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
