Combat,Cohesion,and Controversy

The Combat Soldier Reviewed by: Guy L. Siebold, PhD

One tradition in the social sciences is to debunk something and then let that lead to a new grander vision for society. In his treatise, Anthony King tends to follow that tradition. He starts out by debunking the myth of the effectiveness of the citizen soldier and ends with implicit support for the professionalization of everything as a means to greater solidarity in the postmodern world. Both the debunking and support for professionalization seem overdone.

Nevertheless, in between his debunking and grander vision, Professor King provides a well-written (perhaps too lengthy, sometimes rambling) and well-documented work of immense value, describing infantry tactics from World War I up to the present time, with a clear depiction of the brutality of industrial age and urban warfare. Particularly, useful is his style of presenting a tactical problem and indicating what was done to address the problem. For example, King describes the problem with inertia and passivity by the undertrained citizen soldier, which he labels the (S. L. A.) Marshall Effect, and how the military tried to overcome the effect by using mass, appeals to masculinity, and support for heroic individual effort. King also effectively presents what appear to be counterexamples to his assertions but which he shows are not.

The book is organized logically. Early chapters depict the horrors of combat in the industrial age, the Marshall Effect problem, and King’s theoretical framework. For the latter, he notes that the battlefield is an arena in which the problems of social order and collective action are particularly highlighted and the social processes of group formation, maintenance, and disintegration are on vivid display. Paralleling Emile Durkheim’s seminal text on the religious life, ¹ King states (p. 16) that he wants to imitate Durkheim’s method by examining the most elementary military forms (the platoon, squad, and fire team) to explore group formation and maintenance in combat and general theoretical concerns about social solidarity. In the middle of his book, King details combat motivation, the older mass infantry tactics, modern infantry tactics, and the persistence of difficulties lingering from the older tactics. The solution to the problems occurring with the older tactics is presented in the chapters on battle drills, training, and professionalism. Finally, King adds on chapters describing the nominal success of the female soldier and professionalism as a societal trend. He typically provides a useful summary at the end of each chapter.

The Combat Soldier’s intended audience appears to be the professional military and social scientists who would be well rewarded by obtaining, reading, and keeping the book. It would also be highly appropriate for graduate course work in military sociology and related fields. A number of chapters contain good literature synopses, and the text is a rich source for potential research hypotheses applicable to theses and dissertations. The book would be useful supplemental reading in undergraduate courses in military sociology, small groups, and social organization. Given the extensive use of cross-national comparisons (e.g., British, United States, French, and German unit tactics), this extensive work also should appeal to a wide array of international researchers and policy analysts.

Although I generally consider King’s work as a superb substantive contribution to the field of military sociology, he approaches “going to black” near the penumbra of the dark shadows of terminological infamy. Specifically, I must continue to take strong exception to some of his word choices and the conceptualization of group cohesion. ² Military group cohesion is about the relationships among the group members including their mutual trust and perceived military competence. Stronger cohesion (which may be used as a predictor variable) typically, but not always, enhances and facilitates group resilience and performance. Successful performance in turn usually feeds back to increase group cohesion. King considers that such a conceptualization does not depict cohesion but actually describes motivation; he continues to assert that cohesion is actually the same as cohesive task performance (a criterion or outcome variable). Thus, throughout much of the book, King uses the term cohesion when he means coordinated and synchronized group action. He states (p. 36) that “cohesion refers to collective combat performance itself” and is that which is to be explained in his study. An example of another though less important word choice problem is King’s use of masculinity (a sex related term) when the more appropriate choice would be manhood (a coming of age term) in the context of motivating young male combat soldiers to perform well. In all, much of chapter 2 on cohesion should be skimmed over and ignored once the reader understands that by cohesion King means coordinated and synchronized group action and performance. Thus understood, his use of cohesion will not diminish the great value of the book. Terminology issues perhaps can be fixed if there is a second edition.

Because King focuses cohesiveness narrowly in terms of small group collective combat performance, he misses many of the broader issues with cohesion that in turn do effect collective performance. Group cohesion processes start prior to joining the military and go through basic and advanced training, and eventually deployment to missions. Fortunately, much cohesion research has already taken place on those contexts. ³ Additionally, there have been good descriptions of soldier patterns of interaction over a tour of combat duty during war. ⁴ Since King is looking at cohesive performance within elementary infantry groups, he also of necessity misses out on the effects of cohesion within and on larger formations and noninfantry units. The resulting question then becomes whether by focusing on the small infantry tactics and groups, in parallel to Durkheim’s work, he gains more than he loses by excluding the broader military and longer career time frames and limiting the discussion of future war and resource allocation.

