Setting up effective, local security forces

[ganulv]

Fuchs rightly posted on a separate thread, with my emphasis:

Yes such forces would appear to be mercenaries and history shows that money was one factor in a sometimes complex equation. If the British in the imperial period could raise irregular units in the NW Frontier Province and FATA, with very few examples of mutiny or disloyalty, can this not be replicated? More recently and in a non-imperial context there were local units in Borneo, Oman, Namibia etc.

Are there not American examples post-1945? i am sure there are pre-1939.

The U.S./Montagnard relationship, perhaps. I don’t know that the comparison isn’t apples and oranges, though. The imperial/provincial dynamic is distinct from the dynamic between a hegemon and an admittedly less powerful but nevertheless sovereign state. Mark Danner’s book The massacre at El Mozote (one of my favorite books of any stripe) is a good case study in the latter.