook, set at the end of the Third Succession War, portrays the sellsword life as fairly immoral, even suggesting that looting of friendly populations Is fairly common and giving the rather lukewarm assurance that “any mercenary with even the slightest pretension of nobility bows to most of the [Ares Conventions].” I’d like to tell you whose point of view this represents, but the in-universe origin of the Handbook is unclear. (My guess is that it’s a trade publication written by retired mercenary soldiers.)

However, in Field Manual: Mercenaries, set thirty-four years later and given from the perspective of the Wolf’s Dragoons, we’re told that the Inner Sphere and Near Periphery adheres to a code known as the Honors of War, based on the Ares Conventions and “mercenary practices of the first two Succession Wars”. The text admits that the Great Houses are prone to suspending the Conventions but insists that “the mercenary warrior is often the most ready to uphold [them]”, arguing that the private military contractor is more exposed to “unethical battlefield practices”. The text is ambiguous but I assume that it means mercenaries are more at risk of accusations of bad behavior. I can certainly see how an unscrupulous employer might stitch up mercenaries on war crimes charges, even if their own forces did the same or worse… except that Inner Sphere courts don’t seem to hear such cases. Even if they did, mercenaries might “skip the border” and evade the wrath of one Great House in the territory of a rival.

It’s hard to know exactly what’s going on here but I think we’re meant to see the Mercenary Review Board (and by extension, ComStar) as a de facto war crimes tribunal policing mercenary forces. It seems like financial penalties and blacklisting were the MRB’s main way of dealing with wrong-doing, but there’s a stray reference in Era Report: 3062 to the ComGuards acting as an “enforcement arm” for the Board.

The Commission

Before cross-examining some of the claims in the Field Manual, we need to update the Dragoons’ role in mercenary affairs. After the failure of Operation SCORPION and Anastasius Focht’s somewhat reckless acknowledgment of the Clan-ComStar pact, ComStar’s centuries-old monopoly over the mercenary trade collapsed. If the Great Houses had privately doubted the order’s neutrality in the past, now they had definite proof that ComStar had not only taken sides, but taken sides against them as a whole. Other interests made inroads into ComStar businesses such as banking, some HPG stations were seized by the Great Houses, and the MRB was no longer trusted as an intermediary for mercenary contracts. There’s probably an interesting story to tell about a group of mercenaries who got caught up in this financial upheaval and what they ended up doing to stay solvent, but I’ll try to stay focused on the big picture here. Focht, despite his trademark protests about not being a politician, swiftly moved to broker a compromise. The Mercenary Review Board was dead. Long live the Mercenary Review and Bonding Commission!

The Commission (often known as the MRBC) would be based on the planet Outreach, the Wolf’s Dragoons base of operations. Jaime Wolf had built a significant database of Inner Sphere mercenary units that gave them quality ratings based on WolfNet intelligence. Presumably Wolf transferred an older version of that information back to the Clans in 3019, though the Great Houses were prepared to let that be “just the past”. The MRBC would be placed on Outreach and work in close cooperation with Wolf’s Dragoons. It was governed by a diverse board; three representatives of leading mercenary units (including the Dragoons), one representative from each of the Great Houses, one representative from ComStar, and a rotating caste of representatives from smaller powers across the Human Sphere.

With this in mind, it’s pretty clear that the Dragoons have a vested interest in portraying their system as a moral as well as a practical success. Their account clearly isn’t crude propaganda, insisting that the Inner Sphere was full of unscrupulous mercenaries until Jaime Wolf arrived to show them a better way, but that only shows us that the job is difficult. The Field Manual claim that mercenaries also abide by a principle of not “using excessive and unnecessary force against an opponent” seems a bit dubious (since when did mercenaries shy away from easy wins) and perhaps suspiciously close to Clan notions of honor. Still, I couldn’t turn up a smoking gun here and that might be enough for a tentative conclusion. Even if the account was written by an in-universe propagandist, it seems to have been written by a careful one. As such, we might be able to treat talk of mercenary morality as exaggerated rather than false.

With that in hand, there’s a hazy but fascinating picture of a subtle project. Many fans are familiar with the part of ComStar that used “kinetic” means to control Inner Sphere technology, whether they hoped to take away the most destructive weapons or precipitate a collapse from which the Sphere could be “saved”. The adepts in the Mercenary Review Board may have been engaged in a complementary “soft power” approach, carefully pressuring the Inner Sphere’s soldiers of fortune into behavior that mitigated the suffering of the Succession Wars.

Hear Me Out

Alright, there’s just enough time for some personal indulgence. I’m going to talk just a little about that ComStar-Dragoons Pact theory. Even though they lost full control over administering the mercenary trade, ComStar retained a lot of influence over the MRBC. For one, the communications and banking of the Commission went through the order. In addition, arbitration of individual cases were delegated to four-person panels; a ComStar representative holding the chair, a mercenary officer unconnected to the dispute, and two representatives of neutral governments. This is quite a lot of sway to grant to an organization that was supposedly untrustworthy, and I’m not sure who was making their case if not the Dragoons.

Still, I have to concede that this doesn’t really make the Pact theory all that much more plausible. It’s more of a bonus for folks who bought that “smoking gun” argument about ComStar’s advance knowledge of Dragoon caches. As always with the imagined future of BattleTech, we’re dealing more in the realm of the plausible than the true.

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