It is interesting to consider that King more or less ignores Durkheim’s Suicide, which seems on point and has a section on military altruistic suicide. ⁵ In particular, Durkheim describes how the military spirit of the unit is influential on behavior. He distinguishes the following categories of suicide: egoistic (excess individualism), altruistic (insufficient individualism, over strong sense of duty), anomic (moral normlessness), and by implication ennui (meaninglessness). King, in focusing on ritual and micro-behavior, misses the opportunity to include more intangible, although external and objective, explanations in explaining small group solidarity. This is despite the fact that King recognizes the problems of individualism and meaninglessness (p. 6) and the power of the collective over the individual (p. 327).

King’s central thesis (pp. 337-8, 363) is that today’s small tactical infantry groups in western developed societies are much superior to the citizen soldier of the last century because of more and much better training and tactics along with a culture of professionalism that unite technical competence with moral imperatives to generate strong social solidarity and cohesive collective performance. On the surface, this thesis may appear somewhat obvious and simplistic, that more and better training produces more and better performance. Yet the assertion is more nuanced and important as presented in the context of the full set of arguments in the book. In essence, King’s analyses identify critical themes such as how tactical problems are noted and addressed with changes in organizational practices and how larger social processes beyond the military like the rise of professionalism conflue to change military practices. These changed practices then heighten solidarity and collective combat performance as well as form a basis for giving meaning and purpose to current military service. King’s gift is a wide-ranging yet deep, valuable, and fascinating read.

The Combat Soldier Reviewed by: Tyler Crabb, Univ. of Maryland, College Park

The Combat Soldier attempts to bridge several discourses to provide a comprehensive examination of the experience of infantry combat in the modern era. Much of this literature is unfamiliar to many American military sociologists; it is contained in military doctrine, historical analysis, memoirs and official histories, and even fictionalized accounts. These are generally works by and for military men, attempting to communicate the experience of combat and teach the next generation how to survive it. But the project is immanently sociological. How do groups maintain solidarity and cohesion under immense external pressure? This approach takes the platoon as the “elementary form” of military life. King repeats Durkheim’s methodological claim that the events, which occur at this basic level represent an exceptionally promising object of analysis, where the noise is stripped away and signal can be observed. Also echoing Durkheim, less explicitly, he defines cohesion as the capacity for a group to operate collectively to achieve an objective. This is a functional definition that operationalizes such a possibly diffuse and unobservable objects for scientific analysis. There are a great many observations made throughout this book, giving a concreteness and clarity to the observation of military life at the concrete level. But methodologically, there is still work to be done and a few omissions, which ought to be clarified.

The book begins with several chapters devoted to the experience of mass combat in an industrial era. The core of the approach not only evokes Durkheim but clearly fulfills C.W. Mill’s claim about the need to link historical events to the social milieu or lived experience of individuals. The battles and wars of the twentieth century are undeniably some of the most momentous historical events ever recorded, and the people who fought them are undeniably average. These engaging chapters make war meaningful, graspable to the reader by the provision of a great many vignettes and historical episodes. King demonstrates that even outwardly irrational behavior, such a bayonet charge into a machine gun emplacement, has an inner logic that makes it intelligible when grounded in the lived experience and legitimating discourses. The analysis begins with the problem of the Marshall Effect, the tendency of a majority of mass soldiers to not engage in combat—to take the individually rational but collectively irrational decision to take cover rather than obeying operational commands. Though the specific methodology of S. L. A. Marshall has long been discredited, the core finding of the unreliability of conscripts and citizen soldiers remains and is thoroughly evidenced in this book. The question is how have modern infantries struggled to overcome this problem?

