The chapter critically engages with the literature on combat motivation, morale, and cohesion; it contends that historical and contemporary scholarly debates on why soldiers fight have largely overlooked and diminished the role of society and socio-political discourses, whilst keeping an unnecessarily narrow focus on the here and now of combat. Inspired by critical war studies and the cultural study of war, the chapter encourages students, scholars, and practitioners to consider and problematize the home/front relationship and its practical implications for military operations. It accentuates that the will to fight is constantly in the making, inherently unstable, and always already socially and historically situated; fundamentally, the will to fight is contingent on (shifting) notions of legitimacy in society at large, whereas public discourse in turn is shaped by the experience of combat and its representations. Thus, interlinkages between society’s and soldiers’ construction of meaning are worth uncovering and theorizing further.