Advisors vs Mercenaries

A distinction without a difference

Author’s Note: I completely forgot to link a major source & motivation. Go down to comments section for more detailed info.

In December 2022 the first contingent of Romanian “advisors” arrived in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Their mission was to train the local African soldiers in support of a decades long globalist effort to exterminate the Tutsi menace¹. As is almost always the case, White military men in sub-Saharan Africa inevitably become a kind of Special Force regardless of the initial reason for their presence, and the so-called “Romeos” are no exception. The first stage of this operation was logical and elegant: French speaking former members of the Légion Étrangère would be grouped into tightknit teaching cadres to help train up the local DRC conscripts & war wagies, most of whom spoke French as well. The initial cadres were familiar to each other, familiar with black African militaries, and eager to collect good pay for hard work.

Their task was not small.

Every 5 years the White West rediscovers the unfathomable shithole that is the DRC. The national borders are notional, tribes are the only semi-coherent political unit, the breeding rate is astronomical, and the cultural typhoon of backwards savages, virulent black Christians, vying tribal elites, and ravenous Western mineral interests creates a permanent spiritual blight on an already heinous continent, drawing the absolute worst from ever corner of Africa and, in some cases, the globe.

I could spend the rest of this essay using every adjective at my disposal in maximal dudgeon and I wouldn’t even come remotely close to how truly awful central sub-Saharan Africa is when it comes to human suffering. If you’ve never been to a developing country², you can fall prey to the delusion that it’s some kind of secret paradise where nice brown people live simply except for when roving bands of marauders come along. If you understand just a bit about people, how they work & what they need to be fulfilled, and you understand a bit about logistics & infrastructure, what’s required to keep lights on & water clean, when you see these places you realize how magical the West is.

It is an Occidental trope that challenges and struggle burn away weakness and strengthen the soul, and for us this may be true. But it is likewise true that humans can also be too stubborn to quit when logic and spirit require a radical relocation of both body and mind. A man who gets lost in the wilderness and has to cut off his own arm to survive is inspiring. But what if a man just sits or squats, day in and day out, as a tiny cut becomes a gangrenous infection that nearly kills him before an unpaid German surgeon addicted to the scalpel and moral superiority swoops in and carves the rotting flesh away?³ Is that inspiring?⁴ Withstanding harsh circumstances has to have a point, otherwise it’s just a humiliation ritual. We have a term that for places where dim people sit in squalor:

Shitholes.

All the worst things about human societies are over represented on this map, and the people loudest about “helping” are the most at fault. It isn’t even close. Foreign aid is monstrous.

There are shitholes on every continent and in every country, but as with everything in nature, there is a spectrum. As shitholes go, central Africa is probably the worst. Prior to European Colonization, the region was rich with flora and fauna but thinly populated with a plethora of hunter/gatherer savages that had lived, uninterrupted and uninspired, for time unmeasurable. This laid down a genetic foundation that would have dire consequences during Modernity and Postmodernity.

Europeans arrived to stay, but other peoples had come before. Increasingly, archeological discoveries are slowly demystifying the presumed isolation of sub-Saharan Africa that has become more-or-less religious dogma. The denizens of central Africa were not at the top of the food chain, were not interested in any kind of social or cultural development, and were quite content to go along for the ride in perpetuity. I am not saying these things to denigrate them; you can believe this is a bad way to live or hold it up as some kind of Noble Savage Ideal. The point is that these are not a people who proactively respond by nature. These are not cultures that are constructed to vie with competitors. And this is not a geography that lends itself to technological domestication.