King answers this question with a cross-national exploration of the dynamics of combat, roughly divisible into the periods of conscription and professional armed forces. But this is not a systematic comparative historical study; King focuses on showing the similarity of infantry experience across multiple nations and times rather than constructing an explanatory, comparative account of why different national paths produced variations on the meaning of infantry combat. And the similarities are striking—evidenced by gripping vignettes taken from Australian, British, French, German, occasionally Italian, and North American forces. The narrative is broad and compelling, taking evidence fluidly from many militaries in many times, but I do not understand how this evidence was selected. The glaring omission is Russia and the Soviet Union; we see the eastern front of both wars only through the perspective of the Germans alone. If the point of this work is to elucidate common aspects military experience of infantry under fire, it is hard to justify the exclusion of the major ground power in Europe. Durkheim used suicide as a point of observation to understand social integration and regulation by examining the point at which it broke down. Surely an army composed of a majority of unwilling conscripts that formed a core constituency of a radically antiwar revolutionary vanguard is worth exploring. King is primarily interested in modern, democratic states and perhaps having radically different forms of political organization such as Tsarist Russia or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics provokes some methodological problems. But if Russia is not to be included in these develops, surely it deserved an explanation for that omission.

The next chapters focus on the concrete strategies of overcoming “The Marshall Effect” and general improvement of infantry performance through socialization: battle drills and training. The method of these chapters changes abruptly, focusing on the experience of contemporary units, specifically British ones. This plurality of approach is a nice way to triangulate findings, and the critical argument that citizen armies have certain weaknesses, which can be overcome by professional training, is well evidenced. But I wish I knew more about the methods employed. The tone is quite intimate and specific, with quotations and exposition of the layout of training courses. It is clear the author has some firsthand experience with the subject. The layout of these chapters at time reflect the aesthetics of military training manuals, with sporadic photos of armed men performing the tasks at hand, primarily urban combat. These events are a great example of another Durkheimian theme of organic solidarity: the mutual dependence of specialized tasks to achieve a common objective. This microlevel mutual interdependence was cleverly and subtly prefaced in the earlier chapters about the dependence of specialized units. The solidarity of these soldiers takes the form of professional identity based, another major theme in this work. But modern infantry tactics require a flexibility beyond that of the highly developed division of labor Durkheim posited; any man must be able to take any position within the platoon as needed.

Following the major themes of Durkheimian solidarity and the transition from citizen to professional forces, it is natural that King develops a link between citizen armies dependent on social cohesion, professional armies based on expertise and mutual interdependence, and Durkheim’s famous types of solidarity. The role of professional or occupational groups in overcoming modern anomie is also developed in an infantry context. One connection that King provides all the pieces for, but does not seem to assemble, is with the types of justice present in mechanical and organic societies and the way training and discipline are connected. Mechanical solidarity is characterized by “criminal law”; violators are subject to corporal, public punishment. These violations deeply offend the collective conscience, and revenge is meted out on the perpetrator. Organic solidarity is characterized by “civil law”; violators must offer restitution and correct the offending behavior. In the chapters focused on training and combat discipline, King makes a similar argument about how corporal punishment was more common (though still overstated in the popular imagination) in citizen armies. Training is now focused on developing nuanced and reliable capacities; instructors correct minute errors and the penalty for failure is replication until correct. Squad members provide restitutive advice rather than punitive beatings.

This was an excellent read. I was impressed by the breadth of methods employed by King to tell his sweeping and critical story, even if there was inadequate methodological elucidation and justification to satisfy my taste. As a military sociologist, I felt the serious consideration and expertise of the enlisted soldier was a welcome insight to a population too often informed only by the perspectives of officers.

On a purely personal point: though a very nice edition, this book is expensive. If the cost of disseminating this knowledge is US$125, then perhaps the publishing industry has become a “fetter of production” to invoke another founding sociologist not covered in this study.

The Combat Soldier Reviewed by: Rachel Woodward, Newcastle University, UK

What an absorbing book this is. Presented as a sociology of combat, this is a book about the relationships between direct combat as conducted by infantry, and social processes of interaction, group formation, maintenance, and disintegration that explain its historical evolution and contemporary manifestations. With its sophisticated analysis, in which abstract sociological conceptualization and material empirical observation are brought into (often unexpected) dialogue, and its close attention to detail from a plethora of historical and contemporary textual sources and field observations, Anthony King’s The Combat Soldier provides an original and comprehensive analysis of how combat in infantry platoons actually works. Drawing from, and speaking to, evidence and experience from a range of national armed forces, this is a book with broad international and academic appeal. It is also extremely well written and well referenced. My attempts to read it for the purposes of review kept being sidetracked by interest in the details and nuance of King’s arguments, such that reading it became an exercise in thinking through a diverse range of wider debates, concepts, and puzzles. This is a book to be enjoyed.

