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CHAPTER 1

Force Employment, Unit Peace Operation Effectiveness, and Military Cultures

Col. Brian Christmas served as US Marine Corps Force Commander under NATO command during the battle of Marja in Southern Afghanistan, one of the most famous battles fought by Western troops against the Taliban. When I asked him to tell me more about his experience there during an interview in the fall of 2013, he started by discussing the vast differences in approaches between his own soldiers and the British soldiers they fought alongside: “Our cultures are so different, and it matters so much.”¹ Similarly, when I visited the Italian Force Commander of the Regional Command Capital in the fall of 2009, he told me that one could clearly distinguish between Latin and Anglo-Saxon cultures based on the way soldiers behaved.² Field commanders are often well aware of the differences between (and the importance of) the operational styles and military cultures of different armies. These characteristics inform the way commanders plan coordination across contingents; the tactical and operational planning for launching a battle, which might involve two bordering AOs (as was the case for Col. Christmas); or simply the expectations about the security situation in a specific AO. More importantly for this book is that military contingents are deployed along national lines with, in general, limited contacts with military contingents in different AOs and an even more limited sharing of information. This makes comparing operational styles an important area of research in order to understand and explain various military units’ behavior. While there is recurring anecdotal evidence that national contingents behave differently in peace and stability operations than in other types of deployments, the issue of variation in behavior across contingents has received little attention from scholars writing about peace operations, and has been dealt with only implicitly in the security studies literature.³ This chapter presents the main theoretical building blocks of the book in two steps. The first step is to extrapolate concepts from the existing literature, develop a theory of force employment in peace and stability operations, and use differences in force employment to categorize different kinds of UPOE. The second step is to present the core theory of the book, which focuses on explaining variations in force employment, with reference to military culture as a main factor influencing how soldiers implement their mandate. The theory outlined in this chapter is then tested empirically in Chapters 2–4.

Conceptualizing Military Behavior in Peace and Stability Operations

The Issue with Success in Peace and Stability Operations

The peace and conflict literature has developed sophisticated ways of studying the impact of conflict dynamics on conflict outcomes. With an overall greater emphasis on quantitative approaches, peace and conflict scholars have mapped, analyzed, and tested the dominant components that affect different kinds of conflict-related dependent variables, ranging from conflict termination to conflict outcomes.⁴ Explanations of the success and failure of peace operations have been labeled as “structural.”⁵ In line with the broader peace and conflict tradition, such structural explanations have focused on variables that affect the durability of peace or the level of violence against civilians, such as the nature of hostilities, local and international capacities, and the characteristics of the troops deployed.⁶ Recent works have used the number of battle-related deaths to measure the effectiveness of UN peace operations.⁷ Through quantitative approaches sometime combined with case studies, scholars have isolated the positive effect of specific factors on a well-specified outcome.⁸ While all these structural explanations seem to confirm that “external interventions tend to increase the chances of establishing a durable peace,”⁹ these works have failed to explore the conditions, or causal mechanisms, that lead specific characteristics of a phenomenon (or a particular behavior of specific set actors) to result in peace operation success. In addition, they have only assessed success and failure at the aggregate level.

A smaller set of explanations, called “agent driven,” has partly addressed this problem by looking at specific actors involved in those operations, such as belligerents, UN agencies, and NGOs—usually describing their main traits. Unfortunately, however, such studies do not prioritize the measurement of the actual impact.¹⁰ Only Séverine Autesserre, in her recent book Peaceland, has analyzed the impact of the everyday politics of intervention on peacebuilding effectiveness. In what she identifies as an “empirical shift,” she advocates for a much deeper analysis of the on-the-ground dynamics of external interventions.¹¹ Such analysis is crucial for understanding how certain agencies’ practices affect the effectiveness of various operations, and the mechanisms that ultimately lead to what (at the aggregate level) peacekeeping scholars call success.

The Big Absence: Military Organizations

Neither structural nor agent-driven explanations have studied foreign military organizations in depth.¹² The peace operations literature has surprisingly never debated the conditions under which military organizations operate, whether behavior varies across national militaries, or whether specific patterns of military behavior affect peacekeeping success. Yet military organizations’ role in peace operations is eminent, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitatively, military contingents constitute the bulk of most deployed peacekeeping missions. Qualitatively, in most peace operations, military units are assigned to specific AOs and are in charge of implementing the mandate in those areas—centralizing core responsibilities such as maintaining control of the territory, as well as quintessentially political decisions such as deciding where to distribute humanitarian aid, or how to interact with local institutions.

Despite their crucial role in peacekeeping, the peace operations literature has overwhelmingly neglected to consider military organizations’ role, behavior, or effectiveness. Some peacekeeping scholars have identified relevant material factors that influence success, which are to some extent tied to the military, such as equipment, vehicles, weapons, munitions, and financial support for humanitarian projects. Yet even these studies fail to study foreign military organizations as actors with some measure of agency.¹³ Fortna’s influential work, which partially recognizes the important role of military organizations in peace operations, analyzes the size of the host government’s army, but does not consider the size of foreign peacekeeping forces.¹⁴ And in general, most authors largely omit military organizations—national or international—as an object of study. For instance, Doyle and Sambanis offer a sophisticated explanation of peacebuilding success that is based primarily on the nature of the conflict (ethnic/ secular/ religious), the level of economic development and resources available to the host country, and whether the country has a UN peacekeeping operation or financial assistance package.¹⁵

Even an important recent work by Hultman et al.—which finds that deploying troops, rather than military observers or police, has a positive effect on the protection of civilians—does not take military organizations and their complexity into account.¹⁶ Their research relies on the assumption that the mission type and mandate determine force employment, and does not consider soldiers’ interpretation of the mandate or their behavior as variable factors potentially affecting the implementation of the mandate. Thus a review of the peace operations literature leads to the conclusion that the characteristics of military organizations (as an important actor with agency), as well as their behavior and effectiveness, have been neglected.

