when did wars change from being waged by mercenaries to being waged by dedicated armies?

Answer 1

The feudal lords banded together and kingdoms/fiefdoms were formed. In medieval Europe, powerful warlords became kings and gave land to nobles in exchange for protection. It was up to the nobles to procure the soldiers to protect the king.

Answer 2

Honestly in Greece Philip of Macedon generated the first standing armies and thus they were propelled to greatness. But really we need to get into the Mercenary thing. I think Black water is great we just need to expand this. Since manufacturing in america is down and exports are down; lets sell our ability to wage war to the countries that need a little help waging theirs. We could make some good cash money and keep all the technology for ourselves. We would have to be professional No CIA oh by the way we want this guy or that guy taken out. Do the jobs they hire us to do and get the GDP up in this country.

Answer 3

During the French revolution. The French revolution created the first national army - because it created nationalism. From then on, people were willing to kill and be killed, not for money, but for the glory of the nation.

The quantitative change was enormous: in 1740, France could muster only 160,000 soldiers against Prussia's 80,000. By the first world war, the figures had risen, respectively, to 4,400,000 and ‎5,300,000‎. It was now far cheaper to employ soldiers because soldiers fought for something more than money: they considered it a religious duty to fight and kill, or be killed.

The qualitative change was no less striking: in 1914, the army consisted of ‎nationals; not so in the eighteenth century. Where the American War had bankrupted France and ‎led to revolution, now it was inexpensive to employ soldiers. “Every able-bodied man ‎regarded this, now, as a sacred duty. That is how, when 1914 came, so many millions of ‎men went to their graves like sheep”‎, observes one historian.

A legacy of the revolution was the combination of the two principles of the ‎‎‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen’: first, the nation decides its own ‎destiny, and, second, ‘the nation’ means the People ‎. The French nation was not to be a ‎collection of individuals, but a union of persons into one family: worship of the collective ‎self. As an historian observed “...the Revolution became a kind of religion, and one that ‎everybody was supposed to share”‎ ‎. The Declaration ‘consecrated the principle of ‎election by or through the People’‎ ‎. The deification of the people had begun: the ‎French people deified, the Germans soon reacted by deifying the German people. Heine anticipated Nazi Germany 100 years before the event: “There will ‎come upon the scene armed Fichteans whose fanaticism of will is to be restrained neither ‎by fear nor by self-interest; for they live in the spirit, they defy matter like those early ‎Christians who could be subdued neither by bodily torments nor by bodily delights...he ‎has allied himself with the primitive powers of nature, that he can conjure up the ‎demoniac forces of old German pantheism....The old stone gods will arise from the ‎forgotten ruins and wipe from their eyes the dust of centuries and Thor with his giant ‎hammer will rise again, and he will shatter the Gothic cathedrals...‎"‎ ‎