King’s focus is on the infantry platoon and how it maintains its cohesion in combat. For good, Durkheimian sociological reasons, the platoon is taken as the most typical and significant site for the development, maintenance, and expression of cohesion, and it is the infantry platoon which provides King with a focal point from which much broader claims about the execution of organized armed violence and the nature of social solidarity can be made. As the book’s subtitle indicates, it is the development of infantry platoon cohesion across the length of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries which is considered, and this enables King to review both broad processes of military transformation from the mass conscription citizen armies of the First World War to the small professionalized all-volunteer forces of (most) contemporary advanced capitalist nation-states, and the detail of specific influential instances along the way. King traces the evolution of cohesion as a collective performance and focus of management, from attempts to use appeals to masculine, nationalistic, and patriotic sentiment to bind men together with shared obligations to fight, to contemporary practices of professional soldierly skill inculcated through training and honed and developed through experience to the point where, as countless testimonies of deployed soldiers engaged in armed operations attest, “the training kicks in.” Yet as King makes clear throughout the book, and particularly in the concluding chapter, there is a broader significance to his analysis which goes beyond a focus solely on the sociology of combat and speaks to a much broader sociology readership. This is significant, certainly in the United Kingdom, given a long-standing reticence within the mainstream discipline to engage seriously with questions pertaining to the sociology of the military. With notable exceptions (and King is one), British sociology has shied away from engagement with military questions. This book, quite implicitly, makes a very elegant case for sociologists to take military matters far more seriously for what they might learn. Furthermore, in terms of speaking to debates within military sociology itself, the book is a significant intervention. Taking a specific issue—unit cohesion—and interrogating it with reference to seminal publications which have been quite foundational in shaping military sociology’s understandings of its core phenomena, what is so original and so useful about this book is that it provides the space to extend and contextualize arguments suggested in King’s existing interventions on the topic ⁶ —and with a level of nuance and complexity rarely evident within the subdiscipline.

But it is what else that The Combat Soldier does—its reasons for being so absorbing and so provocative of tangential flights of thought—that I want to focus on here, namely the book’s potential contribution to studies of military phenomena beyond military sociology. Of any number of observations, I will limit myself to two. First, The Combat Soldier shows quite directly the benefits and positive consequences of the engagement of armed forces themselves with critical, engaged ethnographic fieldwork. Like John Hockey’s Squaddies or Anna Simons’ The Company They Keep or Kenneth T. MacLeish’s Making War at Fort Hood, the book is evidence of the benefits of getting up close and personal to the phenomenon under research. ⁷ Doing ethnographic observation and depth interviews is quite a privileged position, not only (as King says in his preface) because of the engagements with others that such tasks enable, but also (as the book shows, particularly in the chapters on Battle Drills and on Training) because of the cumulative benefits of insights which individually quite minor observations can bring. An example might be the insights King is able to bring to bear on observations about the use of specific intonations for the words of command shouted by physical training instructors at the Royal Marines’ Commando Training Centre—and the connections between the inculcation of appropriate physical responses to this in a gymnasium and their use in a specific company assault in Helmand (pp. 277-8). In its use of ethnographic observation, depth interview and detailed analysis of text—which as King notes, relied on direct endorsement by military gatekeepers—The Combat Soldier would seem to be a weighty endorsement of the benefits for academics and for military personnel of enhanced access to what is often considered and experienced as an institution closed or limited to researchers.

A second observation is about what The Combat Soldier might potentially bring to explorations of the spatialities of military activities from those working within geography’s landscape tradition. This tradition provides a range of ways of considering landscape, from the descriptive to the affective. ⁸ My reading of The Combat Soldier flagged up endless instances where the significance of military landscapes, and different approaches to these landscapes, seemed apparent. For example, the book includes discussions of the uses of techniques for the recording of terrain, ranging from the sketches used to instruct platoons in appropriate techniques for offensive action in the First World War trenches, to the contemporary uses by French and British troops of the construction and use of terrain models for Rehearsal of Concept (ROC). It is not just the insights brought by the discussion of military practices for recording and analyzing terrain that are so interesting—given, in particular, the use of very similar techniques by geographers. What is particularly illuminating is that in framing ROC exercises using terrain models around these models’ communicative utility, and in particular the moral components implicit in this for infantry platoons, King illustrates why, in an age where remote sensing, Light Detection and Ranging and laser scanning techniques provide complex, sophisticated methods for terrain analysis which have great military utility, building a model from sand, twigs, and cardboard, in advance of an infantry operation, might still be the best way of doing things. Another example is the ways that (possibly unintentionally) The Combat Soldier adds weight to ongoing arguments about military land use and the possibility for retraction of the military presence from some parts of the defense estate. Certainly in the United Kingdom, essentially a very crowded little island, there is a long tradition of civilian unease about the priorities given to military training uses in large swathes of (particularly upland) Britain. These priorities essentially originate in the different training requirements of the British Army under very different circumstances, not least the need to provide some training for the mass conscript army in trench construction and defense during the First World War, in recognition of the difficulties and horrors of that way of waging war and so eloquently described in The Combat Soldier. The question which then follows is whether the contemporary professionalized infantry, doing what it does, is gradually rendering the continued military use of otherwise high-value land (and landscape) increasingly obsolete.

