Unless I am much mistaken, the reason organized bonding/registering of mercenary units makes sense in the OTU is that low/mid-tech worlds can thus hire entire units of high-tech soldiers on short-term contracts to deal with specific problems. If everyone was at the same tech [moderately high] level, the market for such units would be much smaller. Nobody is hiring Traveller-like merc units for deployment in HIGH-tech countries in the real world, for instance.--Richard Aiken