Military Cultures in Peace and Stability Operations. Chiara Ruffa

and Verba defined political culture as “a system of empirical beliefs, expressive symbols, and values which define the situation in which political action takes place.”⁵⁶ Similarly, for Pye, political culture was “the product of both the collective history of a political system and the life histories of the individuals currently making up the system.”⁵⁷ Thus political culture was thought to affect the context in which political action takes place, and thus indirectly influence political action. As such, political culture was a combination of long-lasting beliefs transmitted through history and lessons learned, and common past experiences of being part of the group under study. Socialization and learning were two crucial components of the concept.⁵⁸ These classical works found it difficult to develop compelling causal explanations because the boundaries of groups bearing a certain culture were not clear, and these scholars’ understanding of culture was static and broad.⁵⁹ These classical studies brought culture to the forefront, and were accused either of being overly deterministic or not entirely convincing scientifically; afterward, studies on culture became rare.

      The specific concepts of “strategic” and “military” cultures became hot topics in the IR subfield of security studies in the early 1980s, in conjunction with a broader interest in ideational concepts. Most authors treated strategic and military culture as distinct, but similar, concepts. Strategic culture is “a unique combination of geographic setting, historical experiences, and political culture which shapes the formation of beliefs about the use of force,” whereas military culture is “assessed according to ideas and beliefs about how to wage war.”⁶⁰ Strategic culture is thus located at a higher level of analysis, while military culture can be studied at the unit, service, or armed forces level.

      Johnston identifies three generations of scholars dealing with cultural issues in the security studies field. The first generation includes those writing in the early 1980s such as Snyder depicting the Soviet strategic culture, and Gray and Jacobsen writing books on nuclear strategy and Soviet defense, respectively.⁶¹ For this generation of scholarship, strategic culture was a monolithic concept including almost all possible explanatory variables. Culture included patterns of behavior and therefore inevitably fell into a tautological trap. In line with the broader literature on culture, the relationship between strategic culture and behavior was conceived as deterministic and hard to change. These theoretical issues made it difficult to operationalize the concept of culture and develop observable indicators. The second generation explored the issue of the instrumentalization of strategic culture to pursue strategic choices.⁶² In contrast to the first generation, they viewed strategic culture as closely linked to history. Yet they did not attribute causal autonomy to culture.

      A third generation emerged in the 1990s, which focused on a more rigorous understanding of strategic and military culture.⁶³ Importantly, these scholars explicitly excluded behavior from their definition of military culture. They focused on recent practices and experiences rather than long-term history. According to Johnston, this third generation’s work had two major advantages. First, it avoided determinism: on the one hand, authors used a definition of culture that was completely separate from the behavior they wanted to explain, while on the other hand, they allowed for cultural variation. Second, they engaged in competitive theory testing. Consequently, third-generation studies on strategic and military cultures are theoretically and methodologically stronger than those from the first and second generations. Still, third-generation scholars use cultural explanations in a residual way, combining them with other theories, such as the domestic balance of power, as in the case of Kier.

      Aside from a few exceptions, the literature on strategic and military cultures reached a stalemate around the early 2000s.⁶⁴ A group of scholars lead by Gray advocated a more complex and broader understanding of culture with no room for causality, while another group continued in line with the third generation without providing any persuasive solution to the assumption that culture was a monolithic bloc emerging from nowhere.⁶⁵ Since the debate over military and strategic culture seems to have reached a stalemate in terms of its ability to address its over-determinism and failure to isolate cultural effects, other disciplines might provide fresh insights and perspectives.⁶⁶

      Anthropologists, historians, and military sociologists have approached military and strategic cultures in ways that security studies scholars have overlooked. Historian Isabel Hull explains this lack of dialogue with reference to the fact that military sociology mostly studies military organizations during peacetime, whereas scholarships using a military cultural approach focus on wartime.⁶⁷ Yet some classical works on military sociology focus on armies during wartime, such as Stouffer’s American Soldier, whereas many works in security studies focus on peacetime, such as Kier’s Imagining War.⁶⁸ Whatever the reason for such lack of dialogue, an important distinction is that sociologists and anthropologists have paid little attention to the state or formal politics, focusing instead on small communities.⁶⁹ Indeed, military anthropologists and sociologists do not engage much with the institution-centered approach in security studies.⁷⁰ The same can be said for authors working in the security studies field.⁷¹ Yet the subjects largely overlap, and each discipline could greatly benefit from the others. From a positivist security studies perspective, the sociological approach is useful but also insufficient: it does not problematize the interplay between culture and behavior; its extremely micro-level focus neglects the higher-level dynamics that are at the core of security studies scholars’ explanations. Still, the debate on culture in security studies could be greatly enriched by a greater focus on cultural practices at the small unit level, and on how military cultures influence the perceptions and construction of the surrounding context on the ground.⁷²

      Similarly 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,