This, then, is an absorbing and illuminating book, not only for the understanding it brings to the practices of infantry platoon activities but also for the insights brought to more diffuse topics within and beyond sociological analyses of the military.

Disputatio Sine Fine: Dr. Anthony King’s Response to Reviews of The Combat Soldier

The Combat Soldier originated in Armed Forces and Society; first in an article I published in the journal in 2006 and then, in an exchange with Guy Siebold in the following year. ⁹ Specifically, the central thesis of the monograph, first articulated in a footnote, occurred to me in the course of that debate; there, I suggested for the first time that there was a fundamental but ignored difference in the cohesion displayed by citizen and professional armies. Because of their generally inadequate training, citizen infantries performed poorly in combat, relying on primary group solidarity and political motivation to encourage their troops. By contrast, professional militaries have often been able to generate coordinated combat teams that are able to perform their collective drills in battle due to intense training. This difference not only seemed to me to be of great sociological and historical interest but, if proved, could constructively resolve many of the disputes about cohesion that have populated the pages of this journal. Instead of alternative theories being definitively right or wrong, they might be seen to reflect and to be relevant to different historical eras.

Unfortunately, despite his generous descriptions of the book, Guy Siebold remains at least partly unconvinced and has a number of criticisms. Most importantly, while he seems to accept the central argument of the book, he objects to my argument on conceptual grounds; he rejects my redefinition of social cohesion to mean motivation and cohesion to refer to synchronized battlefield action and even recommends skipping chapter 2 in which I proposed this redefinition. Siebold would prefer to go back to the old definition in which social cohesion should refer to social relations—not the motivations that arise therefrom.

Ironically, while overtly rejecting my reconceptualization, he ultimately adopts precisely the definition of cohesion which he would refute. For him, cohesion refers to the interpersonal bonds between soldiers created before entering the military and then developed in training and on operations. Explicitly, social cohesion does not refer to the techniques and drills they learn together in training and then apply directly in combat, but to their individual attachments to each other; specifically, by social cohesion, he means the mutual sense of obligation that develops and deepens in the course of their service. This sense of obligation is explanatorily significant in combat because it motivates soldiers to fight for each other and this is precisely why interpersonal relations or “social cohesion” are important to Siebold. Although he denies it, when he describes social cohesion, Siebold is actually talking about motivation. It is precisely because social cohesion has consistently but unwittingly been used to mean a special form of motivation arising from friendship that much of the confusion in the literature has arisen. My redefinition was intended to resolve this error. In his response, Siebold performatively demonstrates precisely why this redefinition has been necessary.

Tyler Crabb offers purely methodological criticisms of The Combat Soldier. It is interesting that Rachel Woodward takes an entirely opposite view to Crabb and regards the ethnographic approach I adopted as one of its central strengths; she believes that the interviews and fieldwork on which the research was based illuminated the military lifeworld with a precision that allowed new questions to be raised and old ones reconfigured. That was certainly my intention

Methodological criticisms are entirely appropriate when they demonstrate that the evidential bases for theoretical claims are unfounded. However, Crabb does not seem to question the substantive claims in the book. Crabb presumes that this was not a systematic study because I excluded the Russian and especially Soviet example from my sample. However, I stated clearly in the opening chapter of The Combat Soldier my reasons for excluding the Soviet or Russian Army (and, indeed, a number of other important forces such as the Chinese and Japanese armies). This book was primarily about professionalization and the differential combat performance of citizen and professional force. Since only western forces have completely professionalized and only their troops have been fighting intensely in Iraq and Afghanistan (providing compelling new evidence about combat performance), I, therefore, deliberately focused on western militaries. The exclusion of the Russian example was a deliberate methodological decision, reflecting my wider research strategy, although, in fact, I made a number of comments about the Soviet Army. Moreover, the Russian army was not completely ignored. Precisely because the Russian army has partly professionalized in the past ten years, it was discussed briefly in the conclusion along with the Brazilian and Chinese Armies to test the central thesis of the book.

