PoisonDwarf said:
What about the Contras in Niacaragua and the Taliban in Afghanistan (1980s). Surely they're examples of outsourcing military operations to private militias for training and vast sums of cash and arms?
You could make same argument about the current Iraqi military and police forces trained up by the Brits in Basra. You recruit them, cloth them, arm them, wind them up, then send them off to defend British/Western interests.
Trouble is, as has been discovered in Afghanistan by British and American soldiers occupying trenches dug by Russians to fight the Taliban, once you let them go without Western officers
they may turn round and bite the West on the arse, i.e. choose to fight for their own interests.