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