Rachel Woodward takes a different perspective. She is persuaded by the central concept of the book, the evidence it presents and its method. Moreover, she has sought to open the debate out, exploring what the implications of The Combat Soldier are for military scholarship more widely. In a symposium like this, I think this is fruitful approach. As a military geographer, she highlights the role of spatial issues in The Combat Soldier, of which I was only implicitly aware. She is absolutely correct, of course, to raise the issue of space and its conception by the armed forces. The collective understanding and use of space has always been a central feature of military operations. Napoleon’s genius lay precisely in his ability to coordinate the movement of large bodies of troops in space and time, concentrating them unexpectedly at decisive points; his generalship was a spatiotemporal skill dependent upon the map.

Indeed, it might also playfully be suggested that the discipline of geography was closely connected with, perhaps even dependent upon, the rise of the modern military. For instance, the extensive mapping of European countries and their empires during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was substantially the product of military requirement. The Himalayas and the Karakorams were mapped by British military offices, known as “pundits,” in order to facilitate military operations in the event of external threats especially from Russia. Without military mapping, the discipline of geography would have been very different—if possible at all.

Today, space plays an equally critical role in military operations. In The Combat Soldier, I discussed the microgeography of urban terrain; there the arcs and angles created by corners and doorways structure combat and form an essential element of contemporary infantry drills. Yet, at the operational level, space and its mapping is no less significant. Indeed, the organizational interpretation of space influences the conduct of military operations—for good or bad. For instance, during the campaign in Helmand, the British Task Force developed a very sophisticated analysis of the tribal dynamics in the province. On the basis of this evidence, the intelligence cell within the headquarters produced a map, illustrating the tribal lay down in Helmand. Each tribe was given a distinctive color that designated its location especially in the Upper Gereshk Valley, where the dynamics were complex. The data was not false. The tribes were broadly located in geographically contiguous areas.

Yet, the map—and the understanding of tribal dynamics that lay behind it—was an example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Tribal politics are important in Afghanistan and especially in the south. However, the notion that the location and the tribal affiliation of an individual or community was always the decisive determinant of their political activities and, above all, their support for the Afghan Government or the Taliban was plainly false. Location and tribal affiliation were but one factor determining the specific ways in which certain communities operated politically; the map reductively and perhaps ethnocentrically reified and orientalized the Helmandis. In this way, the ethnic mapping of Helmand reflected and affirmed a profound misunderstanding of the politics of the province and substantially contributed to the great difficulties, which the British Task Force faced there. The military’s concept of space is an underinvestigated topic of potentially huge scholarly significance.

Woodward’s intervention also raises the question of what military sociology should study in the future. There are, of course, a number of possibilities here. However, one obvious direction is to move away from the small group focus of The Combat Soldier to larger organizational issues. Indeed, anticipating Guy Siebold’s criticism, this is precisely the route that I intend to follow. The Combat Soldier explored the cohesion of the small military unit, the platoon. I am currently beginning a research project on the division, a formation of some 20,000 troops, which is widely conceived as the decisive combat unit in modern war, able to fight and support itself independently. Focusing on the divisional headquarters, this project aims to extend the central question that animated The Combat Soldier. Instead of exploring the question of platoon cohesion, it will ask how is it possible to maintain cohesion in an organization of 20,000? Focusing on command as a decisive factor in coordinating and uniting the units of a division, the project explores the changing agency of the commander in the twentieth and twenty-first century.

However, whatever topics military scholars decide to adopt and whether they find The Combat Soldier useful or not, I take two lessons from it. The combination of thick descriptions of the military lifeworld and historical, international comparison enables new academic perspectives on the armed forces to be generated, in some cases, resolving long-standing debates that are substantial only because scholars have developed their arguments on the basis of overly narrow evidence. The archive of military history is dramatic, rich, and effectively infinite. Even, we, as social scientists, should make full use of it.