Though they eventually capitulated and divested their holdings, a number of Occidental interests poured blood, sweat, tears, & years into this part of the dark continent. In doing so they laid down the bones of commerce & growth, which today only remain as a fractured remnant. Concurrent with their physical and technological efforts, the colonizers attempted to modernize the savages they found. Rabid missionaries managed to convert nearly everyone, but it had no real effect on behaviors. Greedy mercantilists managed to introduce mines & factories and organize labor pools, but they never even came close to curtailing the inclination to “mill around.”

https://x.com/lmrwanda/status/1637822392843075585

While nothing ventured by the colonizers completely succeeded, much of value was introduced. Likewise, more than a few of the most promising of the Noble Savages were shipped West, North, and East to be paraded around universities and government buildings. Most were saturated with a simplified version of Marxism or Leninism, then sent back with cash-filled pockets. Decolonization was nothing more than a reorganization of colonial initiatives and colonizing entities, and by 1970 central Africa had a nice collection of European style city capitals controlled by European style elite black Africans whose primary source of wealth was European mining & industrial interests. Unfortunately, socialism can’t coexist with commerce without the bottomless capacity for cognitive dissonance found in the hearts and minds of European males, and kindergartenized leftism combined with sub-Saharan tribalism created heinous, spiraling conflicts from which the only possible exit is one side exterminating the other.

Because concerted, violent extermination is demonstrably “not cool” with the Occidental Elite⁵, scores of NGOs, nonprofits, government bureaucracies, and state militaries are always riding the “Responsibility 2 Protect” merry-go-round⁶. The local potentate provides legions of dumb labor to mining conglomerates for the purposes of mineral extraction. Neighboring chiefs do their best to sabotage efforts, aided by competing mineral interests. Vying external actors use a plethora of tools & methods to cause turbulence of all kinds. The cauldron bubbles until a middle or great power feels that their strategic interests are being negatively impacted. Cash and weapons flow to the potentate, or the neighbor, or both. Ambush and hit & run tactics are left by the way side and Wakanda marches to war…

…only to rediscover that illiterate artisanal mine laborers whose highest ambition in life is to sit around drinking warm beer while participating in an endless analog “bluetooth conversation” make terrible soldiers⁷. The army is all dressed up, the propaganda has gone out, and there’s no way to call it off. So… they need Advisors.

I suspect they have no idea what “camouflage” is or means.

Here is the pattern that seems to repeat when it comes to both advisors and mercenaries in sub-Saharan Africa:

• Some representative from the West develops a relationship with an African state government. He convinces them that the missing ingredient to victory is expanded capacities. A business entity is spun up to legitimize the financial exchange.

• The company hires ostensible experts to get on the ground and start training the locals. They find a corrupt mess. Against all odds they actually start doing good work, but the tactical circumstances create a situation where they have to actively maintain perimeters & corridors to keep going.

• The advisors start doing military operations, whether for training purposes or security purposes. They punch well above their weight, whetting the appetite of their local employers for more. A core of trainable locals coalesces and attaches itself to the advisors. Their efficacy in the local theater necessitates an escalation by the opposition force. The conflict expands.

The Romeos were well suited to being force multipliers and, once they teamed up with what passes for DRC spec ops, they were a force to be reckoned with on the battlefields around Goma. The contract was expanded when “the M21 rebels”⁸ started being backed up in force by regulars from the Rwandan national military, and soon the advisors crossed over that invisible imaginary line to "mercenary."

Let us reframe the situation before we go further: we now have a full-on war in a distinct geographic region between two competing interests, each with multiple other countries and corporations backing, supporting, or in some way involved. Both sides are a coalition, both coalitions are employing European mercenaries, both sides have global institutional backing of one type or another. Remember: none of this is unique; this is how it always goes. This is Africa.

The minor movements & battles in this conflict are fascinating and worth your time to delve into, but the outcome is that the national militaries on the side of the DRC do absolutely nothing helpful, then capitulate to the invading Rwandan coalition and exit the battlefield largely unscathed. The national military of the DRC crumbles and evaporates, wrecked by incompetence, greed, and corruption⁹. The only capable force left is the Romeos and their attached black Africans. The Romeos make good account of themselves, viciously smashing the opposing force and punching well above their weight in terms of headcount¹⁰, but their leadership is intentionally failing at C&C¹¹ and they lose the few tools they have for ISR¹² and air support. They are pushed back to the city of Goma. Some of them are able to escape via air, but a substantial chunk of them are eventually forced to surrender when M21, now curiously unaccompanied by Rwandan regulars, takes possession of Goma.

