contractors are getting paid VERY good money relatively. Imagine you live in a village, your education is so so. You live in an old house with parents. How much do you earn? Anything?
But now you go to war and you/your family gets 200000 monthly. You can buy a cheap car for that money AND buy a flat in a city (first mortgage payment) after first month. Not counting signup bonus.
How many contractors do you think there are relative to the size of population, so that the previous poster was claiming that was flooded with wealth?? This is just plain nonsense. Mercenary payments have extremely limited impact on the overall 'lower class' wealth.
(And you somehow forget about the little insignificant downside of a mercenary career that you might be a bit dead or maimed, oops)
if you consider that almost all contractors are from poorer families it affects them disproportionately, you need to exclude upper middle class and up from your percentage calc.
I agree that "flooded lower classes with wealth" is an exaggeration but I think it is not completely wrong.
But now you go to war and you/your family gets 200000 monthly. You can buy a cheap car for that money AND buy a flat in a city (first mortgage payment) after first month. Not counting signup bonus.