The traditional depiction of early modern military contracting bears some resemblance to accounts of the age of the dinosaurs which my generation encountered as children in the 1960s. Dinosaurs (then treated as a single generic life-form, like mercenaries and military contracting) were slow, lumbering and ineffectual. They survived essentially because at the outset they faced no serious competition, and by sheer size could dominate a given environment. But they were ‘obviously’ doomed to extinction when set against warm-blooded mammals with their adaptability, speed and evolutionary potential, and the story of the dinosaurs was presented as one of increasingly unsustainable developments in size, in ever-more elaborate defensive carapaces, horns and spikes, and ever-greater dependence on very specific conditions from which they could derive enough food for survival. The obvious question of why such self-evident evolutionary losers should have managed to dominate life on earth for 140 million years was just beginning to be asked at a popular level in the 1960s, but had not yet challenged the general assumptions which suggested that the story was one of physiological and adaptive failure.

Yet in subsequent decades understanding of dinosaurs has undergone a revolution. Lazy habits of speech ensure that the traditional associations and assumptions have not entirely vanished, but they coexist with a scientific consensus that the dinosaurs were extraordinarily adaptable, resilient forms of vertebrate life, able to dominate different environments, climates and competitors over unimaginably long periods of time. Military contracting, easily dismissed under the generalized and unspecific category of ‘(hiring) mercenaries’, is in need of a similar, more thoughtful evaluation.