Made, Not Born

MADE, NOT BORN
Praeger Security International Advisory Board
Board Cochairs
Loch K. Johnson, Regents Professor of Public and International Affairs, School of
Public and International Affairs, University of Georgia (U.S.A.)
Paul Wilkinson, Professor of International Relations and Chairman of the Advisory
Board, Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, University of St.
Andrews (U.K.)
Members
Anthony H. Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy, Center for Strategic
and International Studies (U.S.A.)
Thérèse Delpech, Director of Strategic Affairs, Atomic Energy Commission, and
Senior Research Fellow, CERI (Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques), Paris
(France)
Sir Michael Howard, former Chichele Professor of the History of War and Regis
Professor of Modern History, Oxford University, and Robert A. Lovett Professor of
Military and Naval History, Yale University (U.K.)
Lieutenant General Claudia J. Kennedy, USA (Ret.), former Deputy Chief of Staff
for Intelligence, Department of the Army (U.S.A.)
Paul M. Kennedy, J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History and Director,
International Security Studies, Yale University (U.S.A.)
Robert J. O’Neill, former Chichele Professor of the History of War, All Souls Col-
lege, Oxford University (Australia)
Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development, Department of
Government and Politics, University of Maryland (U.S.A.)
Fareed Zakaria, Editor, Newsweek International (U.S.A.)
MADE, NOT BORN
Why Some Soldiers Are Better Than Others
Bruce Newsome
PRAEGER SECURITY INTERNATIONAL

Westport, Connecticut • London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Newsome, Bruce.
Made, not born : why some soldiers are better than others / Bruce Newsome.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978–0–275–99830–1 (alk. paper)
1. Military education—United States—Evaluation. 2. United States. Armed Forces—Personnel
management. 3. Soldiers—United States. 4. Combat. I. Title: Why some soldiers are better than
others. II. Title.
U408.3.N27 2007
355.3’3—dc22 2007020651
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright © 2007 by Bruce Newsome
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2007020651
ISBN-13: 978–0–275–99830–1
ISBN-10: 0–275–99830–4
First published in 2007
Praeger Security International, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.praeger.com
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this book complies with the

Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 Domestic Politics 10
Chapter 2 Combat Personnel Management 17
Chapter 3 Force Employment, Command, Leadership, and Decision-Making 54
Chapter 4 Combat Stress and Cohesion 85
Chapter 5 Combat Motivation 107
Chapter 6 Athleticism and Special Operations 134
Conclusion 147
Notes 157
Select Bibliography 195
Index 205
INTRODUCTION
Why are some soldiers better than others? Some combat personnel flee quickly from
the battlefield, while others endure all hardships until the bitter end. Some combat
units can perform numerous types of missions, while others cannot keep themselves
organized during peacetime. Some militaries armed with obsolete weapons have out-
fought enemies with the latest weapons. Some massively outnumbered militaries
have beaten back much larger opponents. Why do some soldiers wilt in combat
but revel in violence against noncombatants? While most observers assume that
soldiers are born, this book demonstrates that they are made.
Why Study Combat Personnel?

Combat personnel are military personnel who routinely use violence against
military opponents or are countered by enemy violence.1 Why try to explain the
capabilities and performance of combat personnel? Combat personnel are an ac-
knowledged component of military capability, which is fundamental to international
relations, war outcomes, the causes of war, foreign policy, socio-military policy, and
civil–military relations. If we can understand why the capabilities and performance
of combat personnel vary, we can seek to influence them. Improved combat personnel
performance should help combat personnel achieve their objectives and reduce their
casualties. The improvement of combat personnel is not necessarily a contentious
objective, given the increasing frequency of peace operations and counterterrorist
operations at least, in which personnel capabilities are often assumed to be the most
important capabilities. Careful improvement of combat personnel can promote
desirable attributes, such as self-discipline, without promoting undesirable attributes,
2 Made, Not Born
such as indiscriminate aggression. Better soldiers reduce the risk of long, costly wars
and also war crimes and collateral damage and casualties.
Combat personnel capabilities are important too because they have implications
for other policies, such as the allocation of resources, civil–military relations, and
the citizen’s rights or duties. The negative social consequences of military personnel
policies are often justified on the grounds of their alleged benefits for ‘‘military
capability,’’ ‘‘military readiness,’’ or ‘‘national security.’’ For instance, militaries are
often allowed to ignore equal opportunities legislation. If the assumptions used to
make these justifications are false, then the leeway given to military policy-makers
may need to be revised.
Additionally, an understanding of the varying quality of combat personnel would
help assessments of relative military capability (‘‘net assessment’’), with the theoretical
expectation that this understanding could actually lower the likelihood of war. Some
theories of the causes of war claim that wars break out only when both sides mistake
the likely outcome.2 If true, improved methods of assessing relative military capabil-
ity could lower the likelihood of war. Uncertainty about relative military capability
may lead to optimism about outcomes. Combat personnel are usually acknowledged
to be the most intangible of all capabilities. A better understanding of the true
capability of combat personnel could help improve net assessment.
Finally, an improved understanding of how to influence the performance of
combat personnel may have implications for civilian personnel capabilities and
performance.
Over time, many military roles have become less intimate; for instance, artillery
personnel now routinely fire ‘‘indirectly’’ at enemy forces many miles away, perhaps
without ever seeing their enemy or ever experiencing enemy fire. In the past, artillery
personnel fired their weapons ‘‘directly’’ at enemies within direct line of sight. The
latter situation is still possible but rarer. Consequently, it is true that many combat
roles are less combat-intensive than they used to be, raising the possibility that this
study is more relevant to the past than to the present. However, while the weapons
and processes of war, amongst many other things, have certainly changed dramati-
cally over time, many constants remain. Modern combat personnel are still human
beings with the same innate psychological and physical fragility as their predecessors,
meaning that the ancient and modern soldiers’ reaction to combat stress or leader-
ship, for example, is analogous, albeit historically contextual.
What Do We Mean by ‘‘Performance and Capabilities’’?

While this project will conclude with policy and research implications for relevant
theories of international relations, the causes of war, and military capability, this
project is otherwise limited to a better understanding of why combat personnel capa-
bilities and performance vary. The capabilities and performance of combat personnel
(‘‘combat personnel performance’’) have no accepted measure or explanation. Some
conventional measures, in fact, are misleading. For instance, combat personnel
performance is often inferred from war outcomes (usually coded as win, lose, or
Introduction 3
draw). However, war is not the same as combat: war is a state of at least implicit con-
flict between two or more polities, while combat is active fighting. (Some formally
declared wars have involved no fighting at all.) War outcomes may not accurately
reflect combat personnel performance, especially if the war is long in time and wide
in scope. In the long run and across many regions or media, material inferiority
may overtake even the most capable combat personnel. Some militaries have lost their
wars but nevertheless consistently killed more enemy soldiers than the enemy killed
in return. Consequently, ‘‘kill ratios’’ or ‘‘loss-exchange ratios’’ are often treated as
more accurate than war outcomes as measures of combat performance. ‘‘Loss-
exchange ratios’’ are usually calculated as the ratio of one side’s casualties relative to
the other side’s casualties, although this measure is often criticized for not accounting
for starting force size, material resources, and other factors.
An alternative to the measurement of performance is to measure capabilities and
to assume that performance directly reflects capabilities. Unfortunately, there is no
accepted list of combat personnel capabilities, although most lie within the following
nine categories: force employment (which includes strategy and tactics), command,
leadership, decision-making, resistance to stress, cohesion, motivation, athleticism,
and special operations capabilities.
Competing Explanations
In the literature, combat personnel capabilities are imperfectly distinct and
often poorly defined. Explanations for the varying capabilities and performance
of combat personnel are surprisingly inconsistent. The existing academic theories
of relevance have surprisingly little to say about combat personnel. One might
naturally turn to soldiers and policy analysts for a theory for why combat personnel
performance varies. However, soldiers and policy analysts are rarely trained as
theoreticians and are usually preoccupied with more urgent policy or professional
demands.3
Combat personnel performance and capabilities, and their different explanations,
have not been examined in any comparative way before. There are four main types of
explanation, but all are controversial and some are rarely articulated. Each type of
explanation respectively asserts the influence of material resources, domestic politics,
personnel management, and personnel attributes.
Material Endowments Are Overstated

Most theories of military capability are materialist and have little of theoretical
consequence to say about personnel. The literature on international relations and
military issues does not say much about the variation in combat personnel capabilities
and performance except to imply two contradictory theories: superior material
(usually financial) investment leads to more capable combat personnel, and inferior
material resources cause militaries to compensate through more capable combat
personnel.
4 Made, Not Born
Military performance and capability is an area of vigorous theoretical and policy

research, with implications for international relations theory and the causes and
outcomes of war, yet most of the research has surprisingly little to say about combat
personnel. Commentators often assert that certain resources are the most important
determinants of combat capability or performance. Colin Gray calls these theories
‘‘essentialisms’’ because they assert one particular resource as more essential than all
others.4 In management literature, essential resources may be called ‘‘key success
factors.’’5 The military studies literature often asserts the essential role of combat
personnel and implies that combat personnel are the most essential resource. How-
ever, these assertions can appear platitudinous. They are not proven theoretically or
empirically and are routinely contradicted by the literature’s methodological, and
even theoretical, preoccupation with material resources.
Materialism is a cognitive bias toward material over human resources. Resources
are assets, capabilities, or means. The two most easily distinguished categories of
resources are material and human. Material resources are economic, numerical,
or technological. Economic resources are resources of industrial significance, use,
or application, such as natural resources and commodities. Numerical resources are
measurable by numerical ‘‘bean counts,’’ such as the number of armored vehicles
fielded by any particular side. Technological resources are deliberate tools. Material
resources are distinct from human resources, by which I mean human qualities but
not the numerical resource of personnel quantity.
Combat personnel capabilities and performance are often assumed to reflect
‘‘power’’ or to reflect material resources, which are often treated as transitive. Financial
spending on the military as a whole or on personnel training in particular is often
cited as the most influential form of domestic power. Military technology is another
category of material capabilities that is often assumed to determine combat out-
comes—for example, victory may be attributed to the weapons operated by combat
personnel, rather than to the combat personnel themselves. Unfortunately, the
relationship between material resources and combat personnel capabilities could be
positive or negative: abundant power and material resources could supply combat
personnel with abundant material capabilities, but material inferiority could encour-
age a military to compensate in nonmaterial ways, such as through personnel skills or
motivations.
While there are theoretical justifications for materialism in military studies,
human resources are often neglected for purely practical reasons. We cannot, and
probably never will, model human resources as accurately as material resources.6
Numerical resources are easily counted, limited only by the access granted to the
counter. The effects of technological resources can be readily measured and modeled.
There are many readily accessible economic correlates, such as ‘‘gross domestic
product.’’ By comparison, human resources are difficult to operationalize and are
generally understated in every academic discipline. The United States National
Research Council has identified human resources as asymmetric research needs,
particularly in the study of combat.7
Introduction 5
Critics of the military studies literature’s materialism claim that the military’s
attention to the management of material resources or the human operation of tech-
nology demonstrates that combat is more than a material contest. Unfortunately,
such critics have not necessarily answered the question ‘‘why do combat personnel
perform differently in combat?’’
Domestic Politics Are Too Remote

As described in the first chapter, ‘‘democratic victory theories,’’ as I call them, have
attempted to explain why democracies are more likely than nondemocracies to win
wars. Some argue that democracies are materially stronger, manage their resources
better, or are more prudent in choosing enemies and allies. These theories are rel-
evant to personnel if they also claim that democracies produce better commanders,
superior strategies, more motivated personnel, or better personnel management.
However, other scholars have claimed that autocracies produce more fanatical
soldiers or benefit from the efficiencies of centralization.
Democracies seem to have many advantages over nondemocracies. One advantage
supported by the next (third) set of explanations is that the political decentralization
of democratic systems may encourage decentralized personnel management.
Personnel Management Is Key

As described in the second chapter, the third set of explanations refers to personnel
management. (Management is the manipulation, use, treatment, or control of resour-
ces.) Regimental theories are the most well-recognized theories in this category.
Regimental theories urge decentralization of personnel management to the combat
unit so that the unit has opportunities and incentives to condition personnel and to
develop group- or unit-level attributes such as cohesion. However, critics believe that
regimental systems are inefficient and obstruct centralized quality control. Critics
may also doubt the value of group- or unit-level attributes such as cohesion. These
critics would prefer more centralized personnel management.
Theories of management, organizations, groups, cognition, and psychology allow
a finer understanding of how soldiers are made. This book cross-fertilizes extensively
from these theories. Soldiers have peculiar tasks but are personnel nevertheless.
The human sciences will prove more useful than the poor assumptions that pepper
the literature on soldiers.
Desirable Personnel Attributes Are Made, Not Born

The fourth dispute is implicitly related to personnel management but is rarely
articulated. Are combat personnel capabilities provided by extrinsic or intrinsic
attributes? Extrinsic attributes are personnel attributes derived from the military by
socialization, training, and other forms of conditioning. Military-derived skills,
6 Made, Not Born
belief systems, and value systems as well as group- or unit-level attributes such as
cohesion are examples. Intrinsic attributes are those human resources that the civil-
ian brings into the military as genetic, cultural, or social endowments. A person’s
intelligence quotient, ethnicity, familial value systems, political belief systems
acquired as a civilian, and civilian trade skills are all examples of intrinsic attributes.
Advocates of centralized personnel management imply that personnel are best
managed centrally by their intrinsic attributes. While many scholars may praise regi-
mental systems, most scholars assume—mostly unconsciously—that more capable
combat personnel are intrinsically more capable, perhaps because of their genetics
or nationality, in which case personnel should be managed centrally by their intrinsic
attributes. Regimental theories assert the role of the unit in conditioning extrinsic
capabilities and therefore would deny the overriding importance of intrinsic attrib-
utes. While many military scholars regard training as a cause of personnel capabilities,
regimental theories recognize that conditioning is more than just training. Personnel
management is associated with eight processes identified in chapter 2—training is
just one of those processes. Regimental theories also recognize that training can be
negative as well as positive and claim that the incentives and opportunities provided
to the unit by decentralized personnel management encourage positive conditioning.
Moreover, personnel continue to acquire motivations and skills even after basic
training has finished—by socialization, for instance. Some capabilities, such as
cohesion, are not directly trained. Rather, they reflect several processes associated with
decentralized personnel management, including unit- or group-level recruitment,
training, replacement, socialization, and promotions.
The relationship between the organization or unit and its personnel is often
neglected. While the discipline of psychology has a long history, the field of ‘‘social
psychology,’’ which overlaps the field of management known as ‘‘organizational
behavior,’’ is rarely dated before 1970.8 Organizational behavior (human behavior
in groups) tends to be neglected because it is less tangible than individual behavior.9
Organizations are so pervasive that we generally filter them out.10 There are also
methodological reasons why personnel capabilities might be assumed to be largely
intrinsic. Some researchers have noted that while combat personnel need to be
observed in combat over long periods if their capabilities and performance are to
be accurately observed, it is much easier to measure their intrinsic attributes, such
as their intelligence quotient, instead.11
As chapters 3 through 6 document, whatever the personnel capability under con-
sideration, most of the literature will assume, at least implicitly, that the capability
can be explained largely by intrinsic attributes. For instance, most theories of military
force employment, command, and leadership imply that intrinsically gifted individ-
uals at the top of the organization determine combat outcomes. Similarly, theories
of combat decision-making usually imply that combat decision-making is a function
of intrinsic intelligence and reasoning capacities. Theories of combat stress tend to
overemphasize the individual’s intrinsic resistance to stress and to neglect group and
organizational management of stress. Some theories of cohesion associate cohesion
Introduction 7
with homogeneity in intrinsic attributes such as gender. Theories of combat motiva-

tion overstate intrinsic motivations such as political fanaticism. Theories of combat
athleticism overstate observable intrinsic attributes such as height. Finally, most
theories of SOF (special operations forces) characterize their personnel as intrinsic
‘‘supermen.’’
In contrast to these intrinsic attribute theories, I find that combat personnel
resources are so uncharacteristic of civilian life that they are more extrinsic than
intrinsic. In other words, combat personnel capabilities must be extrinsically pro-
vided; civilians do not enter the military with all the attributes they need to function
as capable soldiers. Combat personnel need to be trained in the correct strategic,
command, leadership, and decision-making skills. Meanwhile, stress management
and cohesion owe more to extrinsic group dynamics than to intrinsic factors.
Intrinsic motivations may motivate the individual to join the military but most do
not endure after combat starts. All personnel need to be athletically conditioned,
whatever their intrinsic talents. Even SOF need proper extrinsic conditioning and
management if they are to achieve exceptionalism, whatever their intrinsic capacities.
A plan of the rest of this study is provided in the next and final section of this
introduction.
Preview
The first chapter examines domestic political explanations. Some ‘‘democratic vic-
tory theories’’ argue that democracies are materially stronger, manage their resources
better, or are more prudent in choosing enemies and allies. These theories are rel-
evant to personnel if they also claim that democracies produce better commanders,
superior strategies, more motivated personnel, or better personnel management.
However, competing theories associate these things with autocracy. Except in
extreme cases, domestic politics seems too remote to really explain why some soldiers
are better than others, although political structure may affect how personnel are
managed.
Chapter 2 examines theories of combat personnel management, the most
well-known of which are regimental theories. Regimental theories assert that
decentralized personnel management should provide units with the opportunities
and incentives to properly condition their troops in the extrinsic resources desired.
Critics claim that regimental systems are inefficient and obstruct centralized quality
control. They may also deny the importance of group- or unit-level attributes such
as cohesion, which regimental theories claim as features of regimental systems.
Implicitly, regimental theories emphasize extrinsic resources, while centralized
systems manage personnel by their intrinsic resources. Decentralization gives units
the opportunities and incentives to develop extrinsic resources, while centralization
encourages the management of personnel by their intrinsic resources.
Are extrinsic or intrinsic resources more important to combat personnel?
Chapters 3 through 6 study this implicit dispute over the relative value of extrinsic
8 Made, Not Born
over intrinsic resources. There is no accepted list of combat personnel capabilities,

although most lie within the following categories: force employment, command,
leadership, decision-making, resistance to stress, cohesion, motivation, athleticism,
and special operations capabilities.
Chapter 3 examines theories of force employment, command, leadership, and
decision-making, which are grouped together as largely cognitive skills, although
they are all psychological as well as cognitive. Chapter 3 finds that the literature
generally associates good force employment with intrinsically gifted ‘‘strategists’’ at
the top of the organization, rather than with the more junior leaders who must
employ forces at lower levels and with the many more personnel who make up those
forces. Likewise, chapter 3 then finds that the military studies literature associates
good military commanders with ‘‘born’’ commanders concentrated at the top of
the organization, ignoring the vast majority of personnel found elsewhere in the
organization. Similarly, the literature associates combat leadership with ‘‘born lead-
ers,’’ intrinsic reasoning intelligence, and above-average levels of civilian education.
The literature neglects the role of extrinsically conditioned emotional skills, which
are important to more realistic models of combat leadership, such as transforma-
tional leadership. Fourthly and finally, chapter 3 examines combat decision-making
and finds that the literature overstates intrinsic reasoning intelligence and formal
decision-making processes while neglecting extrinsically conditioned decision-
making skills and more realistic decision-making processes.
Chapter 4 examines stress resistance and cohesion, which are categorized together
as more psychological than cognitive capabilities. In its first section, chapter 4 finds
an enduring assumption that militaries should select in those who are intrinsically
resistant to stress. However, few humans are immune to combat stress. The
intrinsically-stress-resistant-soldier assumption neglects the important role of stress
management, of which the most important forms are group support and the fre-
quent rotation of groups out of combat for rest. Chapter 4 then examines cohesion
and finds that the military studies literature overstates the role of homogenous
intrinsic attributes and neglects the role of extrinsic factors, such as positive training,
in forming the most desirable forms of cohesion, rather than the less desirable form
(social cohesion).
Chapter 5 examines combat motivation, which, like stress resistance and cohe-
sion, is more psychological than cognitive. Chapter 5 finds a pervasive assumption
in the literature that soldiers are intrinsically motivated to fight. However, while
many people are intrinsically motivated to serve in the military, motivations to serve
are rarely transitive with combat motivations, which are sustained more by group
relationships and sympathetic personnel management.
Chapter 6 examines combat athleticism and special operations capabilities, which
are normally associated with physiological attributes, even though they reflect cogni-
tive and psychological attributes too. Chapter 6 finds a tendency in the literature to
associate combat athleticism with the most observable physiological attributes, such
as body mass and the male gender, and to neglect the role of proper conditioning.
Introduction 9
Chapter 6 then examines theories of SOF. The military studies literature usually
regards the superior personnel of these units as born ‘‘supermen,’’ associated with
exceptional physiques, the male gender, a special psychology, and even a certain
political profile. However, while intrinsic resources certainly matter, the best SOF
seem to share decentralized personnel management practices.
The Conclusion summarizes the research and makes suggestions for policy and
further research. Soldiers are made more than born. To assume otherwise leads, at
best, to wasted effort and unnecessary discrimination, and, at worst, retarded combat
performance and increased illegal violence.
CHAPTER 1
DOMESTIC POLITICS
Could the domestic political system affect the capabilities and performance of
combat personnel? The literature sets up two competing systems: democracy and
autocracy. The literature is not really concerned with variation within these two
categories. For instance, the literature does not normally consider whether the effects
of a parliamentary democracy and a presidential democracy are much different.
Empirically, democracies are more likely than nondemocracies to win wars.
Although the first empirical exploration of war outcomes found that democratic
and autocratic performance was not distinguishable,1 subsequent studies have sug-
gested that democracies are more likely to end up on the winning side.2 The theories
that attempt to explain this phenomenon might be called ‘‘democratic victory theo-
ries.’’ Some of these explanations arise from ‘‘democratic peace theory,’’ which
attempts to explain why democracies are less likely to fight each other than they
are to fight autocracies. Most of these theories assume that democratic politicians
are constrained by the electorate when considering war with other polities or other
democracies in particular. Democratically elected decision-makers are supposed to
make more cautious or wiser decisions because they are subject to electoral and other
institutional forms of review or punishment for bad policies. Not only may these
constraints discourage belligerency, they may encourage increased attention to mili-
tary capability, perhaps because democratic politicians need to avoid high-casualty
wars or perhaps because military capabilities are subject to more frequent or more
consequential reviews in a democracy than in an autocracy.
In the first section of this chapter, I introduce the material explanations for the
correlation between democracy and victory, including a democracy’s greater propen-
sity to display economic wealth and manage resources better. The second section
examines democracy’s relationship with international political behavior, such as a
Domestic Politics 11
democracy’s greater propensity to choose one-sided wars or ally extensively. Sub-

sequent sections examine democracy’s relationship with, respectively, command,
force employment, personnel motivations, and personnel management. Command,
force employment, motivations, and personnel management are discussed in more
detail in later dedicated chapters (chapters 2 through 6), but the theories that associ-
ate these things with democracy are introduced in this chapter.
Material Resources
Democratic victory may be explained by the material wealth of democracies.
Democracies tend to be economically strong and receive more government revenue,
which is weakly associated with victory, than nondemocracies.3 In addition, democ-
racies may manage their resources better. In 1980, A.F.K. Organski and Jacek Kugler
postulated that democracies were better than nondemocracies at mobilizing their
resources, although their evidence came mainly from British history.4 On the other
hand, the political decentralization associated with democracy may make democra-
cies worse at managing their resources. All other things equal, the literature assumes
that centralization is more efficient than decentralization and that political centrali-
zation is associated with economic centralization. ‘‘There is also a natural tension
between the logic of democratic pluralism and the diffusion of power, on the one
hand, and the logic of planning and central control, on the other. Democracy works
against final decisions on resource allocation.’’5
International Political Prudence

Democracies are supposedly more prudent in initiating war and more effective in
forming alliances. They may choose short, winnable wars for fear of an unforgiving
electorate.6 Democracies may also form longer lasting alliances.7 Thus, democracies
may end up facing enemies from weaker or more isolated states.8
Command
Some scholars have suggested that autocracies produce poor military policies.
Autocracies are expected to innovate less. Initiative and competitive solutions are
supposedly retarded by the autocracy’s emphasis on secrecy and unity. Precedent
and political loyalty, rather than merit, guide policy formation and implementation.
Allegedly, this can make autocratic policy inflexible and reactive.9
However, the nineteenth-century political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville believed
that the secrecy and planning required of military policy-makers were better sup-
ported in autocracies than democracies.10 Democratic decision-makers are suppos-
edly constrained by their electorate’s moods and amateurism. Empirically, public
opinion does seem to be protean or ‘‘moody.’’11 The public is typically less informed
about foreign affairs. In a democracy, better-informed and longer-term-oriented
elites are allegedly prevented from acting in ways they know to be best, whereas in
12 Made, Not Born
an autocracy they would not be so constrained. Democratic elites may be unable to

improve policy until public mood catches up with events.12 Democratic govern-
ments may pursue foreign policies that they expect to fail in the interest of staying
in office.13 Autocratic policy may be more flexible. Autocracies may find mutually
contradictory policies, such as rearmament during arms control negotiations, easier
to pursue.14
In addition to the popular constraints on democratic policy, there may be
confusion due to the allegedly higher number of actors in a democracy relative to
an autocracy. In 1938, Winston Churchill had used the word ‘‘confusion’’ to criticize
the British and French governments’ apathetic responses to German and Italian
belligerency, criticisms which would help Churchill win the premiership in 1940.
In 1938, Churchill assumed that autocracies enjoyed advantages over democracies
when they prepared for war:
The part of Europe that is confused is that part ruled by Parliamentary Governments.
I know of no confusion on the side of the great Dictators. They pursue their
path towards sombre and impressive objectives with ruthless consistency and purpose.15
In 1937, Churchill had given more detail as to why he believed parliamentary

democracy produced confused military policies:
I do not like to think how the advocates of totalitarian dictatorships will grin when they
read this sad story. How those persons who think that democracy is played out, and that
Parliamentary Governments cannot make effective preparations for war or a policy of
defence, will plume themselves upon the superiority of their institutions! With them
orders can be given on a gigantic scale and are instantly obeyed throughout communities
of 50,000,000 or 60,000,000 people, and the entire community is organized, by every
kind of pressure, into one obedient instrument. The only chance for the defenders of lib-
erty and democracy in a world like this is to substitute for the many advantages which
despotic authority gains in the field of action a lively comradeship and association which
enables them, by the cooperation of all sorts and kinds of citizens, to produce not merely
an equally fine but a more flexible and more durable organization. The fact that nearly
three years have passed in this squabble without any practical agreement is a reproach
to the system of free government which we enjoy, love, and seek to preserve.16
The British historian Alan J.P. Taylor later wrote: ‘‘It is very hard for a democracy
to make up its mind; and when it does so, often makes it up wrong.’’17 The American
political scientist Richard Betts agreed: ‘‘Confusion is a common feature of policy
debate in a democracy, especially on matters that are highly technical and involve
complex systems.’’18 Democracy often intensifies inexpert, self-interested issue link-
age and waste. For instance, U.S. governmental agencies tend to proliferate, partly
in accordance with the political philosophy of ‘‘checks and balances,’’ thereby exacer-
bating redundancy and issue linkage. Worse, these agencies lack an apolitical civil
service and are often run by short-term and cyclical political appointees, who
lack substantive expertise but whose political imperative is stylistic, top-down
change.19
However, democracies may not be any more confused than autocracies. Realism, a
long-standing theory of international relations, stresses the functional commonality
of polities on the grounds that the international system forces polities to behave
similarly when faced with the same situation. Kenneth Waltz, one of the few realists
to examine the military performance of democracies, claimed that ‘‘democratic gov-
ernments of the Western type are well able to compete with authoritarian states.’’20
Waltz claimed that political interests and issue linkage are no more salient in democ-
racies than in autocracies. The difference is only that they are more ‘‘palpable’’ in
democracies. Waltz admitted that each type of political system faces disadvantages
but implied that they cancel each other out. For instance, while autocratic decision-
making is compromised by the autocrat’s isolation from criticism, democratic proc-
esses may cause democracies to miss ‘‘opportunities.’’ Although democracies are slow,
they are less risky.21 Later, however, Waltz would contradict himself. In 1967, his
comparison of the British and American political systems had concluded that there
were no significant net advantages in each system, although he generally preferred
the American system. But in 1979, Waltz preferred the British system on the grounds
that it ‘‘apprenticed’’ politicians for executive leadership. Thus, British prime minis-
ters were ‘‘safer and surer’’ than American presidents.22
Additionally, some historians have noted that autocracies are not always highly
centralized, nor can we assume that fewer actors are involved in policy making in
autocracies than in democracies. For instance, Nazi Germany has been described
as a chaotic ‘‘plurocracy’’ in which various actors jockeyed for political favor. 23
The Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq could be described similarly.
Force Employment and Strategy

Dan Reiter and Curtis Meek argued that democratic decision-makers choose bet-
ter strategies because they are more likely to be punished (by their electorate, party,
or political partners) for long, costly wars. In particular, Reiter and Meek claimed that
maneuver strategies are the best category of strategy and that democracies tend to
choose maneuver strategies because they promise short wars.24 However, Reiter and
Meek’s coding of strategy as one of only three things—‘‘maneuver,’’ ‘‘attrition,’’ or
‘‘punishment’’—has been criticized as a caricature.25 Belligerents may use all of those
strategies at different times, depending on highly situational events. And belligerents
may even use more than one of these strategies at the same time. For instance, a state
may display an attritional strategy in the air, while a maneuver strategy on the ground.
In any case, there is a strong political theoretical tradition that democracies are
suspicious of maneuverable land forces because of their potential use as coercive
instruments domestically. For instance, Aristotle believed that ‘‘states whose strength
lay in cavalry were in former times the homes of oligarchies.’’ The increasing role for
infantry admitted more people into the political class and made their states more
democratic.26 The early modern political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–
1527) stressed that democracies were defensive and favored citizen militia over
professional cavalry.27 John Millar and Otto Hintze were two later philosophers
14 Made, Not Born
who independently associated democracy with naval power on the grounds that naval
forces could not be used to coerce domestic opponents.28 In the 1930s, French
decision-makers presumed that mechanized forces supported Fascism.29 At the same
time, Silas Bent McKinley, an American, wrote that armored vehicles, airborne
infantry, and aircraft had given new coercive capabilities to twentieth-century states
and thus had encouraged autocracy.30 More recently, a Briton, Richard Simpkin,
concluded that: ‘‘Historically the tank and blitzkrieg are linked with authoritarian
regimes.’’31
Stephen Biddle has noted that the force employment options of democracies are
more likely to be constrained by domestic pressure groups. For instance, defense by
counterattack may be opposed by pacifist groups because the preparations for
counterattack can look like preparations for attack. Defense in depth can generate
political opposition, especially from those living in border areas. Interwar French
governments favored forward fortifications on the German border in part to defend
French industrial, communications, and population centers concentrated along the
border.32 Similarly, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) pressured
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to defend its border with the German
Democratic Republic (East Germany) even though a defense in depth made more
operational sense.
Biddle also notes some reasons why democracies and autocracies may produce dif-
ferently skilled soldiers. Biddle notes that skilled force employment requires ‘‘exten-
sive independent decision making by junior officers and senior enlisted personnel;
for social and political reasons, many states are unwilling to tolerate such autonomy
for so many individuals.’’33 Autocratic leaders may fear military rivals for power and
thus will frequently intervene in the soldier’s professional development. The Stalinist
purges of Soviet officers before the Second World War are extreme examples of such
intervention.34 But democratic leaders also fear military revolution and may also
intervene in military professional development. The leaders of the interwar French
Republic ‘‘felt threatened by the political power of a large professional military and
thus imposed a conscription system with service terms of only twelve months.. . .
[French military leaders] consequently adopted simpler tactics and operations that
they thought were within the competence of their allotted personnel.’’35
Motivation
A popular and familiar explanation for democratic victory is that democracies
produce more motivated soldiers than nondemocracies. The success of the ancient
city-state of Athens against the Persian Empire is often attributed to the high motiva-
tions of its democratic citizen soldiers, but democratic Athens would be defeated later
by despotic Sparta. The assumption of the highly motivated democratic citizen
soldier continues to be popular with historians, being used to explain the outcomes
of the two world wars as well as the British imperial wars and more recent American
successes.
The assumption has a strong tradition in liberal political philosophy, particu-

larly in that strand called ‘‘republicanism.’’ This strand can be traced back to
classical philosophy, through Machiavelli to American ‘‘republicanism,’’ which
helps explain why the assumption pops up frequently in the American literature
related to combat personnel. The assumption was apparently empirically validated
during the Spanish Civil War, when American researchers surveyed 300 highly
ideological American socialists, who had fought with the all-volunteer and uncon-
ventionally democratic ‘‘Abraham Lincoln Brigade,’’ but these soldiers were hardly
representative of Americans.36
Rational choice theory has added weight to the assumption that democratic
citizens make more motivated soldiers. Some contemporary rational choice theorists
claim that soldiers must be rationally motivated by the legitimacy of the regime they
are fighting for and democracies tend to be the most legitimate regimes.37 Some
international relations theorists have also claimed that democracies are good informa-
tion managers and that information management helps motivate their citizen
soldiers.38
Dan Reiter and Allan Stam’s claim is more nuanced. They claim that democracies
produce soldiers with greater initiative. Reiter and Stam’s explanation is normative.
‘‘[T]he emphasis on individual initiative prevalent in democratic culture does have
real military payoffs, as soldiers emerging from democratic societies enjoy better
leadership and fight with more initiative.’’ Reiter and Stam claimed this as a cause
of the ‘‘superior battlefield effectiveness’’ of democracies.39 But they found no direct
evidence for this assumption. While they found that democracies are more likely to
win wars, their analysis of Trevor Dupuy’s ‘‘quirky’’ data on modern battles found
that democracies are not advantaged in morale or military intelligence and have only
slight, declining advantages in logistics and technology. Indeed, Reiter and Stam
admitted that most of their hypotheses, deduced from the same basic premise about
democratic institutional effects on democratic leaders at war, were disproved by
the data. Reiter and Stam also admitted to selection bias. Due to data availability,
the battles included in their database were biased toward American battles, and the
American Civil War, First World War, and Second World War in particular.40 Reiter
and Stam made a manipulated sample, but their database still lacked the breadth of
the Correlates of War database, for instance, although their database was a database
of battles, not wars. American soldiers have enjoyed a much better reputation for
initiative after the Vietnam War than before, even though America was always a
democracy. Meanwhile, many historians would regard German soldiers as displaying
more initiative and ‘‘battlefield effectiveness’’ than most of their enemies during the
two world wars, during both of which Germany was an autocracy. Although Reiter
and Stam make a probabilistic argument, such important anomalies challenge the
explanatory fit of their theory.
While the motivated democratic soldier remains a popular assumption, the tough
or fanatical autocratic soldier remains another popular assumption. Democratic
citizens have been characterized as ‘‘soft’’ soldiers.41 Additionally, democracies may
16 Made, Not Born
subordinate personnel capabilities to other objectives. Democracies must attend to a

broad range of domestic values when managing personnel, such as equitable recruit-
ment. Democracies must work within the individual political and human rights
associated with democratic representation. Such domestic concerns have been
blamed for poor unit cohesion, on the assumption that cohesion benefits from unit
autonomy and also, perhaps, inequity.42
Summary
This short chapter examined whether domestic politics might help explain com-
bat personnel performance. In this context, the literature considers two competing
domestic political systems: democracy and autocracy. While democracy seems to
be a powerful explanation of war outcomes, it may not explain combat personnel
performance or capabilities. The dominant democratic victory theories rely on
material advantages and international political prudence to explain democratic
victory. Only a few have any implications for combat personnel and they are
contested. The most relevant theories claim that democracies produce superior
commanders, superior strategies, or more motivated soldiers, but strong counter
theories associate these outcomes with autocracy. For now, we lack unambiguous
empirical evidence either way. Except in extreme cases, the domestic political system
is too remote to explain why some soldiers are better than others. If a very unpopular
autocracy is fighting a very popular democracy, we would expect to see differences in
the strength of soldier motivations, but many factors mediate the relationship
between political structure and the soldier. Political structure is most likely to affect
combat personnel performance and capabilities through the mediation of manage-
ment. Centralized and decentralized political systems are associated with respectively
centralized and decentralized military systems. Personnel management is the subject
of the next chapter.
CHAPTER 2
COMBAT PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT
Theories of combat personnel management assert that combat personnel capabilities

and performance are functions of how combat personnel are managed. Traditionally,
regimental theories have been the most explicit personnel management theories.
Although imperfectly consistent, regimental theories urge decentralization of
personnel management to the combat unit so that the unit has opportunities and
incentives to condition personnel and to develop group- or unit-level attributes such
as cohesion. However, critics believe that regimental systems are inefficient and
obstruct centralized quality control. Critics may also doubt the value of group- or
unit-level attributes such as cohesion. Instead, they may assert the intrinsic attributes
of personnel. Critics may thus assert centralized combat personnel management over
a decentralized regimental system, since centralization implies efficient management
of personnel by their intrinsic attributes.
The literature to date on combat personnel management has been highly selective
and qualitative. Two main national cases—the British Army and the U.S. Army—
dominate, mainly because they are exemplary of decentralized and centralized sys-
tems respectively as well as being well documented in the English-language literature.
The German Army is also popular, mainly because its high operational effectiveness
during the twentieth century is a source of historical and theoretical interest. One
main war case—the Second World War—dominates. This war is useful because it is
well documented and because a war of national survival exposes the flaws and
strengths in the different national cases. Consequently, these national cases and the
Second World War dominate the qualitative evidence presented in this chapter.
However, this chapter also pays attention to developments in combat personnel
management since the Second World War, which was followed by increasingly
frequent ‘‘small wars,’’ ‘‘peace operations,’’ and ‘‘counterterrorist operations.’’
18 Made, Not Born
Organizational Design
Decentralization is one of three structural ideal types considered here, the others
being centralization and an ‘‘in-between’’ system. The differences between these
three ideal types are best understood as a problem of organizational design. ‘‘Organi-
zational design’’ involves decisions about the structure, process, and culture of an
organization.
Some organizational definitions are necessary at this point, for which I utilize the
conventional organizational typology known as ‘‘departmentalization.’’ ‘‘Depart-
ments’’ are parts of an organization formally distinct from other parts. The military
‘‘services’’ may be thought of as departments differentiated by a ‘‘product’’ specialty,
determined by the primary medium in which the service operates. Most militaries
recognize three services—army, navy, and air force—operating mainly on land, on
sea, or in the air, respectively. While the British military follows this three-service
departmentalization and treats the Royal Marines as a part of the RN (Royal Navy),
the U.S. military sometimes treats the USMC (United States Marine Corps) as a
fourth service, although the USMC remains formally subordinate to the Department
of the Navy. Other polities may recognize their nuclear, paramilitary, police, or coast
guard agencies as separate military services too.
By ‘‘units’’ I mean the functional departments of a military service. Units are
usually distinguished by scale. For instance, in most ground forces, units are known
(from macro to micro) as armies, corps, divisions, brigades, regiments, battalions,
companies, platoons, and squads/sections. Units can be distinguished also by their
combat or noncombat (‘‘service’’ and ‘‘support’’) functions. Combat and noncombat
units may be grouped together under command groups. Depending on the service,
these command groups are usually known as (air) groups, (land) armies and corps,
or (naval) fleets. Command groups are largely administrative and elastic, even tempo-
rary, so command groups are not meant to be included in my use of the word ‘‘unit.’’
Departments structured by geography may be used to group otherwise unrelated
services, command groups, or units. In the U.S. military, for instance, command
groups and units from more than one service are structurally grouped together
according to certain geographic regions, such as Central Command, which is respon-
sible for operations in and around the Middle East. These geographical departments
are not meant to be included in my use of ‘‘unit’’ either.
‘‘Structure’’ refers to formal patterns of relationships within the organization.
(‘‘Structure’’ is a word used frequently by international relations theorists in reference
to the international ‘‘distribution of power’’ or ‘‘system.’’ ‘‘Structure’’ is also used by
military scholars in debates over the proper relationships between civil and military
authorities or between full-time and reservist military personnel.) In structural terms,
‘‘centralization’’ means that primary responsibility for the management of a particular
resource lies with the overall organization rather than with the units within the
organization. ‘‘Decentralization’’ means that a resource is primarily managed by units
rather than the overall organization. One can refer to centralization or decentraliza-
tion in the context of a specific resource without implying that the management of
Combat Personnel Management 19
other resources is similarly structured. To describe the organization as centralized or

decentralized implies that while some resources may be managed by one ideal type,
most resources are managed by the other ideal type.
‘‘Process’’ refers to the formal procedures that managers actually use. There are
eight (almost chronological) personnel management processes identified later in this
chapter: recruitment, selection, training, assignment, replacement, rotation, promo-
tion, and socialization. Centralized systems centrally recruit potential personnel,
select the personnel they want, train them, assign them to units, rotate them between
units, replace their casualties with individual replacements, promote leaders, and
socialize personnel outside of their units. Decentralized systems allow units to do
all these things.
Organizational ‘‘culture’’ has no accepted meaning but is probably best understood
as an aggregate description of the dominant value and belief systems. Culture is not
always recognized but seems to be most important in providing congruence between
structure and process or by encouraging personnel to support the intended structure
and processes. While structure is often assumed to be most important, this would be a
poor assumption.1 Structure can incentivize or disincentivize certain processes and
cultures, which, in turn, can mold structure, but none determines the other, so the
perfect organization seeks congruence between all three. While organizational design
can seek to influence these latter variables, the influence is not perfect, nor is it
perfectly understood.2 Consequently, most organizations are likely to display incon-
gruence most of the time. For instance, the U.S. DOD (Department of Defense) is
often praised for its structural efficiency, but critics have claimed that the DOD’s
organizational behavior is less a function of its highly centralized formal structure
than its ill-defined processes and uncooperative organizational cultures.3 For such
critics, the DOD’s ‘‘formal organization has only a coincidental relationship with
how policy is actually made. . . .[W]hat really exists in the Defence Department
might be more accurately termed a form of ‘organized anarchy’ that inhibits efficiency
and increases the likelihood of failure.’’4
Decentralized Systems
Under a regimental system, a regiment is the familial, organizational, and geo-
graphic home for at least one battalion. These battalions are unlikely to serve together
operationally. Instead, they are usually assigned to different brigades, even though
they retain their regimental affiliations. Each battalion is normally referred to as
the ‘‘nth battalion, x regiment,’’ or simply ‘‘nth x,’’ where n is a number and x is a
name, such as ‘‘Royal Dragoons.’’ The British Army is the classic example of an extant
regimental system. Although in American English the word ‘‘regiment’’ is often used
interchangeably with ‘‘brigade’’ to mean an operational command for several battal-
ions, I use ‘‘regiment’’ in the British English sense of a familial home for one or more
battalions.
Regimental theories are inconsistent, perhaps in part because regimental systems
existed before they were theoretically described. Thus, regimental practices are best
20 Made, Not Born
conceived as equilibrium outcomes resulting from historical path-dependency rather

than theoretical evolution. For instance, the British Army’s regimental structure
has been traced back to the regional political autonomy of mediaeval England.5
Parliamentary Britain supported decentralized regiments because they competed
against each other, rather than Parliament, for financial resources and political favor.
Imperial policing rarely justified larger units anyway (although it did demand excep-
tional combat personnel).6 British military personnel management remains unusu-
ally decentralized today mainly because regimental traditions enjoy the protection
of the British electorate.7 Many other extant regimental systems have been inherited
from imperial Britain: Canada, India, Pakistan, Australia, and New Zealand are
the most notable examples. Some of these latter militaries have not resisted centrali-
zation as successfully as has the British military.
German regimentalism has its roots in feudal and later federal political decentrali-
zation.8 The Japanese army also had a feudal and federal heritage and was later influ-
enced by Imperial Germany’s military advisors. As for nineteenth-century America,
the scattering of U.S. Army regiments across many garrisons served to distribute the
economic benefits of military spending and assuage civilian antimilitarism.9
Regimental Theories
The earliest explicit regimental theories are only a century old, and they display
problems in articulation and coherence. However, what seems common to all regi-
mental theorists is an assumption that combat personnel capabilities are extrinsic
attributes associated with decentralized personnel management.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Colonel Henderson, sometime professor at
the British Army Staff College, provided perhaps the first coherent regimental theory,
although he codified many assumptions that had been around for centuries.
He began with the claim that ‘‘morale’’ best explains combat outcomes, a common
regimental assumption. In regimental theory, morale is often seen as a function of
‘‘discipline’’—sometimes the two are treated as inseparable. The main point of inter-
est for this study is that discipline and morale are treated as extrinsic resources.
Henderson directly criticized the belief that soldiers could rely on ‘‘inherent [intrin-
sic] aptitude,’’ and he went on to warn against ‘‘centralization.’’ Decentralized person-
nel management, Henderson wrote, was vital if regiments are to get the opportunity
to train and discipline their personnel. Henderson admitted that decentralization,
while good for extrinsic resources, was not so good for material resources, which are
more efficiently managed centrally. Henderson advised the British Army to centralize
logistics, as had the German Army in the decades preceding Henderson’s book,
without compromising decentralized personnel management, thereby, as he put it,
combining traditional British small unit ‘‘discipline’’ with German ‘‘efficiency.’’10
The leading British military psychologist of the interwar years, Frederic Bartlett,
agreed with Henderson that ‘‘morale’’ was central to military performance and that
extrinsic ‘‘discipline’’ was the best way to maintain it. Bartlett considered ‘‘small
groups,’’ ‘‘cohesive groups,’’ or ‘‘social organizations’’ characteristic of regimental

systems.11
Norman Copeland, writing during the Second World War as an officer in the
British Army, also referred to Henderson and presented an almost identical
argument: ‘‘morale’’ wins wars; ‘‘fear’’ suppresses combat motivations; ‘‘discipline’’
was the natural ‘‘antidote’’ to fear; and discipline was achieved through extrinsic
‘‘drill.’’ Copeland attacked the ‘‘dangerous fallacy’’ that intrinsic resources could be
used to predict military discipline or military skills, instead noting the importance
of extrinsic ‘‘group loyalty,’’ ‘‘team spirit,’’ and ‘‘collective purpose’’—all conditioned
by the unit.12
Similarly, Lord Moran, writing in 1945 but referring back to his First World War
experiences as a regimental doctor, argued that soldiers were motivated by extrinsic
‘‘willpower.’’ Moran did not mean anything intrinsic by ‘‘willpower,’’ even though
some intrinsic resource theorists have adopted Moran’s concept of ‘‘good character’’
(the intrinsic part of willpower) as the explanation for combat motivation.13 In fact,
Moran argued that intrinsic ‘‘good character’’ mattered less than the extrinsic ‘‘corpo-
rate’’ support provided by the regiment. Since willpower is only really tested by
combat itself, he argued, neither recruiters nor psychologists could adequately
observe intrinsic ‘‘good character’’ anyway. Instead, Moran observed, the individual
must rely on the regiment to provide a familial environment that extrinsically ‘‘props
up’’ willpower.14
Writing in the 1970s, Frank Richardson rejected any idea that morale (which he
also called ‘‘fighting spirit’’) could be intrinsic—he even thought Moran had over-
stated intrinsic morale.15 Richardson thought morale explains the ‘‘comradeship’’
(which he also called ‘‘esprit de corps’’ or ‘‘regimental spirit’’) of the ‘‘small group.’’
The small group, he believed, endures after ideologies and other temporary ‘‘props’’
have dissipated.
Regimental theories agree with primary group theories that enduring combat
motivations come from primary groups. The primary group is a contested concept
but was originally defined as the smallest, most intimate, and most motivated groups
in an organization.16 (See the section on primary groups in chapter 5.) Regimental
theories, which are older than primary group theories, generally refer to primary
groups simply as ‘‘small groups.’’ Some regimental and primary group theories come
to very similar conclusions about these small groups. For instance, the German
regimental theorist Elmar Dinter deduced that the smallest groups should be no
larger than three to five soldiers, 17 while the American primary group theorist
William Darryl Henderson came to an identical conclusion after observing the
Chinese and North Korean practice of three-person ‘‘cells.’’18 Nevertheless, primary
group theorists do not recognize all the benefits of decentralization noted by regimen-
tal theorists.19
Richardson noted some rarely articulated benefits of regimental systems, thereby
producing arguably the most sophisticated regimental theory to date. Richardson
observed that, under decentralized personnel management, the regiment gains
22 Made, Not Born
in-house control of the training, rotation, and replacement of small groups. Thus,
these small groups endure. Small groups, Richardson claimed, not only motivate
but also encourage mutual stress management and more sympathetic leadership.
Leaders are more likely to care for their group members; in turn, they are more likely
to be obeyed.20 This gives the unit more legitimacy to train personnel, so regimental
combat personnel tend to be highly skilled.21 In effect, Richardson was claiming that
regimental personnel are more motivated, more cohesive, less stressed, better led,
better trained, and more skilled soldiers than nonregimental personnel.
Regimental theories are clearly powerful explanations for combat personnel
capabilities and performance, but they are usually founded on personal experience
and they may lack a rigorous grounding in personnel management theory.
Therefore, regimental theories can look somewhat nebulous and difficult to put into
practice.
Centralized Systems
There are plenty of criticisms of regimental theories but few alternative theories.
The main alternative in practice might be best thought of as centralized, a system
associated particularly with the twentieth-century U.S. Army but increasingly
characteristic of other militaries over time. Most observers refer to the U.S. Army’s
personnel management system as the ‘‘individual replacement system’’ or IRS but
the U.S. Army itself does not seem to have created that term. Centralization is
the defining characteristic, and the U.S. Army itself has referred to its personnel
management as ‘‘centrally accomplished’’ according to ‘‘Centralized Assignment
Procedures.’’22 Hogan has referred to current U.S. military personnel management
as ‘‘centrally managed’’ with ‘‘a closed, hierarchical structure.’’23
The U.S. Army’s ‘‘Individual Replacement System’’

