A mercenary is a gun for hire and the longer combat goes on, the more he/she and his/her corporate master get paid(exponentially more than the government issue soldier). A soldier going into battle may receive combat pay, but at $225 a month extra, (depending on what situation may await you at home) it's not enough to want to stay in Afghanistan over the winter. Using mercenaries to help end a war(particularly on a 1:1 ratio) is like using a knife to apply direct pressure to a wound to help stop the bleeding.
When combat's over, the soldier is still a soldier and usually a hero. The mercenary is just a bubba with a gun, lying about the unarmed victims, who has to go molest his sister's kid and beat his girlfriend to get his jones fixed.
You may have heard some stories coming out about Blackwater, murdering witnesses and trafficking and raping children. The same thing occured with another contractor, DYNCorp, who's replacing Blackwater in Iraqin Bosnia and Kosovo.
...DynCorp fired him, forcing him into protective custody by the U.S.
Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) until the investigators could get him safely out of Kosovo and returned to the United States...
...This same man, according to Johnston, "owned a girl who couldn't have been more than 14 years old. It's a sick sight anyway to see any grown man [having sex] with a child, but to see some 45-year-old man who weighs 400 pounds with a little girl, it just makes you sick." It is precisely these allegations that Johnston believes got him fired...
Werner admitted to having purchased a woman to get her out of prostitution
and named other DynCorp employees who also had paid to own women. He
further admitted to having purchased weapons (against the law in Bosnia) and it was Werner who turned over to CID the videotape made by Hirtz. Werner apparently intended to use the video as leverage in the event that Hirtz decided to fire him. Werner tells CID, "I told him [Hirtz] I had a copy and that all I wanted was to be treated fairly. If I was going to be fired or laid off, I wanted it to be because of my work performance and not because he was not happy with me."
According to Hirtz's own sworn statement to CID, there appears to be little
doubt that he did indeed rape one of the girls with whom he is shown having
sexual intercourse in his homemade video.
CID: Did you have sexual intercourse with the second woman on the tape?
Hirtz: Yes
CID: Did you have intercourse with the second woman after she said "no" to you?
Hirtz: I don't recall her saying that. I don't think it was her saying "no."
CID: Who do you think said "no"?
Hirtz: I don't know.
CID: According to what you witnessed on the videotape played for you in which you were having sexual intercourse with the second woman, did you have sexual intercourse with the second woman after she said "no" to you?
Hirtz: Yes.
CID: Did you know you were being videotaped?
Hirtz: Yes. I set it up.
CID: Did you know it is wrong to force yourself upon someone without their
consent?
Hirtz: Yes.
This is where billions of taxpayer dollars are going instead of healthcare and education.
Private para-military contractors have their own air forces to smuggle (weapons in, Afghanistan crops out, etc). These extra-curricular activities are conducive to dragging out a war.
It wouldn't surprise me to find out that they are going so far as to be aiding and abetting the enemy in a way to do just that.
The Mercenary, Considered. Does history not tell us that once there were many soldiers in Italy, who, failing for pay because the wars had at length come to an end, formed themselves into Companies and extorted money from the city-states, plundered the countryside, and were a plague upon the nation? . . . Such outrages do not come from anything other than the fact that these men were skilled in the arts of arms, and turned this into a profession. Do we not have a proverb that reasons as I just have, saying: "War makes thieves, and peace hangs them?" Because those who do not know how to live by any other occupation and who do not find anybody who will support them in soldiering, and who are possessed of such limited skills otherwise that they cannot join together in pursuit of an honest trade or living–these men become mercenaries, they turn to rob on the highways. And in the end, justice has no recourse: it must extinguish them all.
–Niccolò Machiavelli, Dell’arte della guerra, bk i, sec ix (1519-20)(S.H. transl.) also in: Machiavelli: Chief Works and Others, vol. ii, pp. 574-75 (A. Gilbert transl. 1989).