Following Autesserre’s call for an empirical shift, I argue that we can make peace operations more successful—in their ability to save lives, protect civilians, and avoid mass atrocities—by better understanding the on-the-ground dynamics.¹⁷ In particular, I will study the role of military organizations in peace and stability operations and their effectiveness. When I first went to the field working for the UN’s reconstruction mission in the Central African Republic in 2006, I was struck by all those soldiers in uniforms from different countries patrolling together with their blue helmets. Sarah, my supervisor within the Human Rights Section, immediately recommended that I address only what she referred to as the “right military guys” for pushing our agenda in denouncing human rights violations, as they had “a pretty incredibly different idea about what they are here for and why.”¹⁸ Assuming that military organizations will execute the mandate’s orders without interpreting them just because they are hierarchical and fundamentally differ from civilian organizations is simplistic, to say the least. Military organizations’ role and contribution in peace operations must be explored empirically, and understanding how the operating conditions affect military organizations’ behavior needs to be theorized.

Force Employment and UPOE

The important question when studying militaries’ contributions to peace and stability operations is whether their behavior when applying the mandate affects their effectiveness. In this section, as a first step, I review the existing literature on military behavior and introduce “force employment” as the study’s dependent variable. In a second step, I introduce a new concept called UPOE to assess the effectiveness of different units deployed in multinational operations.

Force Employment

The most obvious starting point for understanding whether the same mandate is interpreted and implemented differently is to look at cross-national variation. While we have anecdotal evidence that different military contingents behave differently, the fact that soldiers from different national militaries behave differently in war has received relatively little attention even in the fields that have military organizations as the most obvious object of study—security studies and military sociology.¹⁹ Studies on military behavior, cohesion, and effectiveness in both fields still focus predominantly on “one case, one country,” with the exception of a strand of research initiated by sociologist Joseph Soeters.²⁰ Soeters’s work has studied variations in operational styles during peace and stability operations. Saideman and Auerswald’s work also provides a partial exception: it focuses on variations in the national caveats (exceptions of mandates) of the various troop contributors to the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Saideman and Auerswald have not, however, explored behavioral variations at the tactical level.²¹ The question of how systematically behavioral variations occur among different national militaries (and how to theorize them) has never been the subject of a thorough analysis. In order to study such variations, it is important to find a way to conceptualize, categorize, and measure soldiers’ behavior on the ground.

I turned to the security studies literature to find out how soldiers’ behavior in conventional operations has been conceptualized and to explore whether any of those concepts could be borrowed to study military behavior in peace and stability operations. The classical literature studying military power has traditionally emphasized material factors, assuming that the amount of resources available will directly impact tactical behavior. Similarly to the peace operations literature, these works also overwhelmingly focus on explaining battle outcomes, rather than examining how military organizations work. They identify numerical military preponderance—which is linked to countries with larger populations, more industrialized economies, and greater military expenditure—as the main factor influencing behavior and thus indirectly leading to victory in battle.²² Technology is also often emphasized as influencing military capability.²³ However, these two classical determinants of military power—numerical preponderance and technology—do not satisfactorily explain how soldiers behave or why they succeed or fail in battle. They cannot, for example, explain why small, poorly equipped armies have defeated larger and more technologically advanced armies.²⁴ Other variables, such as motivation, cohesion, and leadership, seem to be influencing the outcome. For instance, despite constant increases in resources and troops during the surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, authors have pointed to alternative factors as responsible for improvements in the security situation, such as the Al-Anbar awakening in Iraq, a factor completely independent of US military strategy.²⁵

Only a handful of classical military and security studies works have implicitly argued that the way force is used at the tactical level is an important determinant of effectiveness.²⁶ McMurry, for example, explains the differences in military effectiveness during the American Civil War between the two largest Confederate armies as a factor of how different military actors—leaders, officers, general officers, and enlisted men—behaved during their operations.²⁷ Nonetheless, there has been no systematic study of how soldiers do their work when deployed in military operations until quite recently.

The first author to attempt to theorize this type of tactical-level behavior was Stephen Biddle, in his book Military Power, which has become one of the most influential pieces of scholarship in political science.²⁸ Biddle introduced the concept of force employment, which he defines as “the doctrine and tactics by which armies use their material in the field,” and uses a variety of methods to study a set of conventional military operations to demonstrate empirically that how material resources are used influences battle outcomes.²⁹

Biddle’s work on force employment, while originally intended for the study of conventional warfare, should logically have an even clearer application to low-intensity operations, such as peace and stability and counterinsurgency operations, in which soldiers have a much greater margin of maneuver.

I borrow Biddle’s concept of force employment—that is, the specific ways armies employ their material resources on the tactical level³⁰—and expand it to capture the broader range of military activities undertaken in peace operations, which may include patrolling, humanitarian work, and responding to enemy fire. Studying peace and stability operations also requires considering a range of nontraditional military activities performed by soldiers in addition to (or instead of) their normal military activities. Thus, in the context of peace and stability operations, force employment refers to the ways in which peacekeepers use their weapons, vehicles, and organizational and social structures to accomplish the various goals of the mission, which may be as diverse as providing humanitarian relief, disarming combatants, controlling territory, and conducting targeted combat operations. I operationalize force employment along five dimensions that cover all activities carried out by soldiers in multinational peace operations—patrols (frequency, timing, and level of armaments), interaction with local military forces, interaction with civilians (including through engagement in humanitarian and development work and civil military coordination [CIMIC] activities), extent of force protection, and command and control. While the military and security studies literature has considered behavioral differences between national militaries in war, there has never been a thorough study of how systematically and persistently these variations occur.³¹ Furthermore, neither the peace operations nor the security studies literature has studied behavioral variations within multinational missions.³²

Ultimately, this research considers force employment as the dependent variable, and seeks to understand what influences how force is employed. However, it is also relevant to consider how force employment influences the effectiveness of each deployed military contingent, and ultimately impacts on the success of the mission as a whole. This book enriches agent-driven explanations of peace operations by specifically focusing on military organizations. I mainly study the force employment of military contingents deployed, but I also make a step forward by evaluating their effectiveness. Studying force employment immediately raises the question, “How does it affect the outcome of the mission?”