When this happens, and as I keep repeating this has happened before and will most likely happen again, the conquering black Africans put on a dramatic show of imprisoning their White adversaries. Disarmed, shackled, and wearing civilian clothes, the Europeans are paraded in front of the curiously ever-present media before being bustled off to temporary incarceration while international institutions broker an exchange. In the case of the Romeos, they cool their heels in Rwanda for about a month, on the heels of a month of hard fighting, before being repatriated to Romania.

Many Western observers would consider the Romeos little more than a slipshod paramilitary, taking advantage of global capital & philanthropy while providing little or no value in return. This is not the case. In fact, while the Romeos are a mere shadow of what Executive Outcomes was in their heyday, compared to the United Nations forces, the government forces of the DRC, and the regular military forces of the other African nations, they are top tier. With the exception of Rwanda, African national militaries seem to suffer from Arab military syndrome¹³.

The Romeos punched well above their weight, held fast when every other national military dissolved or fled, and stuck to the contract they had signed. Indeed, they went well above and beyond anything they had agreed to on paper. In one engagement, the Romeos had two soldiers killed while inflicting 240 kills on the enemy. This is not a Cinderella Story, and they are not a unicorn. This is in fact standard when it comes to European heritage mercenaries getting involved in conflicts on the African continent.

From the stolid Irish national forces to brutal Executive Outcomes to the glorious dead of the Wagner Group, European descended warriors have covered themselves in both glory and ruin in conflicts on the dark continent. Sometimes they surrender, as is the case with the Romeos and the Irishmen at Jadotville, other times they are forced to relent and let brutal tribals run amok on civilians, as is the case with Executive Outcomes in Liberia, and sometimes they fight to the last man, as was the case with both Wagner group in Chad and the Green berets in Niger.

It is not the case that these off-continent mercenaries always win, in fact it's about 50/50 when assessing it through the frame of strategic victory by geopolitical metrics. But it is always the case that Europeans dominate African battlefields, and this tradition stretches back all the way to when the Dutch first landed in South Africa in the 1600s¹⁴.

Anyone who pays more than a bit of attention to the goings-on in sub-Saharan Africa will probably take issue with my inclusion of the Irish at Jadotville and the American Green berets with the likes of Executive Outcomes or Wagner Group, but this is just vestigial neoliberal terminological shell games. Just as police officers use force but criminals use violence, so too is it the case that when media and the LWO¹⁵ support what's happening, the soldiers are called advisors, and when they don't, they are called mercenaries. In the case of the Romeos, we see that they were advisors right up until they lost, at which point they became mercenaries.

Somehow, when a man puts on a uniform and takes up a gun to fight with a national flag on his arm, he is distinct from a man who puts on a uniform and takes up a gun to fight with the flag of an organization on his arm. Journalists love to deploy the term mercenary because they know that Hollywood has already laid the groundwork for the induced imagery they desire in their readers. It never seems to occur to anyone that a young man from Iowa who knows nothing of the ideology or political policy that has put him in the middle of a country he doesn't care about is indistinguishable from a young man willingly participating in a conflict for a specific side because he is good at it.

It is exceedingly rare to find actual mercenaries who do not have a vested interest in the policies and ideologies behind the participants in the conflicts they join. Because movies portray guns-for-hire as soulless, money-motivated mass killers, everyone seems to just believe this is the case. But if you drill down into any specific mercenary group, you will find that it is often the case that the organization is obviously choosing its clients with a political calculus in mind.

Mercenaries are in inextricable element of European martial history. There has never been a single conflict that has not had de facto mercenaries involved. You can call them advisors, you can call them contractors, you can call them paramilitaries; these are all children born of the same mother, that being the queen of the battlefield, the infantry. Yes, they have different fathers, but this is almost irrelevant in the final analysis. No soldier fights for free willingly unless he is insane, idiotic, or cornered.

