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.
CHAPTER 2