Although studies of peace operations and military organizations have both addressed these issues, they fundamentally differ in the way they understand the notion of the success of operations and military effectiveness. In particular, there seems to be a misunderstanding about what effectiveness means in each of these two fields. In security studies, military effectiveness traditionally refers to assessing behavior without looking at the actual impact on, namely, victory and defeat; in the peace and conflict literature, effectiveness refers to the impact on the ground. As a consequence, works in security studies have emphasized the concept of military effectiveness that is assumed to have an effect on victory and defeat. Interestingly, however, studies on how such effectiveness actually affects outcomes have been lacking. The interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan have highlighted the need for observable measures of operational progress. Prior to this, military effectiveness was (and to a great extent still is), in fact, conflated on the behavioral side, “simply” providing ways of measuring behavior.³³ By contrast, the literature on peace and conflict and international relations (IR) in general tends to understand effectiveness as actual impact on the ground.³⁴

Weighing the impact of military organizations against other explanations of the success and failure of peace and stability operations is beyond the scope of this book. My book instead draws on the literature on military effectiveness to provide a partial, nonsatisfactory answer to the question of why force employment matters in peace and stability operations.

As a logical step forward, one can wonder what might be the impact of force employment on the general success of peace missions. This book does not offer a definite answer to that question, but explores and proposes a way to comprehend the role of military organizations in relation to the general success of peace and stability operations. Because of the fundamentally different ways in which the security studies and peace and conflict literatures have understood and conceptualized success, we need a bridging concept that can evaluate peacekeeping practices, while at the same time serve as a stepping stone toward understanding what kind of impact force employment might have on the level of violence. To do so, I introduce the UPOE concept, and tease out criteria to be able to assess and categorize the characteristics of different armies’ force employment.

UPOE

As Biddle recalls, “Military effectiveness matters chiefly because it shapes military outcomes.”³⁵ Given this book’s focus on military organizations, I start by surveying the plethora of scholars who have dealt with military effectiveness in order to determine which dimensions might be relevant for UPOE. Four strands of literature have attempted to disentangle the concept of military effectiveness: political science, military sociology, military operations research, and military history. Political scientists tend to engage in macro-level analysis and consider the possible factors affecting military effectiveness at the state level. Stephen Rosen, for example, has looked at the impact of society on military effectiveness.³⁶ Similarly, Dan Reiter and Allan Stam focused on the effects of regime type on military effectiveness, while Biddle and Zirkle looked at differences in civil-military relations in society.³⁷ As such, this strand of literature conceptualizes military effectiveness as “the capacity to create military power from a state’s basic resources in wealth, technology, population size and human capital.”³⁸ But only focusing on strategic, political, and societal factors misses what happens in practice at the tactical level.

Military sociologists, historians, and military operations researchers have, by contrast, emphasized the importance of getting the tactics right for military effectiveness. For these military scholars, it is not only about the projection of military power but also the tactical execution. While my argument draws on the political science literature, it nonetheless borrows this tactical focus from the military sociological literature.

Sociologists have systematically explored the ideational characteristics of effective armies. For example, for Janowitz and Shils, high levels of unit cohesion, such as “interpersonal bonds among soldiers,” are typical of effective armies.³⁹ In contrast, Bartov considers that high levels of indoctrination to the Nazi ideology explain the “barbarisation” of warfare conducted against the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa between 1941 and 1945. The Eastern Front ended with a Russian victory, but the indoctrination of German soldiers largely explains German military effectiveness at the beginning of the war.⁴⁰ Similarly, Castillo posits that individual initiative, discipline, courage, and nationalism explain a nation’s determination—and, hence, effectiveness—in war.⁴¹ More recently, King has identified professionalization as a crucial factor to understand cohesion.⁴² The “individual and small-unit behavior” focus of sociological explanations is useful for my study of tactical behavior.⁴³ Such explanations tend, however, to adopt an overly narrow focus on one or two factors and to conflate cohesion, military performance, and effectiveness, three concepts usually considered distinct by positivist security studies scholars.⁴⁴

Military operations research, in contrast, provides a more comprehensive and systematic understanding of military effectiveness, focusing on the tactical level of war, although its emphasis on hard assets neglects important organizational and ideational dimensions.⁴⁵ Military historians provide a partial solution to this issue. While often criticized for being overly contextual, Millet and Williamson support their conceptualization with a comprehensive theoretical model that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of different armies. They combine a formal model to evaluate strategic, operational, and tactical military effectiveness with relevance attributed to the context.⁴⁶

Political scientists Brooks and Stanley built on Millet and Williamson’s work in their Creating Military Power and identified four important sets of indicators of military effectiveness at the tactical level: “level of integration of military activity within and across different levels; level of responsiveness to internal constraints and to the external environment; level of skills (such ‘as motivation and basic competencies of personnel’); and quality of assets deployed (meaning ‘calibre of state’s weapons and equipment’).”⁴⁷