When you compare the efficacy of United Nations peacekeepers with any mercenary group or detachment, the evidence is abundantly clear that one is capable of actually completing the mission assigned, and the other does little more than exacerbate the problem while costing anywhere from four to one hundred times as much. This is not hyperbole; compare what it cost to have Executive Outcomes maintain Liberian sovereignty compared with what it cost to have UN peacekeepers lose it¹⁶.

After everything that happened, after everything they endured, the Romeos didn't get paid. Their payroll was dispersed more or less monthly, but for that month of defense when they held the line after every other professional military broke and fled, they didn't get a dime. For that month of incarceration, where it is entirely possible they could have been summarily executed, they didn't get a dime. Adding insult to injury, when they were finally returned to Romania, they were forcibly embroiled in the banana Republic machinations of the EU tampering with a national election to install a flaccid European globalist.

The surviving Romeos are a brotherhood, united by a shared purpose, tempered in the fires of both victory and defeat, fused into a single mass by the permanent bureaucratic oligarchy. Progressives have no coherent theory of mind; they are motivated and controlled by assembled bodies of curated facts. Because of this, they cannot truly fathom the danger of isolating and vilifying an armed brotherhood. The dominant elite in Europe are convinced that coups & rebellions are events that cannot occur in Garden Europa. The morons occupying the EU Parliament are a softer, slightly more female version of the political elite in the United States.

This representative was caught having an illicit relationship with a literal Chinese spy. Because the paper process of government investigating itself has “exonerated” him, he feels no fear in publicly threatening a large and growing group of men who are armed, trained, and marching forward into a sprawling military campaign intended to find and expel foreign invaders. The hubris is astounding; he, and his like kind, are completely convinced there will be no reckoning, no foundational shifts in power.

The Pax Americana has many people convinced that carrying a gun for a living is “just another job.” Political elites will send men off to fight & die with barely a moment’s consideration, and just as blithely consign those same men to ignominy or destitution when opinions shift. It is likely the case that they have fully bought into Fukuyama’s thoroughly debunked assertion that history has ended. The Russo Ukrainian War is the brightest of red flags indicating that history is back and we’re going to be sorry¹⁷. Forming & funding war bands, whatever you wish to call them, is not the same as putting together a landscaping crew. Men who become brothers on the field of battle carry a secret flame with the capacity to burn down the sagging structure of neoliberal hegemony, or any other structure that treats them like a plaything with no consideration for these men. Politicians and elites who understand this, respect those men, and make it their business to look out for their interests will inevitably inherit the earth.

1. There is a very slight possibility you have heard this portrayed a bit differently.

2. I have resigned myself to using this term. It is so stupid, as any country that is developing is dying, and every country that’s called “developing” is actually dying, but GAE-speak is strangely addictive.

3. True story.

4. No. It’s disgusting and horrifying.

5. They prefer slow boiling the frog with auto-genocide. Much cleaner and way less guilt.

6. Often referred to as “R2P” which is convenient because it is more often the case that it means “Right 2 Punish.”

7. You might think I am joking, and I was torn about the Bluetooth joke because it’s way more common in the West, but if you take the time to read up on “modern” conflict in Africa you will find this happening over and over again; they do not train their soldiers, they sell off all the equipment, the supplies go to the black market, and the “army” gets raped by a militia/paramilitary/tribal force that’s only slightly more organized.

8. This exact term is universally deployed by media outlets when this situation is discussed. It is a ridiculous term given the reality of the situation but I have run out of space so an explanation will have to come at some later time.

9. There were multiple documented instances of senior officers being bribed to not fight. This is the culmination of a Traitor Pattern with black African militaries: they don’t train their troops because it’s hard, the sell their weapons, ammo, and supplies because it’s lucrative, they don’t fight because it’s easier to run away or betray.

10. Roughly speaking, it was ~300 Romeos vs ~8,000 black Africans.

11. Command & Control

12. Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance

13. You simply must read this essay.

14. You could go back as far as Rome in North Africa, but sub-Saharan Africa is only connected to the North nominally. Sorry Netflix, Democrats, and shrews.

15. Liberal World Order

16. See: War Dogs by A.J. Venter

17. Some of us will be sorry. Others, less so.