The South African military has adopted an assertive affirmative action campaign to ensure that women are represented across all ranks and branches. This has brought about new tensions in terms of gender integration, related to issues of equal opportunities and meritocracy as well as the accommodation of gender difference and alternative values. The argument is made that the management of gender integration from a gender-neutral perspective cannot bring about gender equality, as it obliges women to conform to and assimilate masculine traits. This affects women’s ability to function as equals, especially where feminine traits are not valued, where militarized masculinities are privileged and where women are othered in ways that contribute to their subordination. Under such conditions, it is exceedingly difficult for women to bring about a more androgynous military culture espoused by gender mainstreaming initiatives and necessary for the type of missions military personnel are engaged in today.
This study centers on the relation between militaries, violence, and publicly available digital images. Military websites can be characterized as forms of representation of national institutions comparable to the sites of any large organization. However, the way these websites publicly frame and explain the military’s use of organized violence has not been investigated. Accordingly, this study examines how contemporary militaries manage their public and online relation to their core expertise, organized violence. The analysis is based on a longitudinal analysis of the Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF) official websites (2007–2015) and interviews with key webmasters. The integration of the Internet and new media into the IDF’s official websites highlights its deliberate move into the cybernetic realm to manage, order, manipulate, and handle its public images and representations as a legitimate social institution charged with using violence in the defense of the country.
This article investigates the potential use of prospect theory to understand civil–military disputes over the use of force. Specifically, I argue that distinct realms of responsibility can lead civilian and military authorities to inhabit different frames of reference when confronting the same crisis. This divergence in perspective causes each to asses risk in fundamentally disparate ways and ultimately produces competing policy recommendations. To illustrate this theory, I analyze the case of the 1976 Korean tree cutting incident. During this crisis, American military authorities define the situation narrowly as pertaining to the Korean peninsula, whereas the civilian leadership viewed it as part of a global challenge to American resolve. As a result, each party weighed the risks of escalation differently and promoted conflicting policy prescriptions.
Children in military families experience various stressors associated with the demands of military life, such as parental absences due to deployments. However, there is a limited understanding of children’s well-being to parental deployment from Canadian military families. This study was conducted to examine the impact of deployment on the well-being of school age children from Canadian Armed Forces families and to consider the resilience factors in their well-being. Focus groups with children (N = 85) showed that deployment negatively impacted children’s well-being, routines, and family dynamics. Active distraction and social support seeking served as the most effective protective factors against deployment stress. Recommendations for mitigating the impact of deployment are offered.
Economic studies of military manpower systems emphasize the advantages of voluntarism under all but the most total threats, but this explains neither the persistence of institutionalized conscription in many states nor the timing of shifts from such conscription systems to volunteer militaries. Traditional explanations focus on external threat levels, but this has also proven unsatisfying. We theorize that threat variables establish the state’s baseline need for manpower, but structural economic variables determine whether the necessary manpower can be more efficiently obtained by conscription or voluntarism. Using a new data set of 99 countries over 40 years, we find that states with British origins are less likely and those experiencing greater external threat are more likely to employ conscripts. Most importantly, states with more highly regulated labor markets are more likely to employ conscripts, which suggests that, controlling for a number of relevant factors, labor markets matter in military manpower decisions.
During stabilization operations, the host nation and the international community are often confronted with a security gap, which could be a prelude to an explosive growth of crime and public disorder. In the absence of a functioning local police, an alternative is that the (international) military temporarily intervenes as interim police. This article analyzes how the Netherlands’ military performed during security gaps in three (post)conflict areas: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Iraq. It concludes that army units frequently were involved in interim policing and de facto operated as hybrid organizations, without leaving the military paradigm behind. Policing is generally not seen as a primary task of the military, however. To adapt to the reality of security gaps and to increase the operational effectiveness in the field of public security, the military would benefit from reflecting on their current military paradigm and on what they could learn from current policing practices.
This study uses a survey to examine the propensity of Indian Gujarati youth to enlist in the Army. The predictors were organized in three categories of demographic, individual characteristics of personality, routine and behavior, and socioeconomic and cultural aspects to measure their impact on the intention to enlist. The relationship between son’s intent to enlist and the father’s intent to allow the son’s enlistment was tested by logistic regression. The results of the study showed that non-Gujarati domiciles of Gujarat and the higher number of people working in the industrial plants had positive effect on enlistment propensity, whereas location of a factory near their residence had negative effect on the intention to enlist. Members of National Cadet Corps and those who did not have a family role model showed a positive intention to enlist.
How the U.S. military establishment interacts with other parts of the American government and the people impacts American national power. Because civil–military relationships are influenced by the context of the environment and the "kind of war" being waged, there are a variety of ways that military and civilian leaders can work together to improve the nation’s security. This article proposes an alternative civil–military relations model called pragmatic civilian control. It integrates Samuel Huntington’s objective civilian control theory with traditional American political philosophy and concepts established by Morris Janowitz, while accounting for current geopolitical conditions.
Cooperation in multinational military operations is one of the main tasks for the Swedish Armed Forces (SAF), which means that Swedish officers need to be able to meet international military staff standards. For this reason, the SAF and the Swedish Defence University organize an annual international staff exercise which aims to train officers in and increase their knowledge of North Atlantic Treaty Organization staff methods and procedures. The essence of successful staff work is good leadership and effective team work. In this article, we present findings from three staff exercises that have significant impact on leadership and possibilities for good team learning that relate to a team learning model. These findings have great potential to be of value in planning and improving leadership education and training in both military and civilian contexts.
Arguments in favor of the topmost senior officers exercising "principled resignation" in opposition to policies, decisions, or orders that they find immoral, unethical, or disastrous for the country weaken the military profession and endanger American national security. A member of the Joint Chiefs, a combatant commander, or a topmost war commander who "resigns" would be injecting themselves improperly into a policy role, opposing civilian authority, and undermining civilian control of the military. The act would be politicizing for the military and likely fail to change what the officer opposes. Most importantly, their act of personal conscience would poison civil–military relations long into the future; civilian trust in military subordinates not to undermine support for policies and decisions with the public and other political leaders would decline. Even more than today, they would choose their senior military leaders for compatibility and agreement above other traits.
Advocates of cultivating a resignation-in-protest ethic understate the costs and exaggerate the benefits. Military officers who believe that the policymaking process is heading in a bad direction already have ample recourse in the form of advising within the chain of command. If their advice is not heeded, it is exceedingly unlikely that the country would be better served by senior officers provoking a civil–military crisis to advertise their policy differences with civilian leaders.
This short article answers the question of whether, in the context of current American civil–military relations, senior military professionals may loyally dissent from a decision by civilian authorities, even including by resignation. Stated another way, can their constitutional duties to obedience to civilian authority ever clash so severely with their responsibilities to their profession and its fiduciary trust with the American people that dissent is obligated. The position offered here is that senior military professionals always retain the moral agency for such dissent. It inheres in their role as a steward of an American military profession exercising the discretionary judgments that are the moral core of their professional work.
Principled resignation of senior military officers is sometimes justified, especially in wartime. First, except under very narrow circumstances, each of us remains a moral agent. Second, American’s hold those on the battlefield responsible for their decisions and actions, and we must hold senior generals and admirals responsible for strategic decisions and actions taken in capitals. Third, organizations—regardless of type—incur significant risks when senior officials remain silent in the face of serious wrongs. Finally, war risks, damages, changes, and often ends lives of the innocent, of the citizens who fight on behalf of their nation, and of the political community itself, even if the war does not involve an existential threat. Although my colleagues, with companion pieces in this journal, disagree, senior leaders who participate in strategic, war-waging decisions and actions are responsible to speak out, perhaps even to to leave, when the risk involves not just effectiveness but using poorly or wasting life.
This AF&S symposium on the ethics of senior officer resignation in the United States includes a collection of four papers, each looking at principled resignation in different ways. Two authors, Dubik and Snider, believe principled resignation of senior military officers is sometimes justified, especially in wartime, where their inherent morals clash with their professional demands; these senior officer's ability to resign in protest distinguishes their service to this nation between stewards and servants. Conversely, Feaver and Kohn believe principled resignation is almost never justified as this action weakens the military profession and ultimately threatens national security. Further, the disastrous effects increase the ever present friction and mistrust in the civil-military process. Each author answers the question in the context of current American civil military relations and it is their hope that this symposium will lead to further discussions, research, and policies regarding the ethics surrounding the issue.
The British Army Reserve (AR), and in particular its logistics component, is undergoing profound changes. The Future Reserves 2020 policy aims to expand the AR and make it more deployable on operations. However, to date, FR20 has struggled to attract the recruits required to man this more deployable reserve force, despite recruitment campaigns offering increased monetary benefits. This study sampled AR logistics soldiers’ reasons for joining, remaining in service, and mobilizing when deployed. Consistent with the previous research, the study found that soldiers who joined for institutional reasons were more associated with longer career intentions and mobilizing for intrinsic reasons. Soldiers who joined for occupational reasons were less satisfied with all elements of reserve service and deployed in order to fulfill their contracts. These trends suggest that recruitment campaigns that stress the pecuniary benefits of reserve service may attract soldiers less committed to reserve service and deployments and who are harder to retain.
Programs aiming to ease the transition from military to civilian life have increasingly focused on specific occupation areas where veteran skills might overlap with civilian job requirements. This research uses the American Community Survey to examine the occupations and industries that veterans tend to work in as well as how veteran incomes compare to similar nonveterans in each area. Results show that veterans tend to seek civilian occupations where military experience is likely to apply, as areas of veteran overrepresentation echo technical military functions. Furthermore, veterans generally tend to earn higher incomes than similar nonveterans in these areas of potential military–civilian overlap, but most income differences are relatively moderate. The results imply that programs encouraging transitioning military members to find a civilian occupation that is similar to their military experience may better assist those in military occupations with clear civilian applications.
U.S. service women were exposed to more combat-related trauma in recent wars compared to prior conflicts and consequently faced an increased risk of trauma-related mental health outcomes. In this study, we examined gender by race differences in self-reported post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and clinician diagnoses in a large sample of U.S. Black and White service men and women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, to determine whether women overall and Black women in particular are at an increased risk of PTSD compared to Black and White men. Using three PTSD measures—two symptom-based measures assessed at different times and one diagnosis measure—we found more traumatic combat exposures were associated with higher PTSD risk for service women compared to service men, but there was no additional increase in risk of PTSD for Black females.
This article examines President Clinton’s decisions to launch military actions against Iraq in June 1993 and Kosovo in 1999. This study represents an attempt to test the descriptive accuracy and further developing the diversionary theory of war. Using a qualitative framework for diversionary use of force developed by another researcher, Ryan C. Hendrickson, this research examines and compares the two cases in order to determine whether or not these strikes appear to be diversionary in nature. This article generally suggests that empirical support for the diversionary argument in these cases is "mixed" but has more validity in the actions against Iraq. Two proposals to further develop qualitative tests for diversionary use of force are advanced.
