Building Better Armies: An Insider’s Account of Liberia

Recent events in Mali, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere demonstrate that building professional indigenous forces is imperative to regional stability, yet few success stories exist. Liberia is a qualified "success," and this study explores how it was achieved by the program's chief architect. Liberia suffered a 14-year civil war replete with human rights atrocities that killed 250,000 people and displaced a third of its population. Following President Charles Taylor's exile in 2003, the U.S. contracted DynCorp International to demobilize and rebuild the Armed Forces of Liberia and its Ministry of Defense; the first time in 150 years that one sovereign nation hired a private company to raise another sovereign nation's military. This monograph explores the theory and practice behind the successful disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) of the legacy military and security sector reform (SSR) that built the new one.