Culture, Mercenaries, and Battlefield Outcomes in Asymmetric Conflicts

Abstract

Mercenaries in Asymmetric Conflicts. By Scott Fitzsimmons. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 332 pp., $53.56 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-1-107-02691-9). The privatization of security has become an increasingly popular topic in the study of international security. The heavy involvement of private military contractors in the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has highlighted the key role these actors play in contemporary conflicts. Choosing instead to use the more nefarious term mercenary, rather than military contractors, Scott Fitzsimmon's Mercenaries in Asymmetric Conflicts adds to this burgeoning genus of scholarship by examining the efficacy on the battlefield of these armed forces for hire in two sets of conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola, from the 1960s to the 1990s. Mercenaries in Asymmetric Conflicts offers a new perspective in the study of the privatization of security. Departing from the typical focus on the pernicious effects mercenaries have on conflicts, Fitzsimmons develops a “normative theory of military performance” to explain why smaller, privately funded armed forces are able to defeat larger, better equipped armies. The book's central claim is that when an armed force possesses cultural norms that encourage creative thinking, decentralized decision-making, personal initiative, free transmission of accurate military information, technical proficiency, and group loyalty, these groups are likely to be more effective on the battlefield and hence prevail against their opponents. Testing this normative organizational logic against a military capabilities-based argument, which Fitzsimmons terms the “neorealist combat theory,” the study finds that the quantity of military personnel, along with the …