Laguerre treats the Haitian army as an institution that cannot be understood apart from the government it makes and unmakes or the society it polices. Much of the research was done inside the institution, at army headquarters and the military academy in Port-au-Prince, among officers who would shortly find themselves on opposite sides of the 1991 coup against Aristide.

The historical chapters follow the force from the fragmented, regionally based body of the nineteenth century, when the centre kept generals on a short leash precisely to stop them building local followings, through its consolidation into a professional bureaucracy under the American occupation, to the Duvalier years, when infiltration by the militia neutralised the army rather than restructuring it.

A recurring theme is the failure to create a separate civilian police. The army has resisted because policing supplies its income, its contacts with politicians, its cover for corruption, and its capacity to remove a president at will.