The strong incentives to centralize political control of the military, the manage-
ment of material resources, macro innovation, and military intelligence all help to
explain why combat personnel management may end up centralized too, despite
the strong arguments advanced by ‘‘regimental’’ theorists and others in favor of
decentralized combat personnel management. This section looks at the U.S. Army’s
IRS, the most influential centralized combat personnel management system, to
understand the arguments in favor of centralized personnel management.
Until the twentieth century the U.S. Army used a regimental system in which
personnel management was decentralized to ‘‘regiments,’’ widely scattered in discrete
garrisons, organized in geographical districts for field command purposes, but
otherwise decentralized. Even during the mass mobilization of the Civil War, many
regiments were formed around personnel recruited from contiguous districts, towns,
or even trades (depending on the peculiar liberty bestowed on certain regimental
entrepreneurs).
The ‘‘Root reforms’’ of 1903, named after then U.S. Secretary of War Elihu Root,
began the centralization of the U.S. Army’s personnel management. Explicitly, the
main objective was to eliminate the material inefficiencies of decentralization.
Indeed, centralization was referred to as ‘‘rationalization’’ or ‘‘unification’’ at the
time. Root was enamored with the ‘‘bureaucratic’’ or ‘‘scientific’’ management
theories emerging at that time in the United States, which have been critiqued for
treating human beings as parts of an organizational machine. The motivations of
personnel were assumed to reflect economic gain, while their skills were simplified
as far as possible for interchangeability (except at managerial levels). The theories
implied material efficiency without human cost. 24 The new efficiencies were
also supposed to enable more effective management of personnel by their intrinsic
attributes, some of which could be tested by new tests, such as intelligence quotient
tests, emerging around the time of the Root reforms.25
Centralization advanced further during Henry Stimson’s two tenures as Secretary
of War between 1911–13 and 1940–45, respectively. In 1913, a centralized replace-
ment system was introduced. When the United States entered the First World War in
1917, all U.S. conscripts were centrally recruited, trained, assigned, and replaced.
The formal end of the regimental system came in 1920, when the National Defense
Act legislated ‘‘units’’ not ‘‘regiments.’’ While the U.S. Army still uses the word
‘‘regiment’’ to describe each of the Ranger regiments, it means nothing other than
the brigade-level command for three Ranger ‘‘battalions,’’ although, given that there
are few Ranger battalions and all Ranger soldiers must complete a Ranger course, the
Ranger regiments could be seen as a traditional regimental subsystem within the
larger (centralized) IRS.
At least one U.S. officer lamented the decline of regimental personnel management
into the 1930s.26 Stimson characterized regimentalists as cantankerous traditional-
ists. Stimson, like Root, pointed out that centralized systems were more materially
efficient than regimental systems. Moreover, he claimed that centralized personnel
management was more effective, not just more efficient, because it allowed more
‘‘scientific’’ personnel selection by their intrinsic attributes. Stimson also claimed
larger social benefits. Centralized personnel management was ‘‘fair and democratic’’
relative to regimental parochialism. It used ‘‘short enlistments and a heavy turnover,
so that military skills might be diffused through an increasing proportion of the
population.’’27 By the time of Stimson’s second tenure as Secretary of War from
1940 to 1945, the U.S. military imagined that personnel management involved little
more than supply-and-demand. There was little recognition of the decentralized
alternative.28 U.S. military historians later portrayed this period of centralization as
a natural and cost-free evolution, taking advantage of new bureaucratic technology
and a reinforced spirit of ‘‘rationalization.’’29
Although criticism is far from normative, critics have raised plenty of criticisms of
the historical performance of the IRS. The predictive capacity of centralized
administration is poor, illustrated by the historical failure of ‘‘planned economies.’’
During war, belligerents tend to centralize—politically, economically, and
24 Made, Not Born
administratively—but predictive models of supply and demand face new uncertain-

ties during wartime. For example, the U.S. Army ran out of infantry toward
the end of 1944, having assigned too many personnel to technical arms. 30 At
the time, this situation was excused in terms of unexpectedly fierce German
resistance, but it actually reflected poor resource allocation much earlier. The
first infantry-replacement crisis occurred in late 1943, when 35,249 infantrymen
were stripped from divisions still in the United States and then reassigned as
replacements. Between April and September 1944, another 91,747 soldiers
were stripped from States-side divisions, equivalent to two-thirds of the divisions’
infantrymen.31
The U.S. Army’s other solution was to reclassify ‘‘service’’ personnel (logistical and
other noncombat technical specialists) as infantry replacements, without the time to
retrain them, with predictably disastrous results.32 One-third of all U.S. military
personnel mobilized for the Second World War never left the continental United
States. Civilian industrial workers, military service personnel, and military home
defense personnel remained overpopulated and overqualified throughout the war.33
Only one-quarter of Second World War U.S. ‘‘soldiers’’ were ever allocated combat
roles. The U.S. military had the largest logistical unit to combat unit (‘‘tail-to-
teeth’’) ratio of any Second World War belligerent.34 The U.S. logistical proportion
during the Cold War was also criticized for being too large—empirically, it was
much larger than the Soviet proportion.35 These problems are not unique to central-
ized systems. Britain also suffered from haphazard conscription and misallocation of
personnel during the Second World War. (The regimental system was not entirely to
blame, since Britain increasingly centralized its military personnel management,
beginning with centralized conscription in April 1939.) The point is that centralized
systems are often justified on the expectation of efficiencies that are not necessarily
realized.
Other criticisms of the IRS relate to poor cohesion, combat motivations, and stress
management. The IRS is accused of neglecting the group dynamics vital to group-
or unit-level outcomes. In the last few years, some former U.S. Army officers have
advocated structural reform of U.S. ground forces, for which they might advocate
some regimental features. Their advocacy is often credited with the U.S. Army’s
decision in 2003 to replace the IRS by ‘‘unit manning,’’ later renamed ‘‘force stabili-
zation,’’ a form of combat personnel management that might be considered some-
where in-between the IRS and a truly regimental system.36 The ‘‘force stabilization’’
system is supposed to stabilize troops in their combat units for three years at a time
before breaking the units down, allowing senior personnel to separate from the
service or take a promotion, before recreating the units with personnel assigned for
a new three-year period.
‘‘In-Between’’ Systems
In-between systems are rarer than either centralized or decentralized systems
historically.
Centralized Selection, Training, and Assignment
A typical in-between system does not stabilize troops within units for temporary
periods of time, as the U.S. Army’s force stabilization system is supposed to, but
instead decentralizes the management of personnel after their centralized selection,
training, and assignment. According to regimental theories, this sort of ‘‘in-
between’’ system might be most appropriate for the management of noncombat
personnel. Noncombat personnel can be centrally selected and assigned by their
intrinsic attributes, which are important to their noncombat roles. A centralized per-
sonnel system can select the most intrinsically qualified noncombat personnel, train
them, and then centrally assign them to whichever specialist position best calls for
their talents. For instance, military intelligence personnel need to be selected by their
analytical skills, while engineering personnel need to be selected by their aptitude for
engineering. Also, noncombat personnel can be centrally trained in their functional
or ‘‘trade’’ skills without much need for the extremely extrinsic skills or motivations
required of combat personnel. Nevertheless, after training, newly trained noncombat
personnel might be best assigned to a dedicated unit so that they can benefit from the
favorable group outcomes associated with long assignments to a single unit.
A rare but sophisticated criticism of decentralized personnel management systems
is that they overlook some of their personnel’s intrinsic attributes. Decentralized units
are relatively inattentive to testing by intrinsic attributes and unwilling to export their
most intrinsically qualified personnel. Regimental systems might attempt to get the
best of both worlds by skimming off the most intelligent or technically skilled recruits
before they join a regiment. For example, until conscription began in April 1939, the
only tests faced by British regimental recruits were a medical test and a regimental
interview. Some aptitude tests for select technical specialties were introduced in
1939 but were unable to supply all the ‘‘tradesmen’’ needed, so the British Army
introduced a crude intelligence test between 1941 and 1942 to skim off a relatively
intelligent minority of its conscripts for either noncombat ‘‘trades’’ or officer training.
Based on their test score, between July 1942 and May 1945 about 700,000 conscripts
were sent for six weeks basic training with the specially created ‘‘General Service
Corps.’’ Those few who failed to graduate as tradesmen or officers were assigned
to combat units. Individuals could also choose to volunteer for different services
and regiments before they were conscripted.37 Thus, during the Second World War
at least, British Army personnel management would be best described as an
in-between system rather than a regimental system.
The British Army now recruits using a mix of regimental and centralized recruiting
methods, the latter mainly for technical trades. Nevertheless, regiments can still inter-
fere with the proper management of noncombat personnel. For instance, the British
Army Intelligence Corps allows its regiments to do most of the selection, training,
and assignments, albeit within guidelines set down by the Corps. By contrast,
some quota of those U.S. Army recruits who score highly enough on their reasoning
intelligence and aptitude tests (some volunteerism is involved too) are sent from basic
training to the Military Intelligence Corps for military intelligence training.
26 Made, Not Born
Successful graduates are then assigned to individual military intelligence battalions.

From there, they will be sent to centralized schools for further regional and functional
training. In the process, they are expected to develop regional and functional special-
ties that may lead to reassignment to whichever battalions are most in need of those
skills. They may be sponsored through civilian academic courses. Academic qualifica-
tions can fast-track recruits into senior roles.
U.S. Army CA (Civil Affairs) personnel are a similar case. They are tasked with
managing the civilian environment during military operations. Such tasks include
coordinating military and civilian agencies, temporarily performing civilian trades,
and other forms of international development, as well as translating and advising
military agencies on the cultural context. Such tasks are most in demand during peace
operations. CA personnel are required to have extremely specialized knowledge-
based, noncombat skills that are in high demand in the civilian sector. The vast
majority (about 85%) of U.S. CA personnel are reservist, a status which allows them
to retain their civilian roles and assuages their intolerance of unnecessary military
duties. U.S. CA officers tend to be exceptional civilian professionals, such as industry
leaders, lawyers, and academics, all of whom are particularly difficult to retain, so they
are recruited laterally at exceptional ranks, such as Captain or even Major, even if they
have no previous military experience. By contrast, the British Army has never formed
CA units, although it recently created a CA Group to advise other units on CA.
Instead, regular British soldiers are expected to take on CA duties as required, a prac-
tice that is flexible but prevents specialization.
Post-Assignment Decentralization
In-between systems may be particularly attractive for the management of navy and
air force personnel, which include a larger proportion of noncombat specialists and
which do not require the same level of cohesion as ground combat units. For exam-
ple, in 1942 the British RAF (Royal Air Force) centralized all basic training and used
intelligence tests to assign specialists, although, after basic training, RAF specialists,
like Army specialists, were decentralized to their units. Similarly, the British RN gave
all sailors their basic training and trade training (if any) at new ashore training bases
(establishing one of them as an exclusive induction and selection center in February
1944). After basic or trade training, most British sailors continued their training on
their ship or at their ship’s dedicated home port. Their training was subject to some
centralized directives but mostly to the ship’s Captain and training officers.38 British
Royal Marines were recruited and trained in regional bases (one of which became the
main induction center in early 1941), from where some of them would be sent for
trade training, after which they were assigned to a ship or to a battalion.39
Cohesion theories and group theories of motivation suggest that long-term
assignment to a contiguous crew is important if crews are to work well together under
the stress of combat. For instance, the persistence displayed by Second World
War German submarine crews, even toward the end of the war when each mission
probabilistically ended in death (three-quarters of all crewmen would be killed), is
best attributed to the remarkable decentralization of their management. Once

assigned, a U-boot crew became the effective responsibility of the U-boot commander.
Together, each crew would train, fight, and then rest at special resorts before returning
to missions.
Most navies now rotate individual personnel between ships almost every time they
return to port, while most air forces post individual personnel to different bases every
few years (as do most armies now too). The military services contain increasingly
high proportions of noncombat personnel, of which many are knowledge-based by
the standards of civilian employment. This suggests that some increasing centraliza-
tion is appropriate. The appropriate balance is not, however, clear from either the
theory or the historical practice. The balance should become more apparent in the
following section, which explores personnel management processes.
Personnel Management Processes

What happens if the competing systems are examined within the context of the
eight main personnel management processes? These processes are explored sequen-
tially in the eight subsections below: recruitment, selection, training, assignments,
replacements, rotation, promotions, and socialization.
Recruitment and Corporatism

Recruitment is the process by which personnel choose to volunteer for, or are
made liable for, military service. Centralized systems recruit soldiers at the organiza-
tional level and then assign them to units later. Theoretically, centralized recruitment
encourages individualism, which may be useful for encouraging innovation. Central-
ized recruitment is certainly useful for noncombat personnel, especially knowledge-
based personnel in highly individualized roles, who switch units frequently accord-
ing to organizational needs and their personal aspirations. Critics claim that central-
ized recruitment is not so good for combat personnel, who require more corporatism
in order to trust and serve their unit in the most trying situations. Corporatism is
value-based commitment to an organization. Corporatism attracts, retains, and
motivates personnel. Centralized recruitment encourages individualism and disrupts
corporatism. Theoretically, organizations that manage their personnel at ever higher
organizational levels find it more and more difficult to assess and reward individual
talent or engender individual identification with the whole. The communication
and oversight burdens increase, as do the free-rider and moral-hazard problems.
Centralized systems may allow soldiers to choose their own branch of service, such
as the Infantry or Field Artillery, but branches may be too vertical in the organization
to engender much corporatism, still less cohesion. More importantly, cohesion
within a branch is of little importance compared to cohesion within combat units.
Soldiers from different branches are assigned to smaller units within divisions,
brigades, or even battalions. In combat, cohesion within and across these units is
more important than branch loyalty. In any case, recruit choices tend to favor the
28 Made, Not Born
least combat-intensive branches, leading to some of their choices being refused.

Some soldiers may be forcibly transferred to other branches after they have joined
a branch, particularly during mobilization for war. For instance, until the end of
1942, the U.S. Army allowed volunteers to choose their branch, but only 5% chose
the Infantry or the Armored Force, later necessitating many bitterly resented invol-
untary transfers.40 Most U.S. Army units have no heritage at all, having been formed
and disbanded according to fluctuations in projected numerical needs. The U.S.
Army’s Special Operations Forces and Airborne units, which are characterized by
contiguous histories and relatively low personnel turnover, have developed strong
unit-level traditions, but most U.S. Army units have not.41
Decentralized systems allow units to recruit personnel. Whereas recruits to the
U.S. Army join the U.S. Army before they join a unit, recruits to the British Army
usually must first secure interest from a regiment or ‘‘Corps.’’ Local recruiting gives
the unit a regional identity. Until the late 1950s, the RN and Royal Marines also
recruited and based their personnel on a regional basis.42 Decentralization allows
and encourages units to differentiate by adopting unique and often idiosyncratic
‘‘regimental traditions’’ of folklore, ceremony, dress, language, and behavior, which
sometimes date back hundreds of years. This differentiation develops ‘‘corporate
pride’’ or ‘‘corporatism.’’43 The German Army, despite its frequent recreations (from
imperial Heer through antirevolutionary Freikorps, Weimar Reichsheer, and Nazi
Wehrmacht to postwar Bundeswehr), has made its units heirs to traditions dating back
to imperial regiments.44 Even such a large organization as the USMC (United States
Marine Corps), which recruits more personnel than all the British services put
together, has preserved an elitist culture by preserving forms of address, marching,
and dress different to those used by the U.S. Army. This elitist corporatism is epito-
mized by the USMC recruiting slogan ‘‘the few, the proud, the Marines,’’ which
contrasts with the U.S. Army’s recruiting slogan ‘‘an army of one.’’
Regimental traditions clearly act as symbols of in-group corporatism. However,
how important in practice are symbols? It is difficult to know to what extent regimen-
tal traditions are symptoms or cause of regimental cohesion. Some observers believe
that the value of regimental traditions is overstated by regiments under threat of
disbandment or amalgamation.45 Regimental value systems are often overstated by
theorists too, who tend to ignore structure. For instance, Peter Dietz attributed regi-
mental cohesion to little more than the ‘‘rivalry of honour between the regiments.’’46
Two primary group theorists compared the U.S. military’s ‘‘industrial’’ approach to
the British military’s ‘‘gladiatorial’’ approach, identifying only a different cultural
‘‘ethos,’’ a conclusion that ignored structure.47 A decentralized structure is necessary
if not more important. Traditions are of little consequence after recruitment if selec-
tion, training, assignments, and replacements are not also decentralized.
Selection and Emotional Intelligence

Selection is the process by which some persons are chosen or rejected for service in
the organization. Decentralized selection allows volunteers to volunteer for units
directly, which helps develop loyalty to the unit. Autonomy in selection, albeit
ideally subject to some generalizable standards, gives regiments the opportunities
and incentives to interview recruits, allowing some assessment, however subjective,
of the recruit’s emotional intelligence and other cognitive and psychological attrib-
utes. These attributes are useful in stressful and intimate interpersonal situations
but are otherwise difficult to test. Decentralized selection also allows recruits to pass
seamlessly from selection to training in contiguous groups, which help members
develop their interpersonal relations and emotional intelligences. 48 The main
problem with decentralized selection is that regiments may abuse their authority in
order to unreasonably discriminate against certain types of recruits. Also, there
may be quality control problems if each unit is allowed to administer selection tests
itself.
Centralized systems select personnel centrally according to generalizable criteria,
such as intelligence, technical aptitude, or psychological stability, tests of which were
first introduced by the U.S. military. When the United States entered the First World
War, the availability of the new and largely American-developed ‘‘Intelligence Quo-
tient’’ (IQ) tests provided an opportunity for more accurate assessment of reasoning
intelligence. IQ tests were first practiced on U.S. Army recruits in 1917. Each recruit’s
IQ score was recorded on their ‘‘Qualification Card.’’ Qualification Cards were then
used to assign individuals to units, in order that each unit’s personnel would have
similar intelligence profiles. The test scores were used to assign individuals according
to five categories (‘‘classes’’) of intelligence. Of the five classes, class I recruits were the
main source of officer candidates, while classes II and III were the main source of
noncombat support personnel.49 In 1940, the U.S. Army (which then included the
Army Air Forces) created an ‘‘Army General Classification Test’’ based on the IQ test
of 1917. The U.S. Navy changed some terminology but used essentially the same test.
Of the five classes, soldiers in classes I and II were directed to Officer Candidate
Schools and would proceed further if admissions boards considered their civilian
education satisfactory.50 Class II and III recruits were selected for service support or
trade roles and were passed to combat units only if they failed ‘‘aptitude tests’’
or ‘‘trade tests’’ developed from the general classification test.51 Recruits with intelli-
gence test scores in classes IV and V were the main source of combat infantry person-
nel.52 In other words, the least intelligent soldiers were most likely to find themselves
in the most combat-intensive roles. While there is a lot of rhetoric about the impor-
tance of intelligent combat soldiers, especially given the increasing technological
sophistication required of them, the least intelligent soldiers still make their way into
the most combat-intensive roles.
Training and Combat Skills

Training is the process by which personnel are instructed in their skills. Under the
IRS, recruits are inducted at centralized induction centers and then sent to central-
ized training units for basic training.53 At the end of basic training, each individual
is assigned to a destination unit, a process which interrupts the groups formed
30 Made, Not Born
during training. Sometimes, this process can be brutal, as a Second World War U.S.
Marine poignantly remembers:
As the men moved out of ranks, there were quiet remarks of, ‘‘So long, see you, take it
easy.’’ We knew that many friendships were ending right there. [Drill instructor]
Doherty called out, ‘‘Eugene B. Sledge, 534559, full individual equipment and M1 rifle,
infantry, Camp Elliott.’’54
For one-third of U.S. soldiers recruited during the Second World War, their
destination unit after basic training was not a combat unit but a specialist training
unit, which would instruct them in a particular weapon or technical specialty. Such
specialist courses lasted about six weeks, after which the individual would pass to
another destination unit, which might be a combat unit but could be another train-
ing unit. Even after assignment to a combat unit, soldiers could still be sent to other
training units for further training, after which their new skills would often preclude
their return to the initial combat unit.55 Marine Sledge was lucky in that he was
assigned to a heavy weapons unit, which provided him with his heavy weapon train-
ing and then, crucially, retained him. By the time he finally entered combat, Marine
Sledge had been integrated into his unit: ‘‘The Marine Corps had trained us new
men until we were welded with the veterans into a thoroughly disciplined combat
division.’’56
Most soldiers in a centralized system are not so lucky. Frequent individual
reassignments cause unit ‘‘turnover.’’ At any point in time, some members of any
unit are always moving on to their next assigned unit, disrupting group-level training
and taking any acquired skills with them. Such turnover robs units of skilled person-
nel, interrupts ‘‘collective training,’’ and forces the unit to repeat training for their
replacements. Interdependent working relationships are most vulnerable, such as
relationships within command groups and within crews.57 For instance, one study
has found that the gunnery scores of U.S. Army tank crews declined over eight
months, an interval of time during which each crew experienced a 75% turnover
in personnel.58 Previous studies had found that individual experience was much
more important than stable relationships to tank crew performance, although the
unit of time was measured in weeks or a few months, which was probably an inad-
equate interval to show the benefits of stable relationships.59 Other studies have
observed wide variability in the ‘‘training proficiency’’ of U.S. Army units rotating
through the Combat Training Centers and have speculated that personnel turnover
might be one explanation.60
Reserve units are lucky that their soldiers usually return after their further train-
ing, while active units may lose newly trained soldiers to other units. Senior leaders
of reserve U.S. Army units contributing volunteer soldiers for a full-time peace-
keeping deployment reported (by survey) that the departures negatively impacted
their combat readiness and training; those leaders who had lost more troops reported
greater impacts. However, these same leaders reported that the returning soldiers
were better trained when they returned than when they had left.61
For their part, units should have little incentive to invest in soldiers who will
shortly leave the unit to move on to their next professional experience. Meanwhile,
soldiers are strongly incentivized to leave their units frequently to learn a new skill
or ‘‘military occupational specialty’’ (MOS)62 because of the rewards in pay or pro-
motion. Thus, the soldier may never really attune to any single MOS or unit. For
its part the combat unit can utilize only one or a few of each individual’s MOSs at
any time. An incentives system based on rank, length of service, and training
achievements seems to overvalue and retain the least valuable skills.
Rather than fix the problems of skill imbalances across the force, the one-size-fits-all
remedies may have exacerbated them by raising the incentives for people with the least
valuable skills to stay in the military well past the period when their low-tech contribu-
tions are most useful and their physical contributions at their peak, while falling well
short of expectations for those who have the most outside possibilities.63
In other words, ‘‘low-tech’’ skills concentrate at middle ranks where they are least
useful. The U.S. military is often criticized as more technologically adept than com-
bat skilled.64 Centralized training enables more efficient and more capital-intensive
training, which is most useful for developing noncombat skills, but, critics claim,
centralized training prevents continuous unit training, disrupts primary groups,
disincentivizes trainers and trainees, and disrupts field training.65 Combat skills are
a specialized skill set, with which narrow technical specialties may interfere.66 While
a centralized system dispenses a lot of technical knowledge, especially since central-
ized training permits more capital-intensive training, this may be at the expense of
combat skills, which demand long periods of field training with the unit.
Some historians claim that the U.S. Army showed inferior combat skills to the
German Army during the Second World War because the U.S. Army, entering the
war in 1941, had less time to train than an army that went to war in 1939 and
because U.S. soldiers ‘‘spent less time in basic training.’’67 Williamson Murray and
Mansoor note that U.S. rearmament began in June 1940, leaving the United States
only two and a half years of training before first fighting German troops. Both
historians compare the U.S. Army’s expansion during that period favorably with
the first two and a half years of German rearmament, which they date from early
1936.68 However, wartime rearmament cannot be fairly compared to peacetime
rearmament. In fact, the duration of wartime divisional training was heavily in favor
of U.S. divisions, the majority of which spent at least two years in stateside camps
before shipping overseas, while most of their opposing German divisions spent only
a few months in training.69 Moreover, the duration of basic training was initially
thirteen weeks for both U.S. and German soldiers; U.S. Army basic training even
lengthened to seventeen weeks during the war, before the infantry crisis of summer
1944; German basic training declined in duration during the war. By British
standards, thirteen weeks was long; British Army soldiers and Royal Marines
received just six weeks (eight weeks for Royal Marines from May 1943 onwards)
basic training.70
32 Made, Not Born
Duration of training seems to matter less than quality, and quality seems to be
encouraged by decentralization. Under regimental systems, regiments train and
assign contiguous groups in-house. Sometimes, whole battalions are created to
replace depleted battalions from the same regiment. This practice is possible on a
large scale, albeit managerially challenging. For instance, the German Army of the
Second World War was organized into a field army and a replacement army. Field
divisions and replacement units were spread across military districts (Wehrkeise), so
that each field division was supplied with personnel from a dedicated replacement
unit. After basic training in the Wehrkeise, personnel were sent to a field replacement
battalion behind the frontlines but near the field division. Personnel would receive
further training with the field replacement battalion, which usually included a train-
ing cadre from the division, thereby incentivizing instructors to produce the best
personnel for their parent unit. One historian has claimed that the Second World
War German Army training displayed a bias toward field training when compared to
U.S. Army training, whose instructors tended toward more classroom instruction and
tended to find rigor in false directions, such as pointless verbal abuse.71 Personnel in
the German field replacement battalion were organized into three companies, each
affiliated with one of the field division’s three regiments.72 The transfer of contiguous
trainee groups, even whole battalions, from training to combat, preserved groups and
disincentivized trainees from leaving the unit for more specialist training.73
By contrast, British wartime decision-makers abandoned regimental training in
favor of increasingly centralized training. David French has criticized the British reg-
imental practice of delegating training responsibilities to unit leaders, claiming that
the practice allowed too much diversity in training and interfered with doctrinal
standardization. However, he also found that the British had no standard doctrine
because they had no doctrinal or training center and that British doctrine was flawed
anyway.74 In this case, standardization would lead to inferior training. A qualitative
review suggests that the centralization of British training did little for its quality.
Unit leaders should be best motivated to train their soldiers effectively and best
placed to decide how and what to train. British home training was increasingly cen-
tralized during the war at the divisional, corps, and even regional level, but was less
realistic than German training, favoring theoretical exercises, one-sided and scripted
scenarios, internally appointed umpires, and heavy weapons and firepower over
minor tactics.75 Under a centrally assigned defensive doctrine, members of the British
Expeditionary Force spent most of their time during the ‘‘Phoney War’’ (September
1939 to May 1940) practicing the construction of defensive positions, ignorant of
lessons gathered from in-country observation of the invasion of Poland.76 During
the eighteen months or so after the evacuation from France, home training did
become more realistic, but the Army still spent most of its time preparing defensive
positions and working on agricultural and industrial tasks. As training was increas-
ingly centralized, many of the positive innovations by combat-experienced training
officers at the unit level were interrupted. In March 1941, infantry regiments lost
their independent training centers; instead, one training center would serve several
regiments, with no more than twenty-five infantry training centers allowed.77 From
July 1942 onwards, British conscripts spent their first six weeks with the new General
Training Corps. After aptitude tests, they would be assigned to ‘‘training regiments’’
(later ‘‘primary training centers’’) administered by a ‘‘branch,’’ ‘‘arm,’’ or ‘‘corps,’’ such
as the Royal Armoured Corps or Infantry branch. After their trade training of
between sixteen weeks (infantry) and thirty weeks (signals), they might be assigned
to a field unit or to one of three Reserve Divisions, first created in December 1942,
where they received five weeks of section, platoon, and company training. Even after
assignment to a field unit, they still might be sent to divisional, corps, and regional
schools for further training.78 Increasing numbers of corps schools (from late 1940)
and divisional schools (from July 1941), as well as the School of Infantry (established
July 1942), provided more tactical training opportunities, but at the expense of
battalion training. Moreover, their ‘‘battle drills’’ proved to be stylized and regressive
and would be phased out by November 1944.79 The rush to send combat personnel
to the front encouraged abbreviated training and the breakup of trained units so that
their personnel could be transferred to depleted units. While some experienced units
improved their tactics during the war, the increasing centralization of training did not
help because centralized training centers were tasked with training inferior skills.
Combined arms skills were most obviously lacking.80
Additionally, the frequent reassignment of personnel from one branch to another
and the frequent conversion of units to different roles interfered with training and
the accumulation of knowledge. The Army’s rapid centralized expansion, most rapid
between June 1940 and 1943, caused frequent reassignment, which interfered with
training. Another solution to prior misallocation of personnel was unit conversion.
Between June and August 1940, 122 new infantry battalions were raised from new
recruits. In the subsequent two years, as new equipment became available, many of
these units were converted into tank and artillery units. (Artillery personnel would
eventually outnumber infantry personnel.) Both the cavalry division and the Guards
infantry division were converted into armored divisions. These conversions wasted
prior skills. Like the U.S. Field Artillery, the Royal Artillery was spared much of this
turbulence and enjoyed a positive reputation. British armor and infantry, subject to
most of the turbulence, did not. For instance, 2nd Armoured Division was destroyed
during its first engagement (March–April 1941) and never reformed, in part because
it had never trained as a division, although weak commanders and shortages of trans-
port are also blamed.81 When British forces invaded Normandy in 1944, after nearly
five years of war, three of the four armored divisions and five of the seven tank
brigades involved had never fought before as contiguous units.82
Training has been increasingly centralized since the Second World War on the
grounds of efficiency. Efficiency justified the centralization during the 1950s of the
Pakistani Army’s training, which previously had been decentralized to regiments.83
In the late 1950s, the RN and Royal Marines also centralized their training.84
In 2001, the Infantry arm was the last branch of the British Army to see its training
centralized to ‘‘training regiments.’’
34 Made, Not Born
Decentralized training is somewhat conditional on decentralized assignments,

which are discussed in the next section.
Assignments and the Formation of Group Bonds

Assignment is the process by which personnel are placed in specific roles. Under a
centralized system, graduates of basic training schools are assigned to whichever units
are short of personnel. A centralized system forms new units by assigning recent
graduates of different basic training schools to a new location and unit designation
or by skimming off some proportion of each established unit, which only creates
incentives for the established units to get rid of their worst soldiers. Centralized
assignments allow the organization to respond quickly to supply and demand and
to manage knowledge-based personnel with comparatively individualized profiles.
However, individualized assignment normally destroys groups formed during train-
ing, which are important to the formation of group bonds between combat person-
nel in particular.
Under a centralized system, assignment to a unit rarely lasts long. Even in peace-
time, a centralized system normally reassigns personnel to different units at fairly
regular intervals. Sometimes this occurs after personnel have acquired new skills,
which qualify them for new positions. Even if the soldier has not received any new
training, a soldier is typically reassigned to another unit after a certain period of
time, perhaps because the soldier is assumed to have learnt new skills on-the-job or
because the organization wants to avoid job stagnation. The U.S. Army calls this sort
of turnover ‘‘job change.’’ During job change, most individuals depart for another
position, usually in another unit, and they take their skills with them. Their skills
will include not just taught skills, such as trade skills, which may be perfectly
replaced by their replacements, but also acquired situational and contextual skills,
such as cumulative experience, institutional memory, and interpersonal skills with
particular coworkers, skills which their replacements will take time to acquire.
Second World War U.S. Army soldiers, even after assignment to a division, were
still subject to reassignment whenever the centralized system adjusted for attrition
or reorganization. For instance, until the end of 1942, the U.S. Army allowed volun-
teers to choose their branch, but only 5% chose the Infantry or the Armored Force,
later necessitating many bitterly resented involuntary transfers.85 Early in the mobi-
lization period, existing divisions were combed for individuals who had scored
highly on the Army General Classification Test so as to supply the burgeoning
demand for noncombat personnel and officers. Selected individuals were unlikely
to be returned to the same unit. Divisions that were perceived to have mobilized
either fast or well were likely to be broken down into cadres for new divisions.
Instead of being treated as training cadres that would lead their trainees into combat,
these cadres were diluted with officers and NCOs straight from their own leadership
training, while the personnel they trained were often reassigned to other units in
order to equalize training levels across divisions. Late in the mobilization period,
divisions might lose all their personnel to the ‘‘[individual] replacement pool’’ in
order to replace the casualties of divisions already in combat. Some divisions were
broken up even after they had been deployed overseas. Some historians find signifi-
cance in the fact that the few U.S. divisions created between the earlier and the later
periods of mobilization, and which thus enjoyed the most continuity in personnel,
had the best combat records. They also note that the Field Artillery, one branch
of the U.S. Army whose excellence is acknowledged, also avoided most of the decon-
struction and reconstruction of units. 86 The Soviet (‘‘Red’’) Army also made
up shortages of personnel by transferring personnel from different branches or by
amalgamating depleted units.87
By contrast, a regimental system allows existing regiments to form new units
around a training cadre that will retain the personnel trained, which creates incen-
tives for the new and existing units to cooperate.88 Subsequent attrition is replaced
by groups created by the regiment through its regular cycles of recruitment and
training. Usually, the same group passes through selection, training, and combat
assignment. These practices preserve the groups created when recruits first enter
the system and allow the unit to transfer recruits in contiguous groups from recruit-
ment through to combat.
During the Second World War, British regimental assignments were abandoned
in favor of more centralized assignments. Britons were also allowed to volunteer
for a service before being conscripted and to indicate their preference after being
conscripted; they preferred the RAF and the RN before the Army. Based on its
own military priorities, the government also allocated conscripts to the Army
last. Consequently, the RN and RAF were considered overpopulated, at least by
the time the government’s emphasis shifted to ground offensives in 1943. The two
services were able to be more selective than the Army, so they tended to induct
the most desirable recruits. The government, however, reacted slowly. Late in
1944, the government ordered the Navy and Air Force to transfer some personnel
to the Army, but both services prevaricated and transferred the least desirable
individuals.89
Meanwhile, the British Army itself had over-allocated personnel to certain arms or
regiments, especially noncombat units, necessitating several rounds of intra-Army
reallocation. Reallocation never completely made up for earlier misallocation.
The Army’s combat units remained underpopulated but contained a disproportion-
ate share of the least athletic, educated, and intelligent conscripts.90
Group bonds are preserved after the beginning of combat by decentralized
replacement of groups, as discussed in the next section.
Replacements and the Preservation of Group Bonds

Replacement is the process by which incapacitated personnel are replaced by new
personnel. Centralized replacement of individual replacements is materially efficient
and should be most useful for replacing knowledge-based personnel in individual-
ized roles. Decentralized replacement of depleted groups by replacement groups pre-
serves those groups and allows existing members of the depleted group to bond with
36 Made, Not Born
their new additions before their return to combat, but is not so good at replacing
individuals with exceptional intrinsic attributes.
Just before the First World War, the U.S. Army decided to replace individual
casualties from an individual replacement pool. The Soviets adopted a similar policy
during the Second World War, when replacements were trained at the level of the
numbered Armies (each Army controlling several Corps).91 Upon induction, some
U.S. Army recruits were sent to basic training with Replacement Training Centers.
Then they would be transferred to holding stations in the continental United States.
From there they would be sent to holding stations in theater. Incrementally, they
would be shunted closer to their eventual assignment to a combat unit. Several
months typically elapsed between the end of training and the eventual assignment
to a combat unit. At all times, each replacement was reassigned as an individual,
which meant that he might be a stranger to everyone else around him at every new
assignment. His physical conditioning and military skills naturally atrophied during
the interval.
Individual replacements seem to disrupt the unit’s existing group bonds and inter-
fere with the formation of new ones. IRSs matter less when combat units have plenty
of time to collate their individual replacements and establish new groups. This time
would have been available if the U.S. Army had practiced unit rotation (described
in the next subsection), in which units are rotated out of the line for refit. During
the Second World War, however, the U.S. Army never planned unit rotation and
had not mobilized enough frontline divisions to practice unit rotation anyway.
U.S. divisions simply stayed in the frontline for the duration of the war, constantly
receiving replacements to replace their casualties. The U.S. Army trained about
2.67 million enlisted replacements during the period of U.S. involvement in the
Second World War, a figure equivalent to twice the number of soldiers assigned to
the eighty-nine combat divisions mobilized by the end of the war.92 Second World
War U.S. infantry divisions typically suffered 100% cumulative casualties every six
months.93 The almost daily receipt of individual replacements meant that combat
units were quickly composed of strangers.94 Meanwhile, individual replacements
seem to suffer psychologically for being strangers to their units. The unit’s veterans
may exclude the replacements, assign them the most dangerous duties, and take no
interest in their further training.95 In such cases, the replacements cannot fully attune
to their new groups. Misattunement causes stress and indecisiveness. Even if these
replacements physically survived such conditions, they were more likely to break
down psychologically.96 As the war progressed, some units learnt to assign replace-
ments to subordinate units at rest, if possible, but the U.S. Army had established no
policy for the receipt of replacements. Ethnic segregation was the only reason for the
U.S. Army to replace groups rather than individuals: during the infantry shortage of
March 1945, some infantry divisions received all-black platoons formed from service
troops, while whites continued to be replaced as individuals.97
The earliest official recognition of the U.S. Army replacement system’s problems
seems to have come in a report by a special research team of five civilian psychiatrists,
who conducted unsystematic research on U.S. troops in Europe in May 1945.98

Survey data were published subsequently, in 1949, which showed that units with
the longest combat service had the highest levels of anxiety, while individuals with
the least combat service had the most psychiatric problems. The latter population
was skewed by psychological breakdown amongst recent replacements.99 Similarly,
those reserve Israeli armored personnel who had been sent hurriedly to the front in
crews formed from strangers suffered higher psychiatric casualties than regular tank
crews.100 General Eisenhower (Supreme Allied Commander Europe, 1944–45)
excused the American data by claiming that ‘‘efficiency demands’’ the replacement
of soldiers as individuals whenever personnel needs are ‘‘acute.’’ 101 However,
the U.S. military established its IRS three decades earlier during peacetime, when
personnel needs were definitely not acute.
The IRS damages the unit’s cumulative experience. For instance, some observers
believe that during the Korean War, the Chinese and North Koreans were able to
repeat the same relatively simple tactical traps because each U.S. unit’s experience
of the previous iteration was lost as personnel were replaced.102 On the other hand,
some observers of peacekeeping operations have concluded that when units rotate
‘‘each newly arriving unit must relearn the lessons of the past.’’103 However, individ-
ual rotation occurs much more frequently than unit rotation: individual rotation
causes the unit to constantly leech experience, while unit rotation causes infrequent
fluctuations in experience. The common regimental practice of assigning the
replacement unit’s leaders to shadow the deployed unit’s leaders, just before the
handover, helps to transfer experience.
Since the Vietnam War, the U.S. military has temporarily ‘‘stabilized’’ unit person-
nel before the unit’s deployment to major combat operations, such as the Gulf War in
1991, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and has
rotated units, rather than individuals, into and out of the theater. The duration of the
typical stabilization period before deployment is three to six months. Units are less
likely to be stabilized before deployment on peace operations, which are usually
not considered combat intensive enough to warrant unit stabilization. For instance,
35–40% of soldiers in units scheduled for deployment to Bosnia in 1995 were
considered nondeployable because their individual tours would end before the unit’s
deployment would end. Therefore, those soldiers did not deploy and were replaced
by individual replacements.104
Some field research suggests that turnover does not affect unit cohesion or perfor-
mance, in which case unit stabilization would not be necessary. However, these
studies have examined units deploying on peace operations, which may not be of suf-
ficient intensity to fully test the unit’s cohesion or performance. Guy Siebold studied
a U.S. Army battalion formed from volunteer reserve and active component soldiers
three months before the battalion’s deployment on peacekeeping duties to the Sinai in
the 1980s and concluded that cohesion and performance were not affected by the
formation of the unit from strangers. Cohesion and motivation declined steadily
during the deployment even though personnel turbulence was ‘‘low,’’ suggesting that
38 Made, Not Born
individual replacements did not cause the cohesion and motivation problems. How-
ever, the Sinai deployment was a peace operation that did not involve any hostile
activity at all.105 Nevertheless, Bartone and Adler would agree with Siebold. They
found that the cohesion of a medical task force deployed to a peace operation fluctu-
ated over time. They blamed various ‘‘unit climate’’ variables, including ‘‘stressful
events or situations.’’106 However, the unit under study was a noncombat unit, which
may be less concerned with cohesion than a combat unit would be. Moreover, Bar-
tone and Adler did not control for individual replacements. The unit under study
was stabilized only one month before deployment; ‘‘about 10%’’ of personnel left
the unit before the end of the deployment. Bartone and Adler claimed that ‘‘most’’
were not replaced and thus they assumed that the unit was stable. However, Bartone
and Adler’s final (third) survey surveyed only 81 persons, while the first survey sur-
veyed 188 persons. Since Bartone and Adler did not track individual respondents,
they had no way of telling whether the same individuals were being surveyed by each
survey. Consequently, they admitted that survey attrition had caused selection bias.
As described under the subsection on training, in the modern era the German
Army consisted of a field army and a replacement army. The replacement army con-
tained the training divisions, which would train whole replacement battalions to
replace depleted battalions in their parent combat divisions. The field replacement
battalion could be rotated whole with a depleted battalion and could form the basis
for a regenerated division in case the division was critically depleted. The field
replacement battalion could be used to rehabilitate the wounded too.107
Nondivisional battalions, regiments, and brigades, such as the heavy tank and anti-
tank units, received personnel from replacement and training units organized by their
branch. Some of these units trained their own replacement pool. For instance, while
preparing for the Allied invasion of France, one antitank unit trained 10% more per-
sonnel than were authorized, returning the extra 10% to the antitank replacement
battalion on the expectation that the combat unit would draw on these replacements
first.108 When replacement battalions were unavailable in the field, German practice
was to amalgamate several depleted combat units into a new expedient unit (usually
designated eine Kampfgruppe, literally ‘‘a fighting unit,’’ also used to designate any
temporary tactical grouping of units), thereby reducing the number of units but pre-
serving group bonds. As a further measure, service units could be used as combat
units, but not as a pool of individual replacements, as the U.S. Army used them.109
For instance, ahead of the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944, one armored battal-
ion set aside weekly training in combat skills for the personnel of its maintenance
company.110
In general, German divisions stayed in the frontline until they were depleted, after
which they were reconstituted. As in the British case, the best German divisions
stayed in the frontline the longest. The practice preserved group bonds and discour-
aged the assignment of inexperienced individual replacements to combat alongside
strangers. However, some individual replacements were received, particularly of
officers and personnel with rare skills, such as mechanics. Increasing political
interference in personnel management and in force employment sometimes

confused the traditional unit-level replacement system and led to the assignment of
masses of replacements from various sources unrelated to the destination unit. The
story of SS Totenkopfdivision (Death’s Head Division) is unusually well documented,
predates the war, lasts its entire length, and illustrates a mix of formal unit-level
replacement with occasional emergency replacement on a more individual basis.
When formed in October 1939, each of the three regiments in the SS Totenkopfdi-
vision was associated with a dedicated replacement battalion and each of the regi-
ment’s battalions was associated with one of the replacement battalion’s companies.
Reserve Totenkopf units were designated as replacement units. Replacements were
gathered in divisional training units before assignment. In August 1940, a new Waffen
SS personnel command broke the direct link between the division and its reserve and
replacement units, motivated in part by the division’s illegal hoarding of the best men
and equipment. In June 1941, the division was permitted to form its own reserve
infantry battalion of three fully motorized companies, each taken from one of the
infantry regiments, which was intended to receive replacements and rotate with
frontline battalions. However, the invasion of the Soviet Union the same month
prevented this praiseworthy system from working as planned. Just days before the
invasion, more than 900 replacements arrived from five separate SS replacement units
and were absorbed by frontline battalions. The replacements received by the division
during the fighting are probably best described as individual. The divisional com-
mander complained in November 1941 that the replacements, being poorly trained
and inexperienced, were likely to become casualties before they could be properly
absorbed. Thus, he continued, they were weakening, rather than strengthening, his
division. Hitler’s no-retreat order in the face of the Soviet counteroffensive of January
1942 perpetuated the situation. Occasionally, the division received individual
replacements, many trained without the division’s own replacement units, but none
of the division’s frontline units were rotated out of the frontline during its eighteen
months on the frontline. Instead, in May 1942, the formation of a new SS Totenkopf-
division was begun in France. In October 1942, the existing division, with just 20%
of its fighting strength remaining, was withdrawn to France too. Most of the new
troops came from without the division’s own replacement system, although some
were transferred as contiguous reserve or replacement units. Fortunately for the
replacements, the long period of reconstitution allowed their integration and train-
ing. Three-quarters of the new troops arrived with only basic training, but the veter-
ans provided expert training. The reconstituted division was subsequently employed
on the Eastern Front almost continuously from February 1943 through May 1945.
The division enjoyed brief periods (measured in days) of rest when in transit to a
new sector of the front. The most consequential period of rest occurred during May
and June 1944, when Soviet attacks ceased and the division received 6,000 replace-
ments, some of them former divisional soldiers returning from convalescence.111
Traditionally, at least during peacetime, a British home battalion would replace a
battalion overseas. However, the British Army failed to maintain its regimental
40 Made, Not Born
replacement system during the Second World War. Whereas the German division
was responsible for finding replacements, at first the British regiment remained
responsible; this lower level of responsibility seems to have been less practical during
large wars. Due to shipping constraints, the government’s decision to keep experi-
enced units at the front, and the over-allocation of personnel to the RAF and
RN and to the Army’s technical arms, the British Army’s newly created battalions
were often assigned to divisions at home rather than as replacements for depleted
battalions in the field. In March 1941, infantry battalions no longer received replace-
ments from their regimental training centers. Instead, several regiments now received
their replacements from a shared training center. In 1943, shortages of infantry and
continued misallocation reduced the number of replacements received by an infantry
regiment from its associated training center.112 After July 1942, deployed units usu-
ally received their replacements from the General Service Corps (a new organization
for training conscripts) rather than from their regiment.113
By then, the British Army was in the worst of both worlds. Despite the avowed
intent to keep experienced units at the front, steady attrition without unit rotation
and rebuild was destroying experienced units. These units were steadily depleted
until amalgamated or disbanded, when they were replaced by inexperienced units
from home. A total of fifty-nine British divisions were in being at some point during
the Second World War, but twenty-seven of them would be disbanded. Six of
the eleven nominal armored divisions were disbanded before the end of the war.
Additionally, of eleven independent tank brigades created during the war, two were
disbanded. Even surviving units were subject to cannibalization and reformation,
with many divisions breaking up the odd battalion or brigade in order to bring other
units within the division up to strength.114 During the campaign in Egypt and Libya
from 1940 through 1942, at least twenty divisions were deployed, of which only four
fought in more than two battles. 7th Armoured Division received seventeen different
armored battalions and nine infantry battalions; 5th Indian Division received
twenty-three changes of brigade during just one month. This unit turbulence robbed
the British Army of some of its hard-won experience.115
Even after 1942, when Britain faced no real shipping shortage, the British Army
continued to be short of trained combat units, especially infantry units, in the front-
line, despite being oversupplied with support units. Disbandment of frontline units
in response to the infantry crisis began as early as March 1944 and accelerated during
the Normandy campaign (6 June to 28 August 1944), when each division lost on
average three-quarters of its infantrymen, including officers. During this period, over
100,000 infantrymen (as many as had been assigned as replacements to frontline
units in Normandy) were still based in the United Kingdom—unassigned to combat
units, in part because they were considered undertrained, although Carlo D’Este
speculated that British politicians were trying to minimize casualties.116 In the front-
line, a depleted unit would be disbanded and its personnel sent to another depleted
unit. The new personnel needed time to assimilate before the unit went into action,
but this time was not always available. If possible, battalions from the same regiment
serving in the same theater were amalgamated, but fellow regimental battalions
were not always serving in the same theater. In any case, battalions from the same
regiment did not necessarily share anything else in common. Some divisional
commanders preserved platoons from disbanded battalions, but this practice was
probably not general. Instead, most soldiers from disbanded units were probably
reassigned as individual replacements.117 The British also suffered shortages of tank
personnel. In July 1944, all armored antiaircraft units were disbanded and their per-
sonnel reassigned as tank crew replacements. An Armoured Brigade was disbanded
on July 30th, followed by two armored regiments, while another regiment’s two
armored battalions were amalgamated.118
Since the end of conscription in 1960, the British Army has returned to unit
replacement, even expecting noncombat units to serve in combat when necessary.
For instance, Britain has fought terrorism in Northern Ireland by rotating noncom-
bat units through the province as infantry.119 Decentralized unit rotation practices
are discussed in the next subsection.
Rotation and Stress Management

