Adapt or Die: The Cultural Foundations of Military Performance in the Sierra Leonean Civil War by

Since the end of the Second World War, mercenary groups have played significant roles in wars throughout the developing world. However, despite being consistently outnumbered by their opponents, these groups have a highly uneven record of military performance. Indeed, some modern mercenary groups have managed to defeat far larger state and insurgent militaries while similar sized groups of private soldiers have experienced crushing defeats at the hands of numerically superior adversaries. Taking this into account, how can we explain the military performance of modern mercenary groups in asymmetric conflicts?1 Scarce literature exists on the performance of mercenary groups and that which does exist consists largely of descriptive case studies offering an overview of specific groups or the private military industry. In brief, most of the leading works on mercenary forces are long on empirical data and narrative but short on theory and explanation.2 This paper seeks to redress this failing by evaluating my own normative theory of military performance against the empirical record of one of the best-known conflicts involving mercenaries: a twenty-one month period of the Sierra Leonean Civil War, from May 1995 to January 1997. The theory hypothesizes that a military force’s cultural norms influence its tactical behaviour (its military effectiveness), which, in turn