Violence against civilians is portrayed as an antecedent of civil war, a cause, or both. Civil war creates opportune environments for planning and carrying out these acts that in turn can have detrimental effects on peace processes. Since not all civil war factions will see peace as beneficial, some actors may use violence to undermine the peace talks. The rebels may use indiscriminate violence to demonstrate their ability to exact costs on the government thus forcing the latter to negotiate. This article focuses upon acts of violence committed by rebel groups during mediated peace process. The central hypothesis is that violence against civilians increases the probability of mediation that in turn increases the prospects for violence. Using all civil war episodes from 1970 to 2008 as observations results from bivariate probit analysis endogenizing the choice of mediation bear out this theoretical argument.
Despite increasing prevention efforts, military suicide rates have surpassed those of the general population. This trend may reflect a deficit in our understanding of suicide, historically atheoretical and based on decreasing risk factors of suicide. The interpersonal–psychological theory of suicide (IPTS) provides a theoretical foundation to understand suicide but only assesses three risk factors of suicide and is primarily aimed at explaining who may die by suicide, but not when. The fluid vulnerability theory (FVT) provides a broad theoretical framework to understand and organize risk and protective factors of suicide in order to understand the process of suicide risk over time. Overlaying the IPTS’s constructs of thwarted belongingness, perceived burdensomeness, and the acquired capability for suicide within the FVT framework provides a robust model to understand not only who is at risk for suicide but also when suicide risk is likely to emerge.
Owing to regional and partisan imbalances, the U.S. military is at greater risk than at any time since the advent of the all-volunteer force of becoming estranged from significant portions of the society it serves. What—if anything—should be done? This article takes three initial steps to address this problem. First, the article examines regional and partisan representation in the U.S. military and suggests that existing imbalances are likely to grow worse over time. The article then argues that the most obvious policy response, a renewed draft, would in fact fail to adequately bridge the gap. Finally, the article outlines one policy response—the reassertion of nonpartisan norms—that would help to mitigate, though not close, the gap.
Jihadist terror is a multidimensional challenge that compels unique difficulties on compatibility between the military campaign and the political goal. Compatibility between military campaigns and political goal requires a deeper understanding about the Jihadi terrorism phenomenon that could be achieved by a strategic and diagnostic learning process. Such learning requires certain characteristics, which enable the creation of open discourse. This article introduced definitions of closed and open discourse, characterized the required conditions for creating open discourse, and explained the linkage between strategic learning and open discourse. This article aims to add another theoretical layer to Rebecca Schiff’s "targeted partnership" concept by elaborating on the essence of the encounter and discourse between the political and the military echelons in the context of terrorism in the Middle East, using examples from the American and Israeli experience. The concepts of "Discourse Space" and "Diagnostic Learning" are corresponding with Schiff’s concept and accomplish it.
This study investigates message strategies used in U.S. military commercials using Taylor’s six-segment strategy wheel. A content analysis of 125 military television commercials reveals that (1) majority of military commercials employed transformational strategy rather than informational strategy; (2) military commercials only used high involvement message strategies (i.e., ration, ego, and social) and no acute need, routine, and sensory commercials were observed; and (3) message strategies in military advertising varied across the number of wars and recruiting targets. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.
Since the early 2000s, civil–military relations in Turkey have been tremendously overhauled. The National Security Council (MGK) lay at the crux of this transformation. This semi-military council was considered to be the principal formal channel that allowed the military to intervene in politics. Therefore, the reforms toward more civilian domination in the MGK were extensively hailed and reckoned as the end of the military’s protracted political role. However, subsequent developments did not verify this initial optimism about the demise of the old pattern of strong military presence in politics. This study examines the political activism of the reformed MGK. It suggests that the reforms trimmed the military’s power through subjecting its functions to civilian control. Nevertheless, this shift proved insufficient to end MGK’s political role. The MGK still actively takes part in politics and preserves its executive authority, although this authority is now performed concertedly by civilians and the soldiers.
In 2011, the Australian Defence Force Academy became embroiled in a sex scandal when a cadet made public, claims of abuse. Her claims led to a number of inquiries, which unveiled many other historical abuse claims. As such, this case revealed some of the potential problems associated with the containment of such disputes. To explore this further, a brief review of workplace changes (1930–present) was conducted, which highlighted the development of current containment measures. This was followed by a two-pronged case analysis of the 2011 Australian Defence Force Academy Skype sex scandal. Boltanski’s process theory was used in conjunction with Bourdieu’s field theory to study the containment of the case. Combined, these analyses revealed that, while a focus on the central players and their relations as psychologized/personal is a main strategy for containment, this approach can deflect attention from other factors that play important roles, resulting in more significant, far-reaching problems.
There is growing interest in the implications of military service for the political attitudes, behaviors, and activism of military veterans. This article considers how promission and antiwar veterans’ narrate their experiences of becoming political activists and the mechanisms that effect that transition. The research draws on narratives from 40 members of the antiwar organization Iraq Veterans against the War and 28 members of the promission organization Vets for Freedom. Using "exemplars" from opposing political groups, the article reveals the shared process of politicization for both groups of veterans, and how divergent promission and antiwar definitions of duty, service, patriotism, and narratives of experiences and interpretations of warfare activate meaning-making activities, mechanisms, and analytical frames that share more in common than surface political differences might suggest.
Although military and civilian personnel work closely together in defense organizations, they are subject to different human resources practices and conditions of service. Assessments of military personnel along a range of job characteristics are examined to identify areas in which they assess themselves as "better or worse off" than their civilian counterparts, and how these comparisons relate to perceptions of fairness using data from Belgium, Canada, and the Netherlands. Military personnel reported meaningfulness/support aspects (e.g., meaningful work) as similar for military and civilian personnel, indicated that negative impacts (e.g., risk of injury) were greater for military, and perceived variability in instrumental benefits (e.g., pay, advancement). Upward social comparison (i.e., seeing oneself as worse off) was related to lower perceived fairness, whereas downward social comparison was related to higher perceived fairness. This research informs mechanisms for promoting perceptions of fairness and enhancing military–civilian personnel relations in defense establishments.
This article examines the relationship between advisors and linguists in the contemporary military advising mission and applies an emergent postmodern military culture theoretical framework. This project’s multimethod collected data from Iraq, documents, and interviews. The study reveals an intriguing and nuanced story about the deployment of advisors and linguists in the advising mission. This article defines the military advising mission including the major actors. The article then introduces the postmodern military culture theoretical framework and method. The findings report many themes including linguist selection and hiring processes, the importance of advisor–linguist relationships, the relevance of linguists’ backgrounds, linguists as full advisory team members, and the building blocks of successful advising sessions. Effective advisors work with linguists to deploy a Swiss Army knife of cultural tools including peacekeeper diplomat, warrior, subject matter expert, innovator, and others to accomplish the mission, which divulge broader changes indicative of an emergent postmodern military and culture.
The characteristic challenges of combat lead military personnel to develop adaptive coping styles that are different from coping styles used in routine life. This contention is explored using data collected from Israel Defense Forces conscript and reserve soldiers during intense military operations. The results of this study support this claim, in particular concerning faith. Coping styles were also correlated with combat motivations and measures of positive and negative emotions. It seems that a well-adapted soldier may use unique coping styles that, although perhaps not understood by outsiders, can contribute to his capacity to carry out his undertakings. A better understanding of such a state of mind should prove valuable for military leaders and religious experts.
Hard power, the unorthodox foreign policy mechanism, has emerged recently as a complex agency that uses military power to regulate diplomatic relations between military and civilian actors. Although national governments use hard power rather frequently to influence foreign public opinions, the field’s scholarship tends to downplay the role of military instruments in the development of public diplomacy. Almost all armed forces contribute to various public diplomacy efforts by applying basic tools, including humanitarian-relief operations and construction works, and international military education and training programs. This article analyzes these tools in the context of soft power and public diplomacy and demonstrates the impact of military power on public diplomacy. It also reconstructs the effective time frames of public diplomacy works of the military by introducing a novel pattern to understanding these works.
An estimated 70,000 personnel are annually released at the prime of life from the Indian armed forces to maintain a youthful service profile. The migration of veterans in search of a second career to civil society involves managing crucial socioeconomic needs. This article examines the resettlement needs of veterans using survey research which measured resettlement needs of air force veterans in two distinct districts (regions) in India (N = 400). The analysis reveals that the educational needs of dependent children are on top of the agenda followed by the need to find civilian employment. This study also develops a socioeconomic need continuum and a motivation model of resettlement.
Latin American scholars often maintain that militaries should be kept out of internal security operations. Soldiers, they claim, are ill suited for these assignments, inevitably placing innocent civilians in harm’s way. This study instead argues that not all counternarcotic missions are the same. When a specific operation coincides with a military’s capabilities and proclivities, it can be conducted effectively and humanely. When there is a disconnect between the operation and the institution, there is a greater chance for mission failure and civilian casualties. Those differences are revealed in a comparative case study of the Mexican military’s crime patrols versus its targeted operations against cartel kingpins. It finds that while there are justifiable doubts about transforming soldiers into cops, it is also the case that soldiers can conduct themselves professionally and with restraint when they are tasked with assignments that conform more closely to their skills sets.
Political actors have assumed that economic sanctions hinder a nation’s stability by reducing its economic growth, though history has shown otherwise. One potential explanation for this phenomenon is that any decline in a growth is offset by the economic benefit they receive from a response of increased militarization. Using a defense-driven model, we test this explanation with data Iranian from 1959 to 2007. The findings show that economic sanctions have limited the development of Iran, but the influence of an increasing defense sector offsets the sanctions, suggesting sanctions may be ineffective due to the substitution effect from defense expenditures.
Charity watchdogs and the media level serious allegations of mismanagement of funds at charities serving former and current members of the U.S. armed services, affecting service recipients, families, donors, grantors, foundations, and taxpayers. To examine these allegations, we use two approaches from the literature to assess nonprofit financial effectiveness: the organization’s ability to gain resources and to sustain activities. We mirror the approach of charity raters, whose measures are widely available to the public. Using GuideStar/Internal Revenue Service data, we compare fund-raising expenditures, assets, and financial sustainability of large national military and veterans nonprofits to a random sample of national nonprofits. We apply propensity score matching and compare organizations similar in size, age, and other factors. We find little difference between military and veterans charities and other nonprofits and provide an improved method for evaluating the financial health of nonprofits across academic discipline, nonprofit field of service, and within or among countries.
How does military change take place in states that are not able to develop autonomous solutions? How does transformation occur when limited resources are available? What are the "sources of military change" for armed forces that do not possess the (cognitive and material) resources that are essential for autonomous development? In articulating an answer to these questions, this article draws from the theoretical debate on interorganizational learning and looks at the mechanisms that drive "learning from others." We argue that adaptation and organizational learning often had to look for, and then try and adapt, off-the-shelf solutions that required relatively more limited resources. Empirically, the article focuses on the Italian Armed Forces, which have rarely attracted scholarly attention, although it emerged from almost total lack of activity in the Cold War to extended deployments in the 2000s.
