Through the Threshold Tower (Tiberium/???)

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Mercenaries have played a pivotal role in global affairs since time immemorial. For a while they fell into insignificance, but that changed with the Second World War. The conflict not only immortalized one mercenary as a hero of the Allied Powers and returned soldiers of fortune to the forefront of the public consciousness, it also set the stage for mercenaries to once more step forth and ply their trade.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union and resultant independence of its constituent Soviet Republics, led to a string of regional wars between the former member states as they fought to claim from each other and the still cooling corpse of the USSR that which they believed to be theirs.

Around them sat Asian and European nations once invaded and exploited by the Soviet Union, who in the aftermath of the war were largely in ruin and absent the industry and funds required to raise and maintain armed forces.

These nations looked to the conflicts growing beyond their borders and feared the possibility of them spilling over into their lands. Others among them more suspicious of their ex-Soviet neighbors feared that when war came, it would not be so accidental.

This would not be these nations' only source of concern. Soviet holdouts yet remained. The militaries of the Allied Powers in the post-war period were dedicated to tracking down large formations of Soviet holdouts – the campaigns against them lasting into the late '80s, formally ending with the destruction of the Scavengers – but smaller bands that registered lower on the Allied priorities lists roamed about uncontested. Leveraging MCV technology, theses bands assembled pocket armies capable of threatening ill prepared wartorn nations.

Given such tumult, mercenaries found themselves awash in seas of contracts and for the period time between the Second World War and First Tiberium War, the sight of hired guns in warzones became the norm and not the exception. Additionally, the average size of mercenary outfits would rapidly balloon during this time, as countries hired on merc groups to carry out duties traditionally entrusted to large standing militaries.

Many of the people who helped fill out these numbers were recently discharged soldiers of the Allied Powers. The Allied Powers, greatly diminished by years of total war, had understandably moved to demobilize large portions of their wartime armies once victory had been declared.

This left many Allied soldiers free to join in on the burgeoning mercenary business where they could earn a fortune doing what they had once done for country, and leveraging the skills they had learned during their time in the service. For others it was an opportunity to live a unique military adjacent lifestyle that they found agreeable.

Though that is not to say that mercenary work was always the preferred choice. More than a few men signed on to fight because they lacked alternative choices when it came to employment. Many former Red Army soldiers would become mercenaries as well for much the same reasons.

Mercenary forces made use of an eclectic mix of arms, sourced through equally eclectic means. Soviet war material found its way to them through the black market. Allied equipment was acquired through government surplus auctions. Anything else was bought directly from a youthful military—industrial complex yearning to have another taste of the lucrative business it saw during the war. They treated paying mercenaries as preferred customers and lavished them with complimentary spare parts, choice ammunition, and state of the art upgrade packages.

Thus began the era of mercenary armies, which would persist up until the '90s, when the nature of geopolitics would irrevocably change thanks to the arrival of Tiberium, GDI, and Nod onto the world's stage. Said '90s were a mixed bag for mercenaries.

On the one hand conflicts were common thanks to the increase in terrorist groups such as the Brotherhood of Nod and accompanying terrorist activities. The commodities crash triggered by the introduction of Tiberium onto the world market, contributed to the rise of more extremist groups and resulted in a handful of wars.

On the other many of the warzones that mercenaries had fought in during the '80s had by then quieted down. The United Nations was encouraging peace, Russia had stabilized into a democratic society, and Europe and East Asia were on the rebound.

The nature of conflicts had also changed. Conventional engagements were becoming rarer and giving way to asymmetric fights. Large armies went from being an asset to a burden and many of the established mercenary companies began downsizing.

A few of the large outfits would retain their size and move over into the private security business, hiring themselves out to corporations. Their repeated successes in defending facilities against direct attacks would inspire corporate heads to scoop up out of work mercenaries and use them to create their own in-house security forces, similarly equipped with military grade equipment.

Contrary to what they were labeled as, corporate security invariably conducted more than simple security. Often times corporations used their in-house forces to carry out military actions against the facilities and personnel of competitors.

At the beginning such attacks were limited to overseas locations, but gradually as the governments of the countries that corporations were headquartered in became overwhelmed by the always increasing costs of countering the negative effects of Tiberium, they ceded more and more power and rights to the corporations, and these "commercial wars" soon extended to the home cities of corporations. The sight of militarized corporate security came to be commonplace in cities that housed corporate infrastructure, as was the occurrence of firefights.

By 2020, the ruling corporations had since dropped any pretense that what their forces were particularly well equipped security guards and openly armed their troops with state of art military kit that few national militaries had the budgets to afford.

In between fighting other corporate troops, corporate armies enforced the wills of their masters within their "territories," cracking down on individuals and groups that attacked their de facto – though depending on the state of collapse of their host country it could be de jure – authority, demanding compliance with corporate regulations, and disposing of those deemed undesirable.

Smaller mercenary outfits continued to operate in the new corporation dominated environment. Governments continued to hire them to act against non-governmental entities and small businesses and the occasional private citizen employed mercs for protection. Corporations handed out contracts too when in need of deniable assets.

During this time, the relationships between the different kinds of guns for hire were strained. Generally, individuals who classified themselves as mercenaries looked down on private and corporate security personnel as self-important rent-a-cops.

Those people working private security saw mercenaries as throwbacks to a more barbaric age but held little regard either for corporate types, viewing them as well paid stooges. Corporate security employees held no better a view of private security and considered them weekend warriors and saw mercenaries as anarchic thorns in their sides.

Encounters between the groups tended to end in violence regardless of promised payout.

The Corporate Wars spelt the end of corporate armies. To this day people continue to argue about which incident it was that sparked off the series of conflicts that altogether would come to be known as the Corporate Wars, but there is less uncertainty in regards to how the war ended.

GDI intervention saw to the end of both the Corporate Wars and corporate authority, the conflict finally leading the Initiative to abandon their longstanding vow not to interfere in the domestic politics of sponsoring countries. GDI in conjunction with remaining countries vigorously hunted down and uprooted corporate influences in a manner reminiscent of the deimperialization and desovietization of post-war Japan and Russia respectively.

Naturally corporate armies were banned in the aftermath of the Corporate Wars. Mercenary companies and private security firms were placed under heavy restrictions that saw most opt to leave the line of work altogether. Thousands of unemployed hired guns left GDI aligned territories for what we would refer to today as the Yellow Zones, unable to find employment with government militaries or GDI. The former because they lacked the funds to expand their armed forces and the latter due to the organization's stringent recruitment requirements.

Only a few of the affected would go on to join the Brotherhood of Nod, the rest instead staying as independent contractors and offering their services as combatants. Independent Yellow Zone settlements would come to rely on mercenaries for protection, just as the battered nations of post-war Europe and Asia had done decades before.

Interestingly Nod became the largest employer of mercenaries. More specifically, local Nod leaders. They hired mercenary outfits to protect them from and wage war against their most dreaded enemies, other Nod leaders. In this way modern mercenaries have returned back to their post-Second World War roots, fighting on behalf of populations in conflict with their neighbors.