These indicators offer a valuable starting point for analyzing soldiers’ force employment at the tactical level. However, the context of peace and stability operations differs significantly from traditional military operations, and thus may require some adaptation in three main areas. First, there are limited opportunities to use force in peace operations: since peacekeepers are not a party to the conflict, they are not supposed to fight belligerent parties, but instead to operate within the limits imposed by the mandate. Mandates often entail activities, such as reconstruction work or humanitarian aid, that go beyond strictly military, combat-oriented skills. Second, the objective of peace and stability operations is not military victory through the defeat of an enemy, but rather “establishing conditions in which the outcome may be decided,” to put it in General Sir Rupert Smith’s words.⁴⁸ Third, in contrast to traditional military operations, it is not possible to establish a single “type” of effectiveness for peace and stability operations: there is no single set of characteristics one can use as a metric to determine that one army will be more effective than another in such a mission. Rather, the effectiveness of units in peace and stability operations can be analyzed along varying dimensions, which results in different typologies of effectiveness because the objectives vary between peace operations more than they do for conventional military operations. Peace operations vary not only in their context and the type of conflict, but also in the type of mandate, the core objectives, and the conditions under which armies are deployed. In conventional operations, the core objective is to achieve victory. By contrast, in a traditional peacekeeping operation such as UNIFIL II, humanitarian and development projects are more important than controlling territory, because making sure that the population is not supporting Hezbollah is more urgent than securing a territory that is already stabilized. Yet security conditions are so precarious for ISAF that traditional military skills are in greater demand to ensure control of the territory. Nonetheless, control of territory in Afghanistan can also be pursued through humanitarian instruments, such as humanitarian aid delivery. Thus, indicators of effectiveness in peace operations vary in importance in different contexts, and the standards of peace operation effectiveness must be adapted to and negotiated for each mission.

I propose a new concept, UPOE, which measures and categorizes the effectiveness of each single unit deployed in its AO. UPOE does not measure the outcome of a mission as a success or failure. Instead, it categorizes and evaluates a single component (force employment—i.e., soldiers’ behavior), which together with other factors will lead to an outcome of success or failure. UPOE is situational and multidimensional, and it lies on a continuum that includes various degrees of attainment and typologies of effectiveness.⁴⁹ Consequently, there can be various degrees of attainment of different subgoals within the same mission. UPOE has the advantage of producing an evaluation of force employment that allows for comparison. UPOE assesses how well each unit under study scores for each indicator identified. It is located at the unit level because, generally speaking, contingents of different sizes are deployed as units in their respective AO. In the remainder of this section, I derive different indicators from the classical literature on military effectiveness and adapt them to develop the concept of UPOE.

The four indicators used by Brooks and Stanley and Millet and Williamson (integration, responsiveness, skills, and quality) must be adapted to the new context described above.⁵⁰ In addition to traditional combat abilities, the indicators should include reconstruction, logistical, and humanitarian skills. Soldiers in peace operations may be required, for example, to assist in reconstructing civilian infrastructure, undertaking humanitarian rescue operations, or providing humanitarian support such as the delivery of food, medication, water, and clothing, or launching social or agricultural projects. These activities require a much wider set of military and nonmilitary skills, ranging from empathy to the ability to identify core military and nonmilitary objectives.

Responsiveness, defined as the ability to react to the enemy’s tactics in a conventional context, should be expanded to include the ability to interact with the local population and adapt to their needs and requests. Similarly, integration includes not only integration between the strategic, tactical, and operational aspects of combat activities, but also activities related to humanitarian aid and reconstruction. In addition to adapting the four indicators of military effectiveness to the peace operations context, an additional indicator is necessary—interoperability. Interoperability—having the necessary tools and skills to operate and communicate with other military organizations—is necessary for armies working in multinational contexts, where a single, multinational operational headquarters coordinates the activities of each AO, as is frequently the case for modern peace operations. Thus, the indicators for UPOE are responsiveness, integration, military and nonmilitary skills, quality, and interoperability; and each ranges from low to high.

In practice, each deployed contingent will score differently on the UPOE indicators, either because they perform different activities than other organizations or do some things better than others. A perfectly effective unit serving in a peace operation should be highly responsive; well integrated; have high military, humanitarian, and logistic skills; have high-quality weapons and munitions; and be interoperable with units from other countries to conduct both joint combat operations and joint humanitarian projects. This construct should, however, be understood as an ideal type in the Weberian sense, meaning that it does not necessarily correspond to an empirical reality. According to Weber, “an ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct.”⁵¹ In practice, I expect few military units to score highly on all of these indicators, since, for example, strong combat skills are not normally associated with strong humanitarian skills (or at least, armies have to prioritize between the two in practice). The same trade-off exists within kinds of quality and interoperability: the allocation of resources for materiel, such as bulletproof vests, will be different in quality according to how humanitarian and combat roles are prioritized. Similarly, interoperability in humanitarian actions is different from interoperability in combat. Responsiveness and integration can vary from low to high, and they are required at a high level for both combat operations and peace operations. Yet the ability to adapt and implement orders is different in a peace operation versus a kinetic mission. For example, responsiveness might mean understanding what the population needs in terms of humanitarian assistance in a peace operation, while in combat it might be related to the need to adapt to the rapidly changing enemy’s tactics.

Such an ideal type makes it possible to compare the effectiveness of various armies with the ideal type and develop different typologies of effectiveness. The empirical observations of the French and Italian units in my two case studies (UNIFIL II and ISAF) give rise to two different typologies. While in Lebanon it might have been more important for the military unit to be humanitarian effective, in Afghanistan combat effectiveness might have been more important. A unit is humanitarian effective when it is responsive but not well integrated (i.e., considerable leverage is attributed to individual initiatives of patrolling and CIMIC teams at the tactical level), has high humanitarian and logistic skills, dedicates its resources to humanitarian projects, and coordinates well with other armies for joint humanitarian projects. In contrast, a unit that is combat effective will score low in responsiveness—because it would be less adaptable—but high in integration. It has strong (mainly military) skills, good-quality military equipment and munitions, and coordinates well with other armies for joint combat operations. It would still need to present traits that are specific to low-intensity operations, such as contacts and interaction with the locals, but its strengths are more applicable to conventional military effectiveness.