As increasing numbers of women are recruited into the U.S. Navy, retention of women (especially in combat occupational specialties) lags behind men. Data indicate that women and men leave the Navy because of impact on their family. Lack of career persistence for women in nontraditional professions such as science, technology, engineering, and math professions has also been attributed to social psychological factors including self-efficacy, stereotype threat, and bias. We build on this research to examine the military and service academies’ socialization of women into a traditionally male profession through role model influence. Surveys were collected from students at the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) on their work–family expectations. Results show a gendered difference in career intentions and influences by male and female non-USNA peers, but not from their families or officers. Expected work–family conflict, gender ideology, and family formation intentions were employed to explore relationships between work and family expectations.
Cross-cultural competence not only emphasizes building specific skill sets such as language proficiency or negotiation skills, but also on changing the military’s attitudes to other cultures by emphasizing the value and importance of cultural skills for successful military operations. In contrast to developing cultural skills, the task of shifting cultural attitudes is a far more complex process. Using empirical data from a survey of 2,406 Marines, this paper seeks to identify some of the social, demographic and experiential factors that influence military service members’ attitudes to the value of culture in military operations. The authors found that of the demographic factors tested, only education and commissioning were positively related to attitudes. The greatest predictors were experiential factors: language skills, a multicultural background, travel experience and frequency of interaction with the local population during a previous deployment. Deployment alone was not a predictor. Cultural training was not related to attitudes, although satisfaction with the cultural training was a predictor of positive attitudes.
The average American military enlistee is likely to differ from the average civilian in employment ambitions and prospects. Current research on veteran wages, however, only examines the effect of military service on average earnings. We employ quantile regression techniques to estimate the effect of military service for the above- and below-average earnings that veterans may experience. We draw data from two longitudinal surveys, one including veterans who served during 1980–1994 and the other including veterans of the early 21st-century wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the 21st-century cohort, we find that military service appears to increase wages at and below the median wage but decrease earnings at the high end of the distribution, although these benefits may take several years after service and entry into the civilian labor market to appear.
This paper builds a case for examining suicide in the U.S. military relative to broad societal context, specifically, the unique experiences of birth cohorts relating to processes described by Durkheim’s theory of suicide. In more recent birth cohorts, suicide rates have increased among teenagers and young adults. In addition, suicide rates of age intervals at a given time period have been reliably predicted by the size of the birth cohort and the percentage of nonmarital births—supposed indicators of Durkheim’s diminished social integration and behavioral regulation. Consequences of these trends are likely more evident in the U.S. military due to having proportionally more individuals known to be at risk for suicide, that is, young males who are from nontraditional households. The all-volunteer force compared to draft force has fewer applicants to select, and proportionally more of applicants are accepted for military service. Consequently, more recruits having varied conditions now than before, perhaps including greater vulnerability to suicide, serve in the U.S. military. These points are further elaborated with supporting evidence, concluding with a call for new directions in suicide research, practice, and policy.
Military establishments view religious soldiers with mixed feelings and must contend with the specific dilemmas these soldiers present. This article suggests what might influence the managing of religious diversity in the ranks, using the idea of dimensions of isolation. The more removed a military is from society, the more likely it is to utilize internal mechanisms when dealing with religious soldiers. The less removed it is from society, the more likely it will be to turn to external mediating mechanisms in this regard. Using three dimensions of isolation (physical, temporal, and psychological), this article discusses the treatment of religious troops in the Israeli and Turkish cases. After exploring what can be learned from these cases regarding the accommodation of religious soldiers, the article concludes with some suggestions for future research.
This study contributes to the growing body of literature about women veterans of the U.S. military by investigating how veteran status and disability are related to women’s ability to work. The study uses nationally representative data to analyze labor market outcomes of women who served in the U.S. military since 1973, with a focus on findings about women who have served since 2001. Results indicate women who served after 2001 are more likely to have a disability when compared to men veterans and women nonveterans. Those women veterans who do not have a disability are more likely to be employed than their nonveteran counterparts, net of controls for demographic factors. Disability, including service-related disability, is strongly related to unemployment and being out of the labor force. The discussion considers the implications of women’s military service for their ability to work.
This study examines partnerships between the military and local communities by exploring communication channels of the U.S. military and civilian agencies that provide services to transitioning military members. This article reports on a study conducted in 2013 in the Hampton Roads, Virginia area, designed to determine the degree to which the military enters into partnerships with civilian service providers. We find that navy agencies in Hampton Roads do work with community partners, but the military is more directive than one might imagine in a true partnership, leading to "uneasy" partnerships. Additionally, there are important structural and organizational barriers that prevent true partnerships from developing between navy agencies and the community providers.
Drawing upon data from the Deployment Life Study, this article examines whether female military spouses (SPs) are disadvantaged relative to matched civilian peers in terms of hours worked and earnings, paying particular attention to gaps among the highest educated women. Female SPs do earn less than comparable civilian peers in terms of raw dollars and percentage earnings. Moreover, military wives who are part of the labor force work as many hours as their civilian counterparts, but still earn significantly less for that work. Contrary to predictions, the most educated SPs are not disproportionately affected compared to spouses with less education. These results suggest that SPs at all education levels could benefit from employment assistance; in particular, women already participating in the labor force may benefit from support in finding higher paying jobs.
In line with its "Freedom of Navigation" program, the United States conducts "operational assertions" by sending naval vessels to violate what it considers to be the excessive maritime claims of other states. Efforts have been made to legitimate this program to the public and elected officials on both liberal and realist grounds: Freedom of navigation is an important component of the liberal international order while also central to the exercise of U.S. naval power. However, it does not follow that military assertions, which create a security risk and are inconsistent with liberal principles, should take precedence over diplomatic and multilateral steps. Rather, the program has faced little scrutiny to date due to its relative obscurity.
This article focuses on Carl von Clausewitz’s ideas regarding civil–military relations and in particular how those ideas relate to Samuel Huntington’s models of objective and subjective civilian control. Huntington believed that Clausewitz supplied the foundation for his concept of objective control. Yet an examination of Clausewitz’s own experiences, as well as his theoretical writings, rejects the basic tenants of objective control: a politically neutral military, the separation of political from military considerations during the professional officer’s analytical processes, and the reliance on the professional military as opposed to the citizen soldier. Instead, Clausewitz embraced something similar to Huntington’s concept of subjective control and with it a fusionist model of civil–military relations.
This article attempts to shed light on Israel’s civil–military relations by employing the public’s trust in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as a key parameter. The study is based on a series of public opinion polls conducted between 2001 and 2010, during periods of military confrontation as well as periods of relative quiet. The findings show that despite increased criticism toward the IDF and claims by researchers, the Jewish-Israeli public’s trust in the IDF generally remains very high and stable and strengthens significantly when the cannons start to roar. We also found a fixed pattern of change in public opinion during low-intensity conflicts. In a comparative perspective, the findings suggest that the "rally ’round the flag" effect is relevant in the Israeli case both in conventional war and in limited conflicts. Moreover, the findings indicate that the public’s trust in the army is not a uniform perception but a complex one that may have different and sometimes conflicting facets.
American overseas military operations have become dependent upon private contractors. Thousands of these individuals have suffered casualties as a consequence of employment in high-risk parts of the world. American policy has consistently failed to meet the medical needs of hundreds of thousands of contractors. The root source of this problem is the nature of contracting itself. It is a system defined by a commercial transaction rather than the common bond shared between a citizen and the state. The current and future of costs of this basic disconnect are significant. Contractor casualties have risen at exponential rates. More broadly, policy makers must also confront the state’s obligations to employees who are assuming the risks of outsourced citizenship, a question that pertains to American contractors returning home as well as the vast majority of local national workers left to their own devices once Washington declares its mission complete.
Many scholars have recognized the growing likelihood of urban military operations in the future. Understandably, given the seriousness of this prospect, most commentators have focused on the operational and political difficulties of fighting in cities. At the same time, precisely because of the intense challenges of urban operations, these scholars have also emphasized that urban operations increasingly require highly professionalized infantry and especially Special Forces. Nevertheless, they have tended to ignore recent innovations at the tactical level among these specialist infantry units. This article seeks to address this oversight. It examines contemporary developments in urban micro-tactics among Western forces. Specifically, this article addresses the dissemination of Close Quarters Battle techniques, originally developed by Special Operations Forces in the 1970s, to regular infantry in the last decade as a result of urban operations Iraq and Afghanistan. In this way, this article contributes to contemporary debates about professionalization in Western armed forces today.
Armed forces form the lifeblood of any nation, and morale of its officers is the key to effective defense of the country’s borders. Yet, most militaries, and so does Indian, suffer from a relatively high rate of churn of officers that has adverse effects. Turnover is detrimental to any organization, and it is particularly undesirable for armed forces, as it affects unit cohesion and operational preparedness, thus proving to be chronic problem that demands attention. With this aim, we investigate the factors that are instrumental in influencing the propensity of military officers to leave. A survey of 476 Indian military officers, followed by a rigorous empirical analysis, revealed the pay, promotion, and job satisfaction to be the prime perpetrators for the intention of military officers to leave. Our work is a step in the direction of stemming the attrition and improving the retention of officers in the Indian military.
In 2014, Armed Forces & Society published Ali’s work, "Contradiction of Concordance Theory: Failure to Understand Military intervention in Pakistan." Shortly thereafter in 2015, Schiff, the author of concordance theory, responded with "Concordance Theory in Pakistan: Response to Zulfiqar Ali."
Schiff, in the Disputatio Sine Fine (DSF) section of Armed Forces & Society, defends concordance theory and puts forward four challenges to Ali’s article. Here, this reply explains again why concordance theory not only fails to generate an adequate account of military intervention in Pakistan but also unintentionally imposes a Western style of governance.
Scholarship on racial attitudes has found that white veterans of World War II and the Korean War had more positive views of blacks than white civilians. However, more recent studies have argued that white veterans who have served in an all-volunteer force (AVF) now express more virulent views of blacks. Using data from the 2010–2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we explore whether military service continues to predict positive racial attitudes. We find that white veterans express more negative views of blacks relative to white civilians and that white veterans in the AVF generation exhibit the most negative views of blacks. Taken together, we believe that our results suggest a reassessment of the role of contemporary military experiences in liberalizing white racial attitudes and offer support for the self-selection perspective.
This research note presents the findings of a survey study among veterans from the Netherlands armed forces who participated in operations since the Second World War. The aim of the study is to reveal the veterans’ experiences with respect to their combat motivation—or lack thereof—and actual participation in combat actions. The data demonstrate that over time the degree of combat motivation has increased. The data also demonstrate that those who participated in combat actions and were motivated to do so are generally positive about operational and social–psychological aspects of the organization and its surroundings. The implications of these findings are discussed.
