Broadening the Perspective on Military Cohesion

The Origins of Military Cohesion

Etymologically, the concept of cohesion has dual origins. The first comes from the 16th-century French cohérence, introduced to English as coherence by William Shakespeare ca. 1590 to indicate a figurative “association other than material” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2018a). The second and more literal origin comes from cohesion—“the action or condition of cohering; cleaving or sticking together”—first used in English by philosopher Thomas Hobbes in 1678 in a discussion on gravity (Oxford English Dictionary, 2018b). Like many other military concepts devised during the 19th century, the origins of military cohesion too thus lie in physics.

While cohesion is a seemingly universal phenomenon—witness that four of the seven factors which Tzu (2012, p. 6) claimed could predict victory are connected to it—an investigation of some of the most important military literature of the 19th century proves that as a concept, it is of relatively recent provenance. For instance, although Carl von Clausewitz used the term Kohäsion once in his classic Vom Kriege, posthumously published in 1832–1834, he preferred the terms Zusammenhang (hanging together) and Zusammenfügung (putting together). Implicit in his choice of words is a more mechanistic order, where soldiers assumed the role of cogs or automata within a larger military machine: Clausewitz (2004, p. 40) envisaged soldiers kept together by the will of their commander who “stands above the masses and continues to be their master” moving “like a well-oiled machine.” That cohesion was a new term is not only demonstrated by the way Clausewitz had not fully adopted it to his vocabulary but also by the way the term was not yet used in the military sense it would later acquire: Clausewitz used the term to describe an enemy state rather than its military force.

The second part of 19th century saw cohesion increasingly make its way into the military sphere. James John Graham, who later translated On War to English, similarly employed the term cohesion just once in his Military Ends and Moral Means, published in 1864. His use of cohesion referred to a force without which “the whole mass [of society] would crumble into dust” or the way individuals were professionally self-interested, yet united “in one general development…all fancying they are only following their personal impulses” (Graham, 1864, p. 52). For Graham, cohesion was not mechanistic and furthermore concerned societies instead of states or their armies. Yet when his translation of On War was published in 1873, cohesion appeared 9 times, varyingly used to describe armies, ideas, and states (Clausewitz, 2004). To take a final example that illustrates how cohesion had within a century become a common military term, one can take Ardant Du Picq’s Battle Studies. First published posthumously in 1880, its English translation from 1921 has often been used in discussions of morale, and hence military cohesion. This should not be surprising, since the work mentions cohesion no less than 17 times in its main text. Discussing both technological changes that had required the dispersion of soldiers and societal changes that prohibited draconian punishments, Du Picq continued to perceive commanders as the crucial factor in combat (1921/2013, p. 60): “Victory belongs to the commander who has known how to keep them [troops] in good order, to hold them, and to direct them.” While he ultimately saw that commanders on lower levels had acquired unprecedented independence on battlefields, unlike Clausewitz, he also recognized contemporary battles as “battles of men.” While wary of loosening commanders’ control over their soldiers, Du Picq (2013, pp. 60–61) ultimately argued that combat required what he called “moral cohesion, a unity more binding than at any other time.” While Du Picq thus had by no means forfeited the view that emphasized the importance of organizations and iron discipline, he is often better remembered for forming the concept of military cohesion in the manner most people associate it with today: Cohesion denotes bonds—and especially bonds of solidarity and comradeship—between soldiers and furthermore has a direct influence on performance in war (Du Picq, 2013). Through Du Picq, cohesion thus turned from its more mechanical origins to the later affinitive roots better captured by the term coherence.

While Du Picq’s treatise was, and continues to be, used as an example of the importance of cohesion, it was the pioneering article of Shils and Janowitz (1948) which cemented the concept’s prominence. Writing in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Shils and Janowitz investigated the question of why the Wehrmacht kept fighting, even after it was obvious that Germany had lost the war. For Shils and Janowitz, the answer was simple: The Germans enjoyed more cohesion among their armed forces than their adversaries. While prevailing views saw the explanation in the German soldiers’ strong belief in the totalitarian National Socialistic ideology, Shils and Janowitz rather traced the lack of disintegration to the social organization of the Wehrmacht. According to them, his primary group satisfied the individual soldier’s immediate needs. As long as the primary group continued to provide for these needs, the soldier was willing to risk his life to maintain the group. This relationship characterized by need and provision contributed to upholding the overall social organization. Yet the relationship went far beyond material needs alone, as the primary group was also a source of identification, intimacy, and security: The primary group was “the only truly existent community…[which] forces us into its circle, for life is at stake” (Shils & Janowitz, 1948, p. 283).