In the two case studies, the French units tended to be more combat effective, and were thus more effective along dimensions such as integration and military skills, whereas the Italian units were more effective in responsiveness and humanitarian skills. Within each typology, each unit had strengths and weaknesses. Thus, the Italian and French units were differently effective, meaning they had different capabilities and strengths in different areas, and in fact different profiles.

UPOE is also inherently mission specific and situation specific. First, it is contingent on the mission’s characteristics: the standards of effectiveness change according to the type of conflict. For example, peace operations aim to use specific instruments to solve particular types of problems—primarily protecting civilians or making sure humanitarian aid is provided, or that the security situation is stabilized. But UPOE is also AO-specific. In Afghanistan, the standards of UPOE required in Regional Command South were different from those required in Regional Command North. Thus, different evaluative standards of UPOE are required. Table 1 summarizes UPOE indicators as well as two potential empirical types of UPOE and the UPOE ideal type.

Table 1. Two Empirically Derived Typologies of Peace Operation Effectiveness

UPOE is a way to evaluate and categorize force employment in order to compare units’ force employment with each other. It seeks to bridge the gap between (1) how well the military does things on the ground and (2) their impact in the field. Biddle stresses that in conventional operations, “other things being equal, ‘effective’ militaries ought to win more often than ineffective ones.”⁵² Writing about counterinsurgency, Nagl similarly points out that “the army contributes to a large degree to determine whether victory in the campaign is attained and the army contributes materially to the determination of which tasks it can and it cannot do and how and why.”⁵³ This allows us to link what the soldiers do (and how well they are doing it), on the one hand, with the actual impact in the field, on the other hand. UPOE should be consistent with outcome indicators. In the empirical chapters, I try to connect the assessment of UPOE for each unit studied with the available data on the impact of the army studied in their respective AOs.

Explaining Variations in Force Employment: A Culturalist Explanation

In the second half of this chapter, I develop a theory of how military culture influences the observed variations in force employment. I begin by reflecting on how my understanding of military culture relates to previous works on culture. I then discuss the novelty of my contribution and the theory that explains how military culture emerges from domestic political configurations—and how it influences soldiers’ behavior.

The Glorious Past of the Literature on Culture

Though this book focuses specifically on military culture, it builds on a long-lasting tradition of broader studies about culture. Contested and influential at the same time, culture is a notoriously difficult concept to define and study. As early as 1944, Kluckhohn provided eleven different definitions of culture in the Mirror for Man.⁵⁴ Political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists have all written about culture. My conceptualization is drawn predominantly from the field of political science, and security studies in particular, but borrows some components from military sociology and anthropology to fit its specific focus on military organizations at the tactical level of operations.

In political science, culture has traditionally been considered an important but fundamentally residual explanation. The debate about political culture flourished in the 1950s, drawing inspiration from the field of anthropology, and then declined in prominence in the 1970s and resurged in the 1990s.⁵⁵ Almond and Verba defined political culture as “a system of empirical beliefs, expressive symbols, and values which define the situation in which political action takes place.”⁵⁶ Similarly, for Pye, political culture was “the product of both the collective history of a political system and the life histories of the individuals currently making up the system.”⁵⁷ Thus political culture was thought to affect the context in which political action takes place, and thus indirectly influence political action. As such, political culture was a combination of long-lasting beliefs transmitted through history and lessons learned, and common past experiences of being part of the group under study. Socialization and learning were two crucial components of the concept.⁵⁸ These classical works found it difficult to develop compelling causal explanations because the boundaries of groups bearing a certain culture were not clear, and these scholars’ understanding of culture was static and broad.⁵⁹ These classical studies brought culture to the forefront, and were accused either of being overly deterministic or not entirely convincing scientifically; afterward, studies on culture became rare.

The specific concepts of “strategic” and “military” cultures became hot topics in the IR subfield of security studies in the early 1980s, in conjunction with a broader interest in ideational concepts. Most authors treated strategic and military culture as distinct, but similar, concepts. Strategic culture is “a unique combination of geographic setting, historical experiences, and political culture which shapes the formation of beliefs about the use of force,” whereas military culture is “assessed according to ideas and beliefs about how to wage war.”⁶⁰ Strategic culture is thus located at a higher level of analysis, while military culture can be studied at the unit, service, or armed forces level.

Johnston identifies three generations of scholars dealing with cultural issues in the security studies field. The first generation includes those writing in the early 1980s such as Snyder depicting the Soviet strategic culture, and Gray and Jacobsen writing books on nuclear strategy and Soviet defense, respectively.⁶¹ For this generation of scholarship, strategic culture was a monolithic concept including almost all possible explanatory variables. Culture included patterns of behavior and therefore inevitably fell into a tautological trap. In line with the broader literature on culture, the relationship between strategic culture and behavior was conceived as deterministic and hard to change. These theoretical issues made it difficult to operationalize the concept of culture and develop observable indicators. The second generation explored the issue of the instrumentalization of strategic culture to pursue strategic choices.⁶² In contrast to the first generation, they viewed strategic culture as closely linked to history. Yet they did not attribute causal autonomy to culture.