Analysts suggest that the rise of the cyber domain of combat has led to a revolution in military affairs and have greatly changed how society interacts with the Internet. The structure and content of interactions on the battlefield have supposedly changed in light of this development. In the rush to note the changing face of conflict, few scholars have actually examined the impact of cyber conflict on foreign policy relationships. Here we use weekly events data to examine exactly what happens between countries when cyber conflict is utilized as a foreign policy choice. Using a previously constructed data set of cyber actions, we measure conflict and cooperation after a cyber operation to understand the true impact of this new way to arm a state and society. We find that only one method of cyber malice, denial of service, and one tactical goal, seeking a change in behavior in the opposing side, impacts conflict–cooperation dynamics between states.
US combat operations involving women and revelations of sexual abuse in the US military have periodically sparked intense political debates about women’s military roles. In the midst of these debates, US policy makers have repeatedly created independent advisory commissions on issues concerning women in the military. This article uses qualitative case studies of three such commissions to evaluate whether commissions can foster meaningful civil–military dialogue on contentious matters involving the military and society. This article finds that commission deliberations have sometimes led military professionals to change their views of sensitive issues, but that commissioners have been less open to deliberation if they have been affiliated with an organization possessing a distinct political agenda on women in the military. More broadly, the findings suggest that independent advisory bodies can provide valuable mechanisms for civil–military dialogue, so long as policy makers appoint to them individuals who are relatively open minded and unconstrained by political commitments.
Among the many challenges confronting the United States and its allies in Afghanistan were cohesion and communication problems in state-building programs. Merging role theory and bureaucratic politics approaches, this article argues that US Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), the composite groups charged with implementing these programs, suffered from incompatibilities between sectors of government, among which the military was dominant. US PRTs were affected by role conflict, resulting from varying and often competing organizational cultures with divergent role conceptions.
We explore American military academy, Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), and civilian undergraduate attitudes toward transgender people in general, in the workplace, and in the military. Earlier this decade, the US military experienced both the repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy and the exclusion of women from combat, yet transgender people are prohibited from serving openly in the military. The research presented in this study explores tolerance toward perceive gender nonconformity by military affiliation, race/ethnicity, sex, religious affiliation, and political leaning. Most members our sample, regardless of military affiliation, do not believe that having a transgender person in the workplace would impact their job. However, being a military academy cadet, but not an ROTC cadet, significantly predicts support for barring transgender people from military service but general attitudes toward transgender people utilizing a thermometer scale are generally explained by the background characteristics associated with being an academy cadet.
Following the publication of Anthony King’s 2006 article in Armed Forces & Society (The Word of Command: Communication and Cohesion in the Military), Guy Siebold and Anthony King debated the issue of cohesion, in our Disputatio Sine Fine section. King’s new book The Combat Soldier grew out of that exchange. The following essay continues the debate by reviewing King’s book. The pieces gathered in in this Disputatio are intended as a—temporary—conclusion to these discussions.
This article calls for military sociologists to contribute to the study of excitement motivation. Bravery has always played a dominant role in depictions of soldiers in popular culture, and the importance of concepts similar to excitement has been recognized in disciplines adjacent to sociology for decades. Given the transgressive nature of combat, we would intuitively expect soldiers to have their need for thrilling experiences satisfied during deployment, and hence their level of excitement motivation to have decreased when they return from war. However, the opposite seems to be the case. Soldiers return wanting more, and we lack a theoretical explanation why this is the case. This article starts closing this gap by offering one possible reason. And, most importantly, it calls for other researchers to offer other explanations as well. The explanation suggested here is that just like real drug addicts build up a physiological tolerance to narcotics, soldiers can become "adrenalin junkies" because their tolerance toward excitement is "pushed upward" by being exposed to danger. This explanation is tested, and finds partial support, using panel data with soldiers from two Danish companies, serving in Helmand, Afghanistan in 2011.
The growing trend toward the securitization of infectious disease has legitimated a role for national militaries in responding to public health crises. This apparent "militarization" of health has met with resistance from the health and security sectors alike, who argue that it risks politicizing health outcomes while also draining limited military resources. This article attempts to place such concerns within the broader historical context of military involvement in public health. With specific reference to pandemic influenza—a disease of great historical import and a current policy priority in the context of securitized global public health—this article details the pedigree of military involvement in fighting the disease and draws on the established record to demonstrate the role that militaries can play in improving public health outcomes. The article argues for an ongoing military role in the global fight against pandemic influenza, both in augmenting civil influenza programs and in improving their own preparation and response mechanisms for future pandemics.
This article addresses a gap in the scholarly literature. Students of militarism do not link the propensity to use force to the broader issue of what type of civilian control may restrain the use of force. Similarly, even students of civilian control who acknowledge that civilian control and military restraint do not necessarily go hand in hand have not questioned the extent to which we should decouple the two different processes as different modes of control rather than different effects of control. A revised conceptualization of civilian control is therefore offered that distinguishes between two modes of civilian control over military affairs: control of the military, which concerns itself primarily with the military organization, and control of militarization, which draws on the political discourse in which the citizenry plays an active and autonomous role aimed at subjecting the decision to use force to a deliberative process that addresses its legitimacy.
Nearly two decades after the civil war, Bosnia and Herzegovina has yet to establish democratic control over its armed forces. While there is a widespread consensus that democratic consolidation is desirable, the process has been impeded by continuing challenges to state legitimacy. With three ethnic groups challenging state legitimacy, the reform efforts have been overshadowed by each group’s fears of others’ future intentions, leading thus to the maintenance of three armies for a decade after the war and nondemocratic defense relations to this day. The levels of challenges to state legitimacy, however, have varied. Due to the changing political environment, the early 2000s were characterized by a relative absence of nationalist rhetoric, allowing thus significant reforms of the defense sector. However, with reemergence of challenges to state legitimacy in 2006, the reform efforts came to a stalemate, leaving the newly established defense institutions without the capacity necessary for their functioning.
In Zulfiqar Ali’s article regarding concordance theory in Pakistan, Dr. Ali asserts that concordance theory does not explain domestic military intervention in Pakistan. He also suggests that concordance theory superimposes a Western theoretical model on Pakistan, like Huntington’s theory of objective civilian control. In response to Dr. Ali’s claims, this article reiterates how concordance theory can in fact explain why Pakistan has suffered from domestic military intervention—the alienation of the Bengali community and subsequent lack of agreement among the three concordance partners being one significant factor. Additionally, Huntington’s theory focuses on institutional and dichotomous civil–military relations, grounded in the post–World War II US case study. By contrast, concordance theory views the relationship between military and society from both cultural and institutional perspectives and embraces those indigenous qualities that may encourage or discourage domestic military intervention.
Past studies reveal that military service "runs in the family": offspring’s service records often accord with those of their parents. To extend this research, this study uses the complete Liberian Housing and Population Census of 2008 to estimate rates of military participation among Liberians living with relatives in the military. The study finds—both in the overall data and in an exactly matched subset consisting of observations that share the same values on all control variables—that Liberians living with a relative in the military participate in the armed forces at over two times the rate of individuals who do not live with a member of the military. This finding provides new insight into military participation and civil–military relations in Liberia and, perhaps, other developing nations.
The implications for funding a military, though important, are still not fully understood. Existing work often surmises that military spending is higher in majoritarian electoral systems that are predicated on personalistic ties. However, further examination casts doubt upon these findings. Accordingly, we present a pooled time-series cross-sectional analysis of military spending and electoral institutions and we find that party-based electoral systems, rather than majoritarian ones, foment higher military spending levels—which we attribute to these systems’ predilection for public goods spending. These results are robust even when a host of control measures and four different military spending metrics are employed.
Which factors drive the onset of genocidal violence? While the previous literature identified several important influences, states’ military capabilities for conducting mass-killings and the structure of their security forces have received surprisingly little attention so far. The authors take this shortcoming as a motivation for their research. A theoretical framework is developed, which argues that more differentiated security forces, that is, forces that are composed of a higher number of independent paramilitary and military organizations, are likely to act as a restraint factor in the process leading to state-sponsored mass-killings. Quantitative analyses support the argument for a sample of state-failure years for 1971–2003, and it is also shown that considering a state’s security force structure improves our ability to forecast genocides.
In response to China’s military modernization and growing anti-access/area denial capabilities, the US military has adopted an "Air Sea Battle" (ASB) concept entailing extensive strikes on the Chinese mainland. ASB has been embraced at the Pentagon and increasingly affects procurement decisions. Critics argue that ASB creates grave escalation risks and may incite an expensive arms race. Less discussed, but also of serious concern, is that ASB was adopted with little to no civilian oversight, in a case of "structural inattention." This failure of civil–military relations derives from institutional factors such as the nature and composition of the White House staff, as well as from the administration’s pragmatic rather than strategic approach to China. It has also been facilitated by "subterranean factors" including the interests of influential military contractors and the military’s own inclination toward conventional warfare.
This article is a response to Anthony King’s "Women Warriors: Female Accession to Ground Combat." King rightly asserts that the accession of women to combat roles is a notable historical departure in warfighting. He critiques Brownson’s conceptual ideal of "equivalency" as a potentially profound force of transformation of gender relations in the military. While conceptually progressive, he errs in framing the potential transformation within the concept of "patriarchy." Further, King is unable to recast binary gendered language to acknowledge fully the concept of "kinship." For females to maximally succeed in the military, and particularly in combat roles, patriarchy as the defining explanation for male–female interaction must be discarded and the enabling concepts of equivalency and kinship must be embraced. The continued strength of military organizations and the individuals within them emerges from the reciprocity of these two concepts.
Problems associated with environment and climate change have long been in the headlines. However, research on the effects that such problems might have on civil–military relations has been limited so far. This article examines civil–military cooperation caused by environmental problems in the recent decades particularly in developing countries. It employs Pion-Berlin and Arceneaux’s theoretical framework on military missions and civilian control and then looks at the case of Botswana. This article argues that the recent decade has seen an increase in civil–military cooperation due to new security concerns over environmental problems.
One of the most prominent debates over minority participation in the military has been whether or not inclusive policies would undermine operational effectiveness. While the adoption of inclusive policy has tended to indicate that minority participation does not compromise effectiveness, the question has not yet been tested in the context of transgender military service. In this paper, we conduct the first-ever assessment of whether policies that allow transgender troops to serve openly have undermined effectiveness, and we ask this question in the context of the Canadian Forces (CF), which lifted its transgender ban in 1992 and then adopted more explicitly inclusive policy in 2010 and 2012. Although transgender military service in Canada poses a particularly hard test for the proposition that minority inclusion does not undermine organizational performance, our finding is that despite ongoing prejudice and incomplete policy formulation and implementation, allowing transgender personnel to serve openly has not harmed the CF's effectiveness.
In a recent article on female marines in the US Marine Corps, Connie Brownson has proposed the concept of equivalency rather than equality as a way of understanding their integration into the organization. Because of their almost inevitable physical inferiority to their male comrades, women cannot be regarded as fully equal in a Corps that prioritizes physical strength. However, they are respected and accepted as equivalent if they can perform their specialist military roles with competence and professionalism. This response examines the question of equivalence to assess its adequacy to contemporary gender transformations in the military.
