Fighting for Strangers?: Military Duty in Contemporary War
2017 (English)In: Leadership in Extreme Situations / [ed] Michael Holenweger, Michael Karl Jager, and Franz Kernic, Springer, 2017, p. 167-180Chapter in book (Other academic)
Abstract [en]
This chapter explores the concept of military duty in the context of contemporary war. It focuses on the recent developments in the normative and strategic frameworks of Western military operations, which emphasize that mission effectiveness is largely dependent on the security and wellbeing of the local population. This has seemingly stretched the traditional notion of military duty, which is to master and apply organized military force to achieve political objectives and defeat the enemy on the battlefield. Based on empirical insights from the U.S. military and its recent missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the chapter argues that this development has created tensions between political and military understandings of duty, as well as between organizational and individual notions of duty within the U.S. military. Conflicting notions of military duty hold important policy implications to both domestic civil-military relations and U.S. military power abroad because they challenge the integrity of political objectives and threaten military cohesion and unity of effort with regard to the management of local populations during war.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Springer, 2017. p. 167-180
Series
Advanced Sciences and Technologies for Security Applications, ISSN 1613-5113
Keywords [en]
military duty, U.S. Armed Forces, Afghanistan, local population, peace operations
National Category
Other Social Sciences not elsewhere specified
Research subject
Krigsvetenskap
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:fhs:diva-7106DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-55059-6_10Libris ID: 20813685ISBN: 978-3-319-55059-6 (electronic)ISBN: 978-3-319-55058-9 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:fhs-7106DiVA, id: diva2:1158922
2017-11-212017-11-212017-11-22Bibliographically approved