Rotation is the process by which personnel are returned home for rest or reward.
Centralized systems and decentralized systems have very different approaches to
stress management. Centralized systems attempt to centrally select out those psycho-
logically predisposed to stress and to rotate individuals on individual tours of duty
before they psychologically collapse. By contrast, decentralized systems are less
concerned with selecting ‘‘psychologically stable’’ individuals. Instead, decentralized
systems attempt to build functional small groups that can manage their own stress
internally. Decentralized systems also rotate units, not individuals. Unit rotation
tends to be more frequent than individual rotation and preserves the group.
Centralized systems use an individual rotation system, which removes the individ-
ual from combat stressors before some presumed threshold of stress is breached.
One problem is the one-size-fits-all threshold for very personal reactions. Another
problem is that thresholds do not manage stress; they are supposed to avoid the accu-
mulation of a critical level of stress, but this may be unrealistic unless the threshold is
set impractically low. One strategy for defining the stress threshold is simply to wait
for the individual to display symptoms, but this strategy is reactive, not proactive.
Another strategy is to define the threshold in terms of time or missions. Such gener-
alized thresholds are usually called ‘‘tours of duty.’’ Individual tours of duty began
in 1943, when U.S. bomber crews and, later, British bomber crews were returned
home after a limited ‘‘tour of duty’’—defined by some number of combat missions.
A tour of duty for U.S. ground troops was set up in early 1944. It used a ‘‘point
system’’ to rotate individual soldiers back to the United States for good if they had
accumulated an aggregate number of points based on duration of service, wounds,
and awards.120 The U.S. Army retained this form of tour of duty through the Korean
War. The threshold adopted as the ‘‘tour of duty’’ during the Vietnam War was one
42 Made, Not Born
year ‘‘in theater’’ for most soldiers or just six months for most commanders. The U.S.
Army believed that such a short tour motivated the soldier toward a ‘‘goal,’’ shared the
burden, distributed experience, and mitigated exhaustion. In fact, the short tour
damaged unit morale and discipline, discouraged self-development and cultural
literacy, encouraged counterproductive short-term performance incentives such as
‘‘body count’’ inflation, and interfered with the accumulation of experience and
learning in theater.121
Tours of duty are egalitarian but they do not manage stress. Instead, the soldier
accumulates stress during their tour of duty, while the organization hopes that the
soldier does not break down before the end of the tour of duty. Yet stress accumula-
tion is much more rapid than most tours of duty. For instance, the Second World War
U.S. Army expected its soldiers to withstand 200–240 days of combat. Swank and
Marchand observed that U.S. soldiers fighting in Normandy in 1944 started to
display ‘‘combat exhaustion’’ at around the twenty-eighth day of continuous combat.
By the sixtieth day of combat, 98% of surviving soldiers had become psychiatric
casualties.122 Swank and Marchand observed the first signs of combat exhaustion
after only twenty or so days of continuous combat. The period of ‘‘maximum effi-
ciency’’ for the soldier was even shorter—only ten days or so. Swank and Marchand
believed that new soldiers, due to their inexperience, spent the first ten days or so
unaware of the considerable risks of combat. Their naivety limited their stress but
could encourage them to take unnecessary risks. The IRS exacerbated the individual’s
vulnerability at the beginning of their experience by assigning individual ‘‘replace-
ments’’ to a depleted unit while that unit was still in combat. Some observers claim
that casualties among inexperienced troops account for three-quarters of all psychiat-
ric casualties.123 Large-N study blamed U.S. psychiatric casualties of the Second
World War on an ‘‘organizational policy’’ that failed to manage their stress.124
While tours of duty are often assumed to encourage soldiers to complete their
tour, tours of duty seem to interfere with their motivations and skills. Soldiers
behave cautiously at the beginning of their tours as they adjust to an alien environ-
ment amongst strangers. Even as they gain experience and draw on friends, their
conscious countdown to the end of the tour encourages more caution, especially
after the halfway point, which was known colloquially during the Vietnam War as
going ‘‘over the hump’’ or becoming ‘‘short,’’ as recalled by a veteran:
The problem that it caused was that it took six months for the typical American recruit
just to attain the level of confidence and proficiency necessary to make him an effective
combat soldier. Just when he had reached this highly tuned degree of efficiency, he went
‘‘over the hump.’’. . .He was only trying to stay alive, to survive the end of his tour and
go home. When he had finally attained the skills and had acquired the experience to get
the job done, the motivation was gone.125
The individual tour of duty appears to be less effective at stress management than
is the regimental practice of rotating units out of combat for rest. The rotation of
groups into and out of combat iterates periods of combat stress, preserves group
stress management, and preserves the unit’s institutional memory and accumulated
knowledge. Psychological collapse can be prevented, or at least delayed, if the total
exposure to stress is broken down into iterated periods of exposure punctuated by
periods of rest away from the stressors. Decentralization provides incentives and
opportunities for frequent group or unit rotation.
Neither the Germans nor the British attempted to select out the psychologically
‘‘unstable,’’ as did the U.S. Army. Instead, they emphasized cohesion, leadership,
and unit rotation as solutions to combat stress. During the First World War, British
regiments were rotated out of the forward trenches every few days. Stress casualties
were initially more likely to find themselves sent home to Britain for ‘‘convales-
cence.’’ In 1916, forward treatment centers were established close to the trenches
in order to return soldiers to their units quicker. During the Second World War,
British soldiers were typically rotated out of combat every twelve days, with stress
casualties being treated by local medical staff.126 Fortunately, such rotation was most
frequent at the lowest levels, although opportunities to rotate units larger than the
brigade or to rotate units out of theater were less during the war than they had been
in peacetime. While the peacetime British Army had rotated battalions (most
frequently), brigades, and divisions (less frequently) between overseas and home
stations, it could not do the same during the Second World War because of shipping
restrictions and the government’s desire to keep experienced units at the front while
training new units at home (few of which ever made their way to the front). Conse-
quently, rotation was limited largely to the battalion level and probably did not reach
above the brigade level. A battalion might rotate one company out of the line at a
time, while a brigade might rotate a battalion and a division might rotate a brigade.
Units larger than brigades do not seem to have been rotated at all, although in late
1943 two divisions were returned home from Italy to join the invasion of Normandy
(June 1944). Similarly, while the peacetime RN rested crews at their home ports
frequently, the wartime RN’s fighting ships were in such demand that their sailors
spent most of their wartime service on operational duties, which helps to explain
some instances of psychological breakdown and mutiny. Some ships rotated crew
members from the most combat-intensive tasks (such as gunnery) to the least inten-
sive (such as cleaning), although the practice was probably not systematic.127
It is difficult to establish how frequently German units were rotated, but we know
that German divisions rotated battalions in and out of the frontline frequently,
sometimes sending them to so-called ‘‘recovery homes’’ and sometimes rotating
depleted battalions with the division’s replacement battalion. The battalion under-
going rest would take over the role of the replacement battalion, receiving replace-
ment groups and acting as a cadre to them.128
While the Germans frequently rotated groups, the U.S. military hardly ever
rotated anybody, and when it did, it rotated individuals, not groups.129 The appall-
ingly high rate of U.S. psychological casualties during the Second World War, when
one-quarter of all evacuated casualties were psychological casualties, was atypically
high.130 The German Army seems to have suffered lower rates of psychological
44 Made, Not Born
casualties than did the U.S. Army, even though the German Army was generally
fighting against the U.S. Army on the defensive with inferior material resources.
The comparison is difficult to quantify, since armies categorize their casualties in
different ways and rarely collect data consistently. The Second World War German
Army was less willing than was the U.S. Army to categorize casualties as psychologi-
cal casualties, instead preferring to treat them for organic disease or to execute them
for desertion.131 Additionally, little of its data survived the war. Nevertheless, in
1942, the year in which the regular German Army was almost destroyed in Russia,
psychological casualties were ranked as the sixth most frequent category of German
Army casualties, and accounted for only 6% of admissions. 132 If these figures
are representative, the U.S. Army suffered proportionately ten times as many
psychological casualties as the German Army.
The failure of the IRS to properly manage stress remains one of the most popular
criticisms of the IRS, the other being its alleged disruption of group bonds. Critics
of the IRS have advocated that the U.S. Army should consider unit rotation at ‘‘com-
pany, platoon, or even squad or crew level.’’133 The U.S. military instead relies on
higher level, less frequent ‘‘unit rotations’’ (brigade or regimental tours of duty), each
of six to twelve months preceded by three to six months of unit stabilization,
supported by psychiatric services for the individual casualty and the replacement of
individual casualties who fail to return to duty. During the Korean War, when soldiers
were rotated after accumulating sufficient ‘‘points,’’ stress casualties were initially
evacuated to Japan or the continental United States. Later stress casualties were
treated at the divisional level and then returned to duty after recovery or sent to
theater-level hospitals and thence to the continental United States.134 Psychiatric
services were similar during the Vietnam War, when U.S. soldiers were replaced
individually after a one-year tour of duty. Some 30% of U.S. veterans of the Vietnam
War eventually suffered PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder)—a collection of
psychological effects including flashbacks, sleep disorders, panic attacks, emotional
numbness, and violent outbursts. The rate of PTSD in the general population is
about 5%. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, each of the U.S. Army’s divisions
contained a psychiatrist, psychologist, and social worker to treat minor psychological
casualties. V Corps, which commanded the divisions, took along two ‘‘Combat
Stress Control Detachments’’ for intervention in cases beyond divisional resources.
The normal methods of treatment were training in personal stress management
techniques; basic therapy; the prescription of basic needs such as sleep; and, more
rarely, temporary reassignment to noncombat duties. However, while these methods
do indeed iterate stress, they also remove the individual from their group. Even
though U.S. military stress managers may talk about keeping soldiers close to their
units and returning them as soon as possible, the U.S. military’s centralized personnel
management system often removes soldiers from their units or interferes so fre-
quently in group formation that there is little benefit in being near the unit any-
way. 135 They are also reactive methods; the number of undiagnosed soldiers
remains unknown, but the high rate of PTSD amongst returning soldiers suggests
that most soldiers are not being diagnosed in theater. The rate of PTSD amongst
regular U.S. Army and USMC troops deployed during the invasion of Iraq in 2003
(but not necessarily the later occupation) was at least 12% within a year of the
invasion’s conclusion, with another 5% suffering other psychological problems, such
as depression or anxiety.
Promotions and Transformational Leadership

Promotion is the process by which personnel are selected for higher rank or for
career advancement within the service. Centralized promotion systems respond to
intrinsic attributes or highly observable career achievements, such as training
courses. These criteria are useful for rewarding and fast-tracking the most
knowledge-based personnel. Centralized promotion systems are also useful for pro-
viding wide experience across many units and functions. Some commentators
believe that the IRS also better prepares leaders for higher command:
An officer who spends two decades in a single battalion or brigade would be better
equipped to fight that unit than an officer assigned only recently. But that officer would
be much less prepared to serve in higher level staff assignments than an officer who had
moved in today’s patterns through a variety of career-building assignments.136
However, such comments suggest that centralized promotion systems are less
effective at providing junior combat leaders at the battalion level and below than
they are at providing more senior leaders. There are four possible explanations.
First, centralized systems may overvalue remote and imperfect tests of intrinsic
attributes, cumulative service (‘‘seniority’’), unnecessary training courses, and diver-
sity of qualifications as qualifying criteria for promotion. Centralized systems may
also undervalue the assessment of the leader by the leader’s immediate superiors.
One expectation of centralized systems is that they are less selective than decentralized
systems. After the Invergordon Mutiny in 1931 and other incidents that indicated
disaffected seamen and disconnected officers, the British RN de-emphasized seniority
and reemphasized skills as criteria for promotion. As a whole, the promotions systems
became more selective for both officers and seamen. Royal Marines were invited by
their trainers to volunteer for NCO training; selection criteria favored personal and
interpersonal qualities over technical qualifications.137 Meanwhile, the U.S. military
adopted a greater variety of ranks than traditional European militaries, relied more
heavily on seniority and other impersonal promotion criteria, and administered more
promotions centrally. ‘‘The American system was better for introducing a man gently
to responsibility.. . .On the other hand, supporters of the British system might argue
that the US system diluted authority too much.’’138 The U.S. system produced much
larger proportions of promoted personnel at noncommissioned rank. For instance,
the U.S. Army promoted about 50% of its personnel to NCO rank during the
Second World War, while the German Army promoted only about 17%, a lower pro-
portion with which Martin van Creveld associated higher selectivity.139
46 Made, Not Born
Second, under a centralized system, leaders often have insufficient time to develop
meaningful relationships before their next promotion, which usually means another
change of unit. 140 Meanwhile, existing groups may exclude their externally
appointed leaders, lowering the new leader’s chances of receiving the group’s support,
both emotional and physical, and forcing the leader to resort to personal inspiration.
For instance, during the Second World War, a USMC replacement officer charged
alone to his death after an impassioned speech failed to motivate his unit to
advance. 141 A U.S. Marine from the period recalled that USMC replacement
officers ‘‘were wounded or killed with such regularity that we rarely knew anything
about them other than a code name and saw them on their feet only once or
twice.’’142
Third, centralization of leadership promotions may itself contribute to centraliza-
tion of information and command. This was a problem apparently manifested during
the Second World War, when U.S. and British officers (at least after the peak period
of mobilization in 1941) claimed to be so preoccupied with clerical work that they
were left with insufficient time to lead or train.143 During the Cold War, the U.S.
military deliberately overstocked junior officers so that they could lead newly
mobilized units in the event of another global war. Even after the end of the Cold
War, the high retention of officers (relative to enlisted personnel) until they reach
retirement age (in part to improve the competitiveness of senior officer promotions)
has kept larger staffs than required in some parts of the U.S. military. This oversupply
decreases competitiveness amongst lower ranked officers and encourages microma-
nagement by superior officers of subordinates.144
Fourth, centralized promotion systems may reward undesirable types of leaders
and alienate the most valuable personnel. Hogan has stated that it ‘‘is clear that those
officers who successfully compete and make it to the top positions in the military are
highly competent and effective leaders and managers.’’145 However, critics of the U.S.
military’s promotions system (such critics may not perceive centralization as the root
cause) believe that it favors command-oriented career officers who eagerly pursue new
assignments and new courses of training but neglect their leadership responsibilities.
The centralized promotion system may reward ‘‘toxic’’ leaders and encourage toxic
leadership and has been blamed for contributing to the ethical and tactical leadership
failures of the Vietnam War.146 Centralized reward systems are remote from the small
group and tend to reward ‘‘career officers’’ who impress their superiors more than
their subordinates.147 Such officers tend to be disengaged from their current com-
mand as they look forward to their next professional experience. They downplay
the importance of the organization and emphasize themselves. They cover up unit
failures.148 They cosmetically fix problems immediately before inspections.149 They
are remote. They emphasize style before substance. They neglect meaningful group
relationships over the long term, relying instead on personal inspiration in the
moment.150 Despite often positive first impressions, in the long term such leaders
alienate the led.151 A centralized system discourages group-oriented candidates from
seeking promotion, because promotion usually involves leaving their existing
groups.152 ‘‘This perception of a risk-averse and careerist mindset among their supe-
rior officers leads those junior officers with a professional mindset—those who are
most interested in the intangible rewards—to leave the military, because they do
not see senior professionals they wish to emulate.’’153 Worse, corrupt governments
may centrally promote on the basis of political loyalty rather than military compe-
tence. For instance, South Vietnamese politicians promoted militarily inept political
favorites to senior military command during the Vietnam War.154
Decentralized Promotions
By contrast, decentralized promotions by the unit within the unit may allow
leaders and led to preserve prior group relations; in consequence, they may adopt
transformational leadership patterns and flatter, more democratic decision-making
patterns. ‘‘Transformational’’ patterns of leadership transform the motivations of
others to best serve the leader’s objectives. This contrasts with the ‘‘transactional’’
leadership model, which stresses hierarchy and the use of reward and punishment
to elicit obedience. (Patterns of leadership are described in more detail in the section
on combat leadership in chapter 3.) Transformational leadership was described and
prescribed by regimental theories before the concept was fully described by civilian
leadership theories. As early as 1927, the British regimental theorist Bartlett described
a ‘‘persuasive’’ leadership type that heightens ‘‘morale,’’ ‘‘discipline,’’ and cohesion.155
Richardson thought that regimental leaders were incentivized to practice a leadership
pattern he called ‘‘feminine’’ leadership, which stresses empathy over hierarchy.156
Moran described a leadership pattern focused on ‘‘the care and management of
fear.’’157 Similarly, Copeland defined the leader as ‘‘one who can influence a group
of people to keep themselves in order.’’158 In effect, regimental theories claim
that transformational leadership is more characteristic of decentralization than
centralization.
Decentralized promotion means that units can promote leaders within the unit
and then retain them. Under a regimental system, the regiment selects officers from
civilian society or from the unit’s other ranks (enlisted personnel). NCOs are selected
from the unit’s other ranks. Most promotions do not force the individual to leave the
unit, at least not until they are promoted beyond command of the unit. Intra-unit
promotions imply that leader–led relationships are based on prior relationships, in
which case vertical cohesion should be immediate. For this reason, vertical cohesion
should have more opportunity to develop under regimental systems than under
an IRS. (See the section on cohesion in chapter 4 for more on vertical cohesion.)
Vandergriff also claims that leader stability should improve the leader’s skills because
the leader will have more time in a single leadership position and thus more time to
develop those skills.159 Moreover, prior group relations would be expected to encour-
age transformational patterns of leadership. The strong interpersonal attributes of
functional groups are similar to those of transformational leadership—principally
empathy, communication skills, and self-efficacy. 160 The group encourages
equivalence across rank. Equivalence allows more efficient, flatter, even democratic
48 Made, Not Born
leadership patterns.161 While such patterns may sometimes look chaotic to the out-
side observer, they externalize the group’s intellectual diversity. As transformational
leadership becomes more and more democratic, normal military hierarchy becomes
meaningless and the groups approach ‘‘self-managing teams’’—teams that are so
attuned to their environments and each other that they require no direction at all
and can adopt flatter structural ‘‘shapes.’’ 162 Self-managing teams benefit
from autonomy and continuity in personnel and therefore do best under decentrali-
zation.163
Promotions by the unit, within the unit, provide incentives and opportunities for
regiments to promote genuinely capable leaders. This also encourages the promotion
of promising enlisted personnel to officer rank. Throughout the twentieth century,
German officers have had to serve some period in their regiments at enlisted
rank before being commissioned—during the interwar years the period between
enlistment and commission was as long as two years. Late in the Second World
War, the German Army added exemplary combat performance at enlisted rank as
the preferred criterion for selecting officers.164
The British Army has a weaker tradition of promoting soldiers to officer rank and
its officers have reflected organizational and social biases. Most officers have been
recruited as civilian ‘‘potential officers’’ by a regiment or branch. Officer selection
is still decentralized because of the dominant role taken by the regiment or branch,
even though officer training is centralized.165
If the regiment is allowed to select officers from civilian applicants who have not
first proved themselves in enlisted rank, then the regiment’s choices can become
parochial. Until 1870, officer candidates were required to pay for their training
and therefore effectively purchased their commissions (although a few were
sponsored from altruistic sources). Competitive entrance and commissions (both
by examination) started in 1877. Subsequently and still today, potential officers
have been ‘‘sponsored’’ by a regiment or branch. This means that the regiment or
branch interviews the potential officer and then decides whether to recommend the
applicant for officer training, after which the potential officer is expected to join
the sponsoring regiment or branch (although some potential officers may switch
regiment or branch during their officer training). The upsides of such a system are
as follows: it allows for personal interviews; the sponsoring unit is incentivized
to carefully select the best applicants; and the applicant acquires a relationship
with, and organizational cultural literacy in, the sponsoring unit before joining
it as an officer. The applicant may have affiliations with the sponsoring unit
even before the interview: perhaps an ancestor served with it or perhaps the applicant
shares its home town or perhaps it has always interested the applicant. However,
the sponsoring unit may end up neglecting centrally decreed selection criteria
or tests, instead choosing officers who perpetuate parochial values. In the 1930s,
only about 5% of British Army officers had been promoted from the ranks and
most were to be found in the least fashionable and most technical regiments or
branches.166
Later centralization of officer selection and training was supposed to promote

meritocracy. It certainly resulted in less social bias. The Royal Military Academy at
Woolwich and the Royal Military College were both closed upon the outbreak of
the Second World War. Instead, all wartime officer candidates were trained at Officer
Candidate Training Units. Conforming to centrally determined curricula and
examinations, the Officer Candidate Training Units were considered meritorious.
However, some holdovers from the prewar system remained. Until April 1942,
officer candidates were selected solely by interview with a local officer, which
perpetuated organizational and social biases. However rigorous the training at the
Officer Candidate Training Units, wartime officer candidates were then sent to their
regiment or branch for further training, which was often redundant and emphasized
skills other than leadership or tactics. 167 About 13% of wartime British Army
officers were commissioned during the war. Most regimental and other unit
commanders were still prewar career soldiers, many being veterans of the First World
War. Their training emphasized discipline through barrack ‘‘fatigue duties’’ but not
necessarily tactics and many are remembered as untechnical. Newly commissioned
Andrew Wilson remembers arriving at his regiment to find ‘‘constant fatigues
for cook-house, salvage[,] and hut-sweeping, which took two-thirds of them [the sol-
diers] away from their tanks and training each day.’’ In mid-1943, the Home Army
replaced many of its unit commanders down to the battalion level with officers
who had proven themselves in the war to date. Wilson empathized with his depart-
ing commander. ‘‘Wirelesss [radio] and the petrol engine killed him. In the earlier
war he was probably a first-class officer.’’ Some of the regiment’s senior officers
voluntarily followed him, unwilling to accept the new commander’s rigorous field
training at the expense of barrack fatigues.168
Moreover, David French alleged, wartime centralization damaged the good
leader–follower relations of the peacetime regiments. While followership remained
strong, leadership did not.169 Historically, regimental leadership had relied on an
implicit bargain: followers offered unhesitating obedience and discipline in return
for friendly, considerate ‘‘paternal leadership,’’ as French put it. (Most regimental
theorists have characterized regimental leadership patterns as ‘‘maternal.’’) ‘‘Follow-
ing the outbreak of war and the progressive collapse of the regimental system, the
psychological needs of the individual took second place to the bureaucratic demands
of the larger army.’’170
Wartime officer candidates were a minority amongst wartime British officers, were
concentrated at the most junior ranks and none reached divisional-level command.
Their commanders were products of the prewar system. British divisional and supe-
rior commanders did not enjoy a good reputation. These commanders have been
criticized for favoring autocratic control, rigid written orders, and detailed timetables
and for lacking initiative.171 Prewar senior promotions utilized all sorts of nonmeri-
torious promotion criteria, some of which were perpetuated during the war. For
instance, the commander of the Guards Armoured Division, formed in June 1941,
had to be a flag officer who had served in a Guards regiment. Both of the division’s
50 Made, Not Born
two wartime commanders proved unsatisfactory but few other candidates could
be found, even though Guards officers were already overrepresented amongst flag
officers.172 In the end, senior promotions were highly subjective and personal and
were dominated by field commanders who themselves were not necessarily best
qualified for their jobs. Before the war, Leslie Hore-Belisha (War Minister 1937–
39) had lowered the retirement age, reduced the duration of senior appointments,
and appointed more flag officers, robbing the Army of its most experienced officers
and setting age as a selection criterion.173 Unable to apply anything other than
subjective opinion, senior decision-makers preferred to appoint regular officers and
personal favorites to command field units, but they rapidly dismissed commanders
if their subordinate units failed, whatever the situational factors. Six commanders
were appointed to command the Western Desert Force (later the 8th Army) in
sixteen months. One of them, Claude Auchinleck, surrounded himself with inex-
perienced associates from his Indian Army days. The last of 8th Army’s commanders,
Bernard Law Montgomery, remained the Army’s most senior field commander for
the rest of the war, during which he frequently dismissed divisional and corps
commanders whenever their unit performance displeased him. 174 Meanwhile,
Montgomery directly managed the careers of many subordinates, some outside
of his personal staff. For instance, when Montgomery was first appointed
commander of 8th Army, he took a personal interest in the career of Brian
Wyldbore-Smith, then an artillery staff officer in 1st Armoured Division. Montgom-
ery asked Wyldbore-Smith to plan the artillery plan for the Battle of Alamein.
Wyldbore-Smith then joined X Corps as a staff officer. When Montgomery and
Wyldbore-Smith returned to England in preparation for the invasion of France,
Wyldbore-Smith became a staff officer in 11th Armoured Division, after which
he was tasked by Montgomery to write a doctrinal pamphlet on tank warfare.
Montgomery had twice posted Wyldbore-Smith back to artillery regiments as part
of his development. It is difficult to see how these interventions could have helped
a future author of tank doctrine.175
British Army regiments continue to choose most of their potential officers directly
from society, a practice which allows discrimination by social class. Some of the older
British regiments, such as the Guards regiments, still serve as first choice for the most
class-conscious potential officers, and the officers of those regiments, in turn, may
see themselves as guardians of values that civilian society regards as arcane. Excluded
potential officers may complain that they were passed over for sponsorship by a
regiment in favor of inferior applicants whose paternal ancestors had served in that
particular regiment, who went to private schools, who play equine polo, or who were
qualified by some other equally parochial attribute.
Socializing Leaders and Organizational Orientation

Socialization is the process by which persons get to know each other. Decentralized
unit promotions mean that leaders within the unit are strongly socialized with their
immediate subordinates and superiors. What about their relations with more distant
others outside of the immediate group?
Centralized socialization, mainly through professional courses or conferences,
encourages an organizational orientation, which is useful for knowledge-based per-
sonnel who often must cooperate across departments and support higher commands.
By contrast, decentralized socialization encourages a unit orientation, which is useful
for unit cohesion but can be antiorganizational. Ideally, care should be taken to
combine a unit orientation with an organizational orientation by socializing peers
within the unit and by socializing the unit’s leaders with immediate subordinates
and superiors.
The regimental practice of socializing leaders of similar rank in a common
‘‘mess’’ (a social facility) develops horizontal group relations, that is, relations
between group leaders of similar rank, within the unit.176 British regiments, ships,
ports, and air bases run messes for officers, NCOs, and other ranks. Vertical group
relations are encouraged by ‘‘messing’’ unit leaders with superiors. For instance,
when battalions are assigned to a brigade, which is an operational command nor-
mally responsible for three battalions, brigade commanders sequentially visit the
battalion messes or invite battalion leaders to mess with them. Additionally, the
brigade staff may be composed of personnel promoted from the staffs of the bri-
gade’s battalions, which preserves the bonds between battalion staffs and their
brigade superiors and thus encourages a vertical organizational orientation within
the brigade.
Inspired by such regimental practices, between 1957 and 1961 the U.S. Army
phased in what it called a ‘‘combat arms system,’’ which tied some battalions
together. But without decentralization of personnel management, the high turnover
of individual personnel prevented the development of enduring human relation-
ships.177
Some opponents of the U.S. Army’s more recent plans to stabilize personnel in
units argue that it will lead to insularity and antiorganizational impulses. The argu-
ment is unclear but may play on traditional prejudices against regiments, which,
since they are comparatively autonomous in their personnel management, are often
assumed to be insular. However, regimental rivalry tends to be good-natured rather
than malicious. Severely internally oriented units tend to form outside of the normal
regimental practices of socialization. For instance, during the Second World War,
basic training in centralized training regiments or centers encouraged British trainees
to look negatively on units outside their training platoon or company, sometimes
encouraging hoarding or theft.178 An investigation into the murder of a Somali by
the Canadian Airborne Regiment in 1992 revealed that internally oriented loyalties
had perpetuated socially unacceptable and sometimes illegal behavior, such as abuse.
Although the regiment was eventually disbanded and the regimental system blamed,
the Canadian Airborne Regiment had been formed especially for Somalia by hastily
combining other units, during which the new unit was not socialized with other
units or commands.179
52 Made, Not Born
Theoretically, internal orientation should be strongest under centralized systems,

which do not benefit from the longer term leader–led relationships of decentralized
systems. The IRS, by imposing strange leaders on units and by interrupting relations
between organizational levels, may disrupt vertical cohesion. During the Korean War,
U.S. Army soldiers spent most of their combat time in two-man holes as part of static
defensive positions, in visual sight of a handful of friendly troops. Depending on
when the soldier had been assigned to the unit, the soldier might not even know the
rest of his unit. Thus, soldiers formed social–emotional bonds at the most micro
level, often in opposition not just to their organization (the U.S. Army) but also to
the unacknowledged other part of their own unit. U.S. personnel management
during the Vietnam War was even more impersonal. Most U.S. soldiers were
centrally assigned on one-year ‘‘tours of duty’’ to combat units to which they had no
prior relationship or long-term commitment.
Summary
This chapter reviewed three competing systems of personnel management.
The decentralized system ties an individual to a unit, providing opportunities and
incentives for the unit to condition its personnel. Such conditioning is most useful
for combat personnel, whose capabilities are unlikely to be provided by intrinsic
attributes.
A centralized combat personnel management system is best illustrated by the U.S.
Army’s IRS, which was originally justified mainly in terms of its efficiency and cen-
tralized quality control. Centralization seems most appropriate for the management
of noncombat personnel, for whom intrinsic attributes are more important than
extrinsic attributes. However, centralization may not be appropriate for combat per-
sonnel, who are more dependent on extrinsic resources provided by a dedicated unit.
An in-between system is historically rarer than the other two systems but may
get the best of both worlds if it centralizes recruitment, selection, training, and
assignment in order to find efficiencies in areas where group outcomes may be
considered less important, while decentralizing replacement, rotation, promotion,
and socialization in order to encourage group outcomes where they matter most.
After describing each of the three systems of personnel management, I then
examined eight personnel management processes: recruitment, selection, training,
assignment, replacement, rotation, promotion, and socialization.
Centralized recruitment encourages individualism, which is useful for noncombat
personnel who switch units frequently according to organizational needs and their
personal aspirations. Unit corporatism, which is encouraged by decentralized
recruitment, is more important for combat personnel, who must trust and serve their
unit in the most trying situations.
Centralized selection permits rigorous selection by intrinsic attributes such as rea-
soning intelligence and civilian education, which are most useful for noncombat
roles. Decentralized selection enables and encourages attentiveness to personal skills
including emotional intelligences, which are essential to the more intimate and
trying demands of combat.
Centralized training enables capital-intensive classroom training, which is
most useful for developing noncombat skills. Decentralized training enables and
encourages field training, which is most useful for developing combat skills.
Centralized assignments allow the organization to respond quickly to supply and
demand—a response that is most useful for managing knowledge-based personnel
with comparatively individualized profiles. Decentralized assignments allow the
unit to transfer contiguous groups from recruitment through to combat, thereby
promoting and preserving group bonds.
Centralized replacement of individual replacements is materially efficient and
is most useful for replacing knowledge-based personnel in individualized roles.
Decentralized replacement of depleted groups by replacement groups preserves
groups and allows groups to bond with their new additions before their next
commitment to combat.
Centralized rotation of individuals according to some tour of duty is egalitarian,
which is valued by knowledge-based personnel. Decentralized rotation of groups
iterates combat stress and preserves groups, whose stress management is vital to
combat endurance.
Centralized promotions rely on remote and imperfect selection criteria. Central-
ized promotions are useful for rewarding and fast-tracking the most knowledge-
based noncombat personnel but are less useful when they reward superficial careerists.
By contrast, decentralized promotions mean that leaders and led usually share prior
group relations; in consequence, they adopt transformational leadership patterns
and flatter, more democratic (and more effective) decision-making patterns. Intra-
unit promotions also allow prior performance, even combat performance, to be used
as a selection criterion. However, allowing units to select their potential officers,
especially directly from society, can encourage bias.
Centralized socialization encourages an organizational orientation, which is useful
for knowledge-based personnel who often must cooperate across departments and
deal with comparatively macro issues. Decentralized socialization encourages a unit
orientation, which is useful for unit cohesion but can be antiorganizational. Ideally,
care must be taken to combine a unit orientation with an organizational orientation
by socializing peers within the unit, by socializing the unit’s leaders with immediate
subordinates and superiors, and by socializing leaders across units that must coordi-
nate routinely.
CHAPTER 3
FORCE EMPLOYMENT, COMMAND,

LEADERSHIP, AND DECISION-MAKING
The previous chapter documented the dispute over whether decentralization or cen-
tralization is preferred for the management of combat personnel. A related but rarely
articulated dispute concerns the relative value of extrinsic over intrinsic attributes.
Decentralization gives units the opportunities and incentives to develop extrinsic
attributes, while centralization encourages the management of personnel by their
intrinsic attributes. Intrinsic attributes are those attributes that personnel brought
with them into the organization. Extrinsic attributes are those attributes acquired
from the organization. Personnel attributes are considered combat personnel capa-
bilities if they are useful in combat. I argue that most combat capabilities are derived
from decentralized personnel management. My argument is not the same as previous
arguments in favor of training, for instance. Training is one of eight personnel man-
agement processes identified in the previous chapter, and training can be negative
as well as positive. I argue that decentralized personnel management encourages
positive training at the unit level, as well as positive conditioning of other kinds.
For instance, cohesion is not directly trained. Rather, it reflects several processes
associated with decentralized personnel management.
Are extrinsic or intrinsic attributes more important to combat personnel capabil-
ities? This chapter and the following three chapters examine the extent to which
combat personnel capabilities are extrinsic or intrinsic. In each of these four chapters,
I look for the intrinsic or extrinsic nature of those capabilities. This is important
because I argue that combat personnel capabilities are so uncharacteristic of civilian
life that they are more extrinsic than intrinsic. There is no accepted list of combat
personnel capabilities, although most lie within the following nine categories: force
employment, command, leadership, decision-making, resistance to stress, cohesion,
motivation, athleticism, and special operations capabilities.1
Force Employment, Command, Leadership, and Decision-Making 55
The four sections of this chapter tackle force employment, command, leadership,
and decision-making, respectively. These four capabilities are grouped together
because the literature considers them all to be largely cognitive, although they must
contain psychological components too. (The literature considers resistance to stress,
cohesion, and motivation as largely psychological. By contrast, the literature consid-
ers athleticism and special operations capabilities as largely physiological, although
they must reflect individual cognition and psychology too.)
Force Employment
This first section examines force employment, the first of the nine categories of
combat personnel capabilities identified for this research. While assertions of the
importance of force employment would appear to assert the importance of the
personnel who employ forces, these assertions usually reify strategy, a single and high
level of analysis that discourages attention to the wider number of personnel who
employ forces at lower levels of analysis. As the first subsection shows, force employ-
ment is a recent term; strategy is often considered determinant, even though it
is only one level of analysis of force employment. The second subsection, on the
sources of force employment, shows that the reification of strategy allows advocates
to assert the dominant role of impersonal strategic ‘‘recipes.’’
Military scholars conventionally recognize four analytical levels of force employ-
ment—the political, strategic, operational, and tactical. The definitions offered by
Carl von Clausewitz in his book On War remain the benchmark. Clausewitz’s Book
II, Chapter I, defined tactics as the use of the armed forces in engagements (or battles)
and defined strategy as the use of engagements to attain the object of the war.
Clausewitz seemed to accept that the object of the war is the concern of politics,
although subsequent writers, such as Basil Liddell Hart, criticized Clausewitz or
some interpreters of Clausewitz for subordinating politics to strategy.2 Historically,
scholars have recognized a ‘‘grand strategic’’ level between politics and strategy.
British, but not U.S., military doctrine still recognizes the grand strategic level,
which includes ‘‘the full range of issues associated with the maintenance of political
independence and territorial integrity and the pursuit of wider national interests.’’
The operational level is normally assumed to lie between tactics and strategy
(an assumption shared by both U.S. and British doctrine), but it may be assumed
to include both tactics and strategy. While recognizing four levels of war (grand
strategic, military strategic, operational, and tactical), the British military admits their
overlap and urges pragmatism.3 The U.S. military recognizes fewer levels of war
(strategic, operational, and tactical) but still admits their fluidity. ‘‘The levels of war
help commanders visualize a logical arrangement of operations, allocate resources,
and assign tasks to the appropriate command. However, commanders at every level
must be aware that in a world of constant, immediate communications, any single
action may have consequences at all levels.’’4 At the least, the traditional analytical
framework lacks consistency. Some critics have described the levels of analysis as
indistinct and arbitrary.5
56 Made, Not Born
In recent years, Stephen Biddle has advocated a more explicit focus on ‘‘force
employment’’ without reference to ‘‘strategy’’ and other traditional analytical levels.
Biddle defines force employment as ‘‘the doctrine and tactics by which forces are
actually used in combat.’’6 According to Biddle, while force employment is normally
accepted as important, it is not normally measured and it usually drops out of
analysis:
International relations theorists mostly ignore force employment. Many simply assume
that states will use material ‘‘optimally,’’ hence the material itself is the only important
variable.7
Biddle has presented empirical evidence that force employment is central to

combat outcomes. In fact, he argues, force employment has become increasingly
important since 1900 as a response to the increasing lethality of military technology.
Military technology certainly does not determine outcomes. Rather, advanced weap-
onry can widen the gap between unskilled and skilled forces. Biddle’s argument
implies that personnel are more important to combat outcomes than materialists
would imply.
Strategy
In the military studies literature, strategy is the most commonly used level of
analysis and is often treated as transitive with force employment. Clausewitz defined
strategy as the use of battles to achieve the war’s objectives. This definition is rarely
repeated exactly because of the difficulty of defining where battles begin and end,
but it remains the most influential. The U.S. military explicitly places strategy above,
and places tactics within, the level ‘‘at which battles and engagements are planned and
executed’’ but does not define battles or engagements, except as each other.8 The
British military places strategy above ‘‘campaigns’’ (which are placed within the
operational level) and ‘‘warfighting’’ (which is placed within the tactical level).9 Colin
Gray is one of many military scholars who explicitly recalled Clausewitz when
defining strategy as ‘‘the use that is made of force and the threat of force for the ends
of policy.’’10 Basil Liddell Hart defined strategy in many ways but always described it
as an ‘‘art,’’ a fairly common position in a traditional but now anachronistic debate
about whether strategy is an art or a science. In perhaps his most definitive publica-
tion on strategy, Liddell Hart, a critic of Clausewitz’s definition, nevertheless defined
strategy similarly, as ‘‘the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the
ends of policy.’’11 Liddell Hart still influences British military doctrine, which defines
strategy as ‘‘the art of developing and employing military forces consistent with grand
strategic objectives.’’12 Increasingly, however, definitions of military strategy reflect
wider definitions of strategy as the process of matching resources to objectives or as
simply a plan of action.13 Consequently, the U.S. military defines strategy as: ‘‘A pru-
dent idea or set of ideas for employing the instruments of national power in a
synchronized and integrated fashion to achieve theater, national, and/or multina-
tional objectives.’’14
The literature on military strategy often reifies strategy, treating it as determinant

of outcomes or even as a pseudonym for everything military. Military studies is often
called ‘‘strategic studies,’’ even though the study of military strategy is only a subset
of military studies.15 The adjective ‘‘strategic’’ has even come to imply exceptional-
ism, as in the label ‘‘strategic weapon’’ or ‘‘strategic location.’’16 By contrast, manage-
ment literature typically treats strategy as the link between command and behavior
and treats a strategist as a strategic planner or decision-maker.17 Strangely, some
military scholars criticize the more precise management concept as too ‘‘loose.’’18
While strategy is normally considered just one of four levels of analysis of force
employment, the other levels are often assumed away on the assumption that the stra-
tegic level is determinant. Each belligerent’s military capability is often reduced to its
supposed strategy. For instance, Edward Luttwak attributed the Roman Empire’s lon-
gevity to a particular ‘‘grand strategy,’’ dismissing alternative theories that identified
superior tactics, cohesion, logistics, or weapons.19 Another classic example of such
reductionism is Blitzkrieg. The semantically controversial word Blitzkrieg (German:
literally ‘‘lightning war’’) was first popularized in the English language as an explana-
tory shorthand for German victories between 1939 and 1941. It also came to mean
armored or combined air-armored tactics. In fact, the phrase ‘‘lightning war’’ was a
fairly common phrase in many languages between the wars, used to describe the
attractive concept of a ‘‘knockout blow.’’ German was one language in which the
phrase was less common.20 The Germans themselves attributed their success to a
broader collection of tactical and operational skills and used the word Blitzkrieg to
describe the short war that was the objective of this improved military capability.21
The assumption that strategy determines outcomes is a pathology that John
Keegan has called ‘‘stratego-centrism’’ and Colin Gray has called ‘‘strategism.’’ Strate-
gism does not necessarily represent mainstream military thought but does illustrate
the dangers of traditional nonscientific analysis of combat processes. Critics of
‘‘strategism’’ do not believe that strategy is universally determinant. The relative
importance of any level of analysis depends on the situation. Even if a strategy could
be perfect in some abstract sense, it would come to naught if the tactical means, for
example, were unavailable.22
University-based scholars in the war studies field have tended to concentrate on the
upper level of the military art: strategy. That is, perhaps, natural as it is at the strategic
level that military and civil hierarchies most interact. It is also in the making of strategy
that the democratic countries insist upon civilian political primacy. Tactics, on the other
hand, have traditionally been left to the military professionals and relatively few academ-
ics have bothered much with this level of the art.. . .In practice, life is not so simple.
There is a constant interaction between the levels. It is useless to formulate a strategy that
cannot be made operationally feasible. Consequently, it is difficult to discuss strategy
meaningfully in isolation from the lower levels of the military art.23
While congruence between all four levels is associated with victory, it takes a failure
in only one level to cause defeat. Kim Holmes called these failures ‘‘war stoppers.’’24
One case that is commonly used to illustrate the interdependence between the levels
58 Made, Not Born
is the First World War, when great strategic plans repeatedly failed for lack of congru-
ent tactical resources. Long defensive lines supported by machine guns and artillery
defeated overland attacks, while large capital ships, submarines, and coastal guns pre-
vented amphibious attacks. Force employment solutions (naval convoys, infantry
infiltration, and combined arms tactics), technological solutions (tanks), and political
solutions (the entry of the United States) were found before the war was decided in
the Allies’ favor.25 Germany provides a classic case of one state’s varied fortunes in
war: while nineteenth-century Prussia and Germany won several wars that reflected
congruence between military brilliance and realistic political objectives, twentieth-
century Germany’s initial successes but eventual defeats in two world wars reflected
a focus on tactical and operational brilliance at the expense of political reason.26
At the least, force employment may reflect resources, objectives, policies, doc-
trines, strategic theories, tactical protocols, situational factors, and the idiosyncrasies
of the decision-makers. However, military scholars who assume that strategy is deter-
minant imply that victory is merely a function of following predetermined ‘‘strategic
recipes’’ or of following the advice of individual ‘‘strategists’’ or of doctrinal centers.
However, all these sources have imperfect histories. Of most relevance to this project,
these sources have histories of overstating individual ‘‘strategists’’ and their intrinsic
attributes over other personnel capabilities.
Strategic Recipes
Some military scholars imply that ‘‘strategic recipes’’ are more important than the
personnel who must actually execute those strategies. ‘‘Strategic recipes’’ are predeter-
mined rules for employing forces. These strategic recipes are more usually called
‘‘maxims,’’ ‘‘laws,’’ ‘‘doctrines,’’ or simply ‘‘strategies,’’ some of which have been inher-
ited from ancient texts.27 Today, perhaps the most popular of those words in this con-
text is doctrine. ‘‘Doctrine’’ is not a word with any consistent meaning but is generally
used to mean a recommended way to perform a task.28 Soldiers do not necessarily
follow doctrine in practice. Soldiers may not be trained in the doctrine. If trained,
the doctrine may not be internalized. Soldiers may even consciously reject doctrine,
since doctrines impose inflexibilities even as they provide guidance.29 For instance,
the British Army did not fight the Second World War according to a single doctrine.
For most of the war, the British Army benefited from no central doctrinal agency.
Whatever doctrine was produced by the War Office was often wrong and revised.
Doctrine was communicated in so many ways and was so contradictory that its audi-
ence largely ignored it or could not make sense of it. Commanders did not necessarily
train official doctrine. Many units created their own competitive doctrines.30
Doctrinal manuals now generally remind readers to use doctrine flexibly and not
slavishly. If doctrines are understood as strategic magic rather than guidance, then
they may encourage neglect of the resources upon which a strategy ultimately
depends, including combat personnel. Nevertheless, while most military scholars
would accept the validity of this statement, some may still assume that predetermined
strategic principles can explain military capability. In this view, war is reduced to a
game of chess: victory is supposed to follow logical solutions to the strategic problems
presented by the adversary or the geography within the parameters of the game.
Indeed, many self-confessed ‘‘strategists’’ have claimed to decipher the ‘‘universal
logic’’ of strategy. Here a contradiction arises because, having simplified military
capability to merely a question of logic, such ‘‘strategists’’ nevertheless claim that
the logic of strategy is difficult to behold.
Example: Indirect Strategies

For instance, Edward Luttwak claimed ‘‘that the entire realm of strategy is pervaded
by a paradoxical logic [original author’s emphasis] very different from the ordinary
‘linear’ logic by which we live in all other spheres of life.’’31 Luttwak acknowledged
his debt to Basil Liddell Hart, who had famously declared that the ‘‘indirect
approach’’ is usually the preferred approach. Basil Liddell Hart was the most influen-
tial British ‘‘strategist’’ of the twentieth century. After leaving the British Army as a
Captain after the First World War, Liddell Hart became famous for prescribing a
maritime, amphibious ‘‘British way in warfare’’ (reframed as ‘‘indirect strategy’’ to
include strategic bombing). Liddell Hart assumed that a combination of diplomatic
isolationism, naval superiority, static defenses on land, amphibious raids, and stra-
tegic bombing would win out in the long run—and on the cheap too.32 Liddell Hart
was taking British strategic culture to its absurd extreme, which Colin Gray called ‘‘a
strategy of indecisive encirclement in a long war.’’33 The success of Germany’s Blitz-
krieg discredited Liddell Hart at the time, but Liddell Hart resurrected his reputation
after the Second World War by reinterpreting his ‘‘indirect strategy’’ as the inspira-
tion for Blitzkrieg.34
Like the ‘‘indirect approach,’’ Luttwak’s theory of strategy relied on the apparent
paradox that one promising avenue, in both the metaphoric and the literal senses,
might turn out to be a poor option.
To move toward its objective, an advancing force can choose between two roads, one
good and one bad, the first broad, direct, and well paved, the second narrow, circuitous,
and unpaved. Only in the paradoxical realm of strategy would the choice arise at all,
because it is only in war that a bad road can be good precisely because it is bad and may
therefore be less strongly defended or even left unguarded by the enemy.35
Any claim that something can be good ‘‘because it is bad’’ is, strictly speaking,
illiterate. Fortunately, in this particular example the intended paradox is clear
enough. (Other examples are not so clear. For instance, Luttwak claims that an
ancient Roman proverb—‘‘prepare for war in order to achieve peace’’—is ‘‘paradoxi-
cal.’’ Luttwak compares it to the imagined advice to lose weight by eating more. But
the Roman phrase is a linearly logical statement about deterrence and is therefore
incompatible with his analogue, which is the converse of a real causal relationship.)
What Luttwak is really saying is that advantages come with disadvantages, or that
adversaries adapt and adjust their force employment to the material context, but
none of this is peculiar to military strategy, nor is it particularly profound.
60 Made, Not Born
In any case, the logic itself of ‘‘paradoxical logic’’ breaks down. If the ‘‘paradoxical’’
or ‘‘indirect’’ choice is an accurate description of a consistently preferable choice
today, then competitors will quickly counter those approaches tomorrow, in which
case the previously nonparadoxical or direct choice becomes its opposite. Thus, the
supposed ‘‘logic’’ of strategy is self-defeating.
Logic is an unrealistic description of the strategic decision-making process any-
way. Uncertainty, at least, prevents perfect strategic decisions.36 The self-defeating
cycle described above does not normally occur because conditions of perfect infor-
mation, which are rare, would be a necessary condition. The choice between the
straight but potentially well-defended road and the circuitous but potentially weakly
defended road owes less to logic than to information gathering. If we were to know
that the enemy was defending the straight road, we would, logically, take the circui-
tous road, but under normal conditions of imperfect information, the choice is not
obvious, in which case information is more important than logic.
Further, few strategic choices compete on the basis of one or even a few attributes.
Strategic choices have multiple competing attributes, the relative value of which may
not be immediately obvious, and are usually not resolvable through logical reasoning
anyway. For instance, in Luttwak’s example, the choice is between higher speed and
lower casualties, but in the real world rarely is this an either/or choice. Rather, it is
a trade-off, for which there is no universal logic. How is one to determine an accept-
able trade-off between speed and casualties? One commander may consider the costs
of taking the straight but defended road acceptable, while another commander may
not. To resolve these dilemmas, decision-makers refer to training, experience, and
personal value judgments that may be corrupted by various psychological effects,
such as anchoring effects. To describe these decisions as ‘‘logical’’ is misleading.
Evidence from business suggests that even business strategists, unburdened by the
stresses of war, do not make rational strategic decisions most of the time.37 Moreover,
strategies formulated at the top of the organization are never perfectly implemented.
The assumption that a handful of strategists determine how the organization behaves
is known as the ‘‘top-down’’ or ‘‘design’’ model in management literature.38 In prac-
tice, strategy follows a more diffuse ‘‘process’’ model. Decision-makers may conceive
an ‘‘intended strategy’’ but it will not be implemented exactly as conceived. The
intended strategy is interpreted at lower levels and adapted to meet capabilities and
changing locally variant competitive arenas—a process labeled the ‘‘emergent strat-
egy.’’ The typical ‘‘realized strategy’’ follows only about 10–30% of the intended strat-
egy.39 Other observations suggest that most business strategies deliver only 63% of
their potential financial performance—a gap called the ‘‘strategy-to-performance’’
gap. Typical causes include a lack of performance tracking, short-termism, poor
execution, a disconnect between higher and lower organizational levels, cultures of
underperformance, poor assumptions, and a disconnect between objectives and
resources.40 Coincidentally, war initiation, which suggests strategic confidence, ends
in victory only 65% of the time.41 Whether the victor initiated or not, few military
victories are achieved in a way that looks anything like the original strategy.42
Decision-makers are also constrained or enabled by their force’s capabilities. For

instance, a decision-maker may believe in the utility of outflanking the enemy, but
the combat personnel resources of the combat units involved may be so poor that
outflanking attacks are impossible. Outflanking requires some units to hold the
enemy in front while other units find the flank. As units break away to find the flank
they must expose themselves to enemy fire or find concealment while still moving
quickly. They must be mobile and motivated enough to find the enemy’s genuine
flank rather than to stop moving too early. Then they must carry out a successful
attack, with all the necessary motivations and skills this implies. Meanwhile, the
holding units must retain their positions and keep the enemy engaged while friendly
units are being withdrawn for the flank attack. Unless the friendly side is numerically
preponderant in more than a trivial sense, this usually means that the holding units
must hold a numerically preponderant enemy force. Meanwhile, the enemy side
must lack the skills and motivations to spot and stop the friendly outflanking
maneuver or to outflank the attacking force itself, which would cause the friendly
forces to move into a trap. At the least, the enemy side must lack the skills and moti-
vations to hold their positions until the last minute, to cause the maximum casualties
to the attackers, and then withdraw before being outflanked.
If the resources of the attacking force are considerably superior to the enemy’s,
then outflanking is not a brilliant decision but rather an obvious one. For instance,
General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of U.S. Central Command during the
invasion of Iraq in 1991, is often praised for his decision to outflank the Iraqi
defenses in Kuwait by moving around the Iraqi western flank. However, this decision
was made in the certain knowledge that coalition forces were numerically preponder-
ant, more mobile, and more skilled, and that most Iraqi forces were positioned in
Kuwait and would find movement difficult given coalition air superiority. Other
attacking forces may feel they lack the tactical resources to execute their preferred
strategy. At the beginning of the Second World War, French military leaders believed
that they could employ their forces only in simple ways because those forces were
composed of poorly trained conscript personnel.43 Similarly, British commanders
believed that their combat personnel were undertrained, undermotivated, and
undersupplied, forcing them to limit their strategies, sometimes in favor of material,
firepower, and attrition, even though these alternatives were often self-defeating.44
These vignettes merely illustrate the point that the success of military operations
may owe less to the supposed brilliance of the individual strategist or strategy than
to the capabilities of the personnel who must execute the strategy. Strategies are bet-
ter conceived as plans bounded by capabilities, not recipes guaranteeing success. Yes,
strategy is important (poor strategy may be a ‘‘war stopper’’), but if the capabilities
do not meet the strategic vision, the strategy will fail. Strategic recipes discourage
serious attention to capabilities, such as personnel. The image of the intrinsically
gifted strategist discourages attention to the resources of the majority of military per-
sonnel. As the next section clarifies, the image of the intrinsically gifted military
commander leads to the same outcome.
62 Made, Not Born
Command
Command is decision-making with authority.45 A commander is the individual
with formal authority over a military organization. What do popular theories of
military command have to say about combat personnel? Militaries often engage in
applied research on their particular command problems. Some of this research may
lead the field. However, diplomatic historians and military historians typically rely
on much simpler assumptions, assumptions that may attribute a unit’s performance
to the commander’s intrinsic talent for command. Command is certainly important,
but a command-centric explanation of performance clearly subordinates combat
personnel capabilities to the commander’s capabilities. It also overstates intrinsic
capabilities and neglects extrinsic capabilities. For instance, a command-centric
explanation would attribute combat personnel motivations to the commander’s
powers of inspiration rather than to organizational, unit, or group processes.
There are disciplinary reasons for command-centrism, as examined in the two
subsections below. Diplomatic historians tend to assert the essential importance to
combat personnel performance of the political leader, while military historians
tend to assert the military commander. These assumptions encourage centralized
command, as described in the third subsection. Centralized command emphasizes
control over flexibility and neglects the role of personnel below the commander,
whereas decentralized command emphasizes the skills of junior personnel and offers
faster, more accurate reactions.
The Military Commander