A third generation emerged in the 1990s, which focused on a more rigorous understanding of strategic and military culture.⁶³ Importantly, these scholars explicitly excluded behavior from their definition of military culture. They focused on recent practices and experiences rather than long-term history. According to Johnston, this third generation’s work had two major advantages. First, it avoided determinism: on the one hand, authors used a definition of culture that was completely separate from the behavior they wanted to explain, while on the other hand, they allowed for cultural variation. Second, they engaged in competitive theory testing. Consequently, third-generation studies on strategic and military cultures are theoretically and methodologically stronger than those from the first and second generations. Still, third-generation scholars use cultural explanations in a residual way, combining them with other theories, such as the domestic balance of power, as in the case of Kier.

Aside from a few exceptions, the literature on strategic and military cultures reached a stalemate around the early 2000s.⁶⁴ A group of scholars lead by Gray advocated a more complex and broader understanding of culture with no room for causality, while another group continued in line with the third generation without providing any persuasive solution to the assumption that culture was a monolithic bloc emerging from nowhere.⁶⁵ Since the debate over military and strategic culture seems to have reached a stalemate in terms of its ability to address its over-determinism and failure to isolate cultural effects, other disciplines might provide fresh insights and perspectives.⁶⁶

Anthropologists, historians, and military sociologists have approached military and strategic cultures in ways that security studies scholars have overlooked. Historian Isabel Hull explains this lack of dialogue with reference to the fact that military sociology mostly studies military organizations during peacetime, whereas scholarships using a military cultural approach focus on wartime.⁶⁷ Yet some classical works on military sociology focus on armies during wartime, such as Stouffer’s American Soldier, whereas many works in security studies focus on peacetime, such as Kier’s Imagining War.⁶⁸ Whatever the reason for such lack of dialogue, an important distinction is that sociologists and anthropologists have paid little attention to the state or formal politics, focusing instead on small communities.⁶⁹ Indeed, military anthropologists and sociologists do not engage much with the institution-centered approach in security studies.⁷⁰ The same can be said for authors working in the security studies field.⁷¹ Yet the subjects largely overlap, and each discipline could greatly benefit from the others. From a positivist security studies perspective, the sociological approach is useful but also insufficient: it does not problematize the interplay between culture and behavior; its extremely micro-level focus neglects the higher-level dynamics that are at the core of security studies scholars’ explanations. Still, the debate on culture in security studies could be greatly enriched by a greater focus on cultural practices at the small unit level, and on how military cultures influence the perceptions and construction of the surrounding context on the ground.⁷²

Similarly to anthropology, military sociology has conceptualized culture in a nuanced and sophisticated fashion, which has proven a useful inspiration for the conceptualization of culture in this book.⁷³ Military sociology has traditionally used three different perspectives for the study of military culture, which emphasize different aspects: integration, differentiation, and fragmentation. The integration perspective emphasizes how “culture is seen as a pattern of thoughts and priorities gluing all members of the group together in a consistent and clear manner.”⁷⁴ By contrast, the differentiation perspective highlights the existence of subcultures within the group or organization, such as service and gender, and ranks subcultures. The fragmentation perspective seeks to integrate the previous two views, combining “the general frames of reference within the group or organization” and its “multiplicity of views.”⁷⁵ Military culture is probably more heterogeneous than security studies scholars have argued; it exists in a turbulent environment and must change and adapt to new circumstances. In fact, the “differentiation perspective seems more attractive: a certain kind of heterogeneity precludes ‘organizational myopia.’ ”⁷⁶ Armed forces today are involved in different types of operations, ranging from traditional cease-fire observation to counterinsurgency; therefore, a higher degree of heterogeneity enhances adaptation and internal dialogue. Sociologists and anthropologists are also able to show the several faces of the military, pointing at the same time at the common features that shape military culture (cohesion, communal character of life in uniform, hierarchy, discipline) as well as the characteristics that frame differences within the group. As such, they are able to show how army cultural traits resonate at the unit level, and vice versa. From this perspective, military culture provides ideational means to an organization, as well as attitudes and orientations; it provides a tool kit of symbols, stories, rituals, and worldviews that people may use in varying configurations to solve different problems. Culture is ideational, and includes a set of notions about how the world works that become naturalized, obvious, and unquestionable. At the same time, these assumptions provide ways of organizing action.

Military Culture 2.0

Writing within the security studies field, but drawing inspiration from studies in sociology and anthropology, I argue that military culture is an important factor that drives variations in force employment. I define military culture as a core set of beliefs, attitudes, norms, and values that become deeply embedded in a military unit and the national army to which it belongs.

Military culture is typically studied at a single level, for instance, as elaborated by high-level officials, or at the branch, division, or unit level.⁷⁷ Johnston is the only scholar who implicitly recognized the existence of a multilevel interaction.⁷⁸ As national military contingents tend to deploy a particular military unit to each AO, those units are the only available focal points to study practices of force employment in operations. Though it is un-contested that different subcultures exist within military organizations (for instance, at the unit level), this book demonstrates that a relatively consistent military culture, identifiable by important cultural traits, exists across different units of the same army serving in different international missions. When deployed units make tactical decisions about how to execute the mandate for their mission, they are acting in line with a unit-specific interpretation of broader general beliefs, values, and attitudes shared at the level of the national army.

