behavioral variations may have important consequences on the level of violence against civilians, the local population’s perceptions of the mission, soldiers’ propensity to coordinate with other actors, and eventually the prospects for conflict resolution.
That different armies behave differently in war is a recurring classical theme in military studies.5 More recently, sociologist Joseph Soeters has launched a new research program that systematically examines cross-national variations.6 Anecdotal evidence also suggests that different armies behave differently in the same peace operation. For instance, in the UN mission in Lebanon, operating under the same regional command and implementing the same mandate, Indian troops conducted foot patrols and organized popular yoga classes, while the Korean units used high force protection measures and conducted patrols strictly in armored vehicles. Why do some military contingents prioritize humanitarian activities, while others prioritize operational activities when deployed under very similar conditions? No previous study has systematically examined the differences in peacekeeping practices in multinational missions and what might explain them.7
The first aim of this book is to systematically document variations in soldiers’ tactical behavior in peace operations. I borrow Stephen Biddle’s concept of “force employment” to denote such variations.8 The force employment variable includes all activities carried out by soldiers in peace operations—force protection, patrols (including levels of armament, timing and types of patrols), interactions with local military forces and civilians, as well as command and control. This book also uses a concept derived from the literature on military effectiveness, which I call Unit Peace Operation Effectiveness (UPOE), to categorize and compare how different armies behave. UPOE does not analyze the impact or consequences of military behavior. Rather, by assessing how good military units are at doing certain things, it evaluates how likely it is that their behavior will have particular intended consequences on the ground. The impact and consequences of such actions, however, are very hard to discern because of several other potential confounding factors. Therefore, I limit myself here to evaluating units’ behavior using the concept of UPOE. The book’s second (and central) objective is to explain the determinants of behavioral variations. I argue that an important factor influencing soldiers’ tactical behavior is the military culture of their home army, on which I elaborate in my next section.
Military Cultures, Domestic Political Configurations, and Force Employment
Militaries are a special kind of organization, often referred to by scholars and practitioners as “total institutions.”9 Compared to other organizations or state bureaucracies, members of the military are bound together by higher levels of cohesion, hierarchy, and discipline, which are linked to their organization’s core function of exercising the state’s monopoly over the use of violence. Becoming a member of a military organization requires individuals to become socialized into a very specific set of practices, beliefs, routines, and rituals. In this book, military culture is defined as a core set of beliefs, attitudes, and values that, through processes of socialization, become deeply embedded within an army and guide the way in which it manages its internal and external lives, interprets its tactical and operational objectives, and learns and adapts.10 It operates as a filter between domestic political configurations and the way the military behaves in the field.
While conventional military operations are guided by tactical manuals that provide detailed behavioral prescriptions, there is more room for interpretation in peace and stability operations. Soldiers on such missions must decide, for example, how to behave when patrolling, how to interact with the local population, and how to protect themselves from enemy attacks. In this book, I argue that it is military culture that influences the way soldiers exercise their freedom of action and behave at the tactical level on peace and stability operations.
When a military unit deploys, its military culture goes with it. I argue that the values, attitudes, norms, and beliefs that constitute this military culture influence the unit’s perceptions as it enters the AO by shaping soldiers’ interpretations of a number of factors of importance for their behavior on the ground: the perceptions of the local context, the perceptions of abstract concepts related to the operations (such as peace), and perceptions relating to organizational variables. For instance, units from different countries in the same AO may or may not perceive the “enemies” as easily identifiable and may understand the nature of their mission as a counterinsurgency or a peacekeeping mission. These perceptions, in turn, guide the choices made by active units in the field, within the boundaries of the freedom of maneuver left to the unit after the mission mandate, actual material conditions, and threat levels have been considered. In sum, I document that these perceptions are strongly consistent with the way soldiers behave and their respective military cultures.
When soldiers are abroad, they are usually deployed as units. Notwithstanding the level of heterogeneity across army unit cultures, this book focuses on military culture in countries’ armies. This is because, a priori, the set of beliefs, attitudes, and values of an army’s military culture seems to have the greatest influence on soldiers’ behavior, through their socialization into the specificities of the service, frequent rotations, and basic and advanced training. I studied several units from different armies and detected common patterns across units of the same army. Empirically, specific unit cultures only account for some residual variation.
Ultimately, I am interested in understanding what influences force employment and UPOE—that is, why military units behave the way they do and how this might influence their ability to keep peace. But doing so requires finding out where military culture comes from, a topic long neglected by the literature on military culture.11 And I show empirically that military cultures do not emerge from nowhere. For the first time in the literatures on security studies and comparative politics, I use historical-institutionalist theories to trace the emergence of a specific military culture.12 I show how military cultures are nested in the domestic political configurations of the armies’ respective countries.13
This means that a military culture, with well-defined traits, is shaped by a specific domestic configuration, usually following a critical juncture (such as a war or the specific reaction to it)—“a moment at which decisions are highly contingent but, once taken, will shape politics.”14 This configuration is shaped by two sets of domestic conditions of importance for setting the constraints to specific military cultures: policies about the armed forces and the military’s relations with civilian decision-making processes and society. I hypothesize that military culture may acquire new salient traits or renegotiate old ones, providing them with new meanings to respond to the new domestic configuration—which emerged from a new set of domestic conditions. For instance, some specific beliefs—such as the importance of assertiveness or an aversion to combat operations—may change their meaning as a consequence of a critical juncture, while others may become less salient.
Two domestic conditions have particular influence on military culture. The first is societal beliefs about the use of force, that is, whether the public tends to be supportive of the armed forces. The second is domestic models of civil-military relations, specifically civilian decision makers’ preferences regarding the degree of military input into decisions related to security and defense, including public expressions of opinions and views by the military. These two conditions create an environment within which military organizations must navigate; military culture tends to follow (and be shaped by) them.
While military culture is inherently conservative and inertial, it slowly adapts to the changed domestic context by reinterpreting and renegotiating its motives and approaches. In some extreme cases, such as a regime change, a military culture may have to change almost completely, as was the case of the Wehrmacht after the reconstitution of West Germany’s armed forces in 1957 as a completely new organization, the Bundeswehr. When new structural changes occur, for instance professionalization or new kinds of operations, military culture will attempt to develop within the constraints imposed by the two primary domestic conditions discussed above. Yet domestic conditions alone