This study is the first to systematically inquire into the lives of transgender men and women currently serving across the branches of the US military in the post-"Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" (DADT) repeal era. We employed an interview protocol from a stratified convenience sample (n = 14) of clandestinely serving active duty, guard and reserve military members from the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps who self-identified as transgender or transsexual. Using phenomenology as a methodological foundation, we present a revelatory case study based on lived experiences from firsthand accounts furthering the collective understanding of gender dysphoria in a contemporary military context.
Previous studies have unanimously agreed that despite the challenges of postmodernism, militaries should not and cannot be governed using an occupational model. However, what the notion of the value type of a postmodern army is should be clarified. This study investigates the changing values of postmodern militaries caused by external economic factors. For this research, a questionnaire and long-term investigation method were adopted to collect 262 cadet samples from the Taiwanese military, navy, and air force. The results of a cluster analysis showed that the cadets primarily comprised 3 types, that is, the devotion (DE) type, socially competent (SC) type, and the comfortable (CO) type. This study shows that the socially competent type best satisfies the value demands of the military. In addition, the enlistment motivations of this type of cadet are generally to alleviate family financial burdens, non-economic-related reasons, self-actualization, and patriotism.
In spite of its sensitivity, diplomatic protection has received very sporadic scholarly attention. This article provides a comparative analysis of US and UK diplomatic security policies, focusing on the increasing use of private military and security companies (PMSCs) for the protection of foreign service and development agencies’ personnel. The existing theoretical explanations of the privatization of security tasks cannot explain why countries displaying similar material incentives and similar political and market cultures have outsourced diplomatic protection to different degrees, nor can they account for variance in the use of PMSCs by different agencies within the same country. Our analysis highlights the importance of investigating organizations’ interests in providing a more accurate explanation of the varying propensity to outsource armed protection. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, the outsourcing of diplomatic security was a resultant of foreign policy bureaucracies and military organizations’ preferences.
This article examines the habitus of soldiers who either deserted or resigned from the Zimbabwe National Army in the post–2000 crisis in Zimbabwe and now live in exile in Johannesburg, South Africa. It is based on the information provided by forty-four former soldiers who related their life histories and participated in informal conversations and group discussions. A main finding is that these men, even though they have left the army, hold on in the extreme to their being as soldiers. This is shaped by at least four, interlinked dimensions of change in their lives: leaving the army without honorable discharge, leaving Zimbabwe itself, being exiles in an often unwelcoming South Africa, loss of family life and military status. The post-deployment dominance of military dispositions in the identity of the former soldiers is quite unique. Most former combatants worldwide have succeeded in different degrees to unmake their habituated forms of military identity or live with multiple identities.
How do we account for the dearth of female contributions to UN peace operations (UNPOs)? For answers, this study examines conditions that led the United Nations to move to reduce the gender imbalance in UNPO personnel and provides descriptive evidence that points to the continuing underrepresentation of women in these operations. To interpret this evidence, the study presents theoretical explanations for the varying contributions of personnel to UNPOs—including the political and socioeconomic character of the contributing states, international reputations and norms, and various demand-side influences exerted by missions—and then tests these explanations with a cross-sectional time-series model that accounts for female personnel contributions to each mission in the 2010–2011 period. Although offering significant support for domestic political explanations, the findings indicate that gender diversity is not a primary goal of most contributors and is largely a by-product of force sizes.
After decades of debate, a void still exists in the literature and socio-political dialog related to the unrestricted and unbiased inclusion of women in the military. The issue remains so highly charged that a fresh theoretical framework is necessary to accurately align the physical and social constraints in which military women serve. Offered here are findings of an exploratory study framed within a synthesis of evolutionary psychological and sociological theory. Distinction between the word "equivalent" as opposed to "equal" is critical in recognizing the physicality, skills, and talents both males and females bring to their Marine Corps experience. Qualitative data obtained from 67 female Marine Staff Non-commissioned Officers, Warrant Officers, and commissioned officers describe tactics to achieve levels of operational competency, respect, trust, and success in the Marine Corps. An achievable goal, the successful woman must manage her physicality, sexuality, and femininity adeptly to achieve the trust and confidence of her male as well as female colleagues.
The importance of an officer’s commitment to the armed forces has been widely recognized and investigated. Although family-related issues seem to be of the utmost importance for developing and enhancing an officer’s commitment, the evidence that is available is rather scarce. The present study seeks to add to current knowledge by incorporating responses from officers’ spouses. In particular, it examines both spouse- and service-related characteristics as antecedents of an officer’s commitment to the army setting. This is an area that has been underinvestigated to date. The sample for this study consisted of eighty-six artillery officers of the Greek Army and their spouses. Evidence revealed the lifestyle that the military demands, such as geographical mobility, periodic separations and risk of injury or death, has an impact on spouses’ satisfaction with army life and their marriage, which in turn may affect spouses’ commitment to the army. Furthermore, as might be expected, spouses’ commitment to the army and service-related characteristics of officers do predict the extent to which officers feel committed to the army.
This article analyzes public opinion of the armed forces, focusing on Sweden and the United Kingdom. The cases offer interesting similarities, such as their institutions of parliamentary monarchies and, most recently, their reliance on all-volunteer force, as well as differences especially with regard to their experience of international defence missions. The discussion considers the extent to which the public has been supportive of recent missions conducted by Swedish and UK armed forces, and whether such support is also accompanied by support for the armed forces as an institution. Levels of opinion and trust in the military are quite different in both cases, and public opinion of international missions reflects the contrasting historical engagements of both states. In both cases, we also find a divergence between what publics are willing to support and what national governments wish to pursue as missions for their armed forces.
This article is a response to Lindy Heinecken’s "Outsourcing Public Security: The Unforeseen Consequences for the Military Profession." Heinecken asks the question of whether privatization in our armed forces has gone too far. The position taken here is that it has. This article proceeds with a discussion of Heinecken’s work noting that much of the literature claiming the benefits of privatization is problematic and often fails to note obvious issues such as the externalization of costs, transaction costs, and contract oversight costs. These arguments are often conspicuously absent or ignored even when they are evident in the citations referenced and in some cases the literature supporting privatization comes dangerously close to circular referencing. Following this, a number of questions of increasingly broader perspective are posed that ask about and challenge readers to consider the consequences of the privatization assault on the public space and its consequences. While the text has endeavored to remain focused on military and security issues, a wider angle has been adopted in the endnotes.
The term ‘resilience’ has grown in its usage across a range of disciplines and practices. The US military and the British armed forces have typified this increasing use of ‘resilience’ in recent years within such initiatives as Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) and throughout British Army Doctrine. However by unpacking what being ‘resilient’ for soldiers might mean we explore the interaction between their personal ‘masculine’ characteristics, the structural environment within which they operate, and the civilian life they return to. In doing so this paper offers a critical sociological analysis combining the agency of the soldiers’ body with the structure of the military as a [total institution] to problematize issues of masculinity, stigma and resilience within the military setting. As such, we question if the fostering of ‘resilience’ in military personnel is something that may be productive during service, but counter-productive thereafter when service personnel return to civilian life as veterans.
Prior empirical research on the earnings penalty of being a tied-migrant has focused primarily on the working wives of servicemen. Over the last couple of decades the increased number of women in the armed forces makes it feasible to study the earnings of another group of tied-migrants, the husbands of servicewomen. Using data from the 2000 U.S. Census, Sample Edited Detail File (SEDF), we show that there is a consistently lower age-earnings pattern for military husbands as well as wives. These annual earnings patterns capture the essence of, but do not provide an explanation for, the observed annual earnings differences. These differences are evaluated using multivariate analysis accounting for sample selectivity. Moreover, decomposition analysis strongly suggests that demand-side factors account for a greater portion of the differences in annual earnings than has been previously acknowledged and, therefore, that retention might respond favorably to job matching assistance and/or employer hiring incentives offered military spouses.
Sampson and Laub’s age-graded theory of informal social control posits that social bonds created through marriage, military, and employment lead to a decrease of criminal behavior or desistance. Most research has focused primarily on the roles of marriage and employment in this process, ignoring the impact of military service on future offending behavior. However, recent US military involvement in the Middle East suggests that the effects of military experience on individuals should be reevaluated. Using data collected from a more recent sample of military-involved individuals, all of whom served in the All-volunteer Force, this study examines how participation in the military impacts offending and potential desistance. The results demonstrate that, overall, modern-day military involvement does not have the same protective effect on future offending as observed in World War II samples. Racial subgroup analyses, however, suggest that military involvement leads to a greater likelihood of desistance for minority service members.
This study explores how US veterans who suffer from mental health problems navigate between two primary statuses: national hero and mental patient. The analysis reveals a more nuanced understanding than previous research, which has focused on a simple negative association between positive veteran identity and stigma. Qualitative evidence collected in a work-therapy program for veterans demonstrates that the status of mental patient became salient in peer-group activities, where it engendered a sense of solidarity and mutual empathy, and in interactions outside the mental health care facility, where it involved a sense of stigma. The status of being a national hero emerged in interactions with casual visitors from whom material contributions were sought, but did not reinforce a sense of positive veteran identity because veterans were aware of its instrumental nature. When leaving the program, a strong sense of stigma emerged despite the possibility of embracing the veteran identity.
The political influence of the Turkish military has substantially declined in the last decade, triggered by the European Union’s decision during the Helsinki Summit in 1999 to grant candidacy status to Turkey. This study illuminates Turkey’s democratization process in the post-Helsinki period by empirically analyzing a relatively underinvestigated aspect of civil–military relations: public opinion and attitude toward the military and civil–military issues. Empirical analyses, based on original and comprehensive public opinion data, indicate that despite impressive reforms and improvements in the legal and institutional structures in Turkish civil–military relations in the past ten years, democratic transformation in the political culture has been lagging behind. This gap is likely to complicate democratization process in Turkey. The article also provides a discussion of broader theoretical and practical implications of empirical findings.
From a theory on occupying regimes and from traditional concepts of counterinsurgency theory, the author traces back the development of the Dutch discourse regarding present day missions. The genesis of the so-called Dutch approach is studied, and the case of Uruzgan is reviewed by scrutinizing political, security, economic, and governance aspects of the use of the military in the aforementioned province of Afghanistan. The case is studied to determine whether there really is something Dutch about this approach. We learn that the "Dutch approach" is predominantly a narrative whose main objective is the appeasement of Dutch public opinion and the legitimation of Dutch policy making. At the same time and even though more comparative case studies are necessary, it seems plausible that the Dutch approach is different. But the difference is not typical Dutch; it lies in the manner of collaborating with and co-opting indigenous elites. Studying the genesis of the "Dutch approach" is therefore an analysis of a discourse and a study in operational effectiveness at the same time.
Using a large-scale survey, we examined the relationship between number of deployments experienced by female spouses of active duty military members and these spouses’ perceived stress. Results suggest a nonlinear relationship such that spouses who had not experienced a deployment reported the lowest stress levels. Stress levels increase after initial deployments and decrease after approximately two deployments, which may indicate an element of resiliency that builds up as spouses acclimate to a deployment lifestyle. Stress levels again increase after several deployments, which may signify limitations to this resiliency over time. A secondary finding showed that higher levels of social support predicted lower levels of stress, above and beyond the number of deployments. This relationship between social support and stress helped explain the negative relationship between parental status and stress. That is, spouses with children may have lower stress levels due to the social network that accompanies parental status.