For critics of military history, military historians tend to assume that military
organizations win battles if guided by gifted military commanders. Disciplinary
historians often stereotype military historians as untrained populists with few meth-
odological skills but with some knowledge of a narrow topic, such as a particular war,
battle, or commander. Some disciplinary historians label such military historians
‘‘utilitarian military historians’’ for their self-appointed role in providing moti-
vational and ideational anchors for military organizations. On the positive side,
utilitarian military historians provide textual monuments honoring sacrifice and
perpetuating pride. On the negative side, they perpetuate simplistic and dogmatic
principles of war based on exaggeration and mythmaking.46
Whether they realize it or not, most military historians favor the traditional ‘‘appli-
catory’’ method—study from the point of view of the commander.47 The applicatory
method views war as a duel between two commanders. This reductionism imposes
homogeneity on each military organization—in other words, each organization is
seen as a unitary actor whose performance reflects the command performance of its
commander.48 The applicatory method blames or credits the commander for every
respectively negative or positive battlefield event. The applicatory method has been
described as a ‘‘battle piece narrative’’ ending in ‘‘sycophancy or hero-worship,’’ in
which the only controversy is not whether military commanders are synonymous
with military capability but which commander is superior.49 This sycophancy is

illustrated by the competitive publishing of Basil Liddell Hart and J. F. C. Fuller,
two retired British officers writing during the first half of the twentieth century.
At one point, Liddell Hart and Fuller published, in the same year, admiring biogra-
phies of rival Union Generals William T. Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant, respectively.
While each author disputed the other’s choices, they both attributed military capabil-
ity to the commander’s ‘‘personality.’’50
The commander’s personality is imagined to determine outcomes in two main
ways: first, the commander can inspire the soldier to victory; and second, the com-
mander can swing the battle by brilliant strategic interventions.
While military historians like to assume that commanders inspire their soldiers to
victory, the ordinary soldier’s relationship with the commander is actually remote.
The influence of the soldier’s immediate leaders and comrades is more profound.
While memoirs may show that soldiers commonly identify their lot with their com-
mander, this may be due to the fundamental attribution error and other psychologi-
cal errors. It is true that commanders can influence soldiers indirectly through the
soldiers’ immediate leaders, but such influence is inherently indirect, imprecise,
noisy (in signal theoretic terms), and subject to deliberate dilution or manipulation.
Even if inspired before the battle, the soldier’s inspiration is likely to dissipate when
battle begins. In any case, inspirational commanders may be negative, not positive,
for military capability. Commanders who focus on inspiring their troops directly
must necessarily waste much of their time on an endless cycle of largely superficial
field visits, speeches, and messages. A commander’s emphasis on inspiration can
signal anti-intellectualism and a bias for action. Rhetoric belies real attitudes.
The latter are more contagious and more deeply internalized. Rhetorical styles
of command have been compared to ‘‘toxic leadership’’; increasingly, militaries are
recognizing the problem.51
The second way in which the commander’s personality may be assumed to deter-
mine outcomes is through their strategic interventions. While it is certainly true
that commanders can have great influence on a battle, this influence is unlikely to
be determinant. While ancient battles could be seen and controlled by a single com-
mander at their start, the commander could perceive or control little once combat
had started, at which point many commanders flung themselves into combat. At this
point, their influence was limited to their performance as an inspirational fighter, a
performance that might inspire those soldiers within eyesight. Over time, as sensors
and communications have improved, commanders have stayed out of combat and
attempted to assert more control, but they still cannot perceive or control everything
whenever they wish.52
However much sensors and communications improve, commanders will always
face straightforward perceptual and cognitive limitations, imperfect information,
imperfect communications, organizational constraints, topographical barriers,
inclement weather and climate, limited friendly combat capabilities, and, most
importantly, enemy adaptations. While military historians often talk about the
64 Made, Not Born
‘‘failure’’ of this or that commander to take advantage of some enemy weakness, they
usually fail to consider whether the commander was aware of that weakness or
capable of doing anything about it. Organizational failures, such as an intelligence
failure to discover that weakness or a logistical failure to move forces to the area of
enemy weakness in time to exploit it, could explain these apparent command failures.
Moreover, commanders may be selected for attributes other than their force
employment skills. For instance, General Eisenhower, supreme commander of the
Western Allies’ forces in Europe, was selected for his diplomatic skills, rather than
his operational record. He maintained an uneasy alliance between egotistical British
and American generals that, as long as it endured, was materially preponderant. Yet,
his critics claim, his decision-making tended to favor linear advances rather than
opportune breakthroughs or envelopments.53 In short, homogenization of military
capabilities under the commander is an oversimplification.
The Political Leader

Just as stereotypical military historians may assume that militaries win battles if
they are guided by gifted commanders, diplomatic historians may assume that pol-
ities win wars if guided by gifted political leaders. Critics have noted that diplomatic
historians routinely homogenize polities as socioeconomic units that perfectly reflect
the wishes of their leaders. The stereotypical diplomatic historian assumes that
polities win wars if they are guided by gifted political leaders. Diplomatic historians
like to study what they call ‘‘war and society’’ because it simplifies and sanitizes their
subject and allows them to escape the ‘‘baseness’’ of combat. Unfortunately, it also
forces them to favor two main explanations for victory in war: a leader successfully
mobilizes economic resources; and the leader successfully justifies war to society.54
Collectively, these two explanations might be termed ‘‘socioeconomic mobilization.’’
For instance, Richard Overy thought that Second World War Allied leaders were
better than Axis leaders at socioeconomic mobilization. For unclear reasons, Overy
thought this was particularly true of the Soviet Union’s leader, Josef Stalin, even
though Overy admitted Stalin’s highly erratic decision-making and destructive
meddling.55 David Glantz and Jonathan House adopted the same assumption. As
they put it, the Soviet survival of German invasion in 1941 ‘‘must be attributed
solely to the Soviet people and to the iron nerve of Stalin, [and Generals] Zhukov,
Shaposhnikov, Vasilevsky, and their subordinates.’’56 Indicatively, Overy, Glantz,
and House show little direct evidence for their assumptions.
A second assumed value of the gifted civilian leader is skilled intervention in mili-
tary policy. If war really is ‘‘too important to be trusted to the Generals,’’ as wartime
politicians (and diplomatic historians) like to claim, then surely the wartime civilian
leader is required to intervene, meddle, remind, and cajole. The political leader’s
interventions, especially when they involve interventions in force employment, are
sometimes conceptualized as ‘‘grand strategy.’’ However, increasingly the concept
of the civilian grand strategist is recognized as unrealistic. Adolf Hitler’s seclusion
in the Berlin ‘‘bunker’’ in 1945 is close to the concept’s ideal type, but even Hitler
heeded a polyarchy of competing powermongers, whose relationships he could not
always manage rationally (even if one assumed that he was rational). He was not
an isolated socioeconomic leader, nor was his erratic decision-making, destructive
meddling, or ‘‘iron nerve’’ any different to Stalin’s. Yet Hitler lost the war that Stalin
won. The assumption that war outcomes can be attributed to the political leader is
an unhelpful oversimplification.
Whether or not the political leader is seen as a socioeconomic mobilizer or a grand
strategist, the literature is split on the value of intervention in military affairs by
civilian leaders. One strand of the literature assumes that political intervention is
inexpert. Followers of this school of thinking advocate giving the military sufficient
autonomy to run its own affairs.57 Another school of thinking claims that autono-
mous militaries are myopic and therefore require political intervention if they are
to innovate.58 Eliot Cohen has pushed this latter claim most recently, claiming that
four particular democratic leaders were meddling ‘‘geniuses’’ who ensured that their
militaries would prevail in wars of national survival.59 However, some biographers of
these four leaders had already found that they had won despite, not because of, their
meddling. For instance, Cohen claimed that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln saved
the Union by removing his field commander, General George McClellan, early in
the U.S. Civil War. However, Lincoln himself had earlier appointed McClellan
against the wishes of his cabinet. The Battle of Antietam of 1862, McClellan’s down-
fall, showed that McClellan’s critics had been correct all along: yes, McClellan was
popular with his troops, as Lincoln had always emphasized, but McClellan’s concern
for his troops was one of the reasons for his cautiousness, which his critics had
noticed before Antietam. Lincoln had overvalued the commander’s popularity with
his troops—a layman’s mistake. Lincoln went on to appoint and sack a string of field
commanders until his field armies finally won under Ulysses S. Grant in 1865, but
even this appointment does not prove Lincoln’s skills of selection, since Grant’s
comparative audacity might be attributed to unprecedented Union material prepon-
derance and the Confederacy’s economic collapse.
Even Winston Churchill—Britain’s Prime Minster during the Second World War
and Cohen’s favorite—is an ambiguous wartime leader to celebrate. During the First
World War, Churchill’s reputation had been tarnished by the abortive amphibious
landings at Gallipoli in Turkey, at which time he had been First Lord of the
Admiralty. During the Second World War, Churchill had supported (again as First
Lord of the Admiralty) the abortive occupation of Norway in 1940, then (as Prime
Minister) the abortive occupation of Crete in early 1941, followed by the disastrous
reinforcement of Singapore in late 1941, after which Churchill faced a ‘‘vote of no
confidence’’ in Parliament. Churchill subsequently deferred more of the decision-
making to his coalition government and field commanders. Churchill appointed six
commanders to the Western Desert Force (later the 8th Army) in sixteen months.60
The last of them, General Bernard Law Montgomery, remained Britain’s most senior
field commander for the rest of the war. However, like the appointment of Ulysses
66 Made, Not Born
S. Grant, Montgomery’s appointment was coincident with friendly material prepon-

derance and the collapse of the enemy’s supply lines. Montgomery would prove to be
a highly controversial field commander; some historians claim that Churchill had
sacked superior commanders before settling on Montgomery. Churchill can be
credited for much, but he should not be reified on the grounds of eventual victory
as seen from the romantic distance of history.
There is no self-evidently superior theoretical reason why politicians should be
superior to soldiers as military thinkers. Military scholars may be correct to assume
that militaries are self-interested actors requiring political intervention, but politi-
cians bring their own self-interests into the relationship, as well as issue linkage and
a lack of expertise. For instance, during the Vietnam War, U.S. politicians generally
endorsed, rather than challenged, the U.S. military’s myopia about how the war
should be fought.61
As it stands, evidence can be found for both sides of the debate over whether mili-
tary autonomy or political intervention increases military capability. This suggests
that political intervention should be contingent on the specific case and should not
be a universal rule. The assumption that the commander or political leader deter-
mines military outcomes encourages observers to conceptualize military command
systems as centralized command systems, as described in the next subsection.
Centralized Command
The assumptions that military capability can be explained in terms of the
commander’s or political leader’s talents encourage assumptions that military com-
mand systems should be highly centralized. Centralized command systems gather
decision-making tasks toward the top of the organizational structure. Centralized
command, like centralized strategy, has its advantages, such as control. Additionally,
in the speed–accuracy trade-off, centralized command favors speed. However, one
downside of centralized command is the inherent inaccuracy of decision-making
whenever speed is favored in the speed–accuracy trade-off. The traditional top-
down concept of command conceives of the decision-maker as an information
processor with an input–output relationship with other information nodes, meaning
that the decision-maker receives information, makes a decision, and issues informa-
tion in the form of orders. In practice, information does not flow as smoothly, nor is
it processed as perfectly, as this model implies. In the absence of perfect information
or unlimited time, centralized decision-making may be unrealistic.62
Another downside is that centralized command neglects the quality of leaders at
the lowest levels, upon which the centralized commander relies for accurate informa-
tion before the decision is made and then to implement the decision after the decision
is made. For some historians, the U.S. and German Army General Staffs make an
indicative contrast. ‘‘General Staffs’’ are an important indicator because they can be
used to either centralize or decentralize command. The U.S. General Staff, dating
from the ‘‘Root reforms’’ of 1903, was explicitly inspired by the German General
Staff formed a few decades previously.63 Critics of the U.S. reforms claim that the
U.S. military tasked its staff officers with more of the tasks that the German Army
decentralized to its NCOs or ‘‘junior managers.’’ This helps explain the U.S. Army’s
comparatively low proportion of leaders at the unit level. During the Second World
War, only 36% of U.S. officers were with combat units, compared to 70% of German
officers. The majority of U.S. Army officers claimed to be engaged in clerical work.64
Allegedly, one consequence of this centralization was that U.S. combat units were
required to refer more of their decision-making up the system than were German
combat units. U.S. military command was further centralized in the 1960s,
when the ‘‘defence management revolution’’ brought more senior officers inside the
Pentagon building in the U.S. capital, removing more responsibility from lower
levels.65
The Second World War German Army’s reliance on brief verbal orders is often
contrasted with the British Army’s emphasis on detailed written orders and timetables
that could not account for the uncertainties of weather and intelligence, let alone the
enemy. The British Army’s traditional peacetime delegation of local command to
remote small units scattered around the empire was abandoned in the twentieth
century in an attempt to impose order on the apparent chaos of modern continental
wars.66
Decentralized Command
Decentralizing command to skilled commanders may achieve both speed and
accuracy in decision-making: speed because commanders can act immediately with-
out referring the decision to superiors; accuracy because commanders can act on
local information unavailable to superiors, such as the precise threat, environment,
and available resources. There is no established term in English for such decentral-
ized command, although the term ‘‘mission command’’ has been adopted to trans-
late the German word Auftragstaktik (literally ‘‘mission orders’’). Auftragstaktik can
be used to describe both decentralized strategy and decentralized command. So far
as command is concerned, the concept is understood to prescribe the issuance of
broad objectives to subordinate commanders, who are also given some autonomy
to decide on the detailed objectives and resource mix.67
Auftragstaktik is a German word but not just a German military tradition.
For example, ‘‘imperial policing,’’ as practiced historically by the British Army
and USMC (United States Marine Corps), relied on isolated regiments in colonial
outposts acting within broad guidelines but without direct orders. This historical
experience with decentralized command continues to influence the British Army
and the USMC, long after ‘‘imperial policing’’ became an anachronistic phrase.
In the following quote, a retired British Army officer comments on the scholarly
interest in ‘‘mission command’’ over the last decade or so:
Ironically perhaps those of us[,] who served in counter-revolutionary operations in the

days of dispersed low level deployments and poor communications, accepted delegated
decision-making as a matter of course.68
68 Made, Not Born
Despite a contrary reputation, Soviet command tended to increasing decentraliza-

tion during the Second World War, at least within armored units, the Red Army’s
leading edge.69
Compared to centralized command, decentralized command relies more heavily
on junior leaders, who consequently must be skilled enough to work with more
autonomy and responsibility. In other words, decentralized command is more cogni-
zant of the importance of personnel capabilities.
Combat Leadership
The concept of leadership has evolved significantly and has many definitions. Most
definitions would admit that leadership is the process of motivating and mobilizing
others toward some objective.70 Leadership is important because no matter how
technical is a skill, that skill will always be influenced by those who set objectives.
Leadership may be disaggregated into vertical leadership (or traditional hierarchi-
cal leadership) and horizontal leadership (or teamwork). Vertical leadership may
be further disaggregated into ‘‘leading down’’ and ‘‘leading up,’’ in which superiors
(or leaders) help subordinates (or followers) to take on more of the leadership burden
while subordinates take responsibility for referring necessary information up the
chain of command and for not bothering superiors with decisions that could be
handled at lower levels of command.
Tensions and contradictions remain, especially in the literature on military leader-
ship. One tension is that between command and leadership. An influential modern
treatise on leadership defines command as decision-making with authority
(decision-making is discussed in the next section) and defines leadership as the pro-
cess of influencing human behavior so as to accomplish organizationally prescribed
goals.71 The military leadership literature has often claimed that ‘‘leadership and
generalship [command] are two different qualities,’’ which, while true, is often over-
stated.72 Even though senior commanders and junior leaders have very different roles,
command is difficult to divorce entirely from leadership. Most researchers accept that
individuals may need to be both commanders and leaders at different times.73 When
command is privileged, leadership may be neglected, which means neglecting the
larger number of personnel found at lower levels of the organization.
Another tension is the contradiction between the leader’s training and their intrin-
sic leadership capabilities. While certain intrinsic capacities seem to be of use to lead-
ers, leadership can be learnt. Popular concepts of military leadership, as well as some
military practices, often overstate the leader’s intrinsic capabilities. Leaders were once
thought of as born leaders (sometimes known as the ‘‘great man theory’’). In time,
leaders were associated with ‘‘personality traits,’’ then situational factors, while
contemporary concepts of leadership view leadership as a capability needed at all
levels of the organization and from all individuals. Some researchers may claim that
all personnel should have some leadership skills so that the leadership burden can
be shared. In this case, leadership approaches a prescriptive model that is often called
‘‘distributive’’ or ‘‘participatory.’’
The first subsection of this section explores the traditional assumptions that
leaders are born or that leadership is a ‘‘personality trait’’—in other words, that lead-
ership is an intrinsic capability. These assumptions enjoy little empirical support,
since the correlations are no better than marginal. As I show in the second subsec-
tion, civilian education, an intrinsic attribute, is now the most popular selection
criterion for military leaders, even though civilian qualifications are fairly remote
from the particular skills that combat leaders require. In fact, there is no more than
a marginal empirical relationship between civilian education and leadership perfor-
mance; there is even a negative correlation between civilian education and victory
in war. As I show in the third subsection, reasoning intelligence, especially when
measured as ‘‘intelligence quotient,’’ is often assumed to determine leadership capa-
bilities. However, while reasoning intelligence is more important to leaders than any
personality traits, most leadership skills are better described in terms of emotional
intelligence than reasoning intelligence. As I show in the fourth subsection, emo-
tional intelligence is rarely intrinsically given, so what leaders really need is training
in the specific skills of leadership. Unfortunately, many militaries still train their
leaders in incompatible top-down leadership models.
Personality Traits
Military leaders are often assumed to be born leaders or to require certain ‘‘person-
ality traits,’’ an assumption known as the ‘‘great person theory.’’ This assumption is
very old and popular. For instance, Carl von Clausewitz attributed much of a mili-
tary’s capability to the commander’s intrinsic ‘‘genius,’’ although others have claimed
he did not actually mean intrinsic ‘‘genius.’’74 In Book III, Chapter IV—‘‘The Prin-
cipal Moral Elements’’—Clausewitz writes that the ‘‘skill of the commander’’ is one
of three key success factors, the others being the ‘‘experience and courage of the
troops, and their patriotic spirit.’’ Clausewitz’s Book I, Chapter III—entitled
‘‘On Military Genius’’—claims that soldiers need intrinsic ‘‘courage,’’ ‘‘intelligence,’’
‘‘determination,’’ ‘‘energy,’’ strength of character, rationality (so as to remain
unswayed by emotions), and ‘‘imagination’’ (in order to visualize terrain). Clausewitz
went on to claim that the commander needs these ‘‘attributes’’ most—that the
commander needs to be a ‘‘genius.’’ In Book III, Chapter V—‘‘Military Virtues of
the Army’’—Clausewitz implies that commanders should be tested for their intrinsic
talents, while lower ranks should not, principally because lower ranks cannot be so
thoroughly tested but also because they need only a ‘‘military spirit’’ anyway.
His Chapter V is ambiguous about what is meant by ‘‘military spirit,’’ except that
‘‘this spirit can be created only in war and by great generals [who inspire soldiers
and win battles by their genius].’’ Clausewitz goes on to say that peacetime training
provides armies with only brittle virtues: ‘‘One crack, and the whole thing goes,
like a glass too quickly cooled. . . .An army like this will be able to prevail only by
virtue of its commander, never on its own.’’ This suggests that Clausewitz did
not value extrinsic conditioning, instead relying on intrinsically inspirational and
competent leaders.
70 Made, Not Born
The sort of ‘‘personality traits’’ popular today are clearly inspired by Clausewitz,
but they remain so self-evident or nebulous as to be non-falsifiable, a typical list
being ‘‘courage,’’ ‘‘will,’’ ‘‘intellect,’’ ‘‘presence,’’ and ‘‘energy.’’75 All such lists
perpetuate earlier, often ancient, assumptions about military leadership.76 Some
contemporary historians have even claimed to resurrect ancient knowledge of use
to leaders, such as the so-called ‘‘pagan ethos.’’77
Some military officers, naturally enough, find it in their self-interest to perpetuate
the ‘‘great person theory.’’ Eisenhower, if anything, a bureaucrat more than an
inspirational leader, claimed that the growing size of ‘‘General Staffs’’ required
commanders with more ‘‘personality’’ and ‘‘strength of character.’’78 Montgomery
could not resist an embarrassing postwar search for the so-called ‘‘personality traits’’
of history’s great commanders.79 Even General S. L. A. Marshall, whose studies
of U.S. combat behavior during the Second World War stressed group processes,
nevertheless would claim, late in his career, that General Ulysses Grant’s personal
behavior inspired Union victory in the American Civil War.80 These authors are
not necessarily wrong to assert the role of personality but they would be wrong to
ignore functional skills.
Such overconfidence in personality alone can perpetuate negative leadership
behaviors. An emphasis on personality and inspirational leadership has been associ-
ated with ‘‘toxic’’ leaders, who favor control but lack substance.81 The great person
theory can also encourage the selection of leaders from particular subpopulations,
as illustrated by the traditional method of selecting officers by social class. An
obvious danger inherent to such a practice is that ineffective but socially advantaged
officers are selected, while those with more capacity are not. For instance, the class
origins of British officers have been used to explain the British military’s occasional
‘‘amateurism.’’82 (See the section on promotions in the preceding chapter on person-
nel management.)
Empirically, the relationship between intrinsic personality traits and command
performance is no better than marginal.83 The consensus in the modern literature
is that leaders are less born than made. Civilian training and reasoning intelli-
gence, as described in the next two subsections respectively, are the only intrinsic
resources to be useful and testable. Even so, they may be less important than extrinsic
capabilities.84
Civilian Education
Contrary to some stereotypes, many militaries have tried to select well-educated
and cognitively capable officers. For over two centuries now, U.S. officer schools
have educated their officer candidates with a civilian degree. For the last hundred
years or so, the U.S. military has used intelligence test scores, discussed in the next
subsection, to select leaders. During that time, the U.S. military has come to expect
its lower or ‘‘enlisted’’ ranks to possess a high school diploma, although this require-
ment has been relaxed during recruitment shortfalls.
Dan Horowitz’s assumption that the comparatively high civilian education of

Israeli military personnel explains their tactical skills is often cited in support of these
practices, but Horowitz did not prove the relationship. Instead, Horowitz found a
potentially spurious correlation between a relatively educated Israeli society and
Israeli victory in war.85 The Israeli military has not significantly biased civilian
education. In the mid-1970s recruits with poor intelligence scores and civilian
education were placed in compensatory education but the program was supposed
to benefit society more than the military. Providing undereducated recruits with a
basic civilian education was supposed to integrate conservative, so-called ‘‘oriental’’
Jews into the more secular, Western-oriented military. A recruit might find himself
in the program because of poor motivation, not poor civilian education. Besides,
the compensatory education was nothing more than extended basic training with
some civilian education thrown in.86 Within two decades of the publication of
Horowitz’s claims, most scholars would attribute Israel’s success to good manage-
ment practices, not civilian education.87
The U.S. military has emphasized the civilian education of its officers for over two
centuries now. Unlike most other officer schools, the U.S. Military Academy at West
Point (established 1802), the U.S. Naval Academy (1845), and the USAF Academy
(1955) are all universities. Their graduates receive an undergraduate degree at the
same time as their commission as officers. The ROTC (Reserve Officers Training
Corps) allows students at civilian universities to graduate with officer commissions.
Sometime before the First World War (the policy was introduced incrementally), the
U.S. military began formally discriminating in favor of university graduates.
The U.S. military’s commitment to the civilian education of its soldiers reflects its
traditions and national culture. The U.S. military academies were founded on
postrevolutionary liberal ideals, which demanded that officers receive a ‘‘liberal arts’’
education if military training was not to lead to militarism. The American liberal arts
tradition expects a liberal arts training to make the officer more ‘‘imaginative,’’
amongst other vague effects. This principle is encouraged by American popular
culture, which regards education as a democratic and American principle that can
be generalized.88 Civilian education is used also as a means of rewarding military
service. The ‘‘GI Bill of Rights,’’ which sponsors the civilian education of those with
prior service in the U.S. military, is intended to reward service, not improve military
capability. Many states issue state funds to resident veterans on top of their federal
entitlements.
Ironically, the U.S. military may favor less well-regarded educational programs.
Alumni from a handful of civilian universities are overrepresented. Alumni from
Texas A&M (formerly: Agricultural and Mining) University are most overrepre-
sented in the U.S. Army, outnumbering alumni even from the U.S. Military Acad-
emy. Such civilian universities tend to be poorly ranked academically and to
explicitly emphasize nonacademic objectives, such as ‘‘Christian’’ values. The U.S.
military opens itself to accusations of bias by choosing which universities,
even which academic departments, its personnel may attend using military funds.
72 Made, Not Born
The U.S. military academies, for their part, rotate serving officers through their
faculty and restrict their civilian positions to U.S. citizens, in part for ‘‘security clear-
ance’’ reasons. Meanwhile, since the 1960s, the banishment of ROTC programs
from the campuses of ‘‘Ivy League’’ universities and other academically highly
ranked universities, as punishment for first the U.S. military’s role in the Vietnam
War and then its discrimination against homosexuals, has denied the military an
important source of well-educated, liberal officers.89
Few other militaries emphasize civilian education to the same extent as does the
U.S. Greek military officers also must complete a four-year degree at a military acad-
emy before they are commissioned. By contrast, British officer schools do not issue
undergraduate degrees; their instruction is in military subjects, and this instruction
lasts less than twelve months. While 85% of British cadets have undergraduate
degrees when they start their officer training, all of those degrees are civilian degrees
and most are acquired without military sponsorship. The only civilian undergradu-
ate degrees that the British military will financially sponsor are those in applied
sciences of military utility, such as engineering or medicine. Similarly, all German
officer cadets must pass through an eighteen-month officer school, whether or not
they have prior university degrees, which most do not.90 Their eighteen months at
officer school make up the final part of a three and a half year training commitment,
which includes experience at enlisted rank. Observers often assume that the ‘‘mili-
tary’’ universities (Universitäten der Bundeswehr) in Hamburg and Munich are equiv-
alent to West Point. In fact, they are universities, not officer schools, and they accept
civilian students.
Providing the officer with a higher (civilian) education must have some merit for
combat leaders, if only by providing time for maturation, but the merit is difficult to
fully test. At worst, military restrictions on the officer’s higher education can
perpetuate parochial educational objectives. At best, the officer’s higher degree is an
expensive and time-consuming burden for the military to bear, a burden which few
militaries other than the U.S. military have been willing to bear. Perhaps the most
consequential part of the burden is not financial but temporal. Wartime expansion
of the U.S. military’s civilian education programs has served to keep many intelligent
personnel out of the war until their students grew restless, their program was
cancelled, or the war ended. During both world wars, the U.S. military academies
and most U.S. civilian universities accelerated their undergraduate degrees from four
to three years, yet there was no attempt to increase their military content. ROTC was
actually supplemented by redundant programs. Most of the students enrolled in
these ‘‘accelerated’’ wartime programs either quit early in order to join the war effort
or graduated after the end of the war. For instance, when the United States entered
the First World War in 1917, the U.S. Army established the SATC (Student Army
Training Corps), which placed potential officers in accelerated civilian degree
programs lasting three years, beginning in the Fall (Autumn) semester of 1918.
The earliest graduates would not have been ready for leadership positions until
mid-1921. Just before the students began their instruction, the instruction period
was lowered to nine months. The armistice was signed a month after instruction
finally began, at which point SATC was terminated, without any of its participants
ever graduating.
In 1943 the U.S. Army and Navy, apparently unmoved by the Army’s experience
with SATC twenty-six years previously, created the ‘‘Specialized Training Program,’’
which placed enlisted personnel who had scored well on the General Classification
Test in civilian degree programs. Army ROTC was shortly absorbed by the Army
Specialized Training Program, only for the latter to be terminated in summer
1944, due to combat personnel shortages, before any of its 150,000 students
(enough to populate ten infantry divisions) had graduated. The Navy ROTC, which
had been established earlier, remained independent of the Navy Specialized Training
Program. Both navy programs were allowed to run their course, mainly because
the USN (U.S. Navy) never faced the personnel shortages faced by the U.S. Army.
The majority of the highly desirable personnel who entered these programs during
wartime did not graduate before the war ended.
While higher degrees are clearly burdensome investments, do they make their
graduates better leaders? Postwar research showed that graduates of these programs
were not rated as better officers than nongraduates.91 In addition, large-N data
showed that a high school or university education was only ‘‘marginally’’ correlated
with the combat ‘‘effectiveness’’ of U.S. Army soldiers during the Second World
War. There were various reasons to regard even the marginal correlation as spurious.
For instance, a successful civilian education might indicate emotional or personal
skills, such as delayed gratification.92 There is even large-N evidence for a negative
relationship between a high school education and victory in war.93 The negative
correlation is difficult to explain, but perhaps militaries neglect extrinsic condition-
ing if they are overly attentive to civilian education.
Although civilian education surely contributes some cognitive skills and perhaps
some personal skills, it does not necessarily teach soldiers how to lead or to do any
of the more peculiar things soldiers must do, such as operate weapons, kill, or face
death—skills that must be extrinsically conditioned. Civilian education is more rel-
evant to noncombat technical roles, such as engineering. Most combat skills have
no civilian counterpart; most civilian skills do not fully translate into military skills.
Even the few civilian skills of some potential relevance—such as hunting—are too
underpopulated and parochial to be reliable. Some civilian qualifications like literacy
are obviously useful for text-based instruction and, indeed, most developing world
militaries make their recruits literate if they are not literate already. Yet this is not
because soldiers fight each other by passing notes, but because literacy makes training
easier. And it is training—extrinsic conditioning—that provides fighting skills.
While the American liberal arts tradition is probably correct that a higher degree
encourages ‘‘imaginativeness,’’ a degree in English Literature or History of Art would
be an expensive and time-consuming way to make the officer imaginative. Why not
directly train the officer in imaginativeness? Better still, why not directly train the
officer in leadership skills more tangible than imaginativeness?
74 Made, Not Born
Reasoning Intelligence
Empirically, reasoning intelligence seems to be useful to leaders. Selecting soldiers
by their reasoning intelligence, however, is problematic. For a start, selecting soldiers
by their reasoning intelligence tends to cause selectors to neglect other forms of
intelligence, such as emotional intelligence. Also, reasoning intelligence is still fairly
difficult to separate from other skills during testing. Historically, civilian qualifica-
tions or social standing have been used as proxies for intelligence, but such measures
easily conflate intelligence with social advantage.
‘‘Intelligence Quotient’’ (IQ) tests were first practiced on U.S. Army recruits in
1917. Each recruit’s IQ score could be used to select soldiers for officer school and
for promotion. 94 In 1940, the U.S. Army (which then included the Army Air
Forces) used the same IQ tests as the basis for its ‘‘Army General Classification Test,’’
while the USN created a similar ‘‘Navy General Classification Test.’’ Of the five
classes, soldiers in classes I and II were directed to Officer Candidate Schools and
would proceed further if admissions boards considered their civilian education
satisfactory.95 Class II was the main source of NCOs.96 Therefore, by 1940, IQ
was the primary selection criterion for U.S. military leaders, after which potential
officers would be selected by their civilian qualifications.
Some skepticism of this use of intelligence tests was expressed at the time. Skeptics
observed that most leadership skills—such as the ability to persuade others to follow
in combat—hardly could be described as reasoning skills.97 As early as 1942, U.S.
Army researchers were reporting that small unit leadership was disappointing. Post-
war study blamed the inattention to ‘‘effective intelligence,’’ a phrase which seemed
to refer to interpersonal, communications, self-awareness, and other skills that might
be best captured under the more contemporary term ‘‘emotional intelligence.’’98
Postwar surveys showed that U.S. Army soldiers valued leaders who displayed ‘‘lead-
ership by example,’’ excellent communication skills, concern for their welfare,
and informality—in that order. Reasoning intelligence did not feature.99 More anec-
dotally, successful British officers displayed military skills, a strong personality, and
courage.100 IQ tests are narrow tests of narrow skills. They ignore other more relevant
skills, such as social skills.101 U.S. university entrance tests, which were originally
derived from the U.S. military’s general classification tests, have evolved since then
to solve their apparent discrimination against emotional intelligences such as social
skills.102
The emphasis on reasoning intelligence even could be detrimental to leadership.
For instance, faith in the individual’s ability to reason their way through their leader-
ship challenges can encourage overoptimism and eventual failure. The ‘‘emotionally
literate’’ or ‘‘self-aware’’ are more honest about the objectives they can be expected
to achieve.103
Emotional Intelligence
Some researchers claim that emotional intelligence is a stronger predictor of indi-
vidual performance than reasoning intelligence in the majority of civilian roles.
People may be highly ‘‘intelligent’’ (meaning they score highly on an IQ test) but
unsuccessful in life. For instance, Asian-Americans tend to be more successful,
judged on their professions, than Caucasian-Americans. The difference in IQ scores
is insufficient to explain their relative success. An alternative explanation is that
Asian-Americans work harder because of a stronger cultural work ethic, amongst
other things.104 People who work hard tend to recognize the value of delayed grati-
fication. They are less tempted by the immediate gratification of play and more
cognizant of the future rewards of hard work. Observable delayed gratification is a
stronger predictor of professional success than IQ.105 The less happy position of
African-Americans may be attributable to sociocultural ‘‘self-sabotage,’’ such as a
low valuation of academic or career success.106
The term ‘‘emotional intelligence’’ is usually written in the singular but conceptu-
ally includes many different types of emotional skills, of which two main categories
are apparent: self-awareness107 or ‘‘intrapersonal intelligence,’’ and ‘‘interpersonal
intelligence,’’108 which is similar to ‘‘social intelligence’’109 or ‘‘group intelligence.’’110
Combat appears to demand self-awareness and the interpersonal skills of empathy
and communications in particular. Self-awareness is the ability to understand
our own emotions. The emotional stability of the self-aware is a source of group
emotional stability. This is because emotions are contagious. Additionally, self-
aware people tend to be able to manage the social signals they send. They make
others feel better. This makes them charming and popular. Others are more likely
to turn to them for help.111 When generalized across group members, these skills
make groups ‘‘internally harmonious.’’ Their members are generally self-aware
enough to know their skills and weaknesses, and empathic enough to relate well with
others.112
Empathy is linked with self-awareness, because the more aware we are of our own
emotions, the more skilled we are at relating to other people’s emotions.113 Empathy
is the ability to know other people’s feelings. That knowledge is not always acquired
by reasoned verbal communication, nor is it always consciously realized. Most emo-
tional cues are picked up through speech tones, gestures, and facial expressions.
Observers may be unconscious about the nonverbal cues they observe. Empathic
people have better relationships. They have greater influence. They contribute more
to groups.114 They have advantages as leaders since they can set the emotional tone
of a relationship. Their emotional expressivity dominates and influences—this is
often called ‘‘emotional entrainment.’’115 Soldiers may even develop ‘‘hyperempa-
thy.’’ Hyperempathy is an obsessive preoccupation with the feelings of others.
Hyperempathy has been observed in adults who were abused as children. These
children become unusually vigilant to others’ emotional cues in case they signal
threat. On the negative side, hyperempathic children may become adults whose
moods are intense and unpredictable. A similar downside for hyperempathic
veterans is ‘‘disillusionment’’ and ‘‘alienation’’ from civilian relations—even from
prior familial and romantic relations.116 However, on the positive side, the hyperem-
pathic are uniquely gifted at reading other people’s emotions.117
76 Made, Not Born
Self-awareness and empathy both improve communication skills. Our thoughts

and expertise are easier to share if we are aware of them and if we relate to others
well.118 Communication skills are also associated with group success in solving prob-
lems. Communications help in proper role assignment.119 Communications help
leaders become ‘‘role differentiated’’ because individuals who give communications
tend to receive communications in return.120 Soldiers can become attuned to each
other in a way similar to the tacit and unconscious attunement between empathic
parents and their children.121 Such attunement allows faster, less verbally intensive
communication skills that have obvious utility in combat.
Transformational Leadership
Such emotional skills are characteristic of a leadership pattern called ‘‘trans-
formational’’ leadership. ‘‘Transformational’’ patterns of leadership transform the
motivations of others to best serve the leader’s objectives. This contrasts with the
‘‘transactional’’ leadership model, which stresses hierarchy and the use of reward
and punishment to elicit obedience. Large-N evidence from a study of Israeli soldiers
suggests that leaders trained in the transformational model tend to be more effective
leaders.122
Unfortunately, militaries are often characterized as late to recognize the latest
leadership research.123 Some insiders report that U.S. military leadership manuals
have excluded the latest research as too ‘‘revolutionary.’’124 Meanwhile, practically
minded soldiers may resist leadership theory. This conservatism is perhaps best illus-
trated by the common preference for inspiring military fiction over empirical
research.125 Thus, a lot of military commentary on leadership may appear mystical:
‘‘As long as we do not know exactly what makes men get up out of a hole in the
ground and go forward in the face of death at a word from another man, then lead-
ership will remain one of the highest and elusive of qualities.’’126 In fact, the research
suggests that transformational leadership is particularly effective at persuading others
to take risks. The hierarchy imposed by rank may prove to be a sufficient incentive
for obedience during peacetime, in which case peacetime leaders may get by with
transactional leadership patterns. However, in the Second World War, U.S. soldiers
‘‘insisted not only that officers who issued fateful orders know what it is to risk their
own lives but that they give proof of their ability to lead and thus validate their claim
to command.’’127 ‘‘Combat was the acid test’’ for new officers, as a Second World
War U.S. Marine recalled.128
Selection by Emotional Intelligence

The alternative to selection by reasoning intelligence might appear to be selection
by emotional intelligences. Indeed, some militaries have attempted to test the emo-
tional intelligence of potential leaders using practical tests, which were first developed
in Europe around the time the Americans introduced IQ tests. For example, while the
Germans briefly used intelligence tests to select officers in the interwar period, they
later added psychological tests and practical ‘‘leadership’’ or ‘‘problem-solving’’ tests,
and then finally rejected intelligence tests entirely in 1941.129 Information on the
German psychological tests is sketchy, but they seem best understood as practical tests
of recall, articulation, problem solving, and teamwork.130 The British Army explicitly
adopted the German psychological tests and practical problem-solving tests in 1941,
initiating a new battery of psychological, psychiatric, and intelligence tests and inter-
views in April 1942. About 40% of all British Army officers commissioned during the
war passed through the new testing battery. The Royal Navy started its own version of
the battery in March 1943. (Previously, the British had relied entirely on interviews,
which were criticized for perpetuating class bias.) The British considered the intelli-
gence tests to be the least diagnostic tests in their testing battery.131 British psychol-
ogy, led by Cambridge University, was skeptical of what it called the ‘‘[American]
intelligence test movement,’’ noting the distinction between ‘‘reasoning’’ intelligence,
genetic ‘‘temperament,’’ and emotional ‘‘attainments’’ such as work ethics and social
skills.132
Back in the United States, in 1943 the OSS (Office of Strategic Services)—the
forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency—decided that reasoning intelligence
and ‘‘mechanical aptitude’’ were inadequate indicators of their agents’ performance
and thus explicitly imported the British tests in order to capture what the OSS called
‘‘effective intelligence.’’ 133 A USAF LRC (‘‘Leadership Reaction Course’’) was
constructed in 1951 after a USAF liaison officer had observed the British tests. LRCs
or Leadership Development Courses are sets of practical problem sets used to test and
train the leadership skills of the users. The U.S. Army constructed its own LRC in
1952, and the USMC constructed its own shortly thereafter. Practical problem-
solving tests are now a normative part of officer selection. LRCs are distinguished
from other leadership training in that they are normally entirely practical. Well-
designed problem sets require users to draw on cognitive, psychological, and psycho-
motor skills simultaneously. Therefore, well-designed LRCs develop highly contex-
tual skills, such as coping skills. These skills are not intrinsically given, although
some individuals may possess predispositional advantages.
Even if emotional intelligences could be tested, would they be intrinsic enough to
warrant testing at all? While temperament is usually considered genetic, emotional
behavior is normally considered to reflect conditioning more than temperament.
Most emotional intelligences are considered external to temperament. Few individ-
uals are lucky enough to have had such positive formative experiences during their
civilian lives that their emotional intelligences and practical leadership skills need
no further development. Even the most emotionally intelligent civilian will need
extensive extrinsic fine-tuning in the intense and specific emotional intelligences
associated with leadership. This suggests that leadership training is important for
combat leaders; careful selection is not enough.
Combat Decision-Making
Decision-making is the process of making choices among competing actions given
incoming information. A good decision is one that increases the chances of a good
78 Made, Not Born
outcome. One of the reasons that reasoning intelligence is considered a vital

selection criterion for both leaders and followers is the traditional assumption that
intelligent people are rational and that combat decision-making follows a rational
model. Traditional rational or formal models of decision-making encourage
the selection of ‘‘rational’’ decision-makers, for which reasoning intelligence is the
operational test. While reasoning intelligence can benefit decision-making, many
combat decisions, particularly at the most tactical levels, must be made faster than
the human brain can reason. These fast emotional responses must be extrinsically
conditioned.
Since there is no model of combat decision-making, the six subsections below
explore six models of decision-making that have been used in relevant research:
rational models, automaticity and naturalistic models, recognition-primed models,
multi-attribute utility models, sequential sampling decision models, and adaptive
planning models. I conclude that combat decision-making skills, particularly at the
most tactical levels, are best described as emotional, not reasoning, and as extrinsic,
not intrinsic.
Rational Models
Most military scholars explicitly assume rationality. They may formally accept
limits to rationality (‘‘bounded rationality’’) but often end up treating problems as
imperfectly rational anyway. Some political scientists use ‘‘rational choice theory’’
to explain human decisions. Meanwhile, military training routinely prescribes
generalizable ‘‘formal’’ or ‘‘events-based’’ decision-making processes in which the
decision-maker is supposed to respond to events by drawing up all the options and
then selecting the optimal option.134 Rational models are now being replaced by
automatic processing and recognition-priming models (described in the next two
subsections respectively) for training soldiers.
Most decision-making researchers no longer accept rational models as realistic. For
some, rational models persist due to simple elegance more than practical utility.135
Few decision-makers, in any area of life, follow the rational model perfectly. 136
Even those soldiers trained in ‘‘formal’’ processes seem to reject them after some
experience.137 Formal processes are ‘‘ill fitting’’ to unique real-world situations.
Decision-makers find it difficult to identify all the available options or to evaluate
the optimal option. 138 Some researchers report that decision-making is both
faster and more accurate when decision-makers are less deliberative and more
‘‘intuitive.’’139
In combat, rational processes are particularly difficult to follow. Soldiers should
not necessarily even try to reason in combat. Combat decision-making takes place
in unusually time-critical, high-stakes situations. Combat soldiers must react faster
than the reasoning mind can reason. ‘‘At various headquarters reason may govern,
but the line is a place of passion and madness,’’ as one veteran recalled.140 Soldiers
in combat may multitask to the point where they feel cognitively ‘‘lost.’’ As the brain
deals with many unique inputs, it engages in selective, focused, or divided attention.
It may even overload.141 This is because ‘‘attentive processing’’ is demanding of cog-

nitive resources, as illustrated by this vignette from U.S. operations in Somalia
in 1993:
Just listening to the shouted questions and commands on the radio, [US Army Delta
Force Sergeant] Howe sensed that some of those in charge were out of their depth. There
was just too much going on. He could see it in their faces. Sensory overload. When it
happened you could almost see the fog pass over a man’s eyes. They just withdrew. They
became strictly reactive.142
With appropriate experience or training, decision-makers can rely on faster

emotional, non-reasoning processes that may even bypass the reasoning mind, as
partially described by the models in the next subsections.143
Automaticity and Naturalistic Models