Military culture is closely related to the national origins of a military unit, and operates as a filter between domestic political configurations and the way the military behaves in the field. This filter is independent of the local conditions in which the soldiers are deployed; it excludes certain actions from the realm of possibility and shapes the courses of action that are adopted. Military culture helps translate fixed threat assessments into tactical choices. Military cultures may lead units to bring certain tactics to the field and maintain them over time, even when practice proves them to be less efficient or ineffective in the context. My conception of military culture is in line with the third generation of military culture scholars who see culture and behaviors as distinct and causally related factors. Such understanding of military culture contributes to the debate about the ideational turn in IR, and in particular the culturalist one, in two ways.⁷⁹

This book’s first contribution to the literature on military culture is to trace the causal mechanism through which military culture influences behavior. Even though the constructivist approach has become more empirical in recent years, few scholars have explored the mechanisms through which culture affects military behavior. I conceive the mechanism as follows: when a military unit deploys, the values, beliefs, norms, and attitudes that constitute its military culture shape the way it perceives the context it operates in, which in turn guides the choices made by units in the field, within the freedom of maneuver that exists after mandates, material conditions, and objective threat levels are accounted for. For instance, different national units deployed in the same context interpret their enemy, the nature of their mission, standards of appropriate behavior, and threat levels very differently. These perceptions are strongly consistent with how soldiers behave and with their respective army military cultures. Training, SOPs, and doctrines are unable to account for all these variations. The causal mechanism proposed here helps move beyond the Gray-Johnston debate and take a step toward theorizing cultural influence on military behavior.⁸⁰

The book’s second contribution to the culturalist turn in IR is that it counters the tendency to treat military culture as a monolithic variable.⁸¹ By doing so, it goes beyond the existing literature by trying to pinpoint where military culture comes from, and by describing how it emerged within its respective domestic context.⁸² Military culture is constituted by inertial and deeply ingrained beliefs that can, however, evolve over time as the meaning and understanding of these fundamental cultural tenets adapt to new specific domestic contexts. This raises questions such as “What constitutes military culture in the first place” and “How do different components of military culture interact and become synthesized into a specific configuration of military culture?” Understanding how culture adapts to modified domestic conditions is a first step toward avoiding the over-determinism found in some studies about military and strategic cultures.⁸³ It also helps understand how military organizations learn how to navigate within domestic conditions and how they might become entrapped in their military cultures.

The Sources of Military Culture

Military cultures do not emerge from nowhere. For a long time, the military culture literature has failed to progress the question of where military culture comes from.⁸⁴

I combine historical-institutionalist theories, which are not typically referenced in security studies and comparative politics literatures, to provide an initial answer to this question.⁸⁵ While historical-institutionalist arguments run the risk of becoming difficult to falsify and over-deterministic, my scope is to use institutionalist insights to understand how military culture emerged in its current version and what sustained its persistence. I contend that military cultures are derived from the domestic political configurations of their respective countries. In this book, I show how military culture, with well-defined traits, emerges in line with two specific sets of domestic conditions, usually following a critical juncture—primarily policies about the armed forces and their relationship with civilian decision-making and society.⁸⁶ I hypothesize that military cultures acquire new salient traits or provide new meanings to old ones in response to new domestic conditions. Some specific beliefs, such as the importance of professionalism, may become more important, while others may fall out of fashion. I selected two sets of domestic political conditions that are the most relevant in the domestic context that gives rise to military culture: societal beliefs about the use of force, and traditions of civil-military relations. These two conditions include both material (such as institutions and procedures) and ideational factors (such as norms and beliefs).

Widely shared beliefs about the conditions under which the use of force is acceptable (and for what purposes) influence how civilian decision makers structure, shape, and react to foreign and defense policies. The literature on casualty aversion has overwhelmingly focused on particular narratives about specific missions and the conditions that affect the levels of support for those missions.⁸⁷ Many scholars have argued that the prospects of success affect tolerance to casualties: “casualties are the central force behind opposition to war, and defeat phobia makes people less tolerant of casualties.”⁸⁸ For others, casualty aversion—that is, a government unwillingness to take risks—is closely correlated with levels of public sensitivity to military and civilian casualties. Public levels of casualty sensitivity cannot simply be categorized as high or low; contextual factors about how (and from where) the sensitivity has developed are also important.⁸⁹ In this book, I focus on a rather broad range of societal beliefs about the use of force. Societal beliefs about the use of force are constituted by three indicators: (1) the propensity to intervene in an out-of-area operation, (2) the kind of intervention considered to be appropriate (i.e., combat or peacekeeping, unilateral or multilateral), and (3) to what extent the public is adverse to casualties in war and other types of international interventions. These beliefs need to be understood in the broader context of their relations with civilian decision makers and the armed forces. Beliefs about interventions are nested into broader narratives and conditions concerning the legitimacy of the armed forces in contemporary society; the historical acceptability of military organizations in society, and in relation to the founding myths of the country; and the level of proximity between civilians and soldiers (for instance, through the existence of conscription).

The second condition is the domestic model of civil-military relations that applies. In democratic regimes, the military is subordinate to civilian control and two broad typologies determine the level of military input: (1) the civilian supremacy model, in which civilians do not want the military to intervene in any way in military decisions and grant very little voice to high-ranking officers, or (2) the professional supremacy model, in which civilian decision makers acknowledge and value military officers’ inputs to decisions related to security and defense and tolerate opinions publicly expressed by the military.⁹⁰ I expect that military culture, which is inherently inertial because it is grounded in deeply ingrained beliefs, will adapt to the new historical context emerging from the critical juncture and reproduce itself by reinterpreting and renegotiating some of its traits to better fit into the new environment. In some extreme cases, such as a regime change, military culture may have to change almost completely, such as the Wehrmacht in 1957.

Societal beliefs about the use of force and the specific character of civil-military relations are the constraints within which military culture emerges and become inertial and deeply ingrained. When structural changes occur, for instance professionalization or new kinds of operations, the culture will attempt to develop while retaining its allegiance to the primary domestic conditions in which the culture emerged. In this book, however, I demonstrate that these two domestic conditions are not sufficient to explain how soldiers behave. Organizations respect constraints, but also develop and work around them.

Military culture crystallizes a well-specified set of attitudes, beliefs, and values that restricts the set of conceivable courses of action once soldiers are deployed in peace and stability operations. Figure 1 illustrates how the military culture influences (and is influenced by) domestic conditions to affect mission success.

