Abstract
In this book, Peter Mansoor and Williamson Murray offer a history of organizational military culture. They argue in this edited volume that ‘of all the factors involved in military effectiveness, culture is perhaps the most important’ (p. 3). They clarify their definition of culture by locating three factors that influence it: geography, history and the environment in which the military branch operates. From this, organizational culture encompasses the military’s distinctive attributes and the behavioural and ideological expectations of its members. For instance, the air force operates in the air, so their environment requires its members to have knowledge of high-tech machinery. This meant that air forces tended to seize the latest weaponry. As Robert Farley’s chapter shows, the US Air Force saw themselves as needing institutional autonomy outside of the Army’s purview partly because the two organizations saw fighting in different ways – Air Force was brains, the Army was brawn.
The chapters seek to understand why militaries think in certain ways, and therefore how they approach warfare. The first part focuses on theory, parts two, three and four cover land armies, navies, marines and air forces. The history of Anglo-American militaries dominate the book. But it also explores the Red Army, the German Army from 1871, the Imperial Japanese Army, the Anglo-Indian Army, the Iraqi Army and the Israeli Defence Force. It edges towards a global history of military culture. This coverage is clearly aimed at its target audience, which is principally military historians and International Relations theorists interested in strategic thought and the military.
Wong and Gerras’ chapter outlines the volume’s theoretical framework. They use the Global Leadership and Organizational Behaviour Effectiveness model. This breaks down culture into nine segments: Performance Orientation; Future Orientation; Assertiveness; Institutional Collectivism; In-Group Collectivism; Power Distance; Humane Orientation; Uncertainty Avoidance; Gender Egalitarianism (pp. 20–1). The succeeding chapters to a greater or lesser extent follow this model.
There are several noticeable themes within the chapters. One that is particularly prevalent is the clash between rational decisions and cultural factors. David Kilcullen’s chapter explains that strategic culture forms at the intersection of historical, national, regional, gender identity and ethnicity. It works at a common-sensical and subconscious level, and can supersede rational-decision making. The US Army’s tradition of ‘leave no man behind’ in Somalia 1993 created a rationally flawed (but humane) decision to retrieve dead soldiers on the battlefield, even though it created more casualties through prolonging urban combat (p. 41). This presents a strong in-group collectivism in the US Army. In Reina Pennington’s chapter, we find that the Soviet Union’s army purged many of its experienced commanders to secure Stalin’s regime in 1937. This was an irrational strategic liability considering the rise of Nazi Germany with its anti-communist and expansionist foreign policy. It shows though that the Red Army had a low orientation to its own future survival. Pennington likens the Red Army as a child of Stalin’s regime – at times loved, but also often beaten and hated (p. 233).
A military branch may have factions that create divergent strategies. David Hunter-Chester’s chapter on the Imperial Japanese Army reveals a military culture that thought it could be supremely powerful in Asia-Pacific after the 1905 war against Russia. It developed two competing interpretations of this moment. There was the Imperial Way faction that favoured a divinely inspired short war against the Soviet Union so Japan’s resource poverty wouldn’t be a strategic liability, and the Control Faction, which wanted to seize Japan’s industry and pursue a total war against China (pp. 212–3). Their hostility to each other boiled over into assassinations and coups. Yet, neither thought that it might be outnumbered, outmanoeuvred and overstretched when it came to fighting a war. Their adventurism in the 1930s and 1940s came from a wild over-confidence from a war three decades before. We find that militaries aren’t necessarily cohesive units. In fact, militaries can be fractious and self-serving, sometimes more loyal to regions or social classes, or even individuals than national or imperial interests.
A chapter or so on UN peacekeepers or private military companies (PMCs) could have taken this point further. What are their organizational cultures? For UN peacekeepers, rich countries pay for deployments, while poorer ones staff their ranks. PMCs often have a home nation – Aegis Defence Services in Britain or the Wagner Group in Russia – but they recruit and operate from all over the world, and work for profit. They cross business and military cultures. Does this affect their organizational culture? This would have extended the volume’s scope into contemporary warfare and security.
Nevertheless, there is a thematic coherence by focusing on nations. Each chapter attests that militaries are total institutions, staffed by life-long professionals motivated by patriotism, comradeship, and even a desire for violence, rather than material self-interest. These attitudes breed organizational mythologies that can be difficult to reverse. The military victories by the ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia continue to imprint a warrior ethos in the modern Iraqi Army (p. 273). The British still recruit from supposed ‘martial races’ for their army, as seen in the Royal Gurkha Rifles. It is difficult to change these habits and traditions. Yet militaries are still capable of radical change. By being such closed institutions, charismatic leaders can play a role in shaping their culture. Bernard Montgomery, William Slim, Ulysses S. Grant and Hyman Rickover each instigated major cultural change to their respective commands. Rickover, the ‘Father of the Nuclear Navy’, built a subculture of nuclear US naval officers. He designed nuclear propelled submarines, interviewed every officer, demanded a strict adherence to nuclear safety and ‘cold-blooded risk-taking’ (p. 363).
This volume is complementary to Mansoor and Murray’s Grand Strategy and Military Alliances (2016), which has a transnational approach to strategy, and reaches further back in time. Culture of Military Organizations presses us to look inside the military. From the outside, they are all in uniform, but after reading this we can see that they aren’t in rigid intellectual lockstep. Even though they work with life and death, and the fate of nations rests on their actions, their generals have personal enmities and factions within their ranks. Their own government might fear them or bask in their glory; sometimes the military becomes the government. This volume makes a useful contribution to begin global historical explorations of military culture.