Automaticity or automatic processing is a form of cognitive decision-making
that does not need to be consciously reasoned. Automaticity may be called naturalis-
tic decision-making, which has been defined as ‘‘the way people use their experience
to make decisions in field settings.’’144 Some naturalistic models are better known
than others. Recognition-primed models are usually considered naturalistic models
but warrant their own subsection, below. There is no single model of automaticity
or naturalistic decision-making; rather, these terms describe a ‘‘movement’’ or an area
of research. The movement is sometimes unpopular because its advocates sometimes
criticize what they call ‘‘traditional’’ decision-making models (rational and multi-
attribute utility models in particular) and they often rely on field research rather than
more traditional laboratory research.145
Naturalistic decision-making models share a concern with situational awareness
and with ‘‘automatic’’ responses, both of which are traditional concerns of military
training. Automatically processed responses are quicker than reasoned responses
and are therefore vital in situations where immediate reaction is demanded, such as
when two opposing soldiers suddenly confront each other. The amygdala, a neural
structure near the brain stem, controls these non-reasoning responses. The amygdala
can take control of human actions while the neocortex (the reasoning brain) is still
processing. It was once thought that sensory stimuli had to travel from the thalamus
through the reasoning brain before a reaction. Now we know that some neurons
bypass the reasoning brain and provide a shorter ‘‘neural backdoor’’ from the thala-
mus direct to the amygdala. The amygdala can start a response before sensory stimuli
are even registered by the neocortex.146 A stressful event, such as a reprimand during
training for not taking cover quick enough, becomes a memory stamped by the
amygdala’s emotional arousal. While the hippocampus, a part of the neocortex,
remembers the facts of an event, the amygdala retains the emotional flavor. This emo-
tional stamp serves as a reactive trigger when the individual is recognition-primed by
a similar situation. For instance, U.S. Army Rangers fired first on the armed Somalis
they ran into during the confused street battles in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993,
80 Made, Not Born
because the Rangers had trained with pop-up targets marked in different colors to sig-
nify legitimate or illegitimate targets.147
Although we want soldiers to react in emotional ways, we want these reactions to
be appropriate. Some of the primitive mechanisms we try to subordinate to the
reasoning mind in the civilized world need to be manifested in the military world.
For instance, in Mogadishu in 1993, after a burst of fire from a Somali removed a
U.S. Ranger’s fingertip, anger kept the Ranger in position to kill the Somali when
he reappeared.148 However, at other times anger is not useful. Another Ranger,
hit in the arm, responded with continuous fire at no target in particular until his
sergeant took over his machine gun.149
While reasoning reactions are relatively slow but precise, emotional reactions are
fast but sloppy. Emotional reactions can fire out of context or the crisis response
can become outdated. Emotional reactions are only useful if they occur when they
should. This makes the soldier dependent on extrinsic conditioning; if the soldier
relies on reactions learnt as a civilian, the soldier is likely to react inaccurately in
combat. The civilian’s typical exposure to war is fiction, especially cinematic fiction,
which causes inaccurate recognition priming. For instance, Second World War U.S.
soldiers were frequently shocked to find that war did not turn out as portrayed in the
sterile war movies of the day.150 Some U.S. Army Rangers in Mogadishu, having
spent much of their free time watching movies on videocassettes, reported an unheal-
thy dissociation from combat threats, which, at first, they incorrectly recognized as
cinematic events.151
When automatic processing is at its most efficient, the soldier can enter states of
peak performance or ‘‘flow.’’ Flow occurs when peak performance is achieved effort-
lessly and ecstatically. During flow, neural activity actually quiets down. Tasks are
performed well because all other memories, concerns, and emotions are suppressed
in the moment of task fulfillment. Reasoning, such as the mere recognition of task
fulfillment, can break flow.152 A U.S. Ranger has described entering something like
flow while fighting in Mogadishu in 1993:
A state of complete mental and physical awareness. In those hours on the street he had
not been Shawn Nelson, he had no connection to the larger world, no bills to pay,
no emotional ties, nothing. He had just been a human being staying alive from one
nanosecond to the next, drawing one breath after another, fully aware that each one
might be his last.153
Flow is only achieved by practice. During practice, neural activity can be finely
attuned to maximum efficiency.154 The most effective form of practice is play. Since
real experience can be fatal or difficult to find, militaries have attempted to create
training that realistically simulates combat missions. Training can even enhance the
sensory awareness of soldiers. For instance, Second World War U.S. Marine recruits
reported that their ‘‘hearing became superkeen’’ listening for prowling instructors
during predawn exercises and, later, listening for nighttime Japanese infiltrators.155
A U.S. Ranger has described the same sensory development in the jungles of Vietnam
during 1969:
Our sense of sight, hearing, and smell had developed to such a degree that we had
become little more than walking sensors. Our eyes, ears, and noses continually collected
data from our surroundings. It was quickly transmitted to our brains for processing,
identification, and storage. What bothered me was that there was no reason to doubt
that our enemies had not developed the same capabilities.156
Even noncombat skills, such as resistance to interrogation, in which rational pro-

tocols (such as the international norm that prisoners of war need only give ‘‘name,
rank, and number’’) might appear to be sufficient for decision-making, are best
learnt as automatic processes through experiential learning. One field experiment
showed that soldiers who had undergone a simulated interrogation were better able
to stick to the protocols than those who had received extra formal instruction in
the protocols.157
Clearly, useful automatic processing is not intrinsically given but rather must be
carefully trained. For advocates of naturalistic decision-making, careful training
means incorporating appropriate contextual and domain-specific cues and tasks
within a stressful experiential environment that delivers cognitive feedback. These
recommendations describe much traditional tactical field training but may go
beyond it. Advocates note that badly designed experiential training may train the
wrong behaviors (negative training) and may be accompanied by formal training in
rational models. Training also needs to go beyond mere practice or the accumulation
of experience, because the decision-maker may practice suboptimal behaviors that
fall short of the performance of which they are capable.158
Recognition-Primed Models
Gary Klein has been at the center of research into what he calls ‘‘intuitive’’ and
‘‘recognition-primed’’ decision-making. When Klein advocates intuition, he does
not mean to advocate guesswork or bias. Rather, he defines intuition as ‘‘the way
we translate our experience into action.’’ The early research into recognition-
primed decision-making enjoyed support from the USMC and the U.S. Army,
which formally endorsed the model in 2003. Klein and his colleagues describe the
traditional ‘‘military decision-making process,’’ based on rational and formal models
of decision-making, as ‘‘cumbersome,’’ slow, and often misleading. Klein advocates
more ‘‘intuitive’’ decision-making, which he thinks is faster and often more accurate,
depending on the decision-maker’s experience and intuitive skills. The cognitive
model for recognition-primed decision-making relies on ‘‘pattern’’ recognition,
which allows the decision-maker to recognize in new situations patterns of cues from
old experiences. Such pattern recognition can be entirely subconscious, something
not allowed by formal or rational models. Patterns activate ‘‘action scripts,’’ which
are imagined scenarios based on potential decisions and their consequences.
The decision-maker assesses the action scripts through mental simulation and then
chooses whichever decision is preferred. Effective recognition-primed decision-
making should be faster and more positive than more formal methods, which do
not recognize the role of subjective experience.
82 Made, Not Born
Klein recognizes many barriers to effective recognition-primed decision-making

but nevertheless believes that it can be trained. Positive training is preferred over expe-
rience, because while accumulated experience helps accumulate patterns, intrinsic or
badly trained experiences may cause inappropriate recognition priming.159
Multi-Attribute Utility Models

‘‘Multi-attribute utility models’’ recognize that a single optimal option rarely
exists. Instead, decision-makers must choose between imperfectly competitive
options, each of which may be attractive when judged by one of its many attributes.
The relative utility of these different attributes is difficult to determine because the
decision-maker is likely to face multiple competing objectives. For instance, if
soldiers are ordered to attack an enemy position, their decision-making will reflect
their valuation of the gain in territory, of the expected personnel costs, and of their
obligations to orders, all of which are imperfectly competitive. (See the subsection
on strategic recipes in the first section.) The trade-offs are not normally solved
rationally but instead by recourse to value systems—value systems which are learnt
in nonrational ways, such as by socialization. If the decision-maker’s value system
is to mesh with the organization’s objectives, the organization must deliberately
condition the individual to adopt those same objectives.160
Sequential Sampling Decision Models

The individual’s resolution of competing objectives is highly personal. Individual
biases also vary across time. This is not something explicitly recognized by multi-
attribute utility models, which assume that there is no variability in preferences over
time. ‘‘Sequential sampling decision models’’ recognize individual biases due to
personal experiences—especially recent or dramatic experiences. These preferences
are known as ‘‘initial biases.’’ Decision-makers weight their initial biases over objec-
tive information. This weighting of initial biases is called ‘‘base-rate neglect’’ because
the individual is neglecting objective probabilities.
Sequential sampling decision models also recognize that time pressures can lower
inhibitory thresholds for certain responses. Higher inhibitory thresholds, normally
associated with more important decisions, imply greater accuracy. Time pressures,
however, imply lower accuracy. If the decision-maker is under no time pressures,
the decision-maker can take as much time as needed to perfect the decision. If the
decision is especially important, the decision-maker will resist pressures to be rushed
and may fail to make any decision. In other words, decision-makers face ‘‘speed–
accuracy trade-offs.’’ Sequential sampling decision models imply that extensive
experience, which is rare and often not replicable, or extensive training, which is
replicable, are required to mitigate the speed–accuracy trade-off. Decision-makers
need to learn how to continue to make accurate decisions even when under time
pressure. Initial biases, base-rate neglect, and time pressures can all be mitigated by
training the decision-maker to recognize their influence and discriminate objective
information. The best form of training in this case is experiential training that
simulates stressful speed–accuracy trade-offs.
Adaptive Planning Models

The previous models all describe a single-stage decision. However, military
decision-makers must usually make several decisions, all of them discrete but poten-
tially related to each other in an interdependent chain. Adaptive planning models
combine decision and learning models to describe how multiple, iterated, inter-
dependent decisions are made. Individuals learn to anticipate consequences based
on preceding sequences of events (this model is known as the ‘‘exemplar learning
model’’), while using sequential sampling decision processes at each sequence.
The model implies that decision-making improves with experience. Few individuals
have the opportunity to learn from real-world combat experience before their inex-
perience kills them. Again, realistic training provides the best alternative to direct
experience.161
Summary
Force employment is normally accepted as important to combat outcomes. Such
acceptance would seem to assert the importance of the personnel who employ forces.
However, the literature has traditionally used a confused analytical framework to
interpret force employment, treating ‘‘strategy’’ as both one level of analysis and
the determinant level of analysis, although the literature seems to be evolving, mainly
through the influence of Stephen Biddle. Reification of strategy (‘‘strategism’’) ends
up attributing combat outcomes to the winner’s strategic leaders or ‘‘strategists’’
and their strategic recipes. These attributions overstate the intrinsic talents, particu-
larly their ‘‘strategic logic,’’ of a handful of individual ‘‘strategists’’ and neglect
the combat personnel at lower levels who must interpret, adapt, and execute the
strategies generated at the top.
Military historians tend to assume that military performance reflects the military
commander’s ability to inspire soldiers to victory or to make critical strategic inter-
ventions. Diplomatic historians tend to assume that military performance reflects
the politician’s ability to mobilize the socioeconomy or to intervene in military
policy. These assumptions encourage centralized command systems, which overstate
the role of the individual commander or leader at the center of the system. Central-
ized command tends to be fast but inaccurate, whereas decentralized command,
if combined with skilled junior leaders, can be both fast and accurate. While central-
ized command tends to assume that personnel perfectly reflect the wishes of
their commanders, decentralized command admits the important role of personnel
capabilities.
Leadership is important to soldiers, who must cooperate in extremely difficult
situations. The great person theory assumes that effective leaders rely on intrinsic per-
sonality traits but the empirical relationships are marginal at best. Civilian education
84 Made, Not Born
is the most popular formal selection criterion for leaders today, but a civilian educa-
tion is of most use to noncombat trades. For instance, a civilian education in
engineering is obviously important to military engineers. Moreover, a civilian educa-
tion can be counterproductive if the wrong sort of civilian education is emphasized.
Leaders are often selected by their reasoning intelligence, but reasoning intelligence
is marginally correlated with leadership performance, probably because leadership
has a strong emotional or psychological component. Emotional intelligences are
more important than reasoning intelligence to combat leadership. Emotional intelli-
gences are similar to the set of skills associated with a leadership model known as
transformational leadership, which is more useful than transactional leadership to
combat leaders. Emotional intelligence is difficult to test, and few individuals are
lucky enough to be intrinsically endowed with sufficient emotional intelligence.
Therefore, leaders, particularly combat leaders, need extensive extrinsic conditioning,
usually practical conditioning, in emotional and transformational leadership skills.
While many observers of combat assume that combat decision-making relies
on intrinsic rationality, combat decision-making actually relies on faster emotional
processes that must be extrinsically conditioned. Rational models of combat
decision-making are unrealistic because decision options may not be perfectly
discernable and may fail to offer a single optimal option anyway. Automatic and
naturalistic models offer a more realistic understanding of decision-making in
combat, at least at the most tactical levels, because they describe the importance of
situational awareness and emotional, non-reasoning responses. One particularly
popular naturalistic model for describing decision-making in combat is the
recognition-priming model, which describes pattern recognition and mental simula-
tion. Naturalistic models generally imply that training is very important to effective
decision-making; experience may help, but experience can embed suboptimal or
negative behaviors. While naturalistic models are often antagonistic to more ‘‘tradi-
tional models,’’ some traditional models—multi-attribute utility models, sequential
sampling decision models, and adaptive planning models—are still important to
research on military decision-making. These models, like naturalistic models, imply
the central importance of positive training. Multi-attribute utility models imply that
good decision-making is a function of appropriate value systems or conscious recog-
nition of the multiple attributes by which utility could be judged. Sequential sam-
pling models prescribe objective information gathering and effective management
of the time–accuracy trade-off. Adaptive planning models prescribe adaptive
learning. While these skills probably benefit from some intrinsic talent, talent seems
less important to effective decision-making than training or experience. While
experience is unreliable and risky, positive training offers more controlled outcomes.
Soldiers need to be trained in split-second emotional responses, intuitive situational
awareness, pattern recognition, mental simulation, organizational value systems,
recognition of the decision’s multiple attributes, and personal management of the
time–accuracy trade-off.
CHAPTER 4
COMBAT STRESS AND COHESION
Combat is a stressful experience. As the first section of this chapter shows, resistance
to stress is less an intrinsic attribute and more a consequence of group-level factors
and personnel management. Cohesion, described in the second section, is often
seen as a group-level moderator of stress, although its effects are not limited to stress
resistance. Like stress resistance, cohesion is more a consequence of group-level
factors and management than intrinsic attributes.
Stress
Stress is ‘‘an individual’s reactions to apparent significant threats to his or her
welfare, reactions that often entail heightened emotion.’’1 Combat stress is often
identified as an important constraint on the soldier’s performance. Stress encourages
anxieties and overly cautious decision-making. Stress leads to poor situational aware-
ness and fratricide.2 Combat stress can cause PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder)
and other psychological problems. Unfortunately for soldiers, historically, many
militaries have treated resistance to stress as an intrinsic attribute that can be filtered
rather than an extrinsic resource that can be trained or managed.
Intrinsic Psychological Stability

The U.S. military was probably the first military organization to attempt to sys-
tematically select out those recruits who could be considered intrinsically predisposed
to psychological problems. U.S. troops conscripted during the First World War were
briefly screened by psychologists, who made subjective judgments about the recruit’s
86 Made, Not Born
likely robustness under fire. Interwar U.S. researchers mistakenly attributed the large
number of ‘‘shell shock’’ psychological casualties that came out of the First World War
to insufficient intrinsic ‘‘emotional stability.’’ During the interwar period, the phrase
‘‘emotional stability’’ came to be replaced by ‘‘psychological stability.’’ Other popular
variants were ‘‘character’’ and ‘‘moral fiber.’’ Whatever the label, the attribute was
regarded as intrinsic.3 Debate about the relative importance of extrinsic factors, such
as ‘‘administrative policies,’’ was emerging but was considered inconclusive.4
When the Second World War began, U.S. induction centers were tasked with
filtering out those who would be ‘‘psychologically ineffective’’ in combat. Those
doing the filtering were not trained psychologists but serving soldiers. They were
instructed to ask recruits about psychological problems, a criminal record, or educa-
tional failures, and to observe their body language. The recruiter would then
send flagged recruits to a psychologist. If the psychologist agreed, the recruit was
discharged. Of 15 million recruits examined, 1,846,000 recruits were rejected in
this way—a failure rate of over 12%. Nevertheless, over 470,000 (or 4%) of those
soldiers accepted were eventually discharged for ‘‘neuropsychiatric’’ reasons. Mean-
while, soldiers who technically could have been rejected, but were not, nevertheless
made excellent soldiers. Some historians have concluded that selection by psycho-
logical stability was, in retrospect, largely worthless.5
There are still no reliable ex ante tests of combat psychological stability. It is very
difficult to indicate experimentally the soldier’s likely behavior in combat, since most
stressors used in lab experiments are relatively benign (for ethical and legal reasons).6
It is prohibitively expensive to build even a basic psychological profile of every
soldier. One academic researcher issued his subjects several surveys and then inter-
viewed each of them for between five and fifteen hours each in order to compare
their psychological profiles. Even after all that, his results could only indicate the
strength of the soldier’s motivations to serve, not the soldier’s likely reactions to
combat stress.7
Attention to selecting out those susceptible to stress tends to cause inattention to
stress management. For those recruits accepted into U.S. military service during the
Second World War, no psychological services were provided until psychological
breakdown. ‘‘Combat psychiatrists’’ were assigned to divisions in 1943, but only to
cure, not prevent, psychological breakdown. The cure was a mix of narcotics and
shame—temporary solutions, if any.8 At that time, the U.S. Army assumed that if a
recruit had been accepted as psychologically effective, then psychological breakdown
was evidence of ‘‘cowardice,’’ an attitude illustrated by General Patton’s infamous
slapping of a hospitalized psychological casualty he called a ‘‘coward’’ near Palermo,
Italy, in August 1943. Some British soldiers also received sedatives, but physicians
managed the patient (psychiatrists were not assigned to British units), emphasizing
rest and reflection, before returning the patient to his unit, where he would benefit
from group stress management practices.9
Given that the U.S. Army had made a conscious effort to reject the ‘‘unstable,’’ it
was later somewhat confused that the largest proportion (one-quarter) of medical
Combat Stress and Cohesion 87
evacuations from both the European and the Pacific theaters were coded as ‘‘neuro-
psychiatric.’’10 Three times as many casualties were neuropsychiatric as were killed.
The neuropsychiatric category equaled the categories for combat and noncombat
wounds combined. 11 While popular understanding of the phrase ‘‘shell shock’’
may imply that psychological breakdown was more characteristic of the First
World War than the Second World War, the psychological proportion of U.S.
casualties was higher in the Second than the First World War (when influenza and
tuberculosis had caused the most casualties). The U.S. military assumed that the
Second World War was more stressful due to the increased destructive capacity of
weapons.12
In fact, most individuals find stress, particularly combat stress, impossible to
avoid. Some intrinsic attributes can help the individual respond less severely to stress.
People who are hopeful, optimistic, positive, and have high self-efficacy accumulate
stress at a relatively slow rate. ‘‘Hopeful’’ people think they can improve. They show
less depression or anxieties. They are more likely to reassure themselves, find new
approaches, motivate themselves, and break down their goals into manageable
steps.13 ‘‘Optimistic’’ people use situational factors to account for failure rather than
blame an enduring dispositional trait.14 ‘‘Positive thinking’’ is a popular description
of the same thing. The concept of ‘‘self-efficacy’’ captures the belief that the self
controls destiny. Learned competencies add to self-efficacy and self-efficacy helps
people make the best use of their skills.15 Unfortunately, most people are not
particularly hopeful, optimistic, positive, or high in self-efficacy.16 Nor are they
satisfied by ‘‘mood purism’’—the decision not to challenge moods. In this sense,
most individuals are slaves to their emotions.
Intrapersonal Stress Management

So, in the absence of extrinsic sources or stress management, what are soldiers
to do? They can attempt a functional intrapersonal stress management strategy
known as ‘‘cognitive reframing.’’ They can try to challenge the validity of the sources
of depression or engage in pleasing distractions.17 They can try to see the positive
side or put a positive spin on the source of the depression.18 Unfortunately, most
people are equally poor at cognitive reframing unless specifically trained in it.
Consequently, given continuing stress and the absence of external stress
management, most individuals eventually adopt dysfunctional intrapersonal stress
management strategies, of which three are characteristic reactions to combat stress:
self-mutilation, narcotics, and internalization. The first strategy, self-mutilation, is
used as a diversion from stress or in pursuit of a medical discharge.
The second dysfunctional stress management strategy is the taking of narcotics.
As described above, prescribed narcotics were popular treatments for combat stress
during the Second World War. Antidepressants and sleep medications with narcotic
ingredients are still prescribed to soldiers. Soldiers may also turn to nonprescription
narcotics. The abuse of nonprescription narcotics by U.S. soldiers during the
88 Made, Not Born
Vietnam War has been described as ‘‘epidemic.’’ During that war, the U.S. military, as
in the Second World War, made no provision for systematic stress management
except for the ‘‘tour of duty,’’ which sent a soldier home after a year in theater.
(For more on tours of duty, see the section on rotation and stress management in
the chapter on personnel management.) The ‘‘tour of duty’’ encouraged soldiers to
take narcotics as a way to ‘‘speed up time.’’ What was described at the time as a ‘‘drug
epidemic’’ broke out amongst in-theater soldiers by the mid-1960s. Figures vary but
at least 30% of servicemen in Vietnam used drugs at some point. (This led to
President Richard Nixon’s decision in June 1971 to create the first ever national reha-
bilitation program. Although a domestic program, it was oriented toward returning
servicemen more than toward domestic users.) Unfortunately, many commentators
subsequently attributed the U.S. military’s drug epidemic to the illegitimacy of the
Vietnam War, poor ‘‘leadership,’’ or low ‘‘job satisfaction,’’ rather than poor stress
management.19
The third dysfunctional stress management strategy is to ‘‘internalize.’’ Internali-
zation is the failure to communicate or externalize thoughts or feelings, even to the
self. Repression is often confused with internalization but the two do not quite mean
the same thing. Whereas an internalizer is cognitively or psychologically affected by
their anxieties and may obsess about them, even if they are unnecessary or insoluble,
a repressive has learnt not to care. This is why a better description of repression
might be ‘‘unflappableness’’—‘‘upbeat denial, a positive dissociation.’’20 Unflappa-
bles do not appear to cognitively ‘‘feel’’ their physiological agitation. Their neural
processing keeps their physiological distress (such as a high heart rate or adrenaline)
from their reasoning brain. Unflappables cognitively reframe distressing inputs
without even knowing it.21 Internalizers, however, become dissociated from their
comrades and cease to be functional within their units. Such internalization helps
explain the incredibly high rate of PTSD found in Vietnam veterans, as one former
U.S. Army Ranger from the Vietnam War admits:
Each of us kept such a place. It was a personal place, that no one else was allowed to
enter. It was the place where the bogeyman dwelled, w[h]ere the bad things could fester
and rot, out of sight and out of mind. We were young. There would be a time in the
future when we would dig back into that attic of nightmares and bad memories, to pull
out all the bitterness, hatred, and guilt we had hidden there in our youth. But not yet!
No, we weren’t ready for that type of trauma. We were still of the mind-set to live for
today.22
Most military psychology researchers now believe that combat stress is situational
and that personality cannot really mitigate combat stress (although personality is
more important to the healing process). Few soldiers are either sufficiently psycho-
logically stable or skilled in intrapersonal stress management to avoid accumulating
combat stress. If stress is not managed externally, the soldier will eventually break
down psychologically. This suggests that militaries should emphasize what they do
with their soldiers rather than how they screen their potential recruits.
Group Stress Management

Group variables—particularly cohesion—are thought to mitigate combat stress
more than can personality variables.23 Some observers have claimed that the ‘‘only
meaningful explanation’’ for the lower rate of psychological casualties in elite units
is ‘‘cohesion and leadership.’’24 The direction of causality between stress and cohe-
sion is a matter of dispute. Empirically, soldiers who report high internal stress
due to their role or their task assignment also report low cohesion. However, while
internal stress seems to lower cohesion, shared stress seems to raise the unit’s
cohesion. Observers often note that soldiers appear to band together under threat.
Sufficiently stressful shared training events can also dramatically increase cohesion.
In turn, cohesion may mitigate stress and enhance psychological coping.25 For
instance, job-related stress normally has a small negative effect on performance but
is mitigated by cohesion.26
Group stress management is important because it is much more effective than
individual stress management. Cohesive groups manage the stress of their members
and give individuals time to acclimatize and repress unnecessary anxieties. Cohesive
groups probably also emphasize shared interpersonal skills such as empathy, which
helps members communicate and externalize their anxieties and needs. In the follow-
ing example from the Pacific Theater during the Second World War, a leader’s
empathy saved a U.S. Marine from breakdown on his fifteenth day of combat:
I felt myself choking up. I slowly turned my back to the men facing me, as I sat on my
helmet, and put my face in my hands to try to shut out reality. I began sobbing. The
harder I tried to stop the worse it got. My body shuddered and shook. Tears flowed
out of my scratchy eyes. I was sickened and revolted to see healthy young men get hurt
and killed day after day. I felt I couldn’t take it any more. I was so terribly tired and so
emotionally wrung out from being afraid for days on end that I seemed to have no
reserve strength left. The dead were safe. Those who had gotten a million-dollar wound
were lucky.. . .I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up at the tired, bloodshot eyes of
Duke, our lieutenant. ‘‘What’s the matter, Sledgehammer?’’ he asked in a sympathetic
voice. After I told him how I felt, he said, ‘‘I know what you mean. I feel the same
way. But take it easy. We’ve got to keep going. It’ll be over soon, and we’ll be back on
Pavuvu.’’ His understanding gave me the strength I needed, enough strength to endure
fifteen more terrible days and nights.27
Later, this same U.S. Marine became an empathic leader himself upon receiving an
unsolicited visit from a comrade during the invasion of Okinawa, 1945: ‘‘He had
come to me because of our friendship and because I was a veteran. He told me he
was terribly afraid of the impending attack.’’ The simple act of understanding the
other’s feelings was enough to stabilize the other’s stress.28 Similarly, a U.S. Ranger
sergeant, who had been ordered to take his ground convoy back into Mogadishu in
1993 after suffering heavy casualties, persuaded a mutinous Ranger to climb back
aboard with a few quiet words about their mutual fear.29 A Delta Force sergeant
calmed a frightened Ranger by simply stopping to tell him that everything would
be all right.30
90 Made, Not Born
Management of Combat Exposure

The duration of exposure to combat stressors matters. While assumptions of
intrinsic stability imply that some people are born stable and will remain so, and will
perhaps even get more stable as they get used to combat, in fact, in the absence of
stress management, the converse is true.31 Combat-induced psychological neuroses
seem to be inevitable, whatever the intrinsic motivations and psychological health
of the individual. ‘‘Almost all work done on stress has consistently demonstrated that
stressors are additive and probably cumulative. New stressors do not displace old
ones.’’32 Combat stressors are much more stressful than most peacetime stressors.
Once exposed to the realities of combat, soldiers are exposed to the real fragility of
their mind and body outside of the civilized, civilian world, as illustrated by the
following exceptionally perceptive memoir, written by a U.S. Army Ranger during
the Vietnam War:
I had been doing a lot of thinking since rejoining the unit [after being wounded], and it
was becoming apparent that I had developed some serious doubts about my
self-confidence and my ability to function on a team. These feelings hadn’t popped up
overnight. They had grown over the past couple of weeks from a small seed of doubt
planted a month earlier when I was recovering from my wounds back at Cam Ranh
Bay. My vulnerability had been revealed to me for the very first time.33
Few soldiers benefit from such conscious realizations. Personal security is broken
down, and stress accumulates, incrementally and somewhat uncontrollably.34 These
effects are best illustrated by the experience of being under artillery fire, as U.S.
Marine Eugene Sledge, who first saw combat against the Japanese in 1944, recalls:
To be under heavy shell fire was to me by far the most terrifying of combat experiences.
Each time it left me feeling more forlorn and helpless, more fatalistic, and with less con-
fidence that I could escape the dreadful law of averages that inexorably reduced our
numbers. Fear is many-faceted and has many subtle nuances, but the terror and desper-
ation endured under heavy shelling are by far the most unbearable.35
Marine Sledge recalled that his first thirty days of combat were ‘‘proof that the
critical factor in combat stress is duration of the combat rather than the severity.’’36
Many people assume that fear is a linear scale—increasing danger means increas-
ing fear—but combat veterans describe crossing a threshold into terror. Terror is
most often described as an absolute loss of personal security. Eventually, in the
absence of stress management, the soldier’s fears will become terror and when terror
takes over the soldier is psychologically incapacitated. A relatively minor situational
observation, added to a soldier’s prior fears, may be enough to throw the individual
into terror. This phenomenon is described by the same U.S. Army Ranger already
quoted above. Here, he is preparing to rappel from a helicopter into a Vietnamese
jungle obscured by mist:
The jungle seemed to emit some eerie, almost ethereal vibration that threatened to over-
power me. I sensed sheer, unadulterated terror. I fought back panic as it tried to root me
in place. I couldn’t drop down into that—whatever it was. It was like something out of a
horror movie.37
The inevitability of psychological breakdown, given sufficient exposure to combat

stressors, suggests that the exposure to combat must be managed. Some militaries
manage the exposure by regularly rotating soldiers out of combat for rest. The more
frequent the rotation and the longer the rest, the more effectively is stress mitigated.
Unfortunately, the same militaries that attempt to select out psychologically unstable
soldiers tend to neglect the role of rotation and instead to expect selected soldiers to
endure unrealistically long and continuous periods of exposure to combat. These
competing approaches toward the rotation of soldiers in and out of combat were
more properly examined in the earlier chapter on personnel management.
Cohesion
‘‘Cohesion’’ is a popular concept for explaining combat performance, but doubts
remain about how to define or explain it. The first subsection of this section explores
the many definitions of cohesion. The second subsection examines why cohesion
matters. The third subsection examines where cohesion comes from.
What Is Cohesion?
Unfortunately, there is a definitional disconnect between research on civilian
cohesion and research on military cohesion. Civilian cohesion researchers tend to
prefer the label ‘‘cohesiveness,’’ and they tend to follow Leon Festinger’s classic defi-
nition of cohesiveness as ‘‘the resultant of all the forces acting on members to remain
in a group. These forces may depend on the attractiveness or unattractiveness of
either the prestige of the group, members of the group, or the activities in which
the group engages.’’38 The civilian cohesion researchers Brian Mullen and Carolyn
Copper claim that ‘‘most subsequent research on group cohesiveness has tended to
accept this description,’’ although they prefer to label Festinger’s first component
(‘‘the prestige of the group’’) as ‘‘group pride,’’ which, they claim, is seldom consid-
ered.39 However, military cohesion researchers might claim that ‘‘group pride’’ is at
least partially equivalent to ‘‘organizational cohesion’’ or, more likely, ‘‘esprit de
corps.’’ Mullen and Copper prefer to relabel ‘‘members of the group’’ (Festinger’s
second component) as ‘‘interpersonal attraction,’’ which military cohesion research-
ers might tend to label ‘‘social cohesion.’’ Mullen and Copper relabel ‘‘activities in
which the group engages’’ (Festinger’s third component) as ‘‘commitment to task,’’
which military cohesion researchers might tend to label ‘‘task cohesion.’’
Military cohesion researchers tend to use the label ‘‘cohesion’’ rather than ‘‘cohe-
siveness,’’ and they rarely refer to Festinger’s definition. Robert MacCoun believes
that Festinger’s definition ‘‘seems over inclusive in the military context, since military
personnel have only a limited role in choosing their unit memberships.’’40 Con-
versely, Guy Siebold thinks that researchers of civilian cohesion define cohesion too
92 Made, Not Born
narrowly. ‘‘Military unit cohesion is more ‘full’ than the cohesion examined in a
great deal of academic research.’’41 Siebold criticized Festinger and his followers for
their ‘‘loose definition’’ and ‘‘narrow interpretation’’ in terms of attractiveness, which
is ‘‘of limited value to the study of military small unit cohesion.’’42 Siebold has
defined cohesion ‘‘as the degree to which the forces of social control, internal and
external to individual group members, maintain a pattern of relationships among
the members which allows the group to accomplish its mission.’’43 Later, however,
Siebold and Twila Lindsay seemingly borrowed from Festinger in offering this
definition:
Cohesion or, more properly, cohesiveness is a property of a group. In comparison, bond-

ing is a property of an individual, personal relationship. The cohesiveness in a group is a
resultant of the forces of social control (e.g., law, regulations, rules, identities, socializa-
tion, perceived requirements of purposeful group actions, norms, and habits) acting on
the members of the group. The forces of social control integrate and bind the group
together and are also a source of power and protection for the members. Embedded in
these forces of social control are such factors as member attraction to the group
(e.g., to the purpose of the group and to the rewards and prestige of being a group
member). The forces of social control are experienced by the individual as external
and, for the most part, preexisting to him or her. This preexisting externality of the
forces of social control provides the sense for the member of the group being an entity
in itself, separate and above the aggregation of the members.44
While criticizing definitions of cohesion in the civilian cohesion research, Siebold

has described definitions of cohesion in the military cohesion literature as inconsis-
tent and dynamic.45 A review of the military cohesion literature found that many
researchers did not even define cohesion and that poor definitions led to poor opera-
tionalization.46 Definitions of cohesion are even more variable in the wider military
studies literature, that is, in the literature that is not directly about cohesion, whose
authors routinely treat cohesion as important but rarely define it. Indeed, some
authors treat ‘‘cohesion’’ as some aggregate of all military human factors.47 This
confusion stems, in part, from the many different labels assigned to the concept of
military cohesion. For instance, as recently as the Second World War, U.S. military
psychologists described the concept of military cohesion—as we now understand it
—using such phrases as ‘‘solidarity,’’ ‘‘esprit de corps,’’ or ‘‘mutual dependence,’’
but not ‘‘cohesion.’’48 ‘‘Morale’’ is another closely tied but ultimately distinct con-
cept. Morale and cohesion have often been used interchangeably. Some scholars still
treat morale as characteristic of both groups and individuals and as interchangeable
with cohesion,49 but today the norm is to recognize morale as an individual-level
property and to recognize cohesion as a group-level property.50
Primary group theory remains a strong influence on how cohesion is defined.
Larry Ingraham and Frederick Manning were explicitly inspired by primary group
theory when they wrote that ‘‘cohesion represents feelings of belonging, solidarity
with a specifiable set of others who constitute ‘we’ as opposed to ‘them.’ Sentiments
characteristic of cohesive groups include mutual affection, interdependence, trust
and loyalty to other group members.’’51 Their definition proved to be influential

when they were part of the team that worked on the (U.S.) WRAIR (Walter Reed
Army Institute of Research) cohesion survey. The WRAIR defined cohesion as a
‘‘sense of belonging to the unit and trust in other soldiers in the unit.’’52
Kellett believes the primary group literature has overly simplified our understand-
ing of combat motivations,53 but nevertheless his definition of cohesion sounds very
similar to that of Ingraham and Manning: ‘‘the feelings of belonging and solidarity
that largely occur at the primary group level (usually the section or platoon) and
results from sustained interactions, both formal and informal, among group
members on the basis of common experiences, interdependence, and shared goals
and values.’’54 Similarly, while MacCoun has criticized the ‘‘frequent failure to
distinguish a variety of concepts that are often listed as aspects of cohesion,’’ he pro-
vided a list of items, which are mostly analogous to the ‘‘primary needs’’ identified by
primary group theorists.55
Some researchers have avoided defining cohesion in terms of primary groups
but share the primary group theorist’s preference for one-sentence definitions of
cohesion. For instance, James Griffith and Mark Vaitkus defined cohesion ‘‘as an
intersubjective dynamic characterized by the strength of supportive ties among unit
members.’’ They claimed that such relatively short definitions maintain cohesion as
a ‘‘distinct construct.’’56
Some researchers prefer longer definitions, such as the long paragraph offered by
Siebold and Lindsay, copied above. Like Siebold and Lindsay, many researchers
define cohesion as an expression of shared values and norms. For instance, the U.S.
National Defense University once defined cohesion as:
the bonding together of members of a unit or organization in such a way as to sustain

their will and commitment to each other, their unit, and the mission. The kind of
commitment required for cohesion is moral commitment, which results from the inter-
nalization of the values and norms (standards of behavior) of the group and sensitivity to
social sanctions of other group members.57
Other researchers view cohesion as an expression of common objectives, a defini-

tion that more closely approaches ‘‘task cohesion,’’ which is more fully described in a
later subsection. For instance, a separate U.S. National Defense University publica-
tion explained that:
cohesion exists in a unit when the primary day-to-day goals of the individual soldier, of
the small group with which he identifies, and of unit leaders are congruent—with each
giving his primary loyalty to the group so that it trains and fights as a unit with all
members willing to risk death to achieve a common objective.58
Compared to the American literature, the British literature is less enamored with
primary group theory and tends to focus on the resilience of cohesive groups as the
defining characteristic. Indeed, current British doctrinal definitions borrow from
the physical sciences:
94 Made, Not Born
At its simplest, cohesion is unity. It is a quality that binds together constituent parts[,]
thereby providing resilience against dislocation and disruption. It minimizes vulnerabil-
ity to defeat in detail and the adverse effects of preemption.59
Disaggregating the concept of cohesion can help breakdown the definitional

problem. Any disaggregation follows what Siebold calls a ‘‘structural’’ definition of
cohesion, which he believes is superior to earlier definitions based on interpersonal
attraction, social identity, or self-categorization. Even so, Siebold still notes flaws
and urges further development.60 For now, cohesion is routinely disaggregated into
different directions (horizontal vs. vertical cohesion), functions (social or affective
vs. task or instrumental), and levels of analysis (primarily, unit vs. organizational
cohesion or leader vs. led cohesion). Griffith and Vaitkus disaggregate cohesion along
all the different directions and different functions, but not the different levels of
analysis. They claim further that the directions and functions can be combined to give
‘‘four interrelated types of cohesion, all of which must be positive to have a cohesive
unit: horizontal-instrumental, horizontal-affective, vertical instrumental, and vertical
affective.’’61
Horizontal and Vertical Cohesion

The [U.S.] ARI (Army Research Institute) described horizontal cohesion as ‘‘rela-
tionships among peers.’’62 Siebold and Lindsay later described horizontal cohesion
as ‘‘cohesiveness within a subelement such as a squad, across subelements at the same
lateral level, or among unit members at a given level.’’63 Paul Bliese and Ronald
Halverson described horizontal cohesion as ‘‘a measure of the degree of fraternal
bonding and kinship within a group.’’64 Griffith and Vaitkus described horizontal
cohesion as the cohesion between members at the same or ‘‘peer’’ organizational
level.65
The ARI described vertical cohesion as ‘‘relationships between leaders and subor-
dinates.’’66 Siebold and Lindsay later described vertical cohesion as ‘‘cohesiveness
between subelements at different levels.’’ 67 Bliese and Halverson claimed that
vertical cohesion ‘‘reflects subordinates’ perceptions that leaders are considerate and
competent.’’68 Griffith and Vaitkus described vertical cohesion as the cohesion
between leaders and subordinates.69 Primary group theorists tend to expect primary
groups to form between individuals who interact face-to-face at organizational levels
as well as within organizational levels.70 MacCoun argued for the use of ‘‘the terms
‘leadership’ and ‘followership’ to refer to downward and upward vertical cohesion,
respectively,’’ but these terms are otherwise limited to unrelated research on leader-
ship.71
Vertical cohesion is usually recognized as an important subelement of cohesion,
especially if it is assumed to mitigate antiorganizational behavior. Since the Second
World War, there has been a growing recognition that cohesion can encourage
unit-level dissent and can legitimize antiorganizational behavior.72 For instance,
Ingraham and Manning noted that ‘‘it is possible to have high individual morale
and high cohesiveness which are antithetical to the goals of the larger organization,
the result being subversion, sabotage and negligent, uncaring performance.’’ 73

Robert Rielly has written about the ‘‘negative side of cohesion, which occurs when
a cohesive unit develops values, attitudes, beliefs and norms contrary to the organiza-
tion’s.’’74 Vertical cohesion and leadership are usually put forward as solutions, but
there is less agreement about how to describe the problem.
The problem could be described as ‘‘internal orientation.’’ Normally, groups are
assumed to be ‘‘externally oriented’’ or in support of the organization. Externally ori-
ented groups direct their capabilities outward in support of organizational partners.
By contrast, ‘‘internally oriented’’ groups support group members in opposition to
external groups. Groups generally display what social scientists call ‘‘the in-group
bias,’’ meaning that group members attribute more positive attributions to group
members than to outsiders.75 In this sense, groups are predisposed to internal orien-
tations. A common military example of internal orientation is that of weapon or
vehicle crews, which typically value members of their own crew more than of other
crews. Internal orientation can be much more disruptive than this. An oft-cited field
study carried out during the Korean War showed that U.S. Army soldiers quickly
came to regard two-person ‘‘buddy’’ relations as defensive dyads against authority.
Buddy relations interfere with organizational objectives by, for instance, encouraging
a soldier to stay behind with a wounded buddy rather than support the rest of the
unit.76 Internal orientation was even more widely observed during the Vietnam
War, as illustrated by the shockingly common practice of murdering (colloquially
known as ‘‘fragging’’) newly appointed leaders.77
The section on socialization in the chapter on personnel management suggested
that frequently socializing subordinates and superiors with each other helps to
counter internal orientations. At least two researchers have prescribed vertical
cohesion (they actually used the phrase ‘‘hierarchical cohesion’’) as a solution to anti-
organizational behavior.78 Other researchers believe that internal orientations can be
moderated by the objectives adopted by the group—if the group adopts objectives
other than those defined by the organization then the group will serve itself. Leader-
ship should be an important factor in determining which objectives the group
adopts. Cohesion is certainly associated with leaders who are perceived positively
by their followers.79 Others imply that task cohesion is the solution. Social cohesion
may encourage purely social objectives and discourage attention to tasks. Social
cohesion may encourage solidarity against higher organizational objectives. 80
Theoretically, ‘‘task-oriented leadership’’ would be preferred over ‘‘relations-
oriented leadership’’ but this expectation has not been tested empirically.81
Social and Task Cohesion

MacCoun, whose definitions of cohesion have become standard for some sub-
sequent authors,82 defines social cohesion as:
the nature and quality of the emotional bonds of friendship, liking, caring, and closeness
among group members. A group is socially cohesive to the extent that its members like
each other, prefer to spend their social time together, enjoy each other’s company, and
96 Made, Not Born
feel emotionally close to one another. Task cohesion refers to the shared commitment
among members to achieving a goal that requires the collective efforts of the group.
A group with high task cohesion is composed of members who share a common goal
and who are motivated to coordinate their efforts as a team to achieve that goal.83
Griffith and Vaitkus describe task cohesion as ‘‘the extent to which group
members provide instrumental support to one another so that group members
maintain individual task roles and work toward achieving group tasks and goals.’’84
Social cohesion, they go on to say, is indicated by attraction to the group as well as
by interpersonal trust, caring, attraction, and support.
A meta-analysis by Mullen and Copper of the research on civilian cohesion
suggests that ‘‘commitment to task’’ is the most important form of cohesion to per-
formance.85 In the military cohesion literature, Griffith found that task cohesion
was more predictive than was social cohesion of perceived individual combat perfor-
mance and group combat performance.86 MacCoun concluded that social cohesion
has no effect on performance after controlling for task cohesion, although it may
help as a buffer to stress. MacCoun observed that although comradely rhetoric
often uses the language of social cohesion, their cohesion stems more from task
cohesion.87 Siebold and Lindsay found that soldiers can live outside their military
base or post without a decline in motivation, cohesion, performance, or corporatism,
even though their social interaction with their fellow soldiers must weaken. This
result suggests that social interaction may not be necessary to cohesion. In the long
run, mere social interaction may become boring.88 Harris and Segal found that
boredom increases internal conflict and that soldiers with the least amount of work
were the most bored.89 Bartone and Adler found that boredom has a moderate
negative effect on cohesion.90
Unfortunately, social cohesion is still often conflated with task cohesion and is
often privileged. This conflation is often the result of a conceptualization of cohesion
based on primary group theory, which tends to privilege social cohesion. For
instance, Wong et al. claimed that social cohesion serves two roles:
First, because of the close ties to other soldiers, it places a burden of responsibility on
each soldier to achieve group success and protect the unit from harm. Soldiers feel that
although their individual contribution may be small, it is still a critical part of unit
success and therefore important.. . .This desire to contribute to the unit mission comes
not from a commitment to the mission, but a social compact with the members of the
primary group. . . .The second role of cohesion is to provide the confidence and
assurance that someone soldiers could trust was ‘‘watching their back.’’ This is not
simply trusting in the competence, training, or commitment to the mission of another
soldier, but trusting in someone they regarded as closer than a friend who was motivated
to look out for their welfare.91
Wong et al.’s definition of social cohesion actually sounds like conventional defi-
nitions of task cohesion. Moreover, Wong et al. assumed that social ‘‘ties’’ and a
‘‘social compact’’ lead unambiguously to task commitment but the validity of this
assumption was never proven. Indeed, many of the quotes taken from a limited
number of interviews conducted with veterans of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and
reported by Wong et al. clearly refer (not necessarily consciously) to conventional
aspects of task cohesion. Unaware of this conflation, Wong et al. concluded that
ideology was more important to cohesion than generally admitted in the previous
cohesion literature.
Organizational Cohesion, Corporatism, Commitment, or Identification

While recent cohesion research routinely distinguishes horizontal cohesion
from vertical cohesion and social from task cohesion, different levels of analysis tend
to be ignored. Oliver et al., having conducted a meta-analysis of military cohesion
studies, observed that cohesion researchers often ignore the level of analysis.
Oliver et al. recommended that both the cohesion data and the outcome data be
collected at the same level, since researchers may evaluate cohesion of the platoon
and then compare platoon cohesion to battalion performance.92 Oliver et al. recom-
mended that cohesion be studied at the squad or platoon level in order to
properly accommodate the concept of cohesion. The primary group literature often
claims the existence of an upper limit on primary group cohesion—this upper limit
is usually assumed to be at the squad or platoon level—certainly not higher than
the company level. ‘‘As a property of primary face-to-face groups, cohesion is
inappropriate for describing larger collectives above the work team, section, crew or
squad.’’93 There is plenty of empirical evidence that as groups become larger, their
members’ liking for the group and performance tends to decrease.94 Griffith found
that company-level cohesion contributed little to outcome measures and speculated
that cohesion at lower levels would explain outcomes.95 Social impact theory (which
expects the social impact on an individual to be a multiplicative function of the
strength, immediacy, and number of other people) expects the group’s impact
on the individual to increase with the size of the group’s membership but also
expects that the marginal effect of the nth person will be less than that of the (n−1)
th person and that immediacy will decline as one moves to a more macro level of
the organization.96
Some researchers believe that ‘‘organizational cohesion’’ is a necessary subelement
of cohesion. The ARI described organizational cohesion as ‘‘relationships between
unit members and their unit as a whole.’’97 Siebold and Lindsay later defined
organizational cohesion as ‘‘the relations between the members of a unit and the unit
as a whole, as well as between the unit and larger-sized units, including the Army as a
whole.’’98 Others claim that organizational cohesion ‘‘is probably adding too much
to the basic concept of group cohesion and would be better treated as a separate
construct.’’99
Writers inspired by primary group theory tend to see a difference between
cohesion and ‘‘esprit de corps,’’ which might be considered the traditional label for
organizational cohesion. For instance, Ingraham and Manning state that esprit ‘‘is
generally reserved for large collectives above the level of face-to-face interaction, also
characterized by pride in group membership, but especially by unity of purpose and
98 Made, Not Born
devotion to the cause.’’100 Similarly, Kellett regards cohesion as a primary group- or

section- or platoon-level variable, while esprit ‘‘denotes feelings of pride, unity of
purpose, and adherence to an ideal represented by the unit, and it generally applies
to larger units, having more formal boundaries, than the primary group.’’101
The soldier’s relationships with the most macro levels may be better described
in terms of ‘‘corporatism’’ or value-based commitment to a higher organizational
level—the level of analysis is usually the organization as a whole. Corporatism is a
common label in the management literature but is more frequently labeled ‘‘organiza-
tional commitment’’ in the military cohesion literature. Borrowing from earlier work
by others,102 the ARI distinguished ‘‘organizational commitment’’ from ‘‘affective
commitment’’ and ‘‘continuance commitment.’’ Affective commitment is defined as
‘‘the emotional attachment the respondent feels for the organization.’’ Continuance
commitment is defined as ‘‘the costs to the person of leaving the organization.’’103
Organizational commitment is similar to ‘‘organizational identification,’’ which is
usually defined ‘‘as a cognitive perception of oneness with the defined aggregate of
persons, involving the perceived experience of the group’s successes and failures.’’104
As it happens, researchers who include organizational cohesion in their definitions
of cohesion often operationalize organizational cohesion as identification with the
organization.
Leadership Team Cohesion
Few researchers collect data on cohesion within the leadership team but ‘‘leader-
ship team cohesion’’ might be important to other forms of cohesion and to outcome
variables, such as performance. Mael and Alderks reported that ‘‘leadership team
cohesion’’ was more important than perceived leadership to cohesion, organizational
identification, job involvement, task motivation, career intent, perceptions of
unit effectiveness, and performance in simulated combat. Mael and Alderks
concluded that leadership team dissension can negatively impact unit morale and
performance.105
Summary
To summarize this first subsection, cohesion is a confused concept but one that
essentially measures group bonds, particularly the group’s resistance to disruptive
forces. Cohesion is no longer regarded as a single concept but is routinely disaggre-
gated into horizontal, vertical, task, and social cohesion, and sometimes organiza-
tional and leadership team cohesion. Some of these different types of cohesion
have unique effects, as described in more detail in the next subsection.
Why Does Cohesion Matter?

