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