Because of its inertia and over-determinism, military culture is often treated as a catch-all variable. This section discusses how, as a concept, military culture is a construct into which the members of the organization are socialized.

Figure 1. Influence of military culture on mission success.

Socialization into Military Culture

Military culture is a type of organizational culture, meaning it is shared by a group of individuals belonging to an organization. It is a collective concept that is distinct from national culture and strategic culture. While it may share some traits with national culture, it is much narrower and specific to a military organization. Likewise, it is different from strategic culture, which refers to ideas and beliefs collectively held by civilian policy makers instead of members of a military organization.

It is important to understand how members of a military organization are socialized into military culture, as such a culture can provide a tool kit for action only if the members are socialized into it. Yet are all soldiers equally socialized into the culture? First, the characteristics of military organizations make socialization very likely to occur. Like other “total” institutions, military organizations function on the basis of shared beliefs, a strong sense of hierarchy, and a closed-career principle at their core. New members are recruited and indoctrinated into the core mission of the unit: this assures cultural continuity. Promotions within the military have no real external competition and are based on limited external veto, meaning that members of the organization usually decide progression of junior members. In this sense, military culture is more homogeneously distributed among members than, for instance, political culture among members of the political elite.

Two aspects could weaken socialization into military culture. On the one hand, as Moskos reminds us, armies are becoming more open to society.⁹¹ This could lead to a different degree of socialization or “embeddedness” into military culture. On the other hand, the professionalization of the armed forces is leading to increasing specialization within each service, such as logistics, or “special forcification,” which promotes the development of subcultures. Military culture is most pronounced at the operational and tactical levels because symbols, traditions, beliefs, attitudes, and values related to the organization are a powerful tool to keep the troops cohesive and help them manage difficult operational situations on the ground. At the operational and tactical levels, the focus of this book, soldiers are much more likely to be socialized as the theory expects, especially given the heightened situation of being deployed together on a mission.

Competing Explanations

Since other factors besides culture and domestic conditions could explain the observed variations in soldiers’ behavior in peace and stability operations, this book takes into account as many potential intervening factors and competing theories as possible.⁹² As theories explaining behavior are scarce in the literature on peace and stability operations, I draw on broader IR theories for competing explanations, primarily from the rationalist paradigm—theories of realism, bureaucratic politics, SOPs, and military leadership theory. I test versions of these theories at the organizational level, which is the most relevant to the question under study. I also test a theory of military leadership, focusing on differences at the individual (rather than unit) level. Factors derived from realist theory are already controlled for through the case selection. I have selected cases with similar characteristics in terms of material resources, mandate, ROE, type of threat level, doctrines, and training.

The difference between military culture and doctrine deserves some further clarifications. Military doctrine is “an authoritative expression of a military’s fundamental approach to fighting wars and influencing events in operations other than war.”⁹³ However, “analyses of military action and decision making derived solely from doctrines will miss much of the actual motivation and most of the tension, dysfunction and irrationality that frequently occur in military organizations.”⁹⁴ At the same time, doctrines should not be neglected: they are one of the determinants of the variations in force employment and—indirectly—military effectiveness. Therefore, this research not only focuses on patterns in practices, but also on a “group’s language, myths, explanations of events, Standard Operating Procedures, doctrines.”⁹⁵ Today, most Western armies (and many non-Western armies) dedicate a specific section in their doctrines to peacekeeping. The French and Italian armies do, and in Chapters 3 and 4 I show further how their military doctrines are extremely similar. Military doctrines are shaped by culture, the domestic balance of power, and the internationalization of military procedures, particularly in Western countries.⁹⁶ A change in military doctrine can reflect military cultural change, while continuity in doctrine may indicate cultural continuity. Alternatively, an innovative doctrine may not mirror a cultural change in the military, but instead reflect an adaptation to international norms. According to Kier, military doctrines are only rarely designed in response to the international security environment and its development; this influence depends on how the military organization perceives the constraints set by civilians and how they cope with them.⁹⁷ In this way, changes in doctrine can occur notwithstanding the continuity in military culture.⁹⁸ In this book, I study how military cultures differ from one another, and observe that they are largely independent from military doctrines.

Army training is another important dimension that differs from military culture. The secondary literature shows that training is partly shaped by culture, yet is distinct from it. Sion, for instance, shows that even well-trained members of the military are not trained for the role they have to perform, as training templates still very much depend on military culture.⁹⁹ The way training is conducted is shaped partly by culture and partly by other factors, such as the availability of resources and the internationalization of Western armies. The French and Italian units received some specific training together before deploying, and they often trained together with other NATO countries. By tracing the basic characteristics of the training that each unit received, I show how similar this training was, which I control for by observing how the training differs from the practice.

For bureaucratic politics theory, I select a version of organizational interests theory related to military organizations, which argues that military organizations develop preferred ways of behaving in order to control and coordinate the contributions of large numbers of sub-units. I test two particular variants of this theory: that military organizations pursue their agenda either by increasing (a) their prestige and legitimacy or (b) their relative power, for instance by seeking an upgrade in military equipment or an increase in resources. According to this competing explanation, different armies behave differently because they pursue different interests in order to increase their prestige, legitimacy, or power. With respect to SOP theory, I test to see whether the units have different procedures and standardized ways of operating that could explain the behavioral variations. According to this alternative explanation, different armies behave differently because they have different procedures and standardized ways of doing things. Finally, military leadership theory holds that military leaders can “stretch constraints and this process requires determination and skill as well as opportunity.”¹⁰⁰ According to this explanation, different armies behave differently because they have leaders with different approaches who order different kinds of behavior.

The next chapter focuses on the French and Italian military cultures and how they emerged.