Cohesion is usually assumed to matter to combat personnel, but there is less
agreement as to why, in part because of methodological problems. Stereotypically,
cohesion studies tend to be anecdotal, so their assertions of cohesion’s relationships
with other variables are often treated with skepticism until the methodology can
be investigated. Even large-N studies of cohesion show considerable variability in

their quality. Oliver et al. found that, of the thirty-nine studies on military
cohesion sampled, only twenty-three reported their survey’s reliability. For this
subpopulation, reliability ranged from 0.57 to 0.98, with a mean reliability of
0.78.106
Surveying is the dominant method of measurement, which creates problems of its
own. Surveying is a notoriously difficult instrument. Moreover, the authors of cohe-
sion surveys rarely describe their items accurately or report statistical data that might
help us evaluate their reliability. Oliver et al. were amazed at how poorly data are
reported:
To produce accurate studies, researchers should report means, standard deviations,

number of participants, and intercorrelations of all continuous variables. All results need
to be included, not just significant ones, with exact probabilities of results reported.
Researchers should describe their samples, instruments, and settings in sufficient detail
to enable readers to judge the extent to which the research might generalize to other
situations and to enable meta-analysts to code pertinent variables. Cohesion researchers
also need to report both the total number of participants and the number of groups as
well as nonresponse rates and attrition data.107
Oliver et al. gathered an initial population of 122 studies of military cohesion

and found that none of them used experimental or control groups. Cohesion might
be peculiarly difficult to experiment with; certainly, some of the typically related
variables, such as stress, are ethically and practically difficult to experiment with.
However, there should be room for experimentation in order to test certain parts,
at least, of the causal chain, with the advantage that control groups and more
objective measures could be used.
Having noted the many doubts over the reliability of many empirical studies of
the benefits of cohesion, I now discuss the alleged benefits. Five main benefits
of cohesion are usually under investigation: motivation, performance, resistance to
disintegration and stress, retention, and readiness. Each of these benefits is reviewed
below.
Motivation
Cohesion’s main effect is assumed to be motivational. Combat is supposed to
be so uniquely challenging that only cohesion is supposed to keep combat
soldiers motivated or bound together in their units when under fire. Cohesion
is even linked with heroism. While popular culture usually portrays heroism as
an intrinsic attribute, heroism appears to be largely situational, although some
personality characteristics are presumably necessary too. Individuals become
heroes because the situation demands it. One contributory situational factor may
be cohesion. Gal sampled Israeli citations for heroism and found that three-
quarters of heroic acts occurred in the presence of others, usually unit members,
although this might be expected given that soldiers normally fight in units, not by
themselves.108
100 Made, Not Born
While cohesion contributes to combat motivation, it is not the same as motiva-

tion and, as a group-level property, is not even descriptive of individual motivations.
Cohesion seems to be something more than motivation because it describes
discipline, commitment, and other things—sometimes collectively called ‘‘stick-
togetherness.’’ For its part, motivation seems to be dependent on more variables than
cohesion alone. Kellett’s qualitative review identified cohesion as several sources of
combat motivation. Gal’s surveys of Israeli troops identified ‘‘unit cohesion and
morale’’ as only one of eight identified causes of motivation, the other seven being
confidence in senior commanders; confidence in one’s self, team, and weapons;
familiarity with missions and frontage; confidence in immediate commanders;
enemy evaluation; legitimacy of war; and worries and concerns.109
In summary, while cohesion is not the same as motivation, its contribution to
stick-togetherness seems to contribute to combat motivations.
Performance
There is evidence that cohesion is important to individual task performance.
Cohesion has been shown to be important to the performance of even noncombat
soldiers, such as military cooks.110 Cohesion has been shown to be important to
certain civilian roles too. However, the evidence for cohesion’s relationship with
combat performance tends to be based on qualitative observations and military
lore. Some critics note that cohesion may bind combat soldiers together during
combat but it is unclear whether combat performance varies with cohesion. Further,
historical case studies and military lore may have little relevance to current military
operations.111
Empirically, cohesion is usually positively correlated with group performance but
the coefficient is highly variable. Griffith and Vaitkus describe the correlation as
‘‘moderate-to-low,’’ and they speculate that the variance may be attributable to ‘‘poor
conceptual understanding’’ or a ‘‘failing to define successful performance from the
viewpoint of the groups under study.’’112 A meta-analysis by Mullen and Copper
of sixty-six studies of civilian cohesion found a correlation coefficient of about
0.25, a coefficient they described as ‘‘small.’’ They observed that cohesion is more
important to the performance of military groups than to nonmilitary and nonsport
groups.113 Noncombat roles tend to be comparatively individualist and less depen-
dent on the group. Combat is peculiarly demanding of cohesion because combat is
a strongly group activity, both for practical reasons and for psycho-emotional rea-
sons. Noncombat units make use of more technical specialists with a greater variety
of functional roles and skills.
Mullen and Copper also found that cohesion is even more important to the per-
formance of sports teams and to the performance of real groups than artificial
groups. This might support theories that cohesion is important to the performance
of group-oriented tasks, such as those associated with many team sports, but not to
individually oriented tasks, such as marksmanship. However, Mullen and Copper
concluded that cohesion is not more important to groups that require a high degree
of interaction for successful performance. Rather, they speculated, the differences

‘‘may map onto increasing degrees of the salience and legitimacy of standards of
excellence’’ and of ‘‘increasing degrees of ‘groupness’ or ‘entitativity’ across these
types of groups.’’114 A meta-analysis found correlation coefficients of 0.4 between
military cohesion and group performance and of 0.2 between military cohesion
and individual performance.115
In other words, cohesion has at least moderate benefits for performance, particu-
larly combat performance as opposed to noncombat performance, and group perfor-
mance as opposed to individual performance.
Resistance to Disintegration and Stress

Cohesion, especially when defined as ‘‘stick-togetherness,’’ at least implies
resistance to unit disintegration. ‘‘Disintegration represents a collective giving
up on the group, either by mutually failing to resist disruptive forces (stress) on the
group or by actually abandoning or dissolving the group.’’116 Disintegration is a
group-level variable so can only be measured in the period between the unit’s
regeneration and its disassembly. It is most likely and salient during combat or
at least during stressful deployments. Paul Savage and Richard Gabriel demonstrated
empirically the disintegration of U.S. Army units during the Vietnam War by
analyzing desertions, fraggings, mutiny, and the use of illicit drugs.117 Manning
and Ingraham have measured disintegration as unit counts of reenlistment and
absences without leave.118 Both studies suggested that cohesion mitigates disin-
tegration. One way in which cohesion may mitigate disintegration is in mitigating
stress. Group members who stick together share and manage each other’s
stress.
Retention
Disintegration is a group- or unit-level variable, whereas retention is most observ-
able at the individual level. Retention refers to the soldier’s decision to reenlist or not
to leave the service. Cohesion encourages retention, but not strongly. A meta-analysis
found a correlation coefficient of 0.22 between cohesion and the individual’s likeli-
hood of reenlistment. This is not a particularly impressive correlation coefficient,
suggesting that cohesion is better able to keep group members together when facing
a common task than to keep group members facing individual choices about their
military career.119
Readiness
Cohesion might enhance readiness. Readiness is not a term with any accepted
definition but is usually a measure of whether a unit or individual is ready for oper-
ations. A meta-analysis found a correlation coefficient of 0.3 between cohesion and
self-reported readiness, again not a particularly impressive correlation coefficient,
perhaps suggesting that cohesion is not as relevant to performance during peacetime
preparations than to combat performance itself.120
102 Made, Not Born
Summary
To summarize this subsection on the benefits of cohesion, although the empirical
evidence is not perfectly reliable, there does seem to be evidence that cohesion has at
least moderate benefits for motivation, performance, resistance to disintegration and
stress, readiness, and retention, in that order. These benefits are strongest during
combat and at the group, rather than the individual, level. Task cohesion is more
beneficial than social cohesion.
Where Does Cohesion Come From?

Explanations for cohesion can be categorized by one of six main causal variables:
homogeneity, familiarity, affection, time or longevity, shared training or stress, and
leadership.
Homogeneity
A group’s cohesion is often linked with the homogeneity of the group’s members.
Homogeneity refers to the lack of diversity in the group members’ intrinsic attrib-
utes. Intrinsic attributes are observable human features not attributable to or derived
from the group itself. Intrinsic attributes include physical genetic endowments, such
as race and gender, relationships outside of the group, such as those with family
members, and values and beliefs acquired outside of the group, such as political
values and religious beliefs.
MacCoun concluded that ‘‘similarity does not appear to influence task cohesion,
the type of cohesion that influences group performance.’’121 Heterogeneity can have
both positive and negative effects on performance—there is no net effect. Siebold
found that similarity in age, education, and home state had no correlation with
squad cohesion.122 Siebold and Lindsay found that ethnic diversity amongst group
members, ethnic diversity across the group and its leaders, marital status, the exist-
ence of children, and housing location (a bivariate coding of on- or off-base) had
no effect on cohesion or performance. They concluded that there was no need to
control for these variables (which they called ‘‘demographic descriptors’’).123
Familiarity
Familiarity is usually measured as the length of time group members have known
each other or as the frequency of their interactions. Bartone and others found
evidence that familiarity has modest effects on cohesion. They believe that long
associations between the individual and the unit can certainly increase interpersonnel
familiarity but that stronger cohesion outcomes require shared experiences or influ-
ential leaders.124
Affection
Affection is usually measured by how strongly group members care for each other.
The main assumed value of familiarity is that familiarity leads to affection and that
affection leads to cohesion. However, familiarity is not the same as affection. Famili-
arity may even lead to contempt, although the evidence largely suggests that expo-
sure increases affection.125 The original assumption of transivity between affection
and cohesion has been revised too. Cohesion was once defined and operationalized
in terms of affection but the subsequent consensus seems to be that cohesion is more
than just affection.
Helpfully, some researchers make a distinction between the interpersonal relation-
ship, to which affection is presumably very important, and the group relationship, to
which affection may be less important.126 Theoretically, this distinction is often
interpreted in terms of social identity theory and self-categorization theory, which
claim that the individual’s social identity is constructed within the terms of a ‘‘group
prototype’’—the individual’s representation of the features that best define the
in-group in the salient social comparative context. The individual constructs his or
her social identity by a process called ‘‘self-categorization’’—depersonalizing percep-
tion and conduct such that members, including the observers themselves, are not
processed as complex, multidimensional whole persons but rather as embodiments
of the contextually salient group prototype. From this perspective, cohesion is the
result of self-categorization, in which individuals depersonalize group members,
including themselves, and attribute to group members the ideal features of the group
prototype. In this context, affection between two group members is the result of each
individual’s perception that the other individual embodies the group prototype.
One salient implication is that interpersonal bonds lying outside of the context of
the group are not that important to cohesion. Therefore, affection will not necessarily
lead to cohesion. However, Siebold counters that
self-categorization theory is primarily about group-member cognitions as group

members. It may be compatible with, but does not deal adequately with, properties
and characteristics of groups per se, including the stages of group development and
group embeddedness in hierarchies, and it fails to address issues of mutual causation
and feedback loops.
Nevertheless, empirical research appears to confirm that affection does not cause
cohesion.127
Time
Cohesion is usually measured at the same time or immediately after the indepen-
dent variable. Thus, some researchers have advocated that cohesion be measured
over time.128 Advocates of longitudinal studies also tend to advocate operationaliza-
tion of cohesion as a dynamic concept, but the methodological challenges remain
outstanding.129
There is empirical evidence that cohesion does fluctuate over time but it is unclear
over what interval of time. Primary group theory implies that the buildup of cohe-
sion will accelerate in relation to the frequency of face-to-face relations. Ingraham’s
ethnographic observations of barracks life suggest that individuals who spend all
104 Made, Not Born
their waking hours with the same people will become accepted into informal
barracks groups within three to four weeks of arrival.130 Of the few large-N studies
that have measured cohesion over time, the typical interval of time is six months or
more—an interval that may obscure important fluctuations in cohesion. During
studies of the U.S. Army’s COHORT experiment of the 1980s, when members
of experimental units were kept together in the unit and removed from the IRS
(individual replacement system) for some period of time, data collection intervals
ranged between six and fourteen months, so there was no consistent unit of time
with which to determine when cohesion might begin to decline, but the data
suggested a general decline in cohesion over the long term. Initially, cohesion and
morale scores were higher for the units formed from soldiers who stayed with the
unit for several months than for the units formed from individuals (from the IRS)
entering and leaving the units on asynchronous cycles. However, two years later this
advantage had disappeared.131
Siebold measured the cohesion of a U.S. Army battalion before it deployed to
the Sinai on peacekeeping duties, at the beginning of the deployment, toward
the middle, and at the end of the deployment. Cohesion within the squads and
within the platoon’s leadership team declined steadily over time. Siebold reported
conversations with the respondents, who suggested that squad cohesion declined
due to declining individual motivations, while leadership team cohesion declined
because squads were assigned to remote observation posts without their platoon
leaders.132
Siebold and Lindsay reported a small negative correlation between perceived
platoon cohesion and the number of months the respondent had been in the
platoon. The small correlation might be attributable to an unseen curvilinear
relationship but Siebold and Lindsay did not analyze the data further or report the
range, average, or median.133
Bartone and Adler suggest that the decline is indeed curvilinear, not linear. They
measured the cohesion of a medical task force before, in the middle of, and at the
end of a six-month deployment and found that cohesion started low, peaked around
mid-deployment, and then declined toward the end. This suggests that the interval
of time during which cohesion increases is at least three months long but not longer
than six months. The evidence from the Sinai study also suggests that three months
is sufficient for the building of cohesion.134
There are few explanations for the gradual decline in cohesion over long periods of
time. The decline in cohesion over time is usually attributed to unfulfilled expecta-
tions, ‘‘mission entropy,’’ ‘‘fatigue,’’ or ‘‘boredom.’’ In an earlier study of U.S. peace-
keepers in the Sinai, Harris and Segal reported that boredom increased over
the time of a deployment and was a severe threat to performance. They reported
anecdotal evidence that boredom could be mitigated by cohesion.135 In the later
study of U.S. peacekeepers in the Sinai, Siebold concluded that cohesion and motiva-
tion would inevitably decline over time during a peacekeeping deployment because
of the ‘‘mission effect,’’ which Siebold believed was related to the boredom and
repetition of typical peacekeeping duties.136 While cohesion seems to decline within

combat units on peacekeeping duties, such decline in cohesion seems less likely for
combat units in training or at war, as described next.
Shared Training or Stress
Some observers see cohesion as ‘‘an emergent quality of relationships built on
shared experiences.’’ Thus, they go on to advocate shared training at the unit
level.137 Bartone and others found evidence that familiarity has less effect on cohe-
sion than the combined effects of familiarity and then experiencing as a group a
stressful event—in this case a week-long training event. Soldiers at war are likely to
experience frequent stressful events that should encourage cohesion; soldiers are
expected also to bind together in response to threat.138
Leadership
In the study described above, Bartone and others also found evidence that cohe-
sion is improved when events are interpreted as positive and productive. They thus
speculated that leaders can improve cohesion by framing bonding experiences in
positive ways. This speculation is fairly common.139 Vertical cohesion in particular,
and cohesion in general, is associated with leaders who are perceived positively by
their followers.140 Most of these cited researchers at least imply that leadership may
be the most important factor to cohesion.
Summary
To summarize this subsection on the sources of cohesion, homogeneity, familiar-
ity, affection, time or longevity, shared training or stress, and leadership are all used
to explain cohesion. Importantly, desirable forms of cohesion are not a function of
intrinsic attributes, nor are they spontaneous. Instead, cohesion, particularly task
cohesion, is improved by shared training, shared stress, and positive leadership. By
contrast, homogeneity, familiarity, and affection have modest effects on cohesion,
mostly on social cohesion.
Summary
It is unrealistic to expect any combat soldiers to join the military with an intrinsic
immunity to combat stress, although a minority may be more resistant than others.
Even those who are relatively resistant cannot escape combat stress if exposed to
combat long enough. In the absence of group stress management and functional
individual stress management strategies, the individual will resort to dysfunctional
stress management strategies, of which three are characteristic reactions to combat
stress: self-mutilation, narcotics, and internalization. Resistance to stress and func-
tional stress management are largely extrinsic capabilities. The organization can train
the soldier in functional individual stress management strategies and can encourage
group outcomes, such as cohesion, which mitigate stress. The organization can also
106 Made, Not Born
deliberately manage the individual’s exposure to stress by limiting or iterating the

duration of time in which the individual is exposed to combat stressors. As explained
more fully in the earlier chapter on personnel management, unit-level rotation of
soldiers permits frequent rotation of soldiers in and out of combat, whereas individ-
ual tours of duty are usually longer than the individual can stand and will also
remove the individual from potential group stress management.
Cohesion is a confused concept but one that essentially measures group bonds,
particularly the group’s ‘‘stick-togetherness.’’ Cohesion is no longer regarded as a
single concept but is routinely disaggregated into horizontal, vertical, task, and social
cohesion, and sometimes organizational and leadership team cohesion, some of
which have unique effects.
The evidence suggests that cohesion is most important to motivation, perfor-
mance, resistance to disintegration and stress, readiness, and retention, in that order.
Cohesion is associated with combat motivations in particular and is perhaps the
most important group-level variable. Cohesion is certainly important to combat
performance and no combat unit would want to be without it, although the relation-
ship may be weaker than commonly thought and is stronger at the group level than
the individual level. Cohesion seems to bind units together and to help them resist
disintegration and stress. Cohesion also encourages retention and readiness, particu-
larly at the group level. Task cohesion is the most beneficial type of cohesion;
cohesion’s benefits are more observable at the group level rather than the individual
level.
Importantly, desirable forms of cohesion are not a function of intrinsic attributes,
nor are they spontaneous. Instead, cohesion, particularly task cohesion, is improved
by shared training, shared stress, and positive leadership. By contrast, homogeneity,
familiarity, and affection have modest effects on cohesion, mostly on social cohesion.
Social cohesion, compared to task cohesion, is most correlated with antiorganiza-
tional behavior and least correlated with performance. Vertical cohesion moderates
antiorganizational behavior too. Task cohesion and vertical cohesion, which are most
strongly correlated with performance, particularly combat performance, are not best
explained by intrinsic attributes. Rather, they are better attributed to extrinsic
manipulation of the group’s attributes and expectations, especially through shared
training, shared stress, and positive leadership. In other words, the most beneficial
forms of cohesion for combat personnel are more extrinsic than intrinsic.
CHAPTER 5
COMBAT MOTIVATION
Motivation is the conscious or unconscious stimulus for action toward a desired

goal. Kellett has defined combat motivation as:
The conscious or unconscious calculation by the combat soldier of the material and
spiritual benefits and cost likely to be attached to various courses of action arising from
his assigned combat tasks. Hence motivation comprises the influences that bear on
soldier’s choice of, degree of commitment to, and persistence in effecting, a certain
course of action.1
In military studies, some of the most contentious arguments about combat

personnel concern their motivations. The trouble is that two distinctions are being
ignored: the distinction between the motivation to serve and combat motivation
and the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Motivations to serve
are intrinsic and are not entirely transitive with combat motivations, which are
largely extrinsic. Military scholars often speak highly of unit ‘‘cohesion,’’ which,
implicitly, is an extrinsic motivation. However, ‘‘cohesion’’ (more fully described in
the preceding chapter) and other similar concepts of group or unit motivation are
routinely treated as a collection of intrinsic motivations—if only because there is
no conventional distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to remind
military scholars to do otherwise.
Cohesion is usually considered a unit-level factor. Organizational factors, such
as organizational communications, are also at work, as are political factors and
situational factors, such as the legitimacy of the war. Morale is often used to capture
motivations, but morale more properly refers to confidence or cheerfulness. While
all of these concepts are often used to capture motivations, they may be treated as
causes. For instance, Gal’s surveys of Israeli troops identified eight causes of
108 Made, Not Born
motivation: cohesion and morale; confidence in senior commanders; confidence in

one’s self, team, and weapons; familiarity with missions and frontage; confidence in
immediate commanders; enemy evaluation; legitimacy of war; and worries and con-
cerns.2 Some of these causes, such as the legitimacy of the war, may not be captured
perfectly by either intrinsic or extrinsic concepts of motivation, but even these causes
are interpreted by intrinsic beliefs and values and by extrinsic sources, such as
commanders.
This chapter is broken down into four main sections. The first section explores the
intrinsic motivations thought to motivate civilians to serve in the military and thence
combat. It concludes that intrinsic motivations certainly motivate civilians to serve
in the military but are not transitive with combat motivations; some are even
counterproductive. The second section examines extrinsic motivation theories,
which claim that the only enduring combat motivations are strong interpersonal
relationships derived from attentive management. The third section examines more
recent intrinsic motivation theories that have counterattacked extrinsic motivation
theories and appear to be ascendant. The fourth section summarizes this chapter,
concluding that intrinsic motivations may be sufficient motivation for noncombat
personnel or for combat personnel at peace but are definitely insufficient for combat
personnel after their first exposure to the realities of combat.
Early Intrinsic Motivation Theories

Routinely, particularly, as we shall see, in the American literature, combat motiva-
tion is associated with all sorts of intrinsic motivations, the most popular of which
I discuss below in sequential subsections: willingness to kill, rational service, volun-
teerism, ‘‘will,’’ ‘‘warrior spirit,’’ militarism, political ideology, nationalism, ethnicity,
masculinity, the male gender, heterosexuality, religiosity, morality, individualism,
and psychological stability.
Willingness to Kill
Human beings are often described as naturally violent, ‘‘the violent apes,’’ the only
organisms to routinely kill members of their own species. Soldiers, therefore, should
be intrinsically motivated to engage in combat, where they are freed from civilized
society and given the license to kill. Even today, most human beings claim that
they would be willing to join the military and kill in order to defend their country,
themselves, and those they care about. Warrior societies celebrate their willingness
to kill their enemies.
In fact, violence is common amongst animals; human beings are not the only
species to routinely kill members of their own species. Moreover, there is some
empirical evidence that the majority of soldiers fail to kill in combat. During the
Second World War, S. L. A. Marshall’s field research suggested that only 15% of
U.S. soldiers, even elite soldiers, routinely fired their weapons. Further research sug-
gested that most of those who fired their weapons did not shoot to kill. Perhaps 2%
Combat Motivation 109
of all soldiers would shoot to kill in combat. The nonaggressive soldier was not
necessarily passive, nor cowardly; rather, the nonaggressive soldier might continue
to engage in activities that exposed them to fire, activities such as spotting or resup-
ply. But even if they had overcome their fears in this way, most soldiers would not
fire their weapons. Even if they fired their weapons, most were providing covering
fire but were not shooting to kill. Military and social obligations might be sufficient
to keep soldiers at the front, but that does not mean that they will shoot to kill.
Deliberately nonlethal fire would be difficult for leaders to identify.3
At first, this reticence to kill might seem counterintuitive. After all, such reticence
should increase the risk to the soldier. However, contrary to the cliché, soldiers are
rarely in a position of ‘‘them or me.’’ It is more typical for both sides to discharge a
lot of munitions at each other rather than close the range and force a fight to the
death. If they do confront a situation of ‘‘them or me,’’ soldiers easily return to their
natural state of comparative apathy. Most soldiers seem to be apathetic in combat;
apathy is their natural state. They can communicate their apathy to the enemy by
‘‘tit-for-tat’’ strategies—they can reward the enemy’s inactivity by remaining inactive
themselves or they can punish aggressive enemy behavior with their own aggressive
behavior. Such cooperative apathy is surprisingly easy to establish when a unit is in
the same location and against the same enemy unit for long enough, as in the First
World War trenches between major offensives or during the frequent stalemates in
Italy during the Second World War.4
There are three main explanations for soldier apathy: fear, pacifism, and poor
training. Soldiers may be full of bravado before combat, but most seem to be terrified
in combat. Fear of being killed, rather than killing, is the most oppressive problem in
combat.5 Fear can cause some soldiers to resist opportunities to kill the enemy
because those opportunities are risky. For instance, soldiers must often expose them-
selves to fire in order to fire their weapons to kill an enemy. Fear can also cause such
cognitive preoccupation that the soldier fails to act; the soldier may cognitively shut-
down and appear to freeze. While fear is a powerful explanation for soldier apathy,
fear can be rationalized or managed. For instance, Gary Linderer, a U.S. Ranger
during the Vietnam War, suffered motivational problems after a grisly combat expe-
rience in which some of his friends were killed, but he later rationalized his fears:
I decided I would go to the dispensary in the next day or two and get my damned
[‘‘unfit-for-combat’’] profile removed. The memorial service a couple of days earlier
had helped me to come to grips with my fears. I had rationalized that if it was my time
to go, then it was my time to go, and there was damn little I or anybody else could do
about it. I was back in control and maybe a little wiser. Fearing death and then suffering
guilt for that fear was a personal conflict in which there could be no winner.6
The second main explanation for soldier apathy is instinctive or primal pacifism.
Observers such as David Grossman believe that face-to-face killing remains biologi-
cally difficult for the majority of humans, a majority perhaps as large as 98%, the
other 2% being psychopaths. (Grossman notes the coincidence between the 2%
who seemed willing to shoot to kill during the Second World War and the 2% of
110 Made, Not Born
civilians who emerge as psychopaths.) Combat may cause ‘‘perceptual distortions’’

such as tunnel vision, leaving the soldier governed by more primitive parts of the
brain. Grossman believes that these more primitive parts of the brain are naturally
pacific. This pacifism is especially stimulated by face-to-face interaction with poten-
tial victims. The sight of another human, the outward appearance of the other’s fear
in particular, seems to stimulate most people’s natural empathy. If ordered to kill a
submissive human, such as a prisoner, most soldiers find killing more difficult still.
Their aversion may be overcome by such routine avoidance strategies as blindfolding
the prisoner, killing the prisoner from behind, keeping the executioner’s identity hid-
den to observers, or assigning a group (such as a ‘‘firing squad’’) to kill each prisoner,
so that the responsibility can be shared. Individuals may engage in various avoidance
strategies, such as macabre humor, to naturalize killing, but most never seem to com-
pletely succeed, even though the most negative effects may not be fully manifested
until years later.7
Pacifism in intimate combat situations does not prevent soldiers from engaging in
a lot of posturing outside of those intimate situations, especially from afar and before
combat begins. This posturing might include very aggressive behavior, such as shout-
ing and displaying weapons. Opposing premodern armies, like opposing soccer
hooligans today, often taunted each other before charging. Historically, militaries
have tried to maximize the psychological effects of their soldiers’ posturing through
impressive dress, martial music, and large, loud weapons.8 For most soldiers, postur-
ing is easy enough, especially if their opponents crack under the pressure first, but if
neither side cracks, soldiers on both sides must face the transition from posturing to
killing or else run away. The dominant biological imperative seems to be flight rather
than fight. In them-or-me situations, killing may come naturally enough, but these
situations are increasingly rare. Soldiers often engage in posturing after combat
too, when the soldier brags to others about the brutalism of their behavior during
combat. Joanna Bourke reports that soldiers commonly write letters home describ-
ing impossibly bloody behavior. Such bragging may serve as an avoidance strategy,
helping the soldier to avoid their own discomfort with killing.9
A third explanation for soldier apathy is poor training. Timothy Harrison Place
concluded that during the Second World War prior failures to train British troops
in minor tactics left them dependent on long-range firepower, especially artillery.
David French also found that British soldiers of the Second World War were deliber-
ately trained to avoid close-range fighting and instead emphasize long-range
firepower, artillery, air support, and armor.10 Since the Second World War, some
researchers suggest, the proportion of soldiers who will fire their weapons in combat
has increased, perhaps because the problem of the nonaggressive soldier has received
more attention or because training has become more effective.11 In any case, killing
has become easier over time not just because training has become more effective but
also because more and more soldiers operate weapons that kill from further away.
If observed at all by the killer, killing is increasingly observed through optical
sights or video screens. The main conclusion of relevance to this project is that
face-to-face killing is not intrinsic for most soldiers but must be trained or assigned to
remote devices.
Rational Service
One of the oldest assumptions about combat motivation is that it must be rational.
The early twentieth-century French military and the U.S. military, which, histori-
cally, modeled itself on the French military, have both produced considerable
literature on rational combat motivations. In 1902, Ardant du Picq’s popular and
influential theory—that soldiers are motivated by rational fears of punishment for
failure by superiors or the enemy—was published in its entirety for the first time
(one part having been published in 1880).12 This theory gave academic legitimacy
to the French Army’s bloody commitment to ‘‘élan’’ during the First and Second
World Wars by prophesizing how easily rational soldiers could be persuaded of its
benefits.13
U.S. military psychologists of the First and Second World Wars were also under
the impression that motivation was largely a rational response to whether or not
the military was fulfilling the soldier’s rational ‘‘needs,’’ such as food and security.14
Material rewards were used to recognize risk. For instance, airborne troops received
double the pay of the least well-paid soldiers. Today, the U.S. military has an
unrivalled material reward system that rewards the most minor training or service
accomplishments with certificates, medals, financial bonuses, preferential tasks, or,
most consequentially, promotion. This is all very well during peacetime (actually,
the evidence suggests that most soldiers come to treat material rewards as expecta-
tions, rather than incentives), but material rewards and punishments are unlikely
to maintain combat motivations.15
Consider rewards first: the most lavish material rewards are hardly of much impor-
tance during the life-or-death decision-making that characterizes combat. Material
awards serve more to rationalize good performance for observers ex post than to
encourage good performance by soldiers ex ante. Award inflation and corruption are
common causes for their discreditation.16 Veterans appear to be less impressed with
awards for combat service than outside observers appear to be: only one-third of
Second World War medal winners claimed their medals, for instance. The U.S. mili-
tary’s material reward system contrasted markedly with the German military, which
preferred to rely on organizational processes to motivate troops.17 This is indicative
because the perception that victorious, materially oversupplied U.S. soldiers were less
motivated in combat than their retreating, impoverished German enemies became
the classic paradox of the Second World War. In the postwar period, critics claim, the
U.S. military’s organizational and group motivations declined further as its culture
moved from a ‘‘personnel-orientation’’ to the impersonal management of time and
resources. Pay incentives allegedly led to a commitment to oneself more than to the
organization.18 The reliance on tangible rewards discourages those who are more
motivated by intangible rewards, such as professional performance.19
112 Made, Not Born
What about punishment? Are soldiers motivated in combat by the threat of

material punishment? Defectors from compulsory military service may face social
ostracism, imprisonment, or ‘‘punishment duties,’’ but this does not make combat
rational, because the costs of defection may be preferred over the risks of combat.
Most of those who refuse to serve claim conscientious objection to killing,
not rational aversion to the risks of combat.20 Besides, the frequency of intentional
resistance to compulsory service is trivial. Only 1.2% of British Second World War
conscripts claimed conscientious objection.21 Only 0.04% of all U.S. Second World
War registrants were imprisoned for refusing military service. The vast majority of
citizens agreed to serve, and they did so for normative reasons.22 Meanwhile, the
majority’s supposedly rational motivations to serve were poor predictors of their
combat motivation. For instance, as described in the section on stress in the previous
chapter, the combat motivations of perhaps one-quarter of all U.S. combat soldiers
would fail during the Second World War for psychological reasons that are exog-
enous to most rational theories of motivation.
Volunteerism
Volunteerism is the individual’s intrinsic voluntary motivation to serve in the
military. (Military scholars often refer to volunteer forces as ‘‘professional’’ but that
word should be preserved as an antonym for ‘‘amateur.’’) This catchall concept is
routinely treated as an explanation for combat motivation. The conventional
supporting cases are threefold: the historically volunteer British Army, which is often
compared to the conscript armies of continental Europe; U.S. Marines, whose strong
performance record is often contrasted with that of U.S. Army conscripts; and the
Waffen Schutzstaffel (SS; literally ‘‘armed guard’’), a ‘‘volunteer’’ army formed by
the Nazi regime outside of the regular German Army. However, while the British
Army has gone through periods of conscription, such as during both world wars,
when the combat motivations of its soldiers came to be seen as less reliable, its
regimental practices were damaged during those periods, as shown in the chapter
on combat personnel management. The USMC (United States Marine Corps)
ended volunteerism in 1943 without an appreciable decline in performance, perhaps
because its legendary corporatism survived.23 Moreover, U.S. Marines are still the
most satisfied U.S. service personnel, Army personnel the least satisfied, despite both
services going all-volunteer in 1979.24 As for the Waffen SS, some of its ‘‘volunteers’’
were actually pressed into service, while the regular German Army contained many
volunteers who had volunteered for certain units, especially the more prestigious
regiments.
Whatever the individual’s initial motivations to volunteer for military service,
these intrinsic motivations tend to dissipate in combat.25 Prior motivations may be
strong, but just a short exposure to the realities of combat usually destroys a soldier’s
intrinsic motivations. Bravado in the calm of peacetime is easily forgotten under the
shock of combat. Gary Linderer, a U.S. Ranger in Vietnam (all Rangers were
volunteers), describes this realization as a conscious cognitive moment while attend-

ing a memorial service for four recently killed comrades:
I stared unblinkingly as the chaplain’s words struggled to penetrate my daze: ‘‘. . .brave
. . .heroic . . .valorous . . .noble . . .glory . . .duty . . .the supreme sacrifice . . .a grateful
nation. . .a heavenly reward.’’ Then suddenly, it hit me that it was all bullshit—pure,
unadulterated bullshit. They were dead! I had been there! I had seen them die and the
way they died. There hadn’t been anything glorious or noble about it.26
Some commentators have even claimed that volunteerism may have downsides.
For instance, Richard Gabriel has claimed that volunteer forces are inferior to
conscript forces because the former attract the dregs of society.27 It is certainly true
that the least-educated Americans are overrepresented amongst volunteers for
the all-volunteer U.S. military, but it is unclear how significant this is for those
militaries, like the U.S. military, which invest heavily in their training.
Will
‘‘Will’’ is a popular but nebulous label for combat motivation. As a military con-
cept, ‘‘will’’ associates combat motivations with the intrinsic character of soldiers,
especially those soldiers drawn from appropriate societies or sections of society.
The word of choice was once ‘‘virtue,’’ an English word transliterated almost exactly
from the Latin. The one commonality across ancient Roman writings on war was
the assumption that ‘‘virtuous’’ soldiers win wars, where virtuous soldiers are usually
citizens of Republics but might be citizens of whatever type of polity or society was
being advocated by the author. This assumption was borrowed from the political
philosophy of the time, so it was slightly self-serving. For similar reasons, the word
and assumption were kept alive by mediaeval political philosophers, most of whom,
such as Niccolo Machiavelli, doubled as ‘‘military philosophers.’’ The assumption
was also common in ancient Chinese writings on war, which borrowed the idea from
Taoist philosophy.28
The popularity of the word ‘‘will’’ today probably derives most from the word’s
association with Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian military philosopher who used
the analogy of boxing to claim that concession is more a function of Geist than
material defeat. Military scholars normally translate Geist as ‘‘will’’ but most linguists
prefer ‘‘spirit,’’ which implies transcendence more than motivation. Whatever
Clausewitz’s true meaning, he seems to have associated the soldier’s ‘‘will’’ with the
will of the soldier’s society, making ‘‘will’’ an intrinsic attribute, although Clausewitz
never formally separated intrinsic from extrinsic attributes.29 In any case, ‘‘will’’ is
certainly popularly conceived as an intrinsic attribute—either of a commander or
of a society. For instance, many commentators assume that commanders can win
battles by sheer ‘‘will,’’30 while others imply that militaries succeed or fail according
to the intrinsic ‘‘will’’ of the society from which the military must draw its
soldiers.31
114 Made, Not Born
In the modern era, the idea that ‘‘will’’ can determine outcomes has been most
popular with nationalists and charismatic leaders, for whom ‘‘will’’ is an egotistical
solution to the otherwise irresistible threats conceived by their paranoia.32 Adolf
Hitler is the classic example. Hitler ‘‘knew nothing about training and based his
evaluation on Geist,’’ as one of his generals (General der Panzertruppen Leo Freiherr
Geyr von Schweppenburg) recalled.33 Hitler’s confidence in Geist encouraged rash
decisions that neglected force employment—epitomized by his refusal to allow his
commanders to withdraw before their inevitable encirclement. Hitler’s faith in ‘‘will’’
was unrepresentative of the German Army’s traditions. According to another of
Hitler’s generals (Oberstleutnant Friedrich Freiherr von der Heydte), most officers
transmitted but failed to enforce Hitler’s most ridiculous orders, such as the require-
ment for unit commanders to sign a ‘‘no retreat’’ contract.34 Hitler’s rhetoric about
the ethnically and ideologically superior German soldier; his biases toward numerical
preponderance, technology, and intrinsic political motivation; his stand-and-fight
orders; and his interference in day-to-day military operations suggest to many that
he never understood the organizational roots of his army’s motivation.35
The concept of will was popularized again in the 1970s, albeit rather circuitously,
by perhaps the most widely cited study of combat motivation. John Keegan’s famous
examination of the ‘‘face of battle’’—the unique experience of combat itself—
stressed intrinsic motivations (though Keegan himself never recognized a distinction
between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations). For instance, in explaining the victory
of the materially inferior English army at Agincourt in 1415, Keegan unfortunately
assumed the motivational power of alcohol, religion, financial rewards, punishment,
and normative violence. Yet, given that the English had been on French soil for two
trying months while the French army was newly formed and more class conscious,
extrinsic cohesion might be a more valid explanation. Indeed, Keegan observed, in
a later case study, the extraordinary cohesiveness of British regiments at Waterloo
in 1815, at which point Keegan added regimental ‘‘honor’’ to the list of motivations.
However, he did not recognize the difference between this clearly extrinsic attribute
and the intrinsic attributes he had previously observed. Worse, Keegan later attrib-
uted German motivation in the Somme battles of 1916 to a rational awareness
of the dangers of surrender, concluding, rather bizarrely, that battle was a test of
Clausewitzian ‘‘will.’’36
Warrior Spirit
‘‘Warrior spirit’’ is another nebulous but popular label for combat motivation.
Like ‘‘will,’’ ‘‘warrior spirit’’ is another Clausewitzian phrase, which, this time, he
explicitly conceived of as societal and, therefore, intrinsic. In modern use, the con-
cept of ‘‘warrior spirit’’ is often justified in terms of Clausewitz’s concept of ‘‘will.’’37
The warrior spirit concept today is largely American. It may be encouraged by
America’s wider ‘‘warrior culture,’’ as perpetuated by Hollywood movies about fron-
tier heroes and upstanding citizen soldiers.38 The U.S. Army’s doctrinal manual,
which has done most to perpetuate the phrase ‘‘warrior spirit,’’ defines it as the ‘‘will
to fight and win.’’39 The warrior spirit concept was removed from later versions of
this manual but remained in popular use and then reemerged in current doctrinal
publications.40
‘‘Warrior spirit’’ is often used interchangeably with ‘‘warrior ethos’’ or ‘‘warrior
ethic.’’ The latter two phrases hark back to classical ‘‘warrior’’ ideals and mediaeval
‘‘chivalry,’’ both of which stressed motivation governed by a code of conduct. The
concept of a highly chivalrous, highly motivated warrior is attractive because it
simplifies the world into friends, enemies, and noncombatants.41 However, with
the decline of formalized large-scale warfare, the concept is increasingly unrealistic.
Those who see themselves as traditional ‘‘warriors’’ find themselves disenfranchised
from peace operations and other so-called ‘‘military operations other than war.’’42
Nevertheless, some U.S. soldiers have claimed that the warrior spirit is only more
relevant to peacekeeping operations, which lack the supposed motivations of wars
of national survival.43
Historically, attempts to stress ‘‘warrior spirit’’ have proven to be counterproduc-
tive. When soldiers actually meet combat, then ‘‘warrior culture’’ is often exposed
as ‘‘warrior myth,’’ making the combat experience even more shocking.44 A warrior
culture also encourages rash behavior or demonstrative violence. For instance, the
Second World War Japanese, imbued with a warrior culture they called bushido, were
overly optimistic about the ability of proactive determined behavior to overcome
challenges. This optimism often neglected sensible tactics and instead encouraged
banzai (massed assaults stressing bladed weapons and noise).45 The futility of such
attacks against moderately well-positioned and equipped defensive forces was
first demonstrated during Japan’s counterattacks against the USMC bridgehead on
Guadalcanal in 1942. Later, when on the defensive, the Japanese wasted their limited
resources by emphasizing uncoordinated frontal counterattacks during the day and
individual infiltration at night. The following example from the U.S. invasion of
Okinawa in 1945 is illustrative:
I saw enemy soldiers rushing out of the culvert. Our line started firing as I counted the
tenth Japanese to emerge. Those incredibly brave soldiers formed a skirmish line abreast,
with a few yards between each other, and started trotting silently toward us across open
ground about three hundred yards away. Their effort was admirable but so hopeless.
They had no supporting fire of any kind to pin us down or even make us cautious. They
looked as though they were on maneuvers. They had no chance of getting close to us.46
Somalis fighting in 1993 also prided themselves on their warrior culture and
imagined that it would compensate for U.S. advantages in weapons and skills. The
habr gidr clan claimed that the United States planned to colonize Somalia and
destroy Islam and that U.S. troops had committed atrocities. In the afternoons (the
disastrous U.S. operation described by the Black Hawk Down book and movie began
in the afternoon of October 3rd), most Somalis were high on khat—a plant chewed
as an amphetamine.47 But the Somalis’ hate- and drug-fuelled warrior culture
116 Made, Not Born
exacerbated their lack of skills. Most Somalis were no more than armed citizens,
sometimes open to direction by a few experienced mercenaries, but generally
uncoordinated: they ran into the open just to fire off their weapons; they fired
without aiming; they caught each other in crossfire; and they blindly walked into
U.S. positions.48
Militarism
Similar to the warrior spirit is ‘‘militarism,’’ which is the societal (and therefore
intrinsic) exaltation of military virtues and ideals. Militarism is often used to explain
spectacular military performance, especially Germany’s. Nonmilitarist societies, like
the American, are supposedly disadvantaged because they lack militarist motiva-
tions.49 Is it true that American society is a nonmilitarist society? Is it true that
militarism is a combat motivation? The evidence suggests that the answer to both
questions must be negative. U.S. popular culture assumes that the U.S. military is
not militarist for two reasons: American society is more liberal than ‘‘old world’’
societies; and the U.S. military reflects society’s liberalism.50 Yet both assumptions
are myths.
First, America was never as analogous to a liberal, non-feudal Europe as Louis
Hartz’s populist theory claimed.51 Hartz had discounted the new world’s ‘‘old world’’
conservatism, as illustrated by immigrant religious fundamentalists, frontier
pioneers, Southern feudalists and slave owners, foreign policy isolationists, and
self-described ‘‘crusaders’’ against first Native American tribes and then neighboring
states to the south.52 Empirically, Martin van Creveld refuted the ‘‘German milita-
rist’’ and ‘‘American pacifist’’ stereotypes with an indicative look at war involvement
and psychological attitudes.53 Then Van Creveld went on to claim that the German
military has a history of high motivation because of its personnel management, not
because it selects from a militarist society. The American military ‘‘philosophy’’ was
closer to Alfred Vagts’ negative definition of militarism: ‘‘customs, interests, prestige,
actions, and thought associated with armies and wars and yet transcending true
military purposes.’’ The German ‘‘philosophy’’ more closely approximated the anti-
militarist professionalism that Vagts called ‘‘the military way.’’54
Second, the U.S. military does not reflect the liberal side of U.S. society. In fact,
the gap between military and civilian values—a gap now known as the ‘‘civil–mili-
tary gap’’—has increased dramatically over the last few decades.55 Self-selection
processes, if not selection biases, mean that U.S. officers are disproportionately
white, rural, Southern, male, socially conservative, and Republican Party supporters.
A Southern ‘‘culture of honor’’ is one of the reasons that military service is appealing
to this subpopulation.56 Meanwhile, civilian society has increased the civil–military
gap by, for instance, banishing Reserve Officers Training Corps programs from the
campuses of liberal universities.57
The civil–military gap is not necessarily a bad thing if you subscribe to Samuel
Huntington’s view that an ‘‘ideological gap’’ between the military and the society is
good for military capability. When given the autonomy to do so, he claimed, the
military should develop a ‘‘military ethic’’ stressing ‘‘conservative values’’ and ‘‘profes-
sionalism.’’58 In this vain, Huntington and other conservative commentators like to
speak of the alleged threat to the U.S. military’s ‘‘ethos’’ from supposedly nontradi-
tional operations such as peace operations.59 Huntington’s depiction of ‘‘conserva-
tism’’ as a reasonable response to the demands of the military profession has been
challenged, mainly because military conservatism is more a sociological consequence
than a reasoned attempt to improve military performance. 60 Nor is there any
evidence that an ideological gap is good for military capability. Instead, it can be
counterproductive. For instance, the Vietnam War divided a myopic U.S. military
first from its cautionary advisors and then from society itself. Meanwhile, U.S.
military conservatism manifested itself as anti-intellectualism and cultural illiteracy,
constraining its declared strategy of winning Vietnamese ‘‘hearts and minds,’’61 as
recalled by this veteran:
I had disliked its people, not because they were physically unattractive or dishonest by
nature, but because I feared and didn’t understand them. Since I couldn’t tell who the
enemy was, I tossed them all into that classification because it was easier on me.. . .My
conservative, white, middle-class upbringing had taught me that America was the best,
and if it wasn’t made or grown in the US of A, it just wasn’t any good. . . .Why hadn’t
someone taught us to appreciate and recognize the culture of the people of Vietnam?
We had been trying so hard to force our culture on them that we had overlooked the
simple, innocent beauty of theirs.62
Similarly, the Israeli military remained committed to its occupation of Lebanon