Joined by the massive research project on The American Soldier led by Stouffer (1949) and the study of Marshall (1947), Shils, and Janowitz’s seminal article thus began the trend that focused on military cohesion on microlevel. In a sense, this development paralleled the changing of tactics used in the two World Wars. Whereas it is still common to associate the First World War with mass ideology and mass frontal assaults, by the end of 1917, armies began to break down into small groups in order to end the stalemate of the atrocious trench warfare. According to Collins (2013), these groups were more influenced by their self-perception as elite formations than by nationalist feelings. The studies of American and German soldiers exemplify how the understanding of combat motivations followed these tactical developments: The First World War focus on macro-level moral reasons propped by ideology changed to microlevel small-group dynamics (Wessely, 2006).

That the microlevel dynamics prevail is clear in the more recent debate on cohesion, partly published in this journal (King, 2006; Siebold, 2007). This debate has dominated discourse on cohesion for the past decade and no doubt added to the understanding of the importance of military cohesion. Yet it has nevertheless suffered from several limitations regarding the concept. While both King and Siebold built on the work of Shils and Janowitz, they emphasized different parts of the articles’ argument and even had a very different understanding of what cohesion amounted to. Whereas King (2006, 2015b) understood cohesion as essentially tactical-level combat performance and saw professionalization and training to lead to it, Siebold (2007) saw cohesion as interpersonal solidarity and trust within primary groups. King too recognized the importance of what he calls “a core group,” but unlike Siebold saw that training and professionalism meant that the relationships in this group could be impersonal (King, 2015a). To some extent, the authors’ different understanding of cohesion meant that they ended up talking past the other.

While by no means questioning the importance of microlevel explanations of cohesion or criticizing the merits of the works mentioned, both King and Siebold focused on microlevel cohesion in the Western armed forces during the 20th and 21st centuries. As King admitted, the two theories were deeply rooted in particular historical eras, with Siebold focusing on the mass conscript armies of the 20th century and King on the later professional ones (Siebold, Crabb, Woodward, & King, 2016). Because of this spatially and temporally narrow scope, the usefulness of these theories in the vast majority of armed groups around the world remains uncertain. After all, the modern Western context brings with it many assumptions, especially those regarding macro-level factors, which may not apply elsewhere. Even further, even in the Western armed forces, developments are historically closely connected with changes in society and technology (McNeill, 1983). As a result, it becomes problematic to investigate any of these in isolation from the other two. While this has been acknowledged even in the previous literature (Ruffa, 2015), opening up the perspective becomes a precondition for understanding cohesion in non-Western contexts where Western assumptions cannot be taken for granted. While acknowledging that these cases even pose new methodological problems (Käihkö, 2016), the remaining part of this article focuses on broadening this theoretical perspective from the microlevel upward to include both meso- and macro-level factors.

Opening Up the Perspective

As the recent investigation of military cohesion has focused on the microlevel, it is pertinent to begin the investigation from it. As already noted, with the post–Second World War literature emphasizing that soldiers first and foremost fight for the comrades next to them (Marshall, 1947; Shils & Janowitz, 1948; Stouffer, 1949), cohesion became mostly associated with interpersonal solidarity within microlevel primary groups.

Primary group, or a group “characterized by intimate face-to-face association and co-operation,” is the formulation of Charles Cooley, who presented the concept in 1909. Writing during a time of rapid social change, Cooley witnessed the breakdown of social cohesion. Against this background, he saw primary groups as the ultimate fusing of individuals into a whole or a “we,” similar to current understandings of military cohesion. Because family offered the least mutable and the first sense of social unity, he used it as his main example of a primary group. Cooley recognized that the influence of the society and the state was limited compared to the power that families and other primary groups had on the formation of what he argued was a “universal human nature.” He therefore argued that primary groups were the most important factor in understanding societies and should be seen as primordial units from which “everything social is the outgrowth” (Cooley, 1910, p. 31). More specifically, he also recognized that as inherently “human,” democracy (if not socialism) and Christianity were founded on primary group ideals (Cooley, 1910, pp. 51–52).