The unique relations between the Israeli-armed forces and the local hi-tech industry have been identified as a strong explanatory variable for the Israeli hi-tech boom. This article highlights the role of the military as a socialization institution in those relations. We identify how the accumulation of "military capital" during military in service contributes to soldiers as veterans and employees in the hi-tech sector. Military service brings with it professional training, social ties, and social codes that influence the composition of the hi-tech workforce and hi-tech industry’s organizational and functional culture. Examination of Israeli hi-tech workers’ profiles reveals not only a very high proportion of military capital amongst the employees but also an institutional preference for those who possess it.
Since the late 1970s Israel has been operating postheroically, with postheroic behavior gradually becoming an integral part of its strategic culture and way of war, and often coming at the expense of mission fulfillment. In the Israeli case, the strongest explanation for such behavior has been the marriage of two factors: Israel's engagement in low-intensity conflicts (LICs), which have not threatened its basic security, let alone its existence, and sophisticated technology, which has played a significant facilitating role in applying postheroic warfare. Sparing the lives of the Israel Defense Forces' (IDF's) own troops and of enemy civilians helped gaining greater domestic and legitimacy, as well as greater sustainability in LICs. On the other hand, living up to postheroic warfare's rules had a price not only in terms of fulfilling the military missions, but also in terms of sensitivity to unexpected, sometimes sudden leaps in casualties and/or collateral damage; the danger of lowering the threshold war; and asymmetry with enemies that do not cooperate with postheroic rules and rather fight heroically. The analysis of the Israeli case covers the LIC events Israel has been engaged in from the 1978 Operation Litani, in which postheroic warfare was detected for the same time, to the more recent 2012 Operation Pillar of Defense.
"Globalized" low-intensity conflicts renew debates about how leading world powers contend with evolving complexities in unconventional warfare. The "foreign entanglements" of America’s imperial present have been compared with the "savage wars of peace" from Britain’s colonial past.1 Beyond the template of Anglo-American civilization, however, military, economic, and cultural manifestations of power must be set in their systemic and structural context for more meaningful comparison. Britain’s variegated experience of unconventional warfare stemmed from its vast colonial milieu of "small wars" and "imperial policing." America’s experience reflects transformational civil–military responses to both existential and ideological threats, reinforcing the evolution of a massive "way of war" over persistent frontier warfare. Integral to reading these small war traditions is the historical method, emphasizing particularity of causation while underscoring the value of flexible, hybrid approaches against overinstitutionalized "ways in warfare."2 Operational success, delivered by blending military skills with political savvy and cultural sensitivity, not only secured populations but support and legitimacy, without which even global powers risked defeat.
Group cohesion is very basic to the human condition and derived from the most fundamental nature of humans as found in the terminology of I am, I go, and I do. Group cohesion is found in the relationships of group members and their perceived capacity for joint action to achieve their missions. For some time the construct of task cohesion has been incorrectly or ambiguously included in the conceptualization of group cohesion. However, task cohesion, if used at all in the context of military group cohesion, should be considered part of the set of performance criteria as in cohesive task performance rather than as part of the cohesion predictor space. The author requests future researchers adopt this preferred word usage.
In August 2012, Armed Forces & Society published an article by Insoo Kim, "Intra-military Divisions and Democratization in South Korea." Uk Heo and Seongyi Yun refuted Kim's argument in their Disputatio Sine Fine response, "Another View on the Relationship between Democratization and Intra-Military Division in South Korea," published in April 2013. In the article, Heo and Yun argued that there was no clear sign of schism in the South Korea military and economic development substantially produced favorable condition for democratization in South Korea. Kim, by contrast, maintains that that the effect of intra-military division on political transition should be incorporated into the explanation of democratization in South Korea because Heo and Yun do not justify their claim that there was no clear evidence of schism in the South Korean military.
This AF&S Forum on National/Social Resilience includes four connected papers, each looking at the concept and its applications in different ways that are individually and collectively useful for a military leadership and practitioner audience. Each article, its perspectives, approaches, and implications, is briefly discussed in this Introduction, and also formally referenced in the hope that readers will engage the entire Forum. Moreover, the Forum authors hope that reader’s interest will be heightened leading to further research on this important topic.
This article explains why the Guinean state remained resilient to armed conflicts following military intervention in politics. The military establishment has been heavily involved in Guinean politics for nearly three decades during which time it has exhibited varied political behavior. This protracted military involvement in Guinean political affairs presented a threat to Guinea’s stability in a region where large-scale armed conflicts are often associated with military intervention in politics. This article explores the linkages between military behavior in politics and political stability by using a model derived from ethnic and identity literature. It concludes that by adopting an ethnic group-like behavior, the Guinean military played a vital role in maintaining political stability during the period between 1984 and 2010. This is in contrast to findings in recent studies where military intervention in West African politics is strongly linked with the onset of large-scale civil conflicts.
Every year the Australian Defence Force (ADF) recruits over 4,900 ab initio sailors, soldiers, airmen and airwomen of whom approximately 31 percent separate prior to completion of an initial obligated period of service. This early separation of personnel, or first-term attrition, can represent a waste of resources and opportunity. Therefore, it follows that an understanding of those pre-enlistment characteristics which may predict first-term attrition will allow the ADF to review recruiting policies with the view to reducing early attrition. A logit regression model was used to analyze the predictors of first-term attrition of 11,372 ab initio sailors, soldiers, airmen and airwomen who enlisted over the period 1 July 2002 to 1 July 2007. The study, the first of its type examining attrition in ADF, found there is evidence that attrition can be predicted by several pre-enlistment characteristics. A low level of education, low aptitude score, and low psychologist interview rating on enlistment all predicted increased odds of first-term attrition compared with those completing 12 years of schooling prior to enlistment or having at least an average aptitude score or psychologist interview rating. There was also evidence that recruits entering combat military occupations had higher odds of first-term attrition than those entering administration or logistics occupations. It is anticipated that future research will focus on specific predictors, expand the variables for analyses and examine attrition over different intervals of time.
This project examines the sophisticated cultural toolkit deployed by contemporary US military advisors to successfully build productive relationships with foreign security forces, advance the advising mission, and survive combat. This project's data stems from a three-part multi-method, including a survey conducted in Iraq; a document analysis; and interviews. This article focuses on numerous subthemes that coalesce to vividly divulge an intriguing story about how contemporary advisors build relationships with counterparts, including avoiding an "Ugly American" approach, how cross-cultural competence benefits the mission and increases survivability, learning about counterparts, the power of informal socializing, employing humor, navigating taboo topics, cultural stretching and associated limits, diplomatically balancing strength and subtlety, and taking physical and cultural risks. This project argues that effective advisors deploy a multifaceted cultural toolkit filled with peacekeeper-diplomat, warrior, subject matter expert, innovator, leader, and other tools, which reveals broader organizational changes indicative of emergent postmodern US military culture.
Today, most military regimes have either given way to some form of democracy or been transformed into another form of authoritarianism. This article formulates a framework for the analysis of the detachment of militaries from politics and applies it to the case of Burma/Myanmar, which is an example of deeply entrenched military rule. It is argued that after the retreat from direct rule the military is still in control, although the regime has embarked on a series of reforms that have liberalized the political system. The article identifies the internal dynamics within the military regime as a prime motive. External factors played only an indirect role, as the growing dependence on China was seen as a threat among nationalistic circles. The military decided to bridge the internal impasse and end the external isolation only after it consolidated its own power, finally allowing the leadership succession to run smoothly.
Since the end of the Cold War, there has been an exponential growth in the use of private military and security companies. Few have debated the long-term consequences outsourcing of security holds for the military profession. The first section of this article outlines the evolution of military outsourcing. From here the focus shifts to how outsourcing affects the armed forces’ ability to retain the monopoly over their "own" knowledge and skills base, and how it affects their autonomy, corporateness, and service ethic. The implications that this has for the armed forces and the military profession are deliberated. The conclusion is reached that extensive growth and use of private security have affected the intellectual and moral hegemony of the armed forces as providers of public security. The long-term implications of this in terms of the social structure and the identity of the military profession are not yet fully realized.
"Small wars" have returned to the international political agenda in the early twentieth century with almost a vengeance. Leaving aside the factors of social media and satellite television today, the nature of small wars has adhered to its politicized, xenophobic, and asymmetrical characteristics. The latter were predicted by British and American military manuals produced in the early to middle twentieth century. This special issue aims to revisit the nature of small wars in the era of great power interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya in the 2000s. It will be apparent that two further characteristics need to be appended to small wars: chameleonic missions and virtual aggression.
As part of a multi-article presentation about national and social resilience to the military practitioner community, the article initially embeds the concept of resilience into a concept of change. From this grounding discussion, the profiling of national/social resilience is presented as a useful part of building an improved intelligence process of holistic change forecasting. Next, as a better way of seeing and evaluating how different nations and societies will uniquely respond to crises, uniquely recover post-crisis and thereafter change into their future, a way of using resilience change profiling to improve intelligence foresight and forecasting is detailed. Also, an argument is presented that during periods of financial stress, such an approach has efficacy, economy-of-force and other comparative advantage benefits to Western military organizations.
This article empirically connects Moskos’ Institutional–Occupational model to the large body of cross-nationally validated research on public service motivation (PSM). We find that in our sample, the PSM construct is positively correlated with institutional motivations that reflect Moskos’ insights. We also find evidence that the four dimensions of PSM (Attraction to Public Participation, Commitment to Public Values, Self-sacrifice, and Compassion) may offer a more nuanced way to assess institutional motivations. Our research suggests that those interested in military recruitment/retention/performance and public administration scholars may have much to learn from each other. We call for further research in this area.
Recent radical changes in the application of military power and service patterns have triggered demands for a change in military identity. This article aimed to examine the ability of military identity to predict perceived military performance and attitudes beyond the contributions of personality traits and Hardiness in Norwegian military academy cadets (N = 117). Military skills, general military competence, and organizational commitment were measured by self-report. Military Identity, in particular operational identity, was found to predict both perceived military competence and skills. Furthermore, Individualism negatively predicted organizational commitment. As the first investigation of the unique influence of Military Identity on perceived skills and competence in the Norwegian armed forces, this study identifies operational identity as an important predictor of military performance. Implications for training as well as leadership development programs are discussed.
This study aims to analyze the effects of democratic transition on alliance commitment, focusing on political leaders’ types and civil–military relations. This work expects to find that democratizers are more likely to be faithful to their existing alliance partner when their political leaders are old elites who are reluctant to initiate drastic domestic reforms and when their political leaders try to reduce military’s influence on domestic affairs. By tracing the process of three US allies’ participation (or nonparticipation) in the US-led multinational coalition against Iraq during the Persian Gulf War period, this study explores whether and how the domestic conditions affect alliance policies. The case studies on South Korea, Turkey, and the Philippines provide some support for the nexus approach which links domestic circumstances to foreign conditions.
While information warfare (IW) has been treated by its foremost western proponents as a strategic revolution, the reasons for such a claim are actually rather weak if one considers how non-western approaches to the informational components of warfare have put forth their positions within a multidimensional context of strategy. This article ventures an Asian perspective that can potentially offer a more nuanced contribution to the study of IW. This article will pan out by first critically analyzing the predominantly American interpretation of IW as a set of five characteristics that can be contrasted to an Asian rival. Subsequently, we will elaborate a list of features likely to characterize a generic Asian IW approach, which I will argue, is more appropriately termed information operations (IO). These Asian IO features will be teased out through a reading of Sun Tzu, Mao Zedong, and Vo Nguyen Giap. An Asian IO approach will not distinguish wartime and peacetime applications, and neither will it place a premium on liberal democratic ideology as a basis for information superiority.
This article starts with a broad discussion related to theoretical and conceptual aspects comprising the concept Social Resilience at the national level, as well as its multiple definitions, dimensions and measurements. This is followed by a unique case study – a longitudinal study conducted in Israel, during the critical period (with over 1000 terrorism-related deaths) of the Second/ Al-Aqsa Intifada (2000-2004), showing some unexpected findings related to community resilience, at the national, mass-behavioral level. These findings comprise both public behavioral indices as well as attitudinal measures. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time such measures are used to assess social resilience. A critical discussion follows, in which the author presents several theoretical and practical challenges to students of the Social Resilience paradigm.
Armed Forces and Society recently published an article, "Intra-Military Division and Democratization in South Korea" by Insoo Kim. In the article, Kim argues that economic development and civil society explanations for South Korea’s democratization are not sufficient because conflict in the military undermined the ability of Chun’s government to suppress the democracy movement, which made the transition possible. We refute Kim’s argument because economic development clearly made significant contribution to South Korea’s democratization by enhancing education attainment and facilitating industrialization and urbanization. Moreover, there is no clear evidence of schism in the military or among political elites, and the authoritarian leader Chun Doo-hwan agreed to change the presidential election system based on his political calculation.
In order to cope with the many violent conflicts all over the world and to enhance their influence, Western armed forces tend to invest in professionalizing the armed forces of developing countries. One way is to educate cadets of such countries at the military academies at home. Following in this wake, Belgium has opened up its military training programs for cadets from Francophone African countries. This article examines the experiences of young men from Benin after they have finished their studies successfully and returned to their parent armed force in this African country. The focus of our analysis is on organizational change through intergenerational diversity reflecting differences in professionalism-related experiences. The findings, suggesting that such organizational change is not self-evident, lead to a discussion about the general implications of diffusing military professionalism to developing countries, in Africa in particular.
Parliamentary oversight of the military constitutes an important element of the civilian control of the armed forces. However, the strength of parliaments in this realm varies greatly across democracies and little is known about the sources of this variation. We propose an explanation for one key aspect of this variation: why does parliament enjoy veto power over military deployments in some democracies but not in others? Our analysis of data from forty-nine democracies around the world suggests that at least three factors account for parliamentary strength or weakness in this realm: the external threat to which a country is exposed, its constitutional tradition, and the experience of severe military failure in the past.
Drawing from the concept of citizenship in the novel, Starship Troopers, we consider public opinion in a world in which "service guarantees citizenship." We do this by examining the political attitudes of US (volunteer) veterans—a group generally neglected in the public opinion literature—relative to the adult population at large. Using data from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we demonstrate that, as a group, veterans tend to be more ideologically conservative and more likely to identify as Republican than their nonveteran counterparts. This finding holds for both individual issues and self-identification.
Opposition to the Iraq War is thought to have contributed to the election of Barack Obama in 2008. The present study shows that controlling for other factors, including the percentage of the vote going to the prewar Democratic presidential candidate, states with relatively high levels of Iraq War military fatalities had a higher percentage vote for Obama. This result is consistent with a prediction derived from rational political theory and the results of several studies examining the impacts of war fatality rates in other military conflicts in previous elections. However, in the current study, we find that the effect of Iraq War fatalities on the percentage vote for Obama is conditioned by state military enlistment rates. Military fatalities have a strong effect in states with historically low military enlistment rates. But the effect disappears in states with very high levels of military enlistment.
This article examines recent cultural adaptations in the contemporary emergent postmodern American armed forces’ culture. First, the piece provides a concise working definition for culture, including a beneficial cultural toolkit concept. Second, the article discusses the concept of postmodernism and then explores applicable examples of contested, divergent, fragmented, and complementary cultural changes, currents, and new tools in US military culture. This study explains cases of cultural innovation linked to the global growth of ambiguity, movement toward greater multiculturalism, impact of the information age, growth of military civilians, increasing questioning of authority and ideas, and the emergence of a multimission military. This project illuminates the stark oppositional qualities and cultural tools of two currently prominent and highly relevant cultural orientations—the warrior and the peacekeeper–diplomat—which, along with other conflicted and necessary cultural spheres, ultimately coalesce and comprise emergent postmodern US military culture. Finally, the article argues that the postmodern military theory requires a new military culture variable.
This exploratory article points out how armies differ in the performance of their daily military activities during a peacekeeping mission and analyses the role of contrasting perceptions of the mission operational environment in explaining this variation. As a first step, this article documents systematic variations in the way French, Ghanaian, Italian, and Korean units implement the mandate of the UN mission in Lebanon in their daily military activity. Second, it shows that the four armies also interpret or "construct" the operational environment differently and in a way that is consistent with their different military behavior. Third, preliminary evidence suggests that previous experiences of each army influence the way in which the operational environment is constructed. Data were collected combining participant observation in Southern Lebanon with questionnaires and interviews. This article thus builds on sociological works on different operational styles but takes a methodological approach closer to that in security studies.
A clear breach of authoritarian rule within the Arab world in 2012 manifested in public uprisings among significant sectors of society. As a relatively autonomous institution within the authoritarian system of rule, the military played an essential role. In many cases, the militaries in the Arab world aligned themselves with resilient protestors or fractured, thereby easing the end of the authoritarian status quo. Though the end result is still undecided with unprecedented changes in the making, future relations between civilians and armies will be a critical factor. After authoritarian regimes collapsed but before democratic regimes are strongly established, new civilian leaders struggle to diminish the military’s ability to directly determine the course of events. This article also draws on theoretical reflections and experiences from earlier transitions to democracy witnessed in Latin America, Southern Europe, and Eastern Europe, in order to provide a reliable map of ways the Arab world might travel, as well as the tools for diagnosing the situation. Finally, this article reflects on what may be necessary to establish democratic civil–military relations in a moving Arab world.
Given various challenges to national security in democracies, such as terrorism and political violence, a growing need for reconceptualization of the term "resilience" emerges. The interface between national security and resilience is rooted in individuals’ perceptions and attitudes toward institutions and leadership. Therefore, in this article, we suggest that political–psychological features form the basis of citizens’ perceived definitions of national resilience. By comparing national resilience definitions composed by citizens of two democratic countries facing national threats of war and terrorism, the United States and Israel, we found that perceived threats, optimism, and public attitudes such as patriotism and trust in governmental institutions, are the most frequent components of the perceived national resilience. On the basis of these results, a reconceptualization of the term "national resilience" is presented. This can lead to validation of how resilience is measured and provide grounds for further examination of this concept in other democratic countries.
As captured by neorealist theory, military power became increasingly relative through into the twentieth century, leading to a concentration of power within and between states—and enabling the buildup of huge colonial empires hardly a century ago. Yet since 1945, due to the overproportional effectivity gained by weaker and in particular nonstate actors it has become less relative, leading to a dispersion of power—resulting in an often violent decolonization, the problems US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces have faced in Iraq and Afghanistan in dealing with comparatively small insurgencies and a growing number of failing states. Military power has a selective function: the more relative it is, the more it restricts patterns of conflict as well as the number and nature of actors relevant to international and domestic security. Today, it is because military power is becoming less relative that security policy has to adapt to increasingly asymmetric challenges.
This study examines how collective identity based around military school ties influences an individual officer’s achievement in the military. The central premise of this study is that if collective identity can form the basis for fragmented social networks in the South Korean officer corps, it can result in different opportunities for members within different networks. The results presented here demonstrate that collective identities are important explanatory factors to account for this exchange of social resources. All else being equal, the exchange of instrumental and material resources is more likely between military officers who graduated from the same civilian or military school.
This article examines the basis of military leadership preferences toward war termination, and thus the basis of the associated civil–military divide, within the context of protracted small war. The conventional wisdom posits military leadership preferences as a near-constant in favor of persistence and thus expects a dominant pattern of military obstructionism. However, such a pattern does not hold empirically across the population of small wars. This gap between expectation and evidence derives at least in part from the limits of the bureaucratic–organizational model, focused on the military’s desire for resources, autonomy, and influence, that underlies the conventional wisdom. In contrast, this article suggests an alternative model privileging the demands of institutional legitimacy. The legitimacy motive as conceptualized here is particularly salient to the small war context. It accordingly provides a foundation for better understanding variation in military leadership preferences toward war termination and thus variation in the direction and intensity of the civil–military divide.
The acceptance of risk in a certain society is tested when de facto or merely potential military death casualties are raised. Several dimensions influencing the acceptability of risk have already been analyzed, although only three are examined in this article—namely, the historicopolitical, sociodemographic, and cultural. The Slovenian public opinion survey persistently shows strong risk aversion among Slovenians and the article’s purpose is therefore to (1) establish how can the strong risk aversion be explained by the selected dimensions; and (2) identify what part of the population is most risk-aversive. To that end, over twenty years of Slovenian public poll data are analyzed using a triangulation of statistical methods, revealing a cultural pattern of safety bubble versus risk awareness. As the risk aversion model reveals, Slovenian society represents a safety bubble, with strong risk aversion and a very narrow selection of activities worth making sacrifices for. Death casualties are rarely accepted, even if incurred in support of ideals society strongly appreciates, like humanitarian causes.
This article portrays the theocratization of the Israeli military. At the center of this process stands the national-religious sector, which has significantly upgraded its presence in the ranks since the late 1970s. It is argued that four integrated and cumulative processes gradually generated this shift toward the theocratization of the Israeli military: (1) the crafting of institutional arrangements that enable the service of religious soldiers, thereby (2) creating a critical mass of religious soldiers in many combat units, consequently (3) restricting the military command’s intraorganizational autonomy vis-à-vis the religious sector, and paving the road to (4) restricting the Israel Defense Forces autonomy in deploying forces in politically disputable missions.
There are several theoretical frameworks proposed by a wide range of scholars to explicate and understand civil and military relations. Rebecca Schiff's concordance theory is one of the recent models in this theoretical tradition. She argues that the theory of separation of civil and military relations given by Huntington not only fails to give an adequate account of domestic military interventions in Pakistan but also attempts to impose the American model of civil and military relations on it. Given the problems and flaws of the separation model, she proposes the concordance theory in place of the separation model. Schiff claims that the concordance theory provides an appropriate model to explain and to avoid military intervention in Pakistan. She purports to demonstrate that a military coup takes place due to discordance among three partners on four indicators. This article will show through the case study of Pakistan that concordance theory fails on four accounts. First, Pakistan's military coup is not the consequence of discordance but concordance. Second, there are not three partners but two. Third, the notion of four indicators runs the risk of oversimplification. Fourth, concordance theory makes somewhat the same mistake committed by the separation model attempting to superimpose the American civil and military framework upon Pakistan. This article will demonstrate that concordance theory draws the civil and military relations upon two rival approaches: abstract theoretical and multicultural approach. By consequence it goes through the internal contradiction because of which it is fated to fail.
This article is a qualitative analysis of nation-state population "resiliency" to several spectacular and/or highly symbolic terrorist assaults that were watershed events. It draws heavily from qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) frameworks to isolate and identify the presence of what Goertz calls the "secondary dimensions" of a "primary concept" such as resiliency to terrorist assaults. In turn, the presence of those secondary dimensions and their strength presuppose and derive from "tertiary indicators" that are the basic metrics and concrete manifestations of those secondary dimensions. The nation-states under consideration include the London bombings of 2005, the United States for 9/11, the Madrid bombings of 2004, the first suicide bombings within pre-1967 boundaries of Israel, and the Russian Federation in the case of the 2002 terrorist assault against the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow. The results serve as the basis for the development of a "resiliency continuum" of nation-states where placement of those countries on the continuum reflect "nonresilient," "semiresilient," and "resilient" conditions, themselves defined by the number of secondary dimensions found in each case study. In the process, the analysis illuminates possible interconnections between "context specific" factors, such as a country’s historical experience with terrorism and population characteristics (e.g., education levels, degree of heterogeneity) to the resiliency or nonresiliency condition, and describes possible links between exogenous "systems factors" such as war and power ranking to the resiliency condition.
Suicides in the US military were observed rising in 2004, most notably in the Army and Marine Corps, and particularly, in the Army National Guard (ARNG). Alarmed, Army leaders and researchers have offered various explanations and prescriptions, often lacking any evidence. In the present study, three data sets were used to examine evidence for various perspectives on suicide—dispositional risk, social cognitive, stressor-strain, and social cultural/institutional, each having different emphases on relevant explanatory variables and underlying mechanisms of suicide. Primary risk factors associated with having committed suicide among the 2007–2010 ARNG suicide cases were age (young), gender (male), and race (white), supporting the dispositional risk perspective on suicide. Some evidence supported the stressor-strain perspective in that postdeployment loss of a significant other and a major life change showed statistically significant, yet weaker associations with increased suicide intentions. Implications of results are discussed for future research and preventive strategies.
Resilience has become a concept that has increasingly informed political and policy discussions around disaster planning and preparedness. In this article, we explore this "resilience creep" and examine the different ways in which this concept has been used in making sense of how to respond to contemporary threats to national security. In order to do this, we establish a typology of resilience that enables us to identify both the overlapping and the contradictory uses that this term has been put to. In addition, this typology affords the opportunity to reflect upon what is made visible and invisible in contemporary resilience speak and to highlight the dangers that may lie in continuing with an uncritical embrace of this concept.
This article focuses on the democratization of civil–military relations and the implementation of democratic control of the armed forces in the Republic of Serbia. By analyzing the basic parameters of democratic civil–military relations, we attempt to evaluate whether civil–military relations in the Republic of Serbia can be classified into a type of relations that occur in consolidated democracies. Based on an examination of legal documents and other data, this article concludes that democratic changes since October 2000 have greatly influenced the course of relations between military and political elites and that civil–military relation in Serbia meet most of the defined parameters. However, due to the difficulties in the implementation of this control in practice, civil–military relations in Serbia can only partially be classified as a type of relations that occur in consolidated democracies.
This study intends to analyze the relationship between military culture, masculine norms, attitude toward women, and workplace aggression. By using a paper-pencil survey in the Austrian Armed Forces, we show that overall 6.5 percent of all soldiers in the sample suffer from severe, long-term collective aggression (bullying). The detailed analysis suggests that systematic workplace aggression is associated with a culture with high power orientation and adherence to traditional (masculine) military norms. It occurs most often within socialization processes in training centers as well as in combat units. Conversely, culture in support units has high levels of task orientation with a comparably positive attitude toward female soldiers and less reported workplace aggression. The data reveal the gender dimension of workplace aggression in the Austrian Armed Forces: women are significantly more vulnerable to bullying. Almost every second soldier declares to have observed and every tenth soldier admits to have conducted aggressive acts against women.
This article addresses an underreported aspect of contemporary warring in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): the experiences of women soldiers and officers in the Congolese national armed forces (Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo [FARDC]). It thus addresses an empirical gap in scholarly and policy knowledge about female soldiers in national armies on the African continent, and the DRC in particular. Based on original interviews, the article explores the way female soldiers in the FARDC understand their identities as "women soldiers" and offers new insight into women soldiers’ role and responsibilities in the widespread violence committed against civilians in the DRC. Moreover, it explores how their understanding of themselves as "women soldiers" both challenges and confirms familiar notions of the army as a masculine sphere. Such insight is important for better understanding the gendered makeup of the military and for contributing to a knowledge base for Security Sector Reform in this violent (post)conflict setting.
The purpose of this article is to outline a model of cohesion useful for assessing military arbitration of revolutions. Current approaches to the study of revolution are not able to adequately integrate the military into their analysis. To remedy the lack of appropriate tools, this article outlines a model of cohesion that may be useful for conceptualizing and examining the behavior of military forces during domestic political crises. Building on the so-called standard model of cohesion, the article develops a cohesion-coordinated action model that incorporates a structural social cohesion element and a voluntarist-coordinated action element, both of which also capture the relations and interactions between the military, the regime, and the opposition. It thereby fulfils the requirements that a model must possess but where other approaches fall short. The article concludes by outlining how this model can be used in further research in order to advance the study of the military’s role in revolutions.
In this research note, the rapid decline of the veteran population in the United States from 1980 to 2010 is outlined. The decline in the veteran population has been accompanied by an increasing concentration of veterans in smaller, more rural counties, often surrounding military bases. The result is that there has been a consistent increase in the residential segregation of veterans from the nonveteran population.
Prior to the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) on September 20, 2011, many observers predicted that allowing lesbian, gay and bisexual troops to serve openly would harm the military, and a group of more than 1,000 retired general and flag officers predicted that repeal could "break the All-Volunteer Force." This study is the first scholarly effort to assess the accuracy of such predictions about the impact of DADT repeal on military readiness. We conducted our research during the half-year period starting six months after repeal and concluding at the one year mark, and we pursued ten separate research strategies including in-depth interviews, survey analysis, on-site field observations, pretest/posttest quasi experimentation, secondary source analysis, and a comprehensive review of media articles. Our goal was to maximize the likelihood of identifying evidence of damage caused by repeal, and we made vigorous efforts to collect data from repeal opponents including anti-repeal generals and admirals, activists, academic experts, service members and watchdog organizations. Our conclusion, based on all of the evidence available to us, is that DADT repeal has had no overall negative impact on military readiness or its component dimensions, including cohesion, recruitment, retention, assaults, harassment, or morale. If anything, DADT repeal appears to have enhanced the military's ability to pursue its mission.
This study examines the construction of US Army National Guard members’ dual identities as soldiers and civilians and posits processes, including behavioral practice, spatial displacement, and narrativity, which soldiers use to reconcile these potentially contradictory identities to develop an understanding of themselves as "citizen-soldiers." Ethnographic evidence gathered from in-depth interviews suggests that for National Guard members who have never experienced deployment, the two identities of civilian and soldier are mostly separated. However, after experiencing deployment and reintegration, soldier and civilian identities become more intertwined and individuals must reorganize their identity according to different conceptions; integrating on a more permanent basis two different cultural modes of being. In light of the National Guard’s increased participation in deployments post-9/11, this reorganization of identity is contributing to a shift in the meaning of "citizen-soldiery" in the current US context.
This paper investigates how a highly politicized system of military reshuffling under the authoritarian military regime contributed to the transition to democracy in South Korea in the 1980s. Through an analysis of individual data on 2,666 Korean Military Academy (KMA) graduates, this study shows that promotion policies favored a small group of KMA graduates, called the Hana faction, who were preferentially treated in military promotions and recruited into the military leadership. These biased promotion procedures undermined the cohesion within the military as the marginalized non-Hana faction graduates became increasingly resistant to the subordination of their Hana faction superiors. This disintegration of military cohesion ultimately reduced the regime’s capacity to block the transition to democracy.
Different countries have varying definitions of the word "veteran," which in turn influence the benefits that ex-Service personnel receive. However, public opinion does not necessarily reflect official definitions. This article seeks to identify whether characteristics by which UK ex-Service personnel self-identify as veterans are aligned with official policy/public opinion, and which factors are associated with self-identification as a veteran. This article utilizes data from a structured telephone interview survey of UK Armed Forces personnel. All those who had left the military by the time of interview (n = 202) were asked whether they considered themselves to be a veteran. Their responses were recorded and analyzed. Only half of the sample considered themselves to be veterans. Definitions used by UK ex-Service personnel do not align with the official UK government definition or public perceptions of "veterans," which tend to focus on older veterans and/or those who served in both World Wars.
One of the defining features of Turkish politics has been the strong influence of the military in civilian politics. However, since the early 2000s, we have seen unprecedented developments, substantially constraining the political powers of the military. How can we interpret this period from a historical perspective? What are the continuities and discontinuities in Turkish civil–military relations? Do these developments mark the end of military guardianship in the country? Employing the principal–agent framework, this study shows that the path of Turkish civil–military relations has been cyclical, where the status of the military has swung between agent and principal. Such swings have led to a significant degree of variance in the nature of the military guardianship. Thus, this study identifies two distinct stages of military tutelage during the Republican period: symbolic (1924–1960) and overt/assertive (1960–2001). It is further argued that the recent reversion of the military back to agent of the civilian principals has initiated a post-guardianship era in Turkey.
Taking as a starting point the case of Iraq, it is argued that the administration of this country by the Coalition from May 2003 onward, is an American example of a culture-bound type of occupation. Already in the early eighteenth-century international differences in occupation regimes between France, England, and the Dutch Republic are discernable. Therefore, in all likelihood, the United States also developed in the course of their history a characteristic pattern of controlling foreign territories. This American modus occupandi could very well stem from the English style of occupying, but may differ in two important respects: it usually is a "short-winded affair," and it can either come down to a rather peaceful "laissez-faire" or to a war-like type of occupation. Finally, the question is discussed in how far such a style of occupation can result in a more or less "constructive" form of foreign domination. In the author’s impression, occupational "success" or "failure" probably depends as much, if not more, on the state of the occupied system—to wit, the degree of unison between native elites—as on the strategy of the occupant.