(‘‘Israel’s Vietnam’’) during the 1980s, even after civilian society had decided that
the occupation was not another justifiable war to preserve Israel from annihilation.63
More recently, myopia has been blamed for the U.S. military’s clumsy handling
of the occupation of Iraq in 2003. Clearly, militaries should stress nonideological
professionalism over militarism or any ideological civil–military gap.
Political Ideology
Advocates of a civil–military ideological gap often assert, or at least imply,
a ‘‘conservative’’ political ideology. Political ideology is a commitment to certain
political values. As we have seen in the chapter on domestic politics, some demo-
cratic victory theories claim that democracies produce more motivated soldiers,
although other popular assumptions associate autocracies with fanatical soldiers.
Political ideology theories of combat motivation are often associated with diplomatic
historians. For instance, Richard Overy advanced a very popular version of political
ideology theory when he claimed that soldiers from the Allied polities—the United
States, Britain, and the Soviet Union primarily—of the Second World War were
motivated by a common antifascist ideology. Overy saw this ideology as being driven
from both the bottom and the top—from the common man and from the socioeco-
nomic leader. Overy had no direct evidence for political ideology on any side but
nevertheless advanced assumptions that had been popular with European socialists
118 Made, Not Born
at the time.64 In fact, survey data had already shown that no Second World War
belligerent produced remarkably ideological soldiers, despite what their political
leadership’s rhetoric and propaganda might suggest.
There are three main problems with all political ideology theories. First,
when militaries emphasize political ideology, their primary objective is usually the
isolation or reconditioning of political undesirables rather than the selection of the
politically motivated for combat. For instance, the Greek military dictatorship
(1967–1974) segregated ‘‘left-wing’’ recruits, sent them to indoctrination training,
and assigned them to hazardous duty, including combat. 65 In other words, the
regime selected its most ideologically unmotivated subpopulation for combat
duty.
Second, most soldiers do not appreciably internalize political ideology anyway.
The Second World War is a good example because it is often considered an ideologi-
cal war, pitting communist, fascist, and democratic states against each other. Even so,
no belligerent seems to have produced generally ideological soldiers. U.S. military
psychologists worked on the assumption that ‘‘morale’’ depended on the soldier
knowing and believing in the war’s stated political objectives.66 By the end of 1942,
there was a ‘‘morale officer’’ in each battalion, part of whose job was to explain to
soldiers the political ideals for which they were supposedly fighting.67 Even so,
General Dwight Eisenhower believed that American troops preparing for the inva-
sion of Europe in June 1944 displayed insufficient ‘‘inner conviction’’ and required
further political indoctrination.68 However, at the end of the war, only 5% of enlisted
U.S. Army soldiers professed to fight for antiauthoritarian reasons.69 Given the
human tendency to rationalize motivations in terms of higher objectives, and the
deliberate U.S. attempt to enhance their political ideology of its soldiers, this trivial
figure is remarkable. The survey data on British soldiers were similar: British recruits
seemed resigned, rather than committed, to war with their enemies; experimental
‘‘hate training’’ and ‘‘battle-inoculation training’’ were terminated in May 1942 as
ineffective; and British officers were prohibited from political activity.70 Meanwhile,
Germany did not appoint any political commissars until the end of the war, at which
point ‘‘time was too short for these ‘educators’ to have any measurable impact upon
the deteriorating morale of the German armies.’’71 The objective evidence suggests
that the ideological rhetoric of Nazi propaganda was not meaningfully internalized
by German troops. 72 Survey data on the Soviet Union are unavailable, but we
know that political commissars were de-emphasized as the war went on because they
were interfering with the Red Army’s professionalism without appreciably motivating
the troops. Evidence from the Korean War (1950–1953) is similar. Chinese Commu-
nist ideology was not appreciably internalized by Chinese soldiers, despite the
appointment of political commissars down to the company level. When captured,
Chinese prisoners were docile; only a minority showed any activism. Sixty-eight
percent of Chinese prisoners refused to return home, compared to only 0.5% of
American prisoners, despite the latter group’s subjection to intensive Chinese indoc-
trination.73
Third, while political ideology may motivate a recruit to serve in a military associ-
ated with that ideology, it would be a mistake to assume that the same motivation
endures as a combat motivation. Political ideology, like any intrinsic motivation,
dissipates upon the first shock of combat and then becomes an irrelevance.74 For in-
stance, a Second World War U.S. Marine recalls that he and his comrades were ‘‘[n]ot
the least bit interested in politics while we were fighting for our lives.’’75
Unfortunately, as I show later in the third main section of this chapter, political
ideology theories would be resurrected in the 1970s as the most popular alternative
explanation to extrinsic motivation theories.
Nationalism
Nationalism is a devotion to the interests or culture of one particular nation.
Diplomatic historians like to attribute Soviet victory during the Second World War
to Russian nationalism (also termed ‘‘soul’’ or ‘‘spirit’’), in the process perpetuating
the Soviet propaganda of the ‘‘Great Patriotic War.’’ However, at that time Russians
made up only 58% of the Soviet population.76 For their part, military historians like
to note the lack of motivation amongst foreign nationals fighting in German combat
units during the Second World War. While this idea fulfilled Allied assumptions and
the German need for scapegoats, effectively managed foreign units may have been
just as motivated as German national units.77 Meanwhile, international relations
theorists often assume that combat motivation is a linear function of ‘‘national prox-
imity’’—the geopolitical distance between the home polity and the point where the
polity’s soldiers are fighting.78 While the defender fights for survival, the aggressor
knows he or she has a homeland to fall back on.79 Some international relations
theorists have attributed the U.S. military’s patchy performance against the North
Vietnamese and their allies to lower national proximity.80 Unfortunately, the national
proximity explanation does not explain why South Vietnamese soldiers were no more
motivated than their American allies.
In its worst manifestation, nationalism encourages ‘‘paranoid nationalist’’
(international relations theorists prefer the term ‘‘hypernationalist’’) atrocities against
the most vulnerable members of the out-group—that is, civilians and prisoners.
Paranoid nationalism helps explain routine atrocities during the wars in the former
Yugoslavia in the 1990s, where, indicatively, no side showed remarkable military
capability.81 Such atrocities are normally associated with highly nationalistic autocra-
cies, but some democratic soldiers also have made atrocities routine, such as the
French soldiers fighting against Algerian separatists, the U.S. soldiers fighting late in
the Vietnam War, or some of the coalition troops charged with the occupation of Iraq
since 2003.
Ethnicity
Militaries have often discriminated in favor of certain ethnicities, which are pre-
sumed to lack combat motivation. For instance, the U.S. military was comparatively
120 Made, Not Born
late to ethnically desegregate, assuming that nonwhites lacked combat motivation or

would damage combat motivation if integrated with whites. Desegregation began in
1947; the National Guard was not fully desegregated until the 1970s. Segregationists
found plenty of apparent evidence for their prejudices. During both world wars,
some segregated African-American combat units performed well, but morale prob-
lems and unit combat failures were common. During the Second World War,
‘‘psychological ineffectiveness,’’ a category used to code everything from chronic
combat fatigue to a refusal to serve, was higher amongst African-Americans than
Caucasian-Americans. Later research showed that these outcomes are best explained
not by intrinsic motivations but by segregation itself, exacerbated by racist leaders,
menial task assignment, poor training, and training areas in Southern states. All of
these things are extrinsic factors.82
Indicatively, the performance of Japanese-Americans during the Second World
War was exceptionally high. Despite being segregated and despite serving under
white officers, Japanese-Americans seem to have been better treated than African-
Americans. While African-Americans were shuffled around various locations and
units and were used mainly in service units, Japanese-American soldiers were kept
together in a single infantry division, which fought only in Italy. So, despite being
segregated and despite serving under white officers, Japanese-Americans were man-
aged better than African-Americans.
The racial purity of Waffen SS personnel is sometimes used to explain their
exceptional combat motivations, but selection by racial purity had been abandoned
before the war began and, in 1943, the Waffen SS formed units from various
non-German and even non-Aryan identities, including Russians and Bosnian-
Muslims.
The longer history of the British imperial army is even more indicative. Since the
1880s, regiments theoretically recruited locally, which separated regiments by
regional identity and sometimes ethnic identity, particularly regiments raised abroad,
but most regiments were open to recruits from anywhere.83 British talk at the time
about so-called ‘‘martial races’’ may have helped recruiting amongst those martial
races but did not conform with operational reality. For instance, between the world
wars the ‘‘Indian Army,’’ the largest British imperial army, ended the bias to ‘‘martial
races,’’ integrated Indian and ‘‘white’’ regiments within brigades, and integrated the
officer corps without any appreciable decline in motivation.84 This suggests that
ethnicity was less important than the extrinsic motivations provided by the regiment,
whose localized recruitment is only one aspect of its peculiarly decentralized person-
nel management. Indeed, the postindependence Indian Army, which retains the
regimental system, is similarly misunderstood. Liberal Indian politicians criticize
apparent regimental discrimination by ethnicity, region, and religion, whereas
soldiers seek to protect the regional regiments.85 While the British Army continues
to recruit Nepalese citizens to serve in the Gurkha regiment, Nepalese soldiers are
attractive not just because of their reputation for fierceness but also because they
can be paid at much lower rates than British soldiers.
Masculinity
Traditionally, militaries have regarded aggression (offensive or proactive behavior)
and the psychological ability to kill as ‘‘masculine’’ resources. Consequently, combat
soldiers have been selected largely from males, even from the supposedly most
‘‘masculine’’ males. Masculinity was usually measured by masculine physiological
attributes, such as torso shape, on the assumption that physiological masculinity
indicates psychological masculinity.86 Physiological tests were later joined by psycho-
logical tests. During the Second World War, some U.S. psychologists associated
combat failure with an ‘‘effeminate disposition,’’ which they measured by various
personality tests.87 During the Korean War, U.S. Army researchers, attempting
to identify what they called ‘‘fighters’’ and ‘‘nonfighters’’ amongst U.S. soldiers, iden-
tified a number of personality traits they called ‘‘masculine.’’ They assumed that these
traits were intrinsic, rather than picked up after joining the military.88 While most of
these tests are no longer used, the cultural celebration of the masculine combat soldier
continues. U.S. military culture today has been labeled a ‘‘combat-masculine-
warrior’’ paradigm, celebrating ‘‘a homogenous force comprised primarily of white,
single, young men who view themselves as masculine warriors.’’89
Such an emphasis on masculinity, even when merely implicit, can be counterpro-
ductive. Any emphasis on masculinity without sufficient discipline may encourage
illegal violence against noncombatants, particularly females, rather than combat
motivation against armed enemies.90 Historically, those militaries with a strong
emphasis on masculine aggression have tended to be the same militaries that have
institutionalized atrocities against women. For instance, the Second World War
Japanese military forced women to work as prostitutes (‘‘comfort women’’) for
soldiers on leave.91 The Serbian and Bosnian-Serb militaries did the same in the
former Yugoslavia.92
The Male Gender

Under traditional assumptions, men are supposed to be psychologically, not
just athletically, better suited to combat than women. (See the section on combat
athleticism in the next chapter for more on military discrimination against women
on the basis of their athleticism.) Women are assumed to be overly emotional and
quick to lose their motivation under stress. On these grounds, some criticize the
‘‘feminization’’ of the U.S. military and claim that the U.S. military will be literally
and metaphorically emasculated.93
Advocates of women in combat suggest that history proves that women can be just
as motivated in combat as men, given the same training, although this history tends
to be rarely visited by male military historians. 94 For instance, some Native-
American and Celtic tribes used female warriors. The army of the nineteenth-
century African kingdom Dahomey was composed mainly of females.95 In the
modern era, ‘‘Western’’ militaries have rarely used women in combat, but ‘‘non-
Western’’ militaries, which are not so well documented in the West, have often used
122 Made, Not Born
women combat soldiers. During the First World War, about 6,000 Russian female
volunteers served in all-female infantry battalions. Only one battalion apparently
saw combat but its performance was reported as above average. The history of these
all-female but ‘‘imperial’’ units was lost after the Communist revolution, especially
since one all-female company found itself defending the Winter Palace against
Communist forces.96 In October 1941, the Soviet Union created an all-female
Soviet air group of three regiments (fighter, bomber, and night bomber regiments,
respectively), which performed at least as well as all-male equivalents, and later
mixed the genders without any known decline in performance.97 The British and
Americans made relatively good use of female agents for espionage during the
Second World War, some of whom engaged in combat alongside resistance
fighters.98 Women were well represented in North Vietnamese combat units, with-
out apparently suffering the motivation problems that characterized some of the
all-male U.S. and South Vietnamese combat units. Women are also well represented
amongst terrorists, who take advantage of popular expectations of female pacifism.99
Clearly, masculinity does not perfectly correlate with gender. Masculinity is a
function of childhood conditioning more than genetics. The military attracts a rela-
tively ‘‘masculine’’ subpopulation of women, conditioned outside of strict feminine
gender roles. For sociologists, insufficient intrinsic ‘‘masculinity’’ may be overcome
extrinsically anyway, by training and socialization in particular.100
For critics of military gender integration, mixed-gender combat units create spe-
cial problems, especially cohesion problems. Some mixed-gender units have certainly
failed. However, the explanation seems to be more extrinsic than intrinsic. Successful
mixed-gender units seem to be those which display sufficient extrinsic discipline to
ensure that cross-gender relations remain professional. During the Second World
War, German and British mixed-gender antiaircraft units performed in combat at
least as well as all-male equivalents. A U.S. experimental mixed-gender antiaircraft
unit never saw combat but appeared to perform in training just as well as all-male
units. The prohibitions on dating across rank and within unit were not significantly
disobeyed.101 Similarly, 100,000 Yugoslav women served in mixed-gender partisan
units during the Second World War. Romantic relations were strictly proscribed,
and performance was consistent with all-male units.102 Soviet females served in
mixed partisan units, as well as in regular infantry and tank units, without remark-
able cohesion problems.103 The same was true of the French resistance,104 the Italian
antifascist resistance, one-quarter of whom were female,105 and the Greek resis-
tance.106 Vietnamese women also fought well in mixed-gender units during the
Vietnam War.107
Even though political expediency has forced the U.S. military to extend to women
noncombat opportunities that are uncharacteristic of most other militaries, the U.S.
military is unusually defensive of its male-only combat roles. Some more liberal mili-
taries have opened all of their combat roles to women, beginning with Norway
(1977), the Netherlands (1979), Denmark (1985), and Canada (1989). Despite
similar social liberalism, Britain and Germany have been more lethargic, in part
because of the concern not to compromise the relatively autonomous regiments.

British and German women have now been allowed in all combat roles except
some of those in infantry and armor units. None of these more liberal militaries have
experienced the intense gender-relations problems so far experienced by the U.S.
military or any motivational imbalances by gender.
Heterosexuality
Modern militaries have restricted homosexuals on the assumption that ‘‘homosex-
ual tendencies’’ (like femininity) indicate insufficient combat motivation and that
professional relationships should not be romantic or sexual.108 However, homo-
sexuality was normative in militaristic ancient societies, most notably within the
standing armies of ancient Sparta and Thebes. Military discrimination against
homosexuals has rapidly declined in the last two decades, with the result that we have
plenty of contemporary evidence that homosexuals are no less motivated and that
they do not damage the motivations of any soldiers other than the homophobic.
Today, the United States and Turkey are the only NATO (North Atlantic Treaty
Organization) members not to allow homosexuals to serve freely. (The U.S.
military’s ‘‘don’t ask, don’t tell’’ policy of 1993, which forbids soldiers from asking
others about, or admitting their own, sexuality, effectively permits only ‘‘closeted’’
homosexuals.) For liberal militaries at least, homosexuality is largely irrelevant.
While homosexuals might offend some soldiers, this might be solved by extrinsic
reconditioning of homophobes, not discrimination against homosexuals. The U.S.
military has been characterized as disinterested in challenging homophobia because,
culturally, social conservatism and military capability often go hand-in-hand. ‘‘For
instance, [US] service members who oppose gays in the military often argue that
homosexuality is a sin, quoting the Bible.’’109 Militaries may permit such overt
religiosity if they assume that religiosity itself is also a combat motivation, as
explained in the next subsection.
Religiosity
Religiosity is religious sentiment. Religiosity is commonly assumed to motivate
soldiers in combat but assertions of the motivational value of religion are usually
supported by nothing more than historical clichés—such as Islamic military
expansion during the Middle Ages, for which there are an equal number of counter-
examples—such as the later Islamic contraction. Islamic armies have a very poor
reputation today, mainly because of Arab performance against Israel. Significantly,
the Jordanian Army, which displays low religiosity relative to other Arab armies but
which inherited British regimental practices, is usually rated as the most motivated
and skilled of the Arab armies faced by Israel.
Other assertions are driven by little more than what might be termed ‘‘faith in
faith.’’ For instance, Norman Copeland, a British military chaplain, when he was
124 Made, Not Born
writing in 1942, stressed the supposed superiority of the civilized, ‘‘divine’’ British
soldier over the brutish, atheist German.110 In the same year, Margaret Mead advised
the U.S. military to take advantage of American ‘‘Puritanism’’ because of its sup-
posed motivational benefits, advice that may have reflected her own confused
religiosity more than her reasoned opinion as an anthropologist.111 The problem
for Mead and Copeland was that contemporary British and U.S. soldiers were not
more motivated than their German opponents.
Today, some U.S. military scholars imply that the best answer to recent
fundamentalist-Islamic terrorism is to emphasize the religious motivations of U.S.
soldiers.112 These commentators mistake ex ante religious rhetoric, ex post thanks
to God, religious atrocities outside of combat, or religious terrorism as evidence
for motivation in combat. Religiosity encourages demonstrative, sacrificial, and
abusive acts, such as terrorism, by small numbers of highly pious, marginalized,
and impressionable people.113 As enlightened religious leaders themselves admit,
religion can be used to support or abuse.114 Regular combat requires more general-
izable and enduring motivations than religion can provide. Combat motivation,
unlike religiosity, is created and maintained by the unit or organization.115
Emphasizing religiosity may encourage illegal violence before it encourages
combat motivation. Religiosity may be counterproductive for leadership skills too,
particularly if the led are less religious than the leaders. U.S. military officers, relative
to other Western officers at least, and despite the U.S. Constitutional separation of
‘‘Church and State,’’ are relatively overt about their religiosity. U.S. officers tend to
assume that religious faith gives leaders faith in their eventual success.116 For instance,
in 1966, General Matthew Ridgway, who was U.S. Chief of Staff at the time, wrote
that ‘‘faith in God’’ engendered character, inner peace, and therefore good leader-
ship.117 Similarly, and more recently, Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czece vaguely
connected ‘‘spiritual imperatives’’ with military ‘‘vision.’’118 Presumably for similar
reasons, Edgar Puryear asserted that duty to ‘‘God and country’’ should define the
military leader.119 However, religion is highly contingent and personal, so an overtly
religious leader can be divisive. For instance, one Captain’s overt Christian evangel-
ism distanced some of the U.S. Rangers under his command in Mogadishu, Somalia,
in 1993.120 In any case, all the attention that a leader devotes to finding inspiration in
religion is attention not devoted to generalizable leadership skills.
Religiosity’s deleterious effects on leadership skills are related to its deleterious
effects on force employment skills. Some observers have observed that the religious
tend to favor vague and dogmatic ‘‘principles of war,’’ such as force-ratio princi-
ples.121 ‘‘Strategy is theology with the hope left out,’’ as one former U.S. Army officer
recently put it.122
The most practical assertion in favor of the soldier’s religiosity is the assumption
that religious faith provides psychological stability. For this reason, faith is apparently
used to select U.S. Army Delta Force recruits.123 Indeed, special operations personnel
are popularly stereotyped as conservative, godly supermen. Yet ‘‘Chris Ryan,’’
a corporal in the SAS in 1991 when he escaped capture by walking nearly 200 miles
from behind Iraqi lines to Syria, was an atheist sustained by his desire to see his family
again.124 Sergeant ‘‘Andy McNab,’’ Ryan’s team leader, survived his capture and
brutal torture by focusing on his training, an experience that only confirmed for
him that ‘‘God did not exist.’’125
Morality
Morality is the doctrine or system concerned with ethical or virtuous conduct
and duty. Morality has been associated with motivation for some time—indeed,
the word ‘‘morale’’ is derived from ‘‘moral.’’ Like religiosity theories, morality
theories reflect frustrated aspirations for civilian society more than military capability.
For instance, between the world wars, senior British officers worried about the effect
of society’s supposed moral decline on any future conscript force’s morale.126 More
recently, James Toner, an American, advocated a ‘‘military ethic’’ (by which he
meant not what Samuel Huntington had meant by the term but instead ‘‘wisdom,
justice, courage, and temperance’’) as a way to return ‘‘cardinal virtues’’ to immoral
civilian America. The benefits for military capability were secondary and tenuous:
Toner attributed ‘‘courage’’ in battle to the ‘‘moral courage’’ displayed by the
temperate.127
Others have suggested that morally secure soldiers will persist where soldiers
with less moral certitude will fail.128 ‘‘Only persons of well-developed character,
well-formed personalities and habits of discipline should be recruited and retained
to do this terrible, morally compromising work,’’ one U.S. Army chaplain has
written.129 A related assumption is that soldiers should be morally outraged. For
instance, Richard Overy claimed that the Second World War Allies were motivated
by the ‘‘moral certitude’’ of their antifascist alliance.130
However, as with religiosity, moralizing on the part of the military diverts attention
from real military tasks.131 For instance, U.S. military personnel support programs
(civilian education, family housing, and social activities) often have ‘‘stewardship
objectives,’’ such as youth direction, that do not overlap ‘‘military objectives.’’132
Stewardship of the soldier toward marriage and procreation, through pay, housing,
and ‘‘community’’ benefits, assists retention and readiness but also encourages hasty
marriage and parenting, which helps explain, ironically, the higher frequency within
the military than within civilian society of adultery, divorce, domestic violence, and
sexual harassment (which is perhaps ten times higher).133
Some stewardship objectives have no military benefit at all, especially those which
seek to protect the military community from immoral civilian society. For instance,
officially U.S. Department of Defense computers can be used to visit any nonwork
related Web sites so long as they are not morally offensive. Using this directive,
individual commanders may order their network administrators to filter Web sites
for anything they might consider antimilitary or personally offensive.134 In other
words, moralizing can encourage isolationism without appreciable benefits for
motivations.
126 Made, Not Born
Individualism
Individualism is the belief that personal achievement is more important than
collective achievement. Again, individualism, like other intrinsic motivations, is most
popular as an explanation for combat motivations in the American literature.
U.S. popular culture is certainly highly individualistic. The international ‘‘Hofstede
scale’’ places the United States as the most individualist society in the world.135
U.S. popular culture explains success through heroic individuals and assumes that
unfettered individualism can achieve more for the greater good than can restrictive
collectivism. 136 Some critics believe that cultural individualism explains why
American military scholars are comparatively neglectful of group processes.137
Between the world wars, Silas McKinley assumed that American soldiers were
intrinsically ‘‘self-reliant and resourceful’’ with little need of extrinsic direction.138
Margaret Mead, the first of the self-described ‘‘cultural anthropologists,’’ gave
this assumption academic credence at an opportune time (the relevant book was
published in 1942). Mead advised the U.S. military to emphasize intrinsic attributes
peculiar to the American people and reject the extrinsic attributes characteristic of
‘‘old world’’ militaries, attributes such as traditional military discipline. Americans
resist orders, she claimed, so adopting European military discipline would be only
counterproductive. Americans are ‘‘Puritans,’’ Mead continued, which means that
they stress justice, morality, intelligence, and science. Thus, the U.S. military should
emphasize the intrinsic righteousness and knowledge of its soldiers, unfettered by
discipline.139 General Eisenhower also attributed ‘‘unique’’ qualities of ‘‘initiative
and resourcefulness’’ to the American soldier.140 Peter Mansoor contrasted the U.S.
soldier’s individualistic motivations with the German soldier’s ‘‘extensive ideological
indoctrination and fear-based discipline.’’141 One U.S. soldier praised a ‘‘uniquely
American reservoir of human initiative.’’142 The U.S. Army recruiting campaign
launched in 2001 has explicitly appealed to individualists under the slogan ‘‘an army
of one.’’
Advocates of individualism seem to be aware of a tension between individualism
and discipline, amongst other traditional military attributes. Individualism is
also criticized as antiorganizational. For instance, during the Second World War,
American individualism apparently caused tensions between leaders and led,
compromised unit cohesion, and interfered with group tasks.143
Collectivism and Discipline

Military capability is so group-dependent that one might expect that collec-
tivism—the converse of individualism—should be preferred over individualism.
Collectivism makes the soldier receptive to the often repetitive, ceremonial, and
apparently useless training in so-called ‘‘drill,’’ whose main purpose is to internalize
discipline.144 Discipline is orderly or prescribed behavior. Its benefits for military
performance are clear: it helps soldiers perform difficult tasks with less hesitation
and without losing direction or control. Consequently, some military scholars have
claimed that collectivist societies, such as the German, produce more cohesive
military organizations. William Darryl Henderson claimed that Israel’s success
against Arab armies also benefited from the collectivism of Israeli society. ‘‘Contrast
with this the Arab soldier who does not benefit from a strong socialization process
emphasizing strong loyalties and social ties beyond the family. The result is the weak
leadership and non-cohesive practices of many Arab armies.’’ 145 Writing later,
Kenneth Pollack also attributed the weak collectivism of Arab armies to the weak
collectivism of Arab society.146
The mistake is to ignore extrinsic factors. Germany and Israel might have
collectivist militaries because their training deliberately emphasizes collectivism,
not because they have collectivist societies. Given the right conditioning, recruits
from any society might be turned into collectivist soldiers; otherwise they would
reflect their intrinsic individualism or collectivism.
Intrinsic collectivism is not necessarily transitive with military collectivism
anyway. For instance, the British have a famously collectivist military even though,
on the Hofstede scale, Britain’s cultural individualism is second in the world only
to the U.S. British civilians may be individualists, but the British military is adept
at reconditioning them as collectivist soldiers.147 Between the world wars, senior
officers turned away from collectivist discipline, associating it with German society,
and instead argued that British citizens were more flexible and thus needed less
specific tactical training or doctrinal guidance. Meanwhile, they continued to
emphasize hierarchical discipline and formal drill. Although formal drill would give
way to tactical training for soldiers and leadership training for officers as the war
progressed, the reemphasis on tactical training was too little, too late.148 Thus, while
the British Army of the Second World War developed a reputation for tactical inflex-
ibility and poor leadership, it maintained its reputation for hierarchical discipline.
Captivity has been used to demonstrate this point. British prisoners maintained
hierarchical discipline and continued to respect rank while their officers organized
escape units, policed their physical and emotional well-being, and managed relations
with guards. American individualism seems to have obstructed these things, leading
to morale problems, interpersonal conflict, and lower chances of survival during the
forced transits of 1945.149 For critics, the breakdown in discipline amongst serving
U.S. soldiers after victory in Europe was dramatic evidence of ‘‘how little the
American military drew on internalized discipline.’’150 Additionally, the discipline
and cohesion of British regiments during their frequent colonial conflicts has been
contrasted with the discipline and cohesion problems experienced by U.S. units
during the Philippines uprising or the Vietnam War.151
Summary
To summarize this necessarily long first section, all sorts of intrinsic resources
are associated with motivation but none are entirely transitive with motivation in
combat. Some intrinsic motivations are even counterproductive, encouraging
insularity at best and illegal violence at worst.
128 Made, Not Born
Extrinsic Motivation Theories

So what does keep soldiers motivated? Extrinsic motivation theorists believe that
human relationships, extrinsically derived when soldiers come together in combat
units under functional management conditions, keep soldiers motivated during com-
bat. Regimental theories of combat motivation were described in the chapter on per-
sonnel management; these theories are clearly extrinsic motivation theories. Theories
of combat motivation that attribute combat motivations to cohesion (more fully dis-
cussed in the preceding chapter) may be regarded as extrinsic motivation theories too.
This section discusses two categories of extrinsic motivation theories. The first
subsection examines crowd or herd theories—the oldest, most eclectic (but largely
forgotten) group of extrinsic motivation theories. The second subsection examines
primary group theories, which are often used to explain both cohesion and combat
motivation.
Crowd Theories
The first extrinsic motivation theories only emerged at the turn of the twentieth
century. These so-called ‘‘crowd’’ or ‘‘herd’’ theories asserted the role of group influen-
ces, such as ‘‘peer pressure,’’ on the individual’s motivations. 152 Crowd theories
were more popular in Europe than the United States, but at least one text at the
U.S. Command and General Staff School during the late 1930s applied such theo-
ries. The author, John Burns, asserted that human behavior was more ‘‘instinct’’ than
‘‘reason’’ and advocated the extrinsic conditioning of instinct in order to manifest the
‘‘group feeling’’ that motivated soldiers.153 Unfortunately, crowd theories did not
eclipse intrinsic motivation theories. Consequently, they are largely forgotten today.
Second World War U.S. military psychologists were employed in improving methods
of selection by intrinsic motivations.154 These psychologists occasionally talked
about ‘‘group solidarity’’ or ‘‘esprit de corps,’’ but they attributed these things to
rational ‘‘mutual dependence.’’155 They would be challenged by the real combat
observations of the U.S. Army’s own S.L.A. Marshall.
S.L.A. Marshall
The Second World War popularly discredited the U.S. military’s claim to select
intrinsically motivated soldiers. U.S. soldiers came to be seen as less motivated in
combat than some of their materially impoverished enemies. This helps explain
the fame and popularity of Men Against Fire, a book published in 1947 by S.L.A.
Marshall, a uniformed U.S. Army researcher. Inspired by crowd theories, Marshall
theorized that most soldiers felt so ‘‘isolated’’ on the battlefield that they did not
act at all. Marshall accused the U.S. Army of exacerbating this problem by worrying
more about preponderant ‘‘firepower’’ than the individual’s motivations to fully uti-
lize that firepower. Marshall’s direct observations of small units in combat suggested
that at least 75% of U.S. soldiers did not even fire their weapons in combat.
Although questions about Marshall’s methodology and even honesty have challenged
the 75% figure, his conclusion is more important than the exact proportion of U.S.
soldiers who were apathetic.156 Marshall concluded that most soldiers were apathetic
in combat. Dominated by the concern to avoid enemy fire, Marshall’s typical sub-
jects made only token efforts to advance or fire their weapons, and only if directly
ordered or threatened. Marshall concluded that combat personnel should train and
fight in dedicated groups (Marshall used the misleading term ‘‘fire teams’’), which
would provide the necessary ‘‘tactical cohesion,’’ ‘‘morale,’’ and ‘‘will.’’157
Marshall failed to provide a theoretical explanation as enduring as his famous
empirical observations. Marshall’s ‘‘fire teams’’ clearly depended on attentive man-
agement if they were to train and fight contiguously but Marshall hardly addressed
their management. Worse, while Marshall had attributed combat motivation to
groups, he sometimes contradicted himself by attributing combat motivation to
militarist or political ideologies. Indeed, the final paragraph of Men Against Fire
advocated a martial societal culture.
Primary Group Theories

After the Second World War, researchers started to explain combat motivations in
terms of groups. The U.S. War Department’s survey data, released in 1949 and
sometimes called the ‘‘Stouffer Report,’’ showed that soldiers did indeed feel isolated
on the battlefield and that the solution was extrinsic. Intrinsic attributes—such as
intelligence quotient and ‘‘psychological stability’’—did not correlate with
performance. ‘‘Informal social groups,’’ as the published report called them,
were the only things that motivated soldiers through combat.158 Later, observers
reported that group bonds between combat personnel may be particularly strong
because they tend to be liberating from the insecurities and restrictive norms of
civilian life.159
Eventually, the term ‘‘primary groups’’ would come to be the most popular
label for such groups. Charles Cooley, an American psychologist, introduced the
term ‘‘primary group’’ in 1909 to describe the smallest, most intimate and most
motivated groups in an organization. Cooley defined the primary group ‘‘by
intimate face-to-face association and cooperation.. . .[I]t is a ‘we’; it involves the sort
of sympathy and mutual identification for which ‘we’ is the natural expression.
One lives in the feeling of the whole and finds the chief aims of his will in that
feeling.’’160
In 1948, Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz popularized the primary group as a
useful description of the functioning combat group. Shils and Janowitz did not offer
their own definition of primary groups but they argued that primary groups must
fulfill the soldier’s ‘‘primary needs’’ if soldiers were to continue to fight. Shils and
Janowitz mentioned weapons, leadership, affection, protection, and identity as
primary needs. In 1985, Daryl Henderson listed weapons, supplies, sustenance,
social activity, affection, self-esteem, protection, direction, a sense of influence, and
identity as primary needs. Subsequent definitions of military primary groups have
abandoned the primary needs and returned to Cooley’s concept of ‘‘face-to-face’’
130 Made, Not Born
relations. The most popular definition of military primary groups is the following:
‘‘small groups in which social behavior is governed by intimate face-to-face rela-
tions.’’161 The value of ‘‘face-to-face relations’’ is one of the most enduring assump-
tions in the literature.162 However, face-to-face relations are really a measure of the
manner in which group members routinely interact rather than a measure of the
strength of their bonds. People may interact intimately every day but nevertheless
hate each other. Moreover, some primary groups can develop remotely, with
sufficient internal bonds to commit illegal, murderous, and even sacrificial acts, as
networked terrorist groups have demonstrated.163
Shils and Janowitz wrote their article of 1948 because they were alarmed by
the popular misconception that political ideology explained German military
capability. Shils and Janowitz noted survey research, which found that few German
soldiers showed any political ideology. So why were German Army soldiers more
motivated than U.S. Army soldiers? Shils and Janowitz were struck by the fact that
the earliest mobilized U.S. divisions performed well while the younger divisions
performed badly. For instance, during the Ardennes counteroffensive of 1944,
younger U.S. divisions surrendered upon the initial shock of combat while older
divisions fought on even when surrounded. Shils and Janowitz believed that the
older divisions showed superior combat motivation because their personnel had
formed stronger primary groups during their longer formative period. For Shils
and Janowitz, political ideology was less important than the ‘‘steady satisfaction of
certain primary personality demands afforded by the social organization of the
army.’’164
Logically, managers could deliberately enhance the length of time primary group
members enjoyed together, but Shils and Janowitz were not directly concerned
with management. Thirty-four years after their article, Martin van Creveld’s famous
book Fighting Power highlighted the role of management. Van Creveld identified
deliberate German efforts to maximize their primary groups.165 Unfortunately,
management and other organizational factors still remain absent from most primary
group theories. Some writers on combat motivations believe that the primary group
literature has overly simplified our understanding of combat motivations, which
encompass primary group motivations but are not limited to them. 166 Kellett
identified cohesion, examined in the preceding chapter, as another type of combat
motivation. Primary group theories only capture group motivations, not extrinsic
combat motivations derived from the unit or organizational level or intrinsic combat
motivations, such as political or situational motivations, which, although weaker
than extrinsic combat motivations, nevertheless exist. This leaves primary group
theories as easy targets for resurgent intrinsic resource theories.
Intrinsic Motivation Theories Strike Back

Two particular categories of intrinsic motivations, social and political ideology,
each explored in the next two subsections, have been asserted as alternative explana-
tions for primary groups.
Social Ideology
Social ideology is a commitment to certain social values. Writing during the
Vietnam War, Peter Bourne and Charles Moskos independently asserted intrinsic
social ideology as an alternative explanation for combat motivation.
Bourne believed that American morale was high at the time he was writing—
toward the end of the Vietnam War. Somewhat intuitively, he claimed that U.S.
soldiers were motivated not by primary groups but by a social ideology based on
American individualism, which interacted positively with the self-reliance imposed
by the limited ‘‘tour of duty.’’ However, his intuition was very publicly discredited
by the evident collapse in morale amongst U.S. soldiers in Vietnam around the time
Bourne’s argument was published. Bourne seems to have been misled by selection
bias toward the subjects of his field research—highly motivated but unrepresentative
Special Forces and helicopter medical evacuation units.167
Moskos’ claim is similar to Bourne’s in that it was written around the same time, it
was based on a field trip, it agreed that U.S. soldiers were performing well, and it
claimed that primary groups were less important to ‘‘combat motivation’’ than
‘‘latent ideology’’:
I propose that primary groups maintain the soldier in his combat role only when he
has an underlying commitment to the worth of the larger social system for which he is
fighting. . . .[US soldiers] have latent ideology . . .[meaning] those widely shared
sentiments of soldiers which though not overtly political, nor even substantially
political, nevertheless have concrete consequences for combat motivation.168
This was a pretty strong claim, considering that it was based on nothing more than
a two-week field trip to a single infantry unit. In his defense, it could be said that
Moskos, like Bourne, was denied the benefit of hindsight, but Moskos’ claim is still
curious from the point of view of his own evidence. Moskos did not observe strong
motivations during his two-week field trip—quite the opposite in fact. Moskos
observed U.S. soldiers identifying with home more than unit, psychologically disen-
gaging near the end of their twelve-month tour of duty, and performing badly on
‘‘point duty’’ so as to discourage leaders from assigning them to point again. Moskos’
only evidence for ‘‘latent ideology’’ was identification with home over unit, but iden-
tification with home over unit would be expected when primary groups are weak.169
Despite the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, these social ideology theories of
motivation survived. Indeed, they provided a convenient excuse. Some U.S. soldiers
and historians have blamed the U.S. soldier’s weak combat motivation during the
Vietnam War on insufficient ideology, which they attribute to a prior decline in
‘‘American values’’ or the withdrawal of civilian support.170
Political Ideology
In 1991, Omer Bartov reasserted intrinsic political ideology as an alternative
explanation to Shils and Janowitz’s original claim that German motivation during
132 Made, Not Born
the Second World War was more organizational than political. His book is well
known in the United States, where it often appears in military studies syllabi.
Bartov criticized Van Creveld for supporting Shils and Janowitz but, rather surpris-
ingly, omitted any critique of Van Creveld’s extensive descriptions of German person-
nel management practices. Instead, Bartov’s book is mostly a critique of Shils and
Janowitz’s earlier article. Bartov began his book by challenging the existence of
German primary groups. Bartov assumed that Germany’s high casualty rates on the
Eastern Front destroyed primary groups within ‘‘a few weeks’’ of Germany’s invasion
of the Soviet Union in June 1941171 because ‘‘there was no time for consideration of
‘primary group’ ties.’’172 Bartov claimed that primary groups ceased to exist as early as
the ‘‘Red Army’s December [1941] counter-offensive.’’173 However, while the losses
of 1941 destroyed the German Army’s material reserves, other historians have
observed that German personnel management practices remained consistent and
preserved the German Army’s primary groups.174 Bartov’s assumption that high casu-
alty rates mean high personnel turnover is misleading. The German system, as Van
Creveld had shown, replaced depleted groups with replacement groups. The German
system did not replace individual casualties with individual replacements, as the U.S.
system did. So it was not the case that German units were constantly turning over
individual replacements as U.S. units were. Instead, German units were turning over
replacement groups. Contrary to Bartov’s assumption that these replacement groups
were mere collections of individuals, they were in fact primary groups, because they
had been formed, trained, and transported to the front as contiguous groups.
Van Creveld identified other complementary management practices that
Bartov ignored or misunderstood. For instance, depleted German units were with-
drawn and used as cadres for new units, in which the cadres were joined by replace-
ment groups. Bartov, however, assumed that cadres are too small to act as primary
groups.175 In fact, small size is an advantage to primary groups: as relationships
become less numerous they become more meaningful.
Van Creveld had also identified Kampfgruppen (by which he meant expedient
units formed from remnants of others) as collections of primary groups, whereas
Bartov used an individual level of analysis and assumed that Kampfgruppen were
too ‘‘heterogeneous’’ to contain primary groups. Bartov’s use of the word ‘‘hetero-
geneous’’ is again misleading. Each remnant of the many units thrown together
was a primary group contributing to the whole.176
Further, Van Creveld had identified promotions within the unit as ways to
preserve primary group bonds. By contrast, Bartov claimed that the promotion of
subordinates to replace incapacitated leaders must destroy the primary group.177
However, a change of rank for an individual within the group theoretically strength-
ens vertical primary group bonds.
Summary
This final section briefly concludes this chapter. The trouble with existing think-
ing about motivations is twofold. First, it fails to distinguish between the motivation
to serve in a military and combat motivation. The former is not transitive with the
latter because the former quickly dissipates upon the shock of combat. Truly endur-
ing combat motivations seem to rely on group phenomena, partly described by
primary group theory. The second problem with conventional thinking about
motivation is the failure to distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.
Intrinsic motivations to serve may be sufficient for noncombat personnel and
combat personnel at peace, but extrinsic motivations keep combat personnel
motivated after combat begins. Attempts to emphasize intrinsic motivations can
be counterproductive, encouraging intellectual isolation at best and poor force
employment and atrocities at worst.
These distinctions clearly matter. While many military scholars can defend their
assertions about certain intrinsic motivations by remembering their caveats
about group motivations, such as cohesion, which I have identified as extrinsic, few
scholars are making even implicit distinctions between the two categories. If they
did, they might be clearer about which category is more important. Extrinsic
motivation theories clearly advance more rigorous, empirically supportable theories
than intrinsic motivation theories. Motivations to serve are intrinsic; combat motiva-
tions are largely extrinsic. This is not to say that intrinsic motivations do not matter
at all in combat, but it is to say that they matter a lot less than assumed and a lot less
than extrinsic motivations.
CHAPTER 6
ATHLETICISM AND SPECIAL OPERATIONS
Of all soldierly capabilities, two stand out as most often associated with intrinsic
attributes: athleticism and special operations. Athleticism is associated with physio-
logical attributes like mass, strength, and masculinity. Special operations personnel
are associated with exceptional athleticism in particular, but also unusual psychologi-
cal and even political attributes.
Athleticism
Athleticism is the individual’s locomotive and biomechanical capability. Athleti-
cism is obviously important to combat soldiers. The two main categories of combat
athleticism considered here are strength and endurance. Although ‘‘physical fitness’’
normally includes such concepts as cardiovascular fitness, strength, flexibility, speed,
power, and low body fat, typical military selection criteria capture only size, weight,
shape, and gender. Traditionally, large body mass and size or a ‘‘masculine’’ shape
and male gender, respectively explored in the two subsections below, have been used
to indicate intrinsic athleticism. While these intrinsic attributes are rough indicators
of strength, they are highly imperfect indicators of endurance. Besides, while combat
athleticism is the most intrinsic of the combat skills identified here, it still relies on
extrinsic conditioning more than intrinsic talent. Only a small minority of all recruits
could be described as physiologically incapable of combat.
Body Mass and Size

Most militaries medically inspect their recruits. Some chronic diseases or physical
handicaps might disqualify the recruit. Some militaries have also filtered recruits
Athleticism and Special Operations 135
using simple physiological measurements, such as height or weight measurements,

which are supposed to indicate strength and perhaps endurance, but such measure-
ments are easily overstated, since observable physiology indicates little about actual
athletic performance. For instance, a very tall individual may have a weak heart.
Direct measures of athletic performance are the only realistic method for assessing
athletic capacity. While brute strength is a function of certain aspects of physiology,
such as height, limb length, and muscle mass, long-term endurance is more impor-
tant than short-term strength to all forms of combat except perhaps hand-to-hand
fighting, which is increasingly rare. Endurance cannot be indicated reliably by
physiology since endurance is determined mainly by the density of long-twitch
muscle fibers and by cardiovascular fitness, things that are not observably indicated
physiologically. Endurance requires long-term conditioning. Such conditioning is
normally extrinsic, because few civilians have the necessary self-discipline and knowl-
edge of sports science to condition themselves to the level desired of combat soldiers.
Masculinity and Male Gender

For critics, many physiological measures filter not for athletes but for men.
Historically, militaries have stressed the ‘‘masculinity’’ of their soldiers. Masculinity
suggests qualities associated with the male gender. As late as the Second World
War, many militaries attempted to discriminate between male recruits by supposedly
masculine physiological attributes, such as low body fat or a triangular torso.1
The U.S. Military Academy and the U.S. Naval Academy used simple height, chest,
and weight-to-height measurements to select officer candidates until the late 1970s,
when women were admitted.2 Critics note that the athletic performance of each
serving U.S. soldier is still annually assessed using weight–height and body fat charts,
which are poor correlates of athletic performance and discriminate against women in
particular, who tend to be shorter and to carry more subcutaneous fat. Confusingly,
more direct measures of athletic performance are sometimes used simultaneously,
such as time running a distance.3
The most obvious indicator of masculinity is the male gender. The view that only
men are athletically capable of combat is almost a law in military studies. Again, it is
the U.S. military that is most attached to this assumption.
The U.S. military’s formal arguments against women in combat are centered on
the female gender’s alleged athletic incapacity. (Some commentators may still
advance pejorative comments about the female gender’s intellectual or emotional
incapacity, or even sexual promiscuity, but these are not relevant to athleticism and
have been refuted elsewhere.) After gender integration in 1973, the U.S. military
lowered its physical standards for both genders or created lower standards for
women. This lowered physical standards across the military, encouraging resentment
and sexism amongst men, especially at the service academies, and reinforced tradi-
tional assumptions about the female threat to military capability.4 However, U.S.
military athletic standards had declined not because more women were admitted
but because the U.S. military lowered its standards in order to admit more women.
136 Made, Not Born
While the average woman is inferior in upper body strength, height, and length of
limbs, these attributes are all indicators of brute strength, not endurance, and the
latter is more important to soldiers. Besides, some experiments have shown that
women can achieve the same athletic performance as men of similar size and build.
This raises the oft-raised question as to why recruits are discriminated by different
body size and mass thresholds according to gender. In other words, why should a
male recruit need a minimum height of x+2 when female recruits are accepted at a
height of x? The civilian athletic performance gap between the genders is narrowing
as declining gender roles encourage more women into sport at higher levels of
competition. These unusually athletic women are overrepresented in the military.
Female recruits tend to enter the military with less prior conditioning than male
recruits, which makes their performance during basic training more noticeable but
also more responsive than their male peers.5 Another extrinsic modification is to
condition both genders in teamwork in order to overcome individual physiological
limitations.6 Fully integrated militaries have set athletic standards not by gender,
only by role. Women then compete athletically as individuals—not as women.
When women compete equally with men, few women are accepted by the most
physically demanding combat units, such as infantry, given the average female inferi-
ority in the particularly strenuous athleticism required of combat infantry, at least.
Technology is making physiology less relevant anyway. Most weapons are driven
or fired but not carried. For instance, physiological gender differences have little
relevance to piloting an aircraft, except that shorter women may have an advantage
fitting into ever smaller cockpits and resisting g-forces.
The fragility of female reproductive organs and the medical and moral difficulty
of pregnancy are the only female attributes that could be regarded as valid physio-
logical concerns in role assignment but they both tend to be overstated. For instance,
both concerns were once thought to preclude women from flying at high g-forces or
working near the nuclear reactor on nuclear-powered submarines, but women are no
more fragile than men in these roles. Indeed, why should men endure risks that
women should not? In fact, most military roles, including some combat roles, such
as air or naval combat, do not require any athletic performance of which the average
woman would be incapable. Preservation of reproductive organs, male or female,
requires education before discrimination, and, with proper management, pregnancy
removes a woman from service for relatively inconsequential periods in her career.7
Special Operations Forces

SOF (special operations forces) personnel attract particular attention from
military scholars and are acknowledged for containing superior combat personnel,
so they may have implications for the study of combat personnel capabilities and
performance as a whole. SOF personnel capabilities must include all the previous
categories of combat personnel capabilities examined in previous chapters but are
often assumed to go beyond them. For completeness, therefore, they are examined
discretely in this section.
Definitions of SOF can occupy pages. The U.S. Department of Defense defines
special operations as:
operations conducted in hostile, denied, or politically sensitive environments to

achieve military, diplomatic, informational, and/or economic objectives employing
military capabilities for which there is no broad conventional force requirement. These
operations often require covert, clandestine, or low visibility capabilities. Special
operations are applicable across the range of military operations. They can be conducted
independently or in conjunction with operations of conventional forces or other
government agencies and may include operations through, with, or by indigenous or
surrogate forces. Special operations differ from conventional operations in degree
of physical and political risk, operational techniques, mode of employment, independ-
ence from friendly support, and dependence on detailed operational intelligence and
indigenous assets.8
In British English, SOF are often known as ‘‘Special Forces,’’ but the latter
phrase also describes particular units in the U.S. Army, so SOF has become the
more inclusive phrase. While paratroops and marines are sometimes considered
‘‘elite’’ relative to other military units, they are not normally considered SOF since
the former are distinguished more by their means of delivery than their mission.
SOF perform the most challenging small unit operations, such as raids, ‘‘force
reconnaissance,’’ insurgency or counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism.
The first subsection of this section gives some historical background to
three nationalities of SOF: the U.S., British, and German. The second and third
subsections examine existing explanations based on material and intrinsic resources,
respectively. The fourth subsection examines assertions related to how SOF person-
nel are managed.
Historical Background
Only a few militaries have SOF with high reputations—the British, French,
German, Israeli, and U.S. primarily. Even within these militaries, SOF have shown
considerable variance over time—consider the mixed performance of U.S. Army
SOF during the Vietnam War compared to their high reputation today. In fact, most
SOF are better regarded as glorified airborne troops.
Only U.S., British, and German SOF are introduced here. They are the best
documented in the English-language literature and are often celebrated as superior.
Additionally, their histories display sufficient contrasts in military traditions
and political systems. Although they are now all allies, German SOF were once
enemies of U.S. and British SOF. Today, U.S., British, and German SOF have
the strongest training links and personnel exchange programs in NATO. Now
that the German constitution permits foreign military operations, it is U.S.,
British, and German SOF that cooperate most frequently in NATO’s out-of-
area missions, such as the ongoing mission in Afghanistan that began in late
2001.
138 Made, Not Born
U.S. Special Operations Forces
There are more different types of SOF unit in the U.S. military than in either the
British or the German militaries; some may appear to be redundant. Most of them
are now organized under Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC or just
SOC), which has mitigated this structural problem. U.S. Army, USN (U.S. Navy),
and USAF intraservice SOCs have been structured within the interservice JSOC
since the latter’s formation in 1980. The USMC (United States Marine Corps) is
well known for its ‘‘force reconnaissance’’ and counterterrorist units. In November
2005, a plan was approved to structure USMC SOF under JSOC, service independ-
ence and specialization previously having argued against it.
USASOC (U.S. Army Special Operations Command) houses Rangers, SF
(Special Forces), and Delta Force. Rangers were formed in 1942 for raiding mis-
sions. SF were formed in 1952 for force reconnaissance and to assist foreign forces
in insurgencies or counterinsurgencies. (SF sometimes but tenuously trace their
lineage to the joint U.S.-Canadian ‘‘Special Services Forces,’’ formed as light infantry
in 1942 and disbanded in 1945.)9 Delta Force, a counterterrorist force, was formed
in 1977.10 USASOC also includes Special Support units (tasked with communica-
tions and logistics), Psychological Operations units, and CA (Civil Affairs) units,
but none of these units are considered SOF here.
The USN supplies JSOC with SEAL (sea–air–land) teams, formed in 1962
for amphibious reconnaissance and raiding. The Second World War ‘‘Underwater
Demolition Teams’’ provided some precedent.11
The USAF supplies JSOC with Special Operations Aviation, formed in 1962 for
air transport and air-ground attack missions in support of ground SOF units. Special
Operations Aviation includes some ground personnel, such as air-ground coordina-
tors and search-and-rescue specialists. The Second World War ‘‘air commandos’’
provided some precedent.12
U.S. SOF have a young and troubled history. During the Vietnam War, the
performance of U.S. Army SF in particular was mixed and tainted by illegal activity.
Poor management practices seem the best explanation. SF personnel, despite their
more rigorous selection and training, were subject to tours of duty, like all U.S.
personnel. Additionally, SF officers had to rotate through conventional units before
they could be promoted.13 During the period of the post-Vietnam ‘‘hollow army,’’
U.S. SOF suffered from declining recruiting and repeated performance problems.
The 1975 attempt to rescue the crew of the freighter Mayaguez from its Cambodian
captors was a costly failure for the U.S. Marines and their Air Special Operations
support. The first test of Delta Force, formed in 1977, was the mission in 1979 to
rescue American hostages held in revolutionary Iran, a mission which was aborted
after a fatal collision between two aircraft at a staging post inside Iran. Unnecessarily,
all services participated in the mission, but without a single command.14 None of the
U.S. SOF operations associated with the 1983 invasion of Grenada accomplished
their missions, apparently also because of poor planning. Planning, intelligence,
and naval containment failures were blamed for the 1985 failure of the SEALs to
get to the cruise ship Achille Lauro before its hijackers departed. The 1989 invasion
of Panama was marred by costly mission failures that also reflected poor planning
and interunit rivalries. Things looked better during the Gulf War in 1991, when
SF, Delta Force, and USN SEALs seemed to perform their separate reconnaissance
missions well. However, U.S. SOF operations in Somalia in 1993 were again marred
by poor planning and inadequate coordination, as well as an overreliance on technol-
ogy. After repeated mission failures, U.S. SOF were withdrawn after a disastrous
mission in which Mogadishu’s armed citizenry cut off almost one-hundred Rangers
and Delta Force personnel until rescued by United Nations armor, by which time
eighteen U.S. soldiers were already dead.15
British Special Operations Forces

British SOF have an exceptional popular reputation.16 Most British SOF missions
are performed by one regiment—the SAS, which was formed by the British Army in
1941 for force reconnaissance and raiding missions. It was joined by many irregular
units modeled on SAS. All were subsequently disbanded after the war; only SAS
was recreated (in 1947). Today, SAS is a regiment of three battalions—two of which
are reservist battalions. The regular SAS battalion has five squadrons, one of which is
always serving a rotational assignment to counterterrorist duties. SAS was the first
military unit to form a permanent counterterrorist capability—it dates back to
1969.17 The famous SAS rescue of the hostages held inside Iran’s London embassy
in 1980 encouraged widespread adoption abroad of similar counterterrorist units.
While counterterrorism is often assumed to be the main role of SAS, in fact the
noncommitted four squadrons are fulfilling more conventional functions—mainly
force reconnaissance and raiding. Each squadron contains a mobile troop for delivery
by light vehicles, an air troop specializing in parachute delivery, a mountain troop
specializing in mountain and arctic warfare, and a boat troop specializing in amphibi-
ous insertion. Additionally, personnel from any squadron might be tasked with
foreign military advising, insurgency, or counterinsurgency, which in the U.S.
military are tasks fulfilled mainly by U.S. Army SF. In April 2005, the British Army’s
new Special Reconnaissance Regiment, which specializes in force reconnaissance and
surveillance, became operational, based on 14th Intelligence Company, which had
previously supported SAS.
The Royal Navy’s SBS (Special Boat Service; initially the Special Boat Section)
dates back to February 1942. It recruits mainly from the Royal Marines and special-
izes in amphibious force reconnaissance, raiding, and counterterrorism.
German Special Operations Forces