While humans have lived in primary groups for most of our existence, there are several problems with the straightforward adoption of Cooley’s conceptualization of primary groups to military settings. To begin with, Cooley’s inherent linking of democracy and primary groups becomes curious in this setting, when one considers that armed groups tend to be among the least democratic ones that exist in contemporary Western societies. Second, it is hardly universal what constitutes a family and how family members are expected to function. This should be apparent from the rise of nuclear families and the later increase in divorce rates in the West, but even the way some cultures replace the institution with a more communal one to the point that they lack a word for family altogether. Clearly, there is no universal way to understand a family. Implicitly then, the literature on military cohesion that builds on ideas of primary group simply assumes that physical proximity results in interpersonal bonding. Third, the idea that macro-level factors such as society and state do not have great influence on primary groups is questionable. Fourth, and just like Cooley, the research on military cohesion based on social psychological literature tends to depart from an essentialist notion of a universal human nature and inflexible social ties (Malešević, 2017, pp. 286–287). Finally, there is the fact that the view of military cohesion building on the primacy of primary groups tends to emphasize the romantic notion of comradery in war at the cost of these groups’ instrumental function.

While this romantic view prevails even in popular culture, it could be proposed that human action is complex enough to encompass both affectionate and instrumental dimensions. As Jesse Glenn Gray described in his description of comradery during the Second World War, the insecurities posed by war forced people to seek support from and depend on each other despite their differences. While he recognized that these links forged by danger were “no less passionate,” they were “utilitarian and narrow” (Gray, 1998, pp. 26–27). Similar examples of circumstantial mutual dependency that developed to ensure survival reportedly existed within the Wehrmacht (Neitzel & Welzer, 2012) but also help to explain why few American soldiers continued to have contact with their comrades after rotating home from Vietnam (Moskos, 1970). The clearly sceptical military sociologist Charles Moskos described this type of dependency as follows (1970, p. 156):

the intensity of primary-group ties so often reported in combat units are best viewed as mandatory necessities arising from immediate life-and-death exigencies…rather than viewing soldiers’ primary groups as some kind of semi-mystical bond of comradeship, they can be better understood as pragmatic and situational responses.

Because the military context foresees violence, these bureaucratic entities but even their individual parts down to a single soldier should ideally be fixed and interchangeable, not unlike cogs in the proverbial military machine. Ideally, a lost soldier, squad, or a battalion can simply be replaced with a new one without friction. While military training has been designed to make this possible, similar replicability does not exist with family members, nor would this typically be desirable. After all, families do not primarily serve the same functions, nor face the same violent situations, as military units. In other words, while interpersonal relationships inevitably develop even in military units, these units do not naturally exist outside this context. As even empirical evidence suggests, these groups often cease to exist when removed from the military framework, for instance, when units are demobilized (Käihkö, 2017). New contexts simply result in demands which the military units and comrades in arms are unable to satisfy. As a result, they often become redundant.

Whether “semimystical” or simply “pragmatic,” the microlevel explanations of cohesion focusing on primary groups are simply insufficient in explaining military cohesion. Instead, they need to be complemented with meso-level factors focusing on armed groups themselves, as well as overarching macro-level factors, which include state and society. National identity and religion alike make their way from society to armed groups, and hence, influence which strategies are available for fostering cohesion in what mirrors Mann’s (1993) idea of national caging restricted by norms and laws.

The importance of macro-level factors is anything but new and has been recognized before. For instance, the British Field-Marshal Bernard Montgomery reputedly stated that “The Army must be woven into the social fabric of the Nation” and that “Anything which weakens the national character weakens the Army” (quoted in Richardson, 1978, p. 4). More philosophically, both Montesquieu and Rousseau recognized that as individual, humans are too timid to wage war but would overcome this weakness as parts of societies and states (Howard, 2008). Clausewitz in turn began to pay attention to social organization and political context because of his study of small wars, and especially Napoleon’s defeat in Waterloo. Ultimately, he found an organic unity of the state, the army, and the people as the key to waging war successfully (Herberg-Rothe, 2011a). This too is recognized by Malešević who soundly argues (2010, p. 113) that “social organization, an external mechanism of social control, is a backbone of military might.” Whereas Siebold (2007) followed Cooley’s lead and saw social horizons extend from military primary groups upward, Malešević (2017) essentially holds the opposite idea and highlights the importance of macro-level factors for understanding military cohesion. This interplay between macro-level and microlevel was arguably something that earlier writers had recognized (Janowitz & Little, 1974; Moskos, 1970). Shils himself, perhaps worried that his and Janowitz’s article on the Wehrmacht had been interpreted as a celebration of the primary group, later explained in plain English that the German military they had investigated could not be reduced to a mere collection of primary groups (Shils, 1950). According to him, just as military units are embedded in military institutions, these institutions are in turn enveloped in a broader social organization (Shils, 1982). As a result, all three need to be integrated into the study of military cohesion.

Rising Above Small Groups

Previous research of military cohesion has resembled the sociological debates of the 19th and early 20th century. These debates were typically Eurocentric and assumed the existence of a society that only existed in the Western nation-states (Joas, 2003). Just like Cooley, these sociologists were concerned about modernization’s negative effects on what can essentially be described as societal cohesion in these specific contexts. For instance, in German sociological debates, Ferdinand Tönnies’s dichotomy between the warm and personal Gemeinschaft (community) and the distant and formal Gesellschaft (society) was used to express these anxieties (Bond, 2013). For some war offered a way to bridge these two, as was the case with the most detached German sociologist of the First World War, Emil Lederer. At the start of the war, he noted that when mobilized to war, the Gesellschaft turned into a Gemeinschaft (Lederer, 2006). In the same manner, later advocates of citizen armies saw them as remedies for the disintegration of social bonds and solidarity in modernizing societies. These views have not disappeared. To give only one example, Junger (2016) has blamed the fragmented social cohesion for the problems soldiers face when they reintegrate to civilian societies from their closely knit “tribe.” These views clearly emphasize that military cohesion and social cohesion are not only closely connected. While seemingly impossible in practice, some would prefer them to be the same. Taken far enough, these views come close to both populism and militarism. Whereas the former seeks to form an undivided and morally pure polity (Müller, 2016), the latter has more specifically seen war as a way to cleanse and unite nations and societies (Kramer, 2008; Sheehan, 2008). Some perceived that individuals can find inner freedom and self-realization in the confines of an extremely regimented and dangerous military life (Paret, 2009), a proposition that through “trenchocracy” was applied to whole nations by fascists. Essentially, the idea was to remodel state and society after military organizations.

As already argued, whereas family represents Gemeinschaft, the military is rather an example of Gesellschaft. According to Janowitz and Little (1974, p. 94),

cohesive primary groups do not just occur but are fashioned and developed by complex military institutions…the goals and standards or norms that primary groups enforce are hardly self-generated; they arise from the larger military environment and from the surrounding civilian society. Consequently, the empirical study of primary groups must extend beyond the factors that contribute to social cohesion in the smallest tactical units.

The meso-level is also required to understand cases where the generally desirable microlevel cohesion can become a problem when the goals of small groups are not aligned to those of the organization, or the methods used by the organization aligned with the norms, values, and wishes of the society. The Vietnam War is perhaps the example most often used to illustrate the interplay between these three levels of analysis. This war also led to more pessimistic views of the causality between cohesion and combat efficiency (Chodoff, 1983, pp. 588–590). As Wessely (2006, p. 281) explains, “as war weariness developed and public support ebbed, group cohesion in theatre began to foster dissent rather than conformity with the goals of the military.” Without this kind of inclusion of all three levels of analysis, it becomes difficult to explain acts like fragging, where soldiers turn against their commanders, who may simply be trying to advance the goals of the military organizations they represent. Conceivably, these micro-, meso-, and macro-levels then need to be harmonized for strong cohesion to emerge. From this point of view, it is the armed groups in contexts where these three levels are harmonized that are most successful, and hence, the most powerful ones.

Western militaries are no doubt designed with this kind of harmonization in mind. Militias in turn pose a much more problematic case. While they can arguably borrow from the sources of cohesion from the states they support (Schneckener, 2017), this alternative is much more difficult for rebel movements. In fact, they often need to find a viable alternative for the regimes they seek to topple or the states they seek to splinter or capture. Despite the fact that virtually all armed groups need to recruit from and interact with surrounding societies, the focus of previous literature on Western state militaries has meant that as long as only these cases were investigated, much could be taken for granted and simply assumed. For instance, King’s (2013) emphasis on training and tactical-level combat explicitly played down the importance of social influences on the performance of military professionals. While Siebold (2007) admitted that “internal and external factors of social control…stabilize relationship patterns and provide a sense outside and above a person that there is something more than just a collection of individuals” (p. 288), the focus on microlevel and Western cases made it difficult to take the logical next step of fully recognizing the importance of these factors on higher levels of analysis. While often seemingly taken for granted (Shalit, 1988), these factors are central for understanding military cohesion in non-Western and nonmodern cases, where they might be significantly different from those in our societies.

It is important to emphasize that Western state militaries typically investigated in military cohesion literature are hardly representative for the overall range of armed groups. These institutions not only usually enjoy long histories but also tend to have stronger foundations than their likes in other parts of the world. The populations of Western countries are comparatively homogenous and can be united under national symbols and by a strong state. In fact, and as Andreas Herberg-Rothe argues, while the word soldier originally simply meant those paid to fight (whereas militias and other armed groups were not), it is today more linked to the state as the sole legitimate employer of professional soldiers. When the increasingly powerful states began to set up standing armies, these soon proved out to be militarily more efficient. With the French Revolution, conscription was in turn seen tightly linked with citizenship, the state, and ultimately patriotism (Herberg-Rothe, 2011b). This connection has since contributed to making any other motivation than patriotism and the lack of direct connection to state suspicious.

For these reasons, Western military organizations exemplify the important interplay between military institutions, social organization, and state: Militaries as state agents build and emphasize social organization. While nationalism is occasionally perceived as an inherently unmodern phenomenon in Western societies, it is hardly a coincidence that Western militaries continue to invest heavily in a communal rhetoric that refers to a shared historical narrative and draw heavily on national (and religious) symbols in order to foster cohesion. These often not only come together but are taken for granted. For instance, President Roosevelt wrote a short and encouraging foreword to a Bible decorated with The Stars and Stripes distributed to all American soldiers in 1941, thus joining together the national and secular with the sacred. This underlines how all soldiers become representatives of both a national community and a political project, which is essentially how Moskos’s (1970) theory of latent ideology can be understood. He argued that primary groups only sustain soldiers’ functionality when the individual is—often unconsciously so—committed to the larger social system he is fighting for. On the matter of soldiers’ unconscious commitment, Shils (1950, p. 22) argued that

a set of generalized moral predispositions or sense of obligation…need not be strongly present in consciousness but some measure of identification with the collectivity and some sense of generalized obligation and readiness to acknowledge the legitimacy of its demands in numerous particular situations must exist. ¹

While Hobbes was certainly correct in marrying coercive (including military) and political power (Hobbes, 1985; Malešević, 2016), his view can be criticized on at least the point of regarding life without a sovereign state resulting in war of all against all. While leviathans led to internal pacification of communities that subscribed to the same social contract, they also resulted in increasingly stronger states. That these states do not employ coercion as openly as they did before is not a sign of their weakness. In fact, they possess more coercive power than ever simply because they do not need to use violence (Lukes, 2005; Malešević, 2016). This was the paradox of Hobbes’s attempt to free mankind from war: It also led to a previously unparalleled capacity for violence against those who did not subscribe to the same social contract. As Clark (2015) has argued, the presence of a state offered war its scale, bureaucratic structure, technology, and military professionalization. This capacity was unleashed, not only in Europe but all over the world. Colonial conquests and subjugation, the French Revolution and the following Napoleonic Wars, as well as the two World Wars all serve as cases in point. With this model of military organization making its way into different corners of the world, it also profoundly influenced previous ways to organize military force.

The connection between coercive and political power is evident in the many ways that stronger armed groups are tied to stronger states. In turn, resourcing war required centralization of states in Europe (Tilly, 1990). It was these centralized states and their centralized armies that could pacify large territories and fight large wars. As Lederer noted in 1915 (2006, p. 252),

Only with a modern military complex is the state’s real achievement of omnipotence possible. Interacting with the state in the closest of ways, the military complex becomes the instrument and substance of the state’s power, and cannot be thought independently of it. For only as the modern state’s instrument and very essence can the military complex become such a cohesive system of machinery.

Conclusions

This article has discussed the origins of military cohesion and argued that its study is in urgent need of a broader perspective. While the recent microlevel explanations of cohesion have substantially advanced our knowledge regarding these issues, they are founded on 20th- and 21st-century Western state militaries. Whether based on conscripts or professionals, these theories come with underlying assumptions that are problematic in the vast majority of armed groups. As a result, it is necessary to broaden the perspective on military cohesion.

This article has advocated two ways of doing so. The first one concerns the investigation of armed groups that are non-Western, nonstate, and nonmodern. Most armed groups currently waging war belong to the first two categories, which alone makes their investigation important. Many can be found on the opposing side, but others fight on what from our perspective is the “right” side of conflicts. The historical cases in the third category may similarly help us to understand the development of armed groups, as well as things about our common humanity. Investigation of armed groups belonging to these three categories, however, necessitates the second way to broaden our perspective, namely, broader theoretical scope. Microlevel factors thus need to be complemented with meso-level armed groups but also the macro-level factors inherent in the contexts where they are embedded in.

There are two reasons why this is theoretical broadening is necessary. First, while much has been taken for granted in the study of military organizations in our own societies, this is hardly possible with rebels in Liberia and voluntary battalions in Ukraine or the Islamic State in the countries it operates in. Second, military cohesion is ultimately established through harmonization of cohesion on these three levels. As a result, a more comprehensive framework which includes these three levels—micro, meso, and macro—is offered for future testing.