German SOF are usually neglected in the literature. Some popular authors
have claimed that ‘‘the Germans did not institutionalize special operations, and it’s
a mystery why.’’18 In reality, Germany was the first to develop dedicated SOF. In
1918 the German Army developed so-called ‘‘Storm-troop’’ units to assault Allied
strong points. More importantly, just before the Second World War, the German
140 Made, Not Born
Army formed a secret company-sized unit for force reconnaissance and raiding. After
successfully supporting the invasion of Poland in September 1939, in December
1939 this company was expanded into the so-called Brandenburger regiment.19
Around the same time, the German Air Force formed its own airborne SOF. The
most spectacular of their missions was the capture of the supposedly impregnable fort
at Eben Emael, Belgium, by glider and assault boat in May, 1940. Germany was the
first to use airborne landings as part of a campaign, using them extensively in the
invasions of Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France in 1940. The capture
of Crete in 1941 relied entirely on air-delivered units. In all of these operations,
German Air Force SOF were used to gather intelligence and secure landing zones
and communications. Airborne SOF were later formed by the Waffen SS too. Waffen
SS SOF are most famous for rescuing the deposed Italian leader Benito Mussolini
from his mountain captivity in 1943; reinstalling the pro-German regime in Hun-
gary in 1944; and causing havoc behind Allied lines during the German offensive in
the Ardennes of 1944.20
After defeat in 1945, Germany did not regain a formal military until 1955 and did
not reestablish SOF until sometime later still. Continuing civilian antimilitarism
ensured that SOF would be kept low-key. Grenzschutzgruppe 9 was the first of the
counterterrorist units to be formed after the formation of the SAS counterterrorist
squadron. GSG 9 is unusual in that it is a federal police unit, not a military unit.
Practically, this does not mean much, except that it is forbidden from foreign
operations.21 The bulk of German SOF are Fernspäh units, tasked with force recon-
naissance. After the German constitution was changed to permit foreign military
operations, the German military created many separate SOF companies within
different commands during the 1990s. In 1995 these younger SOF units were
brought together under a new command called Kommando Spezialkräfte.
Materialist Explanations
The literature on SOF is largely descriptive, not explanatory. As such, it displays
conventional assumptions about the essential role of material resources. But are
numerical, technological, or economic resources valid explanations for the quality
of SOF?
First, let us consider a numerical explanation for SOF capability. This might seem
like an unnecessary exercise but remember that the bean count of a polity’s armed
personnel is often used to predict combat outcomes. SOF personnel make up only
a tiny fraction of military personnel. For instance, during the Cold War, SOF
accounted for less than 2% of U.S. military personnel or U.S. military spending.
Even given the post-9/11 emphasis on SOF, SOF personnel of all types, even includ-
ing oft-ignored personnel such as CA personnel, account for just over 2% of all U.S.
military personnel. Tactically, SOF are rarely numerical preponderant because they
value concealment over confrontation. Force reconnaissance teams are usually of
between four and twelve persons. Upon confronting the enemy, such teams prefer
to escape rather than fight. If a fight is intended, such as during a raid, numerical
resources are little guide to the outcome. Historical sampling suggests that the sort of
SOF considered here are generally outnumbered about ten to one in their combat
engagements but always inflict more casualties than they suffer and they usually
achieve their objectives. Force employment—not numerical preponderance—deter-
mines the outcomes of SOF missions.22
Second, while observers often assume that SOF benefit from special technologies,
SOF technology is less exceptional than popularly believed. For instance, both
British and U.S. SOF still use British-made Land Rovers, which are underpowered
and tall compared to the wheeled vehicles used by the rest of the U.S. military. Some
technology may be adapted for SOF use, such as Fast Attack Vehicles, which
are based on civilian all-terrain vehicles, but such technology cannot be described
as particularly advanced. The ability of SOF personnel to carry or operate more
technology than other personnel is a personnel capability.
Third, superior SOF are often assumed to reflect heavy financial investment,
because of the need to attract the best personnel, the length of their training, the
expense of their equipment, etc. How, then, to explain the inconsistent performance
of U.S. SOF, who have always been the best funded? Few SOF personnel receive any
financial inducements. So-called ‘‘danger money’’ is rare and relatively trivial. In fact,
some SOF personnel, such as SAS enlisted personnel, enter their units at the lowest
possible rank, whatever their prior rank. Promotion opportunities are often limited.
For instance, since only sergeants and higher ranks are allowed to enter U.S. Army
SF, promotions are infrequent. SOF personnel seem to feed their motivations
in normative, not financial, ways. Their long training is an extra expense for their
governments but not remarkable in the final accounting and, as already shown
above, SOF do not receive the most expensive weapon platforms, even though they
receive more personal equipment.
SOF appear to rely not on material resources but on exceptional human resources.
Now the question is, are these human resources intrinsic or extrinsic?
Intrinsic Resource Explanations

The popular literature treats SOF personnel as intrinsic ‘‘supermen.’’ Observers
might accept that extrinsic resources are important to regular units, which draw on
average civilians who need plenty of extrinsic conditioning, but they still tend to
think of SOF personnel as ‘‘supermen’’ or ‘‘born warriors.’’ If these special SOF
personnel capabilities are categorized, they appear to fall within three categories:
athleticism, sociopsychological attributes, and political motivations.
Athleticism
First, SOF personnel are often assumed to be born athletes. One popular
assumption is that SOF personnel must display large body mass. Although large-N
data is classified, SOF personnel themselves dispute this assumption. It is indicative
to note that Bob Consiglio, who was unfortunately killed in Iraq in 1991 on the
Bravo Two Zero mission, was between 5 foot, 2 inches and 5 foot, 5 inches tall
142 Made, Not Born
(accounts differ), or no taller than the British female average. At least one U.S.
Ranger has had asthma that he hid from recruiters. At least one member of Delta
Force rejoined the unit with a prosthetic leg after being wounded in Mogadishu in
1993.23 Asthma and prosthetic limbs are explicit criteria for failing applicants to the
U.S. military, but what justifies the retention of these personnel is their experience
and actual athletic performance, which are not always determined by observable
physiology.
The ‘‘supermen’’ assumption is not literally true. The British Army’s 14th Intelli-
gence Company and its new evolution, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, both
recruited women. Women have served in civilian-clothed counterterrorist operations
in Northern Ireland since at least 1974.24 Delta Force reportedly inducted women in
1990 for similar operations. 25 Supporting evidence comes from the secrecy
surrounding the roles of, or awards received by, a handful of female U.S. soldiers.26
These women have been selected for particular roles—women do not, apparently,
move freely between SOF roles. The stereotype of the male chauvinist SOF soldier
also needs revising. For instance, ‘‘Chris Ryan’’ once stated that he would be happy
to see his only daughter join SOF.27
SocioPsychological Attributes
Second, SOF personnel are often assumed to be intrinsically self-assured, inde-
pendent, ‘‘tough,’’ motivated, or to display other similar psychological attributes.
In other words, SOF personnel are assumed to possess exceptional intrinsic sociopsy-
chological attributes. However, only Delta Force appears to use psychological testing
during selection. This psychological testing is less important than the natural selec-
tion that occurs during training anyway. Some SOF soldiers claim that nothing in
particular distinguishes SOF soldiers from any other soldiers.28 Others suggest that
SOF personnel are distinguished only by their professionalism:
The view of special operations personnel as unruly and cavalier with a disdain for the
brass was not borne out in this study. The officers and enlisted whom I interviewed were
professionals who fully appreciated the value of working with higher authorities.29
The little quantitative data available shows that the only psychological character-
istics that can be associated with SOF personnel might be an authoritarian family
background and a craving for elitist intimacy. Yet, the psychological difference
between regular personnel and SOF personnel, even after socialization within their
units, is relatively trivial when compared to the larger difference between regular
personnel and conscientious objectors.30
Political Motivations
Third, SOF personnel are often assumed to be highly politically motivated. One
academic theory of SOF capability associated exceptional SOF with the personnel
motivations derived from the legitimacy of the democratic political regime
being served.31 This theory is an intrinsic resource theory because it claims that the
SOF soldier’s intrinsic political value system affects performance. How, then, to
explain the inconsistent performance of SOF from the United States, where political
legitimacy has varied hardly at all, versus the consistently high reputation of German
SOF during a century that has seen Germany as both an autocracy and a democracy?
Personnel Management
The difference perhaps lies in the different management styles of the U.S. and
German militaries, not their politics. The German military has maintained many
more aspects of a regimental system, as has the British military, than has the U.S.
military, and their SOF emphasize these aspects further. Centralized militaries might
attempt to select soldiers with slightly superior intrinsic resources, give them some
extra training and some extra equipment, but not do anything exceptional with them
managerially.
The born warrior assumption, like conventional thinking generally, encourages
centralization. It implies that SOF personnel should be centrally selected from
whichever subpopulations are defined as born warriors. This would seem a simple
prospect—so simple in fact that one might expect all SOF to be equally good, unless
one subscribes to some racist or similar theory implying that some militaries can
draw from superior populations. How, then, to explain the variance in the quality
of SOF across militaries? Intrinsic resources seem to be a necessary but insufficient
condition of superior SOF.
Although the evidence is necessarily anecdotal, the next eight subsections below
suggest that SOF appear to benefit from decentralization of the eight personnel
management processes identified earlier in the chapter on personnel management.
Recruitment
SOF normally manage their own recruitment. Normally, they recruit directly
from serving soldiers. For instance, the regular SAS or SBS battalions accept recruits
only from other regular regiments. (The reserve battalions recruit civilians.) The
SEALs accept recruits from serving sailors. Delta Force invites serving personnel,
usually Ranger or SF personnel, to apply after combing their service records.
Selection
SOF tend to be granted autonomy in selection. This decentralization gives units
the opportunities and incentives to be attentive and precise in their selections. In fact,
training and selection merge together and may continue for years. For instance, SAS
troopers undergo almost a year’s training before they even join a squadron, and after
that they still face a four-year probationary period. SEAL recruits must pass six
months of selective training, and then are assigned to active units for a formal proba-
tionary period of six months; the effective probation continues for some period there-
after. U.S. Army SF recruits take a three-week selection course, which tests mainly
physical endurance, after which they proceed to a weapons, combat engineering,
communications, or medical course. (The first three types last eighteen weeks, while
144 Made, Not Born
the fourth lasts thirty-two weeks.) Then they must pass a field exercise before qualifi-
cation. Such attentiveness not only selects the best personnel but also leads to excep-
tional cohesion:
This elite training program did not necessarily make the soldiers either morally, ethically,
or even physically stronger than the average soldier. What it did accomplish was to
strengthen the bond between the graduates of the selection course.32
Training
SOF training may be so decentralized that the smallest units—as small as the four-
or eight-man ‘‘patrols’’ of U.S. SF, British SAS and SBS, or German Fernspäh—may
organize and direct their own training.
Assignments
SOF personnel are generally assigned to a certain group, which is then left alone as
far as possible. Often, the same group passes through selection, training, and combat
assignment. For instance, most U.S. Army SF personnel have effectively left the
centralized system. Most SF soldiers spend the rest of their careers training in their
specialty within the same unit.
Replacement
SOF tend to replace groups, not individuals, and individual casualties tend to be
replaced outside of combat. Most teams are assigned to a mission and then with-
drawn to await the next mission. Teams that receive replacements are then given time
to form new group relations. Where SOF fail to do this, as when U.S. Army Ranger
casualties in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 were replaced by individual replacements,
replacements show misattunement.33 The failure of the Gulf War SAS patrol known
by its call sign ‘‘Bravo Two Zero’’ might be attributed to the misattunement between
its two hastily combined four-man patrols. Interpersonal tensions and poor planning
were in evidence before the patrol began its mission, which was intercepted by the
Iraqis behind Iraqi lines, leading to the capture of four members, the death of three
others, and the escape of only one.34
Rotation
SOF tend to practice group rotation even in peacetime. For instance, SAS rotates
each of its five squadrons through six-months of counterterrorism duty, during
which time the chosen squadron is permanently training or on standby, a very
burdensome rotation.
Promotions
SOF tend to be granted the autonomy to make promotions within groups.
Indeed, it is common for prior rank to be reduced upon selection into SOF, such
as SAS, so that the unit can control all subsequent promotions. Recruits with officer
rank are not formally demoted by SAS but are nevertheless normally subordinated to
more experienced personnel with lower rank until some probationary period is over.
In other words, experience is valued over rank. In practice, SOF usually transcend
rank and make decisions by consensus anyway.35
Orientation
Of the SOF considered here, U.S. SOF have shown considerable internal orienta-
tion. The Vietnam War gave U.S. Army SF a reputation for insubordination and
illegal activity. Then, in the mid-1980s, Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 were both
exposed misspending funds, falsifying documents, ‘‘double dipping’’ travel expenses,
and assisting the CIA in activities of questionable legality.36 A U.S. Army counter-
intelligence unit known as ‘‘Yellow Fruit’’ was disbanded after allegations of fraud.37
U.S. politicians blamed these activities, as well as poor SOF performance during
the missions of the 1970s and early 1980s, on insufficient interunit coordination.
In 1987, new legislation unified the SOF of all the services (except those of
the USMC, which had not displayed similar problems) under SOC. SOC allowed
and encouraged socialization across SOF units and between SOF unit commanders
and SOC. Performance and organizational orientation have improved since then.
British SOF, which are less redundant and have always served under a single
‘‘Special Forces’’ command, have shown less abuse of autonomy or internal orienta-
tion. British SOF have been accused of illegally killing Irish terrorists, but all the
killings have been officially ruled legal. ‘‘Conspiracy theories’’ tend to attribute the
killings to a politically sanctioned policy rather than to autonomous behavior.38
Summary
Height, weight, masculine body types, and male gender are only indirect measures
of athleticism. While they may be correlated with strength, strength is less important
than endurance to combat athleticism. Both endurance and strength are best tested
through actual performance. Even then, intrinsic athleticism is less important than
extrinsic conditioning, especially for endurance. The majority of a normal popula-
tion would be athletically suitable for combat given effective extrinsic conditioning,
while only the old or clinically less physically able are intrinsically incapable of
combat.
While it is certainly true that SOF personnel are selected by superior intrinsic
attributes, they also rely on decentralized personnel management practices that
are less often acknowledged. The assumption that SOF performance is determined
by financial largesse is challenged by the observation that U.S. SOF have an inconsis-
tent history despite the best funding. The assumption that SOF performance is
determined by the selection of born ‘‘supermen’’ is challenged by the observation
that most SOF are unspectacular even though selection of superior subpopulations
should be equally easy for all. The assumption that superior SOF serve legiti-
mate democratic governments is challenged by the observation that German SOF
146 Made, Not Born
have a consistent reputation despite Germany’s transition from autocracy to

democracy.
Intrinsic attributes are best regarded as a necessary but insufficient condition of
exceptional SOF personnel capabilities. Although rarely recognized, decentralized
personnel management seems to be a necessary condition of exceptional SOF
personnel capabilities.
CONCLUSION
This study contradicts the pervasive assumption in the literature that good soldiers
are born, not made. Scholars make all sorts of platitudinous assertions about the
importance of proper training and personnel management and other ‘‘soft’’ factors,
but usually fail to operationalize these factors, instead asserting all sorts of intrinsic
attributes, such as political affiliation and gender. This study proves that good sol-
diers are made, not born. Anybody can pick up a gun, but only properly conditioned
and managed soldiers can utilize that gun effectively and stand up to combat. Put
this way, this statement sounds obvious, but, although often asserted, this assertion
has never been proven before.
This final chapter concludes this study. The first section summarizes my findings.
The second section offers prescriptions for policy. The third section offers prescrip-
tions for further research.
Findings
Why do some combat personnel perform better than others? Combat personnel
are tasked primarily with combat or organized fighting. Their performance is nor-
mally inferred from war outcomes, loss-exchange ratios, or subjective judgments of
their different capabilities. There is no accepted list of combat personnel capabilities,
and there is no consistent explanation for why combat personnel capabilities vary.
International relations theory and theories of war do not say much about person-
nel except to imply two contradictory theories: more capable combat personnel
compensate for inferior material resources, or more capable combat personnel are a
product of superior material (usually financial) investment.
148 Made, Not Born
‘‘Democratic victory theories’’ attempt to explain why democracies are more likely
than nondemocracies to win wars. Some argue that democracies are materially supe-
rior to nondemocracies, ally more extensively, or manage their resources better.
Others claim that democracies produce more motivated soldiers, better force
employment, or better commanders. While democracy seems to be important to
war outcomes, it seems less important to personnel performance and capabilities,
except in so far as it affects personnel management.
A third dispute relates to personnel management. Regimental theories urge
decentralization of personnel management to the combat unit so that the unit has
opportunities and incentives to condition personnel and to develop group- or unit-
level attributes such as cohesion. However, critics believe that regimental systems
are inefficient and obstruct centralized quality control. Critics may also doubt the
value of group- or unit-level attributes such as cohesion.
A fourth dispute is related but hitherto unarticulated. Are combat personnel
capabilities extrinsic or intrinsic? Regimental theories imply that extrinsic re-
sources—personnel attributes acquired after the personnel have joined the military,
such as trained skills—are more important to combat personnel than intrinsic
resources—personnel attributes that the personnel brought into the military,
such as prior civilian values. Advocates of centralized personnel management
imply that combat personnel are best managed centrally by their intrinsic resources.
Scholars of personnel capabilities also imply that combat personnel capabili-
ties are intrinsic. While many scholars may praise regimental systems, most
scholars assume—mostly, unconsciously—that combat personnel capabilities are
intrinsic.
This project established nine categories of combat personnel capabilities: force
employment, command, leadership, decision-making, resistance to stress, cohesion,
motivation, athleticism, and special operations capabilities. SOF are often assumed
to rely on ‘‘special’’ personnel capabilities beyond the previous categories. Thus,
special operations capabilities were examined separately, as a ninth category of
combat personnel capabilities.
Most theories of force employment, command, and leadership imply that intrinsi-
cally gifted individuals at the top of the organization determine combat outcomes.
Similarly, theories of combat decision-making usually imply that combat decision-
making is a function of intrinsic intelligence and reasoning capacities. Theories of
combat stress tend to overemphasize the individual’s intrinsic resistance to stress
and to neglect group and organizational management of stress. Some theories of
cohesion associate cohesion with homogeneity in intrinsic attributes, such as race.
Theories of combat motivation overstate intrinsic motivations such as political
fanaticism. Theories of combat athleticism overstate observable intrinsic attributes
such as the male gender. Finally, most theories of SOF characterize their personnel
as intrinsic ‘‘supermen.’’
While the literature usually assumes that combat personnel capabilities are more
intrinsic than extrinsic, the converse is true. Soldiers are made more than they are
Conclusion 149
born. This is true for most professionals. This is particularly true for combat person-
nel because combat tasks are outside the scope of most civilian tasks.
Policy Prescriptions
What does all this mean for policy? The main implications relate to personnel
management; the management of material resources, innovation, and intelli-
gence; combat personnel capabilities; military performance and capabilities; person-
nel attributes; and the civil–military gap, as explained in sequential subsections
below.
Combat Personnel Management Should Be Decentralized

Combat personnel should be managed in a more decentralized way than noncom-
bat personnel. Decentralized personnel management provides opportunities and
incentives for the unit to positively condition its personnel for the peculiar demands
of combat. Combat personnel rely on extrinsic attributes more than intrinsic attrib-
utes, which means that combat personnel rely on their units to provide the capabil-
ities they need in combat. Extant decentralized systems need to resist the strong
pressures for centralization in pursuit of managerial simplicity, material efficiency,
or control. Military personnel management should be examined in terms of eight
major processes: recruitment, selection, training, assignment, replacement, rotation,
promotion, and socialization.
Decentralized recruitment (recruitment by units) encourages corporatism at the
unit level, which is important for unit motivations and cohesion. The regimental
level is an ideal level during peacetime and small wars, as the British demonstrated.
The divisional level seems more practical during larger wars, as the Germans demon-
strated.
Decentralized selection allows the unit to pay more attention to personal
skills, including emotional intelligences, which are essential to the more intimate
and trying demands of combat.
Decentralized training enables and encourages field training, which is most useful
for developing combat skills, while developing group- and unit-level outcomes such
as cohesion.
Decentralized assignments allow the unit to transfer contiguous groups from
recruitment through training to combat, preserving group outcomes.
The replacement of depleted groups by fresh groups preserves group bonds and
allows members to bond with their new additions before their next commitment
to combat.
Allowing units to rotate constituent groups rather than individuals allows more
frequent rotation (preferably every few days) and preserves groups, whose stress
management is vital to combat endurance. Individual replacement tends to be less
frequent and removes the individual from their group.
150 Made, Not Born
Allowing units to promote their own personnel allows the units to focus on
intra- and interpersonal qualifications, preserves prior relationships between leaders
and led, and encourages more effective leadership and decision-making patterns.
By contrast, centralized promotions rely on imperfect remote criteria and reward
superficial careerists.
Socialization within the unit encourages a unit orientation, which is useful
for unit cohesion. Socializing leaders and led, especially between the unit’s
leaders and the unit’s superiors, and socializing personnel across partner units
promote organizational orientations and counters antiorganizational internal
orientations.
Some Personnel Should Be More Centrally Managed

Centralization has some advantages, which are most relevant to noncombat per-
sonnel. Intrinsic attributes are more important to noncombat roles than to combat
roles because noncombat roles are closer to civilian roles. Some noncombat personnel
should be centrally recruited so that the military can more accurately advertise for
desired intrinsic attributes and can more flexibly adjust to its needs. Centralized
recruitment encourages individualism, which is useful for higher competency or
knowledge workers who switch units and roles frequently according to organizational
needs and their personal aspirations. They need to be centrally tested for particular
intrinsic attributes that are useful for certain roles; for instance, recruits with high
analytical aptitude scores could be assigned to military intelligence units. They need
to be assigned to roles that fit their attributes. They need more classroom (formal)
instruction than combat soldiers, and this sort of training is more efficiently delivered
and its quality is more effectively controlled centrally. After new courses of training,
such personnel should be centrally reassigned to the role that properly takes advan-
tage of their new skills, which are usually more individualized than combat personnel
skills. They need to be replaced and rotated as individuals by their specialist branch so
that these knowledge-based individuals can be replaced with equally well-qualified
replacements and can feel that their treatment is egalitarian. Centrally controlled
measures of merit are more useful for the promotion of knowledge workers than
combat soldiers. They may need to be fast-tracked or given lateral entry because of
their advanced skills or qualifications. They may need to be socialized across
units so that they can build networks across the organization and can focus on the
macro issues that characterize many noncombat roles, such as the analysis of military
intelligence.
The Management of Other Resources Requires a Mix of Centralization and

Decentralization
While combat personnel should be managed by units, decentralization is not
appropriate for all resources. Units should be given primary responsibility for com-
bat personnel, micro innovations (such as field modifications to weapons), and the
Conclusion 151
collection of military intelligence. Noncombat personnel should be managed cen-

trally, as should material resources, macro innovations (such as major technological
and doctrinal developments), and the analysis and dissemination of military intelli-
gence. Additionally, the desire for increased control, perhaps by governments that
do not trust their militaries, encourages increased centralization. The centralization
of resources requires nuance, however. Micro innovations are best handled at the
unit level, while macro innovations require the material backing and knowledge-
based personnel found at the organizational level. Military information is best
collected by units but is best analyzed and disseminated centrally. These structural
contradictions require procedural and cultural solutions. Centralization is a struc-
tural aspiration; process and culture should be congruent. Material resources
may be centrally managed, but centralization can encourage risk averseness, largess,
and inventory-based management. Centralization needs to be balanced by proper
oversight, coordination, and professionalism.
Most Combat Personnel Capabilities Should Be Created, Not Selected

The analysis of personnel capabilities is useful to those charged with improving
capabilities and to net assessment. Combat personnel capabilities should be studied
and improved in nine categories: force employment, command, leadership,
decision-making, resistance to stress, cohesion, motivation, athleticism, and special
operations capabilities.
All combat personnel need force employment skills. The ways in which a military
employs its forces do not just reflect a strategic recipe, strategist, military com-
mander, or doctrinal center. They reflect the greater number of personnel who must
employ forces at all levels of the organization and who must interpret orders from
above. Strong force employment skills encourage faster, more accurate, and more
flexible decisions about force employment and encourage congruence between
objectives and capabilities. Weak force employment skills encourage highly central-
ized, inflexible force employment, an overemphasis on objectives to the detriment
of capabilities (leading to overextension or underextension), and an overreliance on
numerical preponderance (fielding more entities than the enemy fields) or attrition
(incapacitating more entities than the enemy incapacitates).
Similarly, military command is a capability that should not be limited to a handful
of individuals at the top of the organization. The commander is not capable of
perceiving or controlling all aspects of a battle. While centralized command tends
to be fast, it is inaccurate. If junior decision-makers are sufficiently skilled, they can
take over more of the decision-making burden, making decisions based on immedi-
ate and local information and not overloading the command system with informa-
tion or requests for orders. This more decentralized command is both fast and
accurate. The skills on which decentralized command relies depend on extrinsic
conditioning; the intrinsically brilliant commander is an unrealistic expectation.
Moreover, an organization that does not care about skills at lower levels is unlikely
to promote meritorious commanders to higher levels.
152 Made, Not Born
Similarly, positive combat leaders are less born than made. Militaries should worry
less about selecting leaders by their civilian qualifications and should worry more
about their development. They should promote by aptitude from the ranks and
train those leaders in preferred combat leadership patterns, such as transformational
leadership.
Combat decision-making relies on processes that must be trained. Soldiers need to
be trained in split-second emotional responses, intuitive situational awareness, pat-
tern recognition, mental simulation, organizational value systems, recognition of
the decision’s multiple attributes, and personal management of the time–accuracy
trade-off. Civilian experiences are unlikely to provide these skills and can condition
undesirable behaviors.
Resistance to stress depends on functional stress management. Civilians are not
immune to stress and combat is very stressful. Stress can lead to poor situational
awareness, poor decisions, and fratricide. Soldiers should be trained in functional
personal stress management practices, such as reframing and externalization, and in
functional group stress management practices, such as empathy. Cohesion, which
mitigates stress, should be encouraged. The soldier’s exposure to stress should be iter-
ated by frequent periods of rest, preferably in the company of the soldier’s group, so
that the individual can benefit from group stress management.
Cohesion helps soldiers stick together under trying circumstances. Cohesion helps
to motivate soldiers, helps them perform, and helps them to resist stress. The most
desirable forms of cohesion (task cohesion and vertical cohesion) are not intrinsically
given but are encouraged by shared training, shared stressful events (such as training
events), and positive leadership. Homogeneity in intrinsic attributes, familiarity, and
affection (which all may arise spontaneously without proper personnel management)
are associated with social cohesion, which in turn is associated with antiorganiza-
tional behavior and is not as strongly associated as is task cohesion with motivations,
performance, or resistance to stress.
Combat motivations do not necessarily follow from motivations to serve in the
military. While motivations to serve in the military are largely intrinsic, combat
motivations are largely extrinsic. Intrinsic motivations quickly dissipate upon the
first shock of combat. Attempts to emphasize intrinsic motivations encourage intel-
lectual isolation, poor employment of forces, and atrocities. Group attributes, prin-
cipally primary group bonds and cohesion, provide enduring combat motivations.
These group attributes must be encouraged and preserved by appropriate personnel
management.
The sort of athleticism required of combat personnel either is comparatively
limited (in the case of aircraft pilots, for instance) or requires extensive conditioning
(in the case of ground combat personnel). The sort of athleticism required of ground
combat soldiers is not intrinsically given. Commonly used indicators (such as height,
weight, masculinity, or gender) of combat athleticism are not reliable. While aged
and clinically less able persons may be disqualified on the basis of intrinsic attributes,
most persons could not be disqualified from combat duty. Disqualification is most
Conclusion 153
accurate when judged by actual athletic performance, of the sort commonly tested
during the training of combat soldiers. This casts further doubt on prior discrimina-
tion against recruits on the basis of their physiological attributes. Recruits should be
accepted for combat duty on the basis of their actual athletic performance according
to standards that accurately reflect the needs of the role. For instance, pilots do not
need to travel miles on foot with heavy packs in order to fly a plane (although they
might after being shot down), so pilots might not be tested on this capability. While
ground combat soldiers often do need this capability, to measure this capability on
the basis of the recruit’s gender or height would be invalid.
Special operations personnel capabilities seem to include all previous eight catego-
ries of capability but tend to push their upper limit and may go beyond the previous
eight categories to include something exogenous. Yet the causes of better perfor-
mance and capabilities are no different for special operations personnel than any
other personnel: their exceptional capabilities require exceptional conditioning, even
though some intrinsic capabilities help. While some intrinsic attributes might be
described as necessary conditions of superior special operations personnel, they are
not sufficient. All combat personnel, including special operations personnel, benefit
from decentralized personnel management, which gives the opportunities and incen-
tives for extensive conditioning and the creation and preservation of groups.
Human Resources Should Be Prioritized

The literature on military studies overstates the effect of material resources,
numerical preponderance, new weapons, and materialist strategies on military perfor-
mance and capabilities, while understating personnel capabilities. Materialism in the
literature may encourage militaries toward materialism, which would leave those
militaries vulnerable to competitors who differentiate in human resources. Fears of
this differentiation drive the so-called ‘‘asymmetric warfare’’ literature. My study
supports Arquilla’s previous work: material resources are not the key success factors
in most wars, but only in sufficiently capital-intensive wars (wars with high material
barriers to entry) where navies and air forces, and high technology armies, can
dominate. These sorts of wars are rare and are becoming less frequent. Consequently,
personnel capabilities are increasingly important, as the reliance on light infantry and
SOF in post–Cold War peacekeeping and counterterrorism illustrates.1 My study also
supports Biddle’s previous work: the literature’s emphasis on material capabilities,
such as technology, typically neglects the important role of force employment.
Discriminate Less by Intrinsic Attributes

Militaries need to downgrade the supposed importance to combat personnel
capabilities of intrinsic attributes. Intrinsic attribute biases help explain continuing
military discrimination by gender, sexuality, and values. Integrationists have found
it difficult to challenge such discrimination on military capability grounds, but my
154 Made, Not Born
theory suggests that while some intrinsic attributes matter, what the organization
subsequently does with them is more important. Most combat personnel resources
must be extrinsically conditioned, so arguments in favor of discrimination by
certain intrinsic attributes on the grounds of combat capability should be treated
with caution. Some intrinsic attributes do matter to combat but most are over-
stated.
Diversity in intrinsic attributes need not be problematic given the correct
extrinsic conditioning and personnel management. When problems arise they
signal inattention to extrinsic solutions such as discipline; they do not prove the
problematic nature of particular subpopulations. In the absence of extrinsic condi-
tioning, intrinsic attribute biases persist and make life unpleasant for those flagged
for a lack of the favored intrinsic attributes. The preferred bias should be to recruit
and train the receptive and the progressive, not intrinsically gifted ‘‘warriors’’ or ‘‘born
leaders.’’
Close the Civil–Military Gap

My theory suggests that selection or self-selection by intrinsic attributes causes
the ‘‘civil–military gap.’’ My theory casts doubt on the argument that a military
requires a distinctively ‘‘conservative’’ value system or indeed any other value
system. In fact, the value systems favored by the stereotypical military have some-
times retarded intellectual development and perpetuated poor traditional assump-
tions—and sometimes have encouraged illegal and counterproductive behavior in
combat.
Further Research
My theory has implications for some topical debates, including strategic culture,
democratic victory theory, irregular warfare, the causes of war, and methodology,
each explored in sequential subsections below.
Strategic Culture
My theory supports the ‘‘strategic culture’’ literature in its assertion of the influence
of belief or value systems on how militaries fight. My study suggests that there are
cultural reasons for why militaries might overstate material resources, centralized
strategy, centralized command, and intrinsic attributes. My study suggests that
this myopia is a consequence of tradition and of the higher observability of these
resources. Some militaries are more myopic than others. This variance needs to
be further explained, perhaps by reference to the particular military’s culture. Com-
monly described ‘‘strategic cultures’’ are pretty nebulous, however. Too often, they
are considered homogenous ‘‘national security cultures’’ rather than differentiated
organizational cultures. It is important that ‘‘cultures’’ are reconceived in terms of
belief and value systems. The adjective ‘‘strategic’’ is also misused.
Conclusion 155
Democratic Victory Theory

My theory helps explain the positive correlation between democracy and victory.
Democracies seem to have material advantages. Democracies also seem to manage
their resources better than nondemocracies. Democracy is correlated with decentral-
ized personnel management. Democracies seem to enjoy better civil–military
relations and are thus able to accept the declining political control implied by decen-
tralization, while centralized autocracies prioritize the control given by centralized
management. However, much of the correlation between democracy and decentral-
ized personnel management is attributable to the correlation between democratic
Britain and its regimental system. By contrast, twentieth-century America abandoned
regimentalism. This variation in personnel management across two very important
democracies needs to be explained, perhaps by reference to culture and the differences
between presidential and parliamentary democracy.
Irregular Warfare, Insurgency, and Terrorism

My theory might explain why ‘‘irregular’’ military organizations are so successful:
they are forced to rely on decentralization and human resources, while established
militaries tend to emphasize centralization and material resources. My theory also
might explain why new regimes are vulnerable after a successful insurgency. Consoli-
dating internal politics by centralization usually also means military centralization,
which weakens combat personnel capabilities.
The Causes of War

My study supports theories of war initiation that stress uncertainty as a cause of
war. If uncertainty is a cause of war, a better understanding of military capability
would inhibit war. Superior methodologies of ‘‘net assessment’’ would help. More
attention to personnel capabilities and to the role of personnel management would
assist net assessment.
Methodology
My theory has obvious implications for methodology in international relations
and military science. Most operationalization of combat factors relies on material
correlates and materialist models, such as attrition models. Further research should
be devoted to coding human resources for large-N analysis.
Military effectiveness is important to many policies, theories, and disciplines but
rarely receives the scientific treatment it deserves. Instead, the literature is built on
assumptions that are rarely empirically tested. This book has refuted long-standing
assumptions about the dominant importance to combat soldiers of intrinsic attrib-
utes. These assumptions neglect the importance to human development of manage-
ment, organizations, and groups. These factors are particularly important to the
156 Made, Not Born
development of combat personnel. Combat is a peculiar task and uncharacteristic of

the vast majority of civilian tasks. Combat personnel require peculiar cognitive,
psychological, and physiological attributes that are uncharacteristic of civilians
and therefore must be provided by their military employer. In other words, the
desired attributes are more extrinsic than intrinsic. Careful management ensures that
soldiers accumulate desired attributes, such as self-discipline, without accumulating
undesired attributes, such as indiscriminate aggression. Soldiers, like most professio-
nals, are made more than born. To assume otherwise leads, at best, to wasted effort
and unnecessary discrimination, and, at worst, retarded combat performance and
increased illegal violence.
NOTES
Introduction
1. ‘‘Personnel’’ are members of an organization. Military personnel are members of a

military organization, which bears arms and is concerned with war or organized violence.
Combat is active, armed violence between opposing forces. The term ‘‘combat personnel’’ is
more precise than the term ‘‘soldier.’’ All military combat personnel are soldiers, although
not all soldiers are combat personnel. A soldier is a person who serves in the military; therefore,
all soldiers are military personnel. Soldiers are sometimes distinguished as members of an army,
as opposed to sailors, air force personnel, and marines. However, I use the term ‘‘combat per-
sonnel’’ and ‘‘soldiers’’ to include members of all types of military organization, including
naval, air force, and marine personnel (except when I wish to make specific organizational
distinctions, such as ‘‘United States Army soldier’’ and ‘‘United States Marine’’). It is true that
Army combat personnel primarily fight on land, at closer ranges, and in more intimate
situations than members of the other services. Consequently, this study is informed by, and
has lessons for, Army combat personnel most. However, since combat personnel (such as
‘‘fighter pilots’’ and ‘‘naval gunners’’) can be found in all the services I see no need to study
Army combat personnel exclusively and can foresee that to do so would forego useful informa-
tion. Elsewhere, the word ‘‘soldier’’ has been used to distinguish non-officers (‘‘noncommis-
sioned personnel’’ or ‘‘enlisted personnel’’) from commissioned officers (for instance:
Franklin D. Margiotta, Brassey’s Encyclopedia of Military History and Biography [Washington:
Brassey’s, 2000], 962), but I use ‘‘military personnel’’ or ‘‘soldiers’’ to include all military
persons. Junior personnel tend to engage in the most intimate forms of fighting and are more
numerous than senior personnel, meaning that studies of combat are most populated with
noncommissioned personnel. Again, however, I see no need, and I see some danger in, restrict-
ing this analysis to noncommissioned personnel. My use of the term ‘‘combat personnel’’
includes some ‘‘branches’’ or ‘‘arms’’ that are less combat-intensive than others. This statement
158 Notes
conceptualizes combat personnel as a sliding scale: different types of combat personnel fall on a
spectrum between the most (such as infantry personnel) and the least combat-intensive roles
(such as engineer and artillery personnel). The difference between less combat-intensive roles
and noncombat roles is a judgmental problem, because all military personnel may face combat
(such as when a military truck driver accidentally strays into combat) but I define combat per-
sonnel as military personnel who routinely face combat. I code artillery and engineer personnel
as combat personnel because their tasks, if carried out during war, routinely involve the use of
violence or are countered by enemy violence. Civilian personnel (such as civilian police person-
nel) may be armed and authorized to use lethal force under certain circumstances. Parts of this
study will be informed by, and will have lessons for, such personnel. However, civilian person-
nel are excluded from this analysis, except where formally civilian organizations (such as
‘‘paramilitary’’ police forces) routinely engage in lethal activities. Some persons, although
not members of an armed organization, may nevertheless engage in, or experience, organized
violence, even lethal violence. Civilians are most likely to experience organized violence during
extreme, particularly ritualized, confrontations between demonstrators, ‘‘hooligans,’’ gangs, or
supporters of rival sports teams. Their experience will overlap some of the topics, such as stress
and aggression, covered in this study, but this study formally addresses violence that is both
organized and military.
2. Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1988).
3. Stephen D. Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 207.
4. Colin S. Gray, War, Peace, and Victory: Strategy and Statecraft for the Next Century (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 324.
5. Charles W. Hofer and Dan Schendel, Strategy Formulation: Analytical Concepts (St. Paul,
MN: West Publishing, 1978), 77.
6. H.K. Weiss, ‘‘Requirements for the Theory of Combat,’’ in Mathematics of Conflict, ed.
Martin Shubik (Amsterdam, New York: North-Holland, Elsevier Science, 1983), 73–88;
Joyce L. Shields and others, ‘‘Training and Education,’’ in Emerging Needs and Opportunities
for Human Factors Research, ed. Raymond S. Nickerson (Washington, DC: National Academy
Press, 1995), 86–105, 100; Richard W. Pew and Anne S. Mavor, eds., Modeling Human and
Organizational Behavior: Application to Military Simulations (Washington, DC: National
Academy Press, 1998); Brigadier General US Army retd. Stanley Cherrie, ‘‘The Human in
Command: A Personal View,’’ in The Human in Command: Exploring the Modern Military
Experience, ed. Carol McCann and Ross Pigeau (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Pub-
lishers, 2000), 17–28.
7. Raymond S. Nickerson, ed., Emerging Needs and Opportunities for Human Factors
Research (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1995); Pew and Mavor, Modeling
Human and Organizational Behavior.
8. Macro organization theory, of the sort that is associated with bureaucratic politics, stan-
dard operating procedures, and suchlike, is best dated from 1947 (Herbert Alexander Simon,
Administrative Behavior [New York: Macmillan, 1947]). But micro organizational behavior
(commonly known as just ‘‘organizational behavior’’) was not recognized as a field before
1970 (Charles A. O’Reilly III, ‘‘Organizational Behavior: Where We’ve Been, Where We’re
Going,’’ Annual Review of Psychology, 42 [1991]: 427–58; Richard T. Mowday and Robert I.
Sutton, ‘‘Organizational Behavior: Linking Individuals and Groups to Organizational
Contexts,’’ Annual Review of Psychology, 44 [1993]: 195–229).
9. Weiss, ‘‘Requirements for the Theory of Combat.’’
Notes 159
10. Jeffrey Pfeffer, ‘‘Understanding Organizations: Concepts and Controversies,’’ in The

Handbook of Social Psychology, ed. Daniel Todd Gilbert, Susan T. Fiske, and Gardner Lindzey
(Boston, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998), 733–77, 733.
11. Alexander L. George, ‘‘Primary Groups, Organization, and Military Performance,’’ in
Handbook of Military Institutions, ed. Roger William Little (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publica-
tions, 1971), 293–318, 313.
Chapter 1
1. Quincy Wright, A Study of War (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1942), 849.
2. David A. Lake, ‘‘Powerful Pacifists: Democratic States and War,’’ American Political
Science Review, 86, no. 1 (March 1992): 24–37; Allan C. Stam, Win, Lose, or Draw Domestic
Politics and the Crucible of War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
3. Karen Rasler and William Thompson, ‘‘War Making and State Making: Governmental
Expenditures, Tax Revenues, and Global Wars,’’ American Political Science Review, 79, no. 2
(June 1985): 491–507.
4. A.F.K. Organski and Jacek Kugler, The War Ledger (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980), 217–19.
5. Richard K. Betts, Military Readiness: Concepts, Choices, Consequences (Washington, DC:
Brookings Institution, 1995), 234.
6. Kevin Wang and James Lee Ray, ‘‘Beginners and Winners: The Fate of Initiators of
Interstate Wars Involving Great Powers Since 1495,’’ International Studies Quarterly, 38, no.
1 (March 1994): 139–54; Scott Sigmund Gartner and Randolph Siverson, ‘‘War Expansion
and War Outcome,’’ Journal of Conflict Resolution, 40, no. 1 (March 1996): 4–15.
7. Randolph Siverson and Julian Emmons, ‘‘Birds of a Feather: Democratic Political Sys-
tems and Alliance Choices,’’ Journal of Conflict Resolution, 35, no. 2 (June 1991): 286–306;
Michael Simon and Erik Gartzke, ‘‘Political System Similarity and the Choice of Allies,’’ Jour-
nal of Conflict Resolution, 40, no. 4 (December 1996): 617–35; D. Scott Bennett, ‘‘Testing
Alternative Models of Alliance Duration, 1816–84,’’ American Journal of Political Science,
41, no. 3 (July 1997): 846–78; Brian Lai and Dan Reiter, ‘‘Democracy, Political Similarity,
and International Alliances, 1816–1992,’’ Journal of Conflict Resolution, 44, no. 2 (April
2000): 203–27.
8. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and David Lalman, War and Reason Domestic and
International Imperatives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Clifton Schwebach
Valerie Morgan, ‘‘Take Two Democracies and Call Me in the Morning: A Prescription for
Peace?’’ International Interaction, 17, no. 4 (1992): 305–20; Bruce M. Russett, Grasping the
Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1993); Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Randolph Siverson, ‘‘War and the Survival
of Political Leaders: A Comparative Study of Regime Types and Political Accountability,’’
American Political Science Review, 89, no. 4 (December 1995): 841–55.
9. Lloyd Jensen, Explaining Foreign Policy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982),
110.
10. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1945),
234–35.
11. Frank Klingberg, ‘‘The Historical Alternation of Moods in American Foreign Policy,’’
World Politics, 4, no. 2 (January 1952): 239–73; Jack E. Holmes, The Mood/Interest Theory of
American Foreign Policy (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1985); Kurt Taylor
160 Notes
Gaubatz, Elections and War: The Electoral Incentive in the Democratic Politics of War and Peace
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 12–13.
12. George Frost Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1951); Walter Lippmann, The Public Philosophy (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 1989), 23–24; Bruce M. Russett, Controlling the Sword: The
Democratic Governance of National Security (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1990), 132, 148.
13. Wright, A Study of War, 819; Russett, Controlling the Sword, 7–8.
14. Jensen, Explaining Foreign Policy, 109.
15. Speech to Parliament during a debate on foreign affairs on February 22, 1938, when
Churchill was still a backbencher. Winston Churchill and Randolph S. Churchill, While En-
gland Slept: A Survey of World Affairs, 1932–1938 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1938), 383.
16. Speech during the Second Reading of the Air Raid Precautions Bill, November 16,
1937. Churchill and Churchill, While England Slept, 365.
17. Alan J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (New York: Fawcett, 1961), xi.
18. Betts, Military Readiness, 31.
19. Karen A. McPherson, ‘‘The United States,’’ in Central Organizations of Defense, ed.
Martin Edmonds (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985), 200–22, 221.
20. Kenneth Neal Waltz, Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics: The American and British
Experience (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1967), 308.
21. Ibid., 309, 311.
22. Kenneth Neal Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley,
1979), 83.
23. Martin Kitchen, Nazi Germany at War (London: Longman, 1995).
24. Dan Reiter and Curtis Meek, ‘‘Determinants of Military Strategy, 1903–1994:
A Quantitative Empirical Test,’’ International Studies Quarterly, 43, no. 2 (June 1999): 363–
87, 365; Dan Reiter, ‘‘Military Strategy and the Outbreak of International Conflict,’’ Journal
of Conflict Resolution, 43, no. 3 (June 1999): 366–87, 367; Stam, Win, Lose, or Draw, 84–85.
25. Eliot A. Cohen, ‘‘Toward Better Net Assessment: Rethinking the European Conven-
tional Balance,’’ International Security, 13, no. 1 (Summer 1988): 50–89, 62–63; Biddle,
Military Power, 18–19. Edward Luttwak labeled the same typology ‘‘maneuver,’’ ‘‘attrition,’’
and ‘‘punishment’’ strategies. Edward Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 96–106. John Mear-
sheimer earlier labeled the same strategies ‘‘blitzkrieg,’’ ‘‘attrition,’’ and ‘‘limited aims.’’ John
J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 31.
26. Aristotle and Ernest Barker, The Politics of Aristotle (Oxford: The Clarendon Press,
1946), 160, 188.
27. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius (London:
Penguin, 1983), 114–15, 122–23; Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (London: Penguin,
1981), 78–79.
28. John Millar, An Historical View of the English Government from the Settlement of the
Saxons in Britain to the Accession of the House of Stewart (Dublin: Printed by Z. Jackson
for Grueber and M’Allister, 1789), II, 119–25, 379, 388, 472, IV, 91, 114–15, 129–35;
Otto Hintze, ‘‘Military Organization and State Organization,’’ in The Historical Essays of Otto
Hintze, Otto Hintze (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 214–15.
29. Brett D. Steele, Military Reengineering Between the World Wars (Santa Monica, CA:
Rand, 2005), 27.
Notes 161
30. Silas Bent McKinley, Democracy and Military Power (New York: Vanguard Press,
1934).
31. Richard Simpkin, Tank Warfare: An Analysis of Soviet and NATO Tank Philosophy
(London: Brasseys, 1979), 38.
32. Steele, Military Reengineering, 25.
33. Biddle, Military Power, 49.
34. C.J. Dick, ‘‘The Operational Employment of Soviet Armour in the Great Patriotic
War,’’ in Armoured Warfare, ed. J.P. Harris and F. H. Toase (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1990), 88–123, 91; Steele, Military Reengineering, 34–41.
35. Biddle, Military Power, 49–50.
36. John Dollard and Donald Horton, Fear in Battle (Washington, DC: Infantry Journal
Press, 1944); Alvah Cecil Bessie and Albert Prago, Our Fight: Writings by Veterans of the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Spain, 1936–1939 (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press with
the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 1987); Peter N. Carroll, The Odyssey of the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1994); Arthur H. Landis, The Abraham Lincoln Brigade (New York: Citadel Press,
1967); Don Lawson, The Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans Fighting Fascism in the Spanish
Civil War (New York: T.Y. Crowell, 1989).
37. Margaret Levi, Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).
38. Karl Wolfgang Deutsch, The Nerves of Government Models of Political Communication
and Control (London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963); Russett, Controlling the Sword, 150.
39. Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam III, ‘‘Democracy and Battlefield Military Effectiveness,’’
Journal of Conflict Resolution, 42, no. 3 (June 1998): 259–77, 274–75.
40. Ibid., 268.
41. William Darryl Henderson, Cohesion: The Human Element in Combat. Leadership and
Societal Influence in the Armies of the Soviet Union, the United States, North Vietnam, and Israel
(Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1985), 8.
42. Eli Ginzberg, The Ineffective Soldier: Lessons for Management and the Nation (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1959), III, 310–13; Paul L. Savage and Richard A. Gabriel,
‘‘Cohesion and Disintegration in the American Army,’’ Armed Forces and Society, 2, no. 3
(Spring 1976): 340–75, 40; Henderson, Cohesion: The Human Element, 151.
Chapter 2
1. Jay R. Galbraith, Designing Organizations: An Executive Guide to Strategy, Structure, and
Process (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002), 11.
2. David Nadler, Michael Tushman, and Mark B. Nadler, Competing by Design: The Power
of Organizational Architecture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 47–48.
3. McPherson, ‘‘The United States,’’ 214–21.
4. Ibid., 213.
5. Dennis E. Showalter, ‘‘Caste, Skill, and Training: The Evolution of Cohesion in
European Armies from the Middle Ages to the Sixteenth Century,’’ Journal of Military History,
57, no. 3 (July 1993): 407–30, 416.
6. Peter Dietz, The Last of the Regiments: Their Rise and Fall (London, Washington:
Brassey’s (UK), 1990); Hew Strachan, ‘‘The British Way in Warfare,’’ in The Oxford Illustrated
History of the British Army, ed. David G. Chandler and I.F.W. Beckett (Oxford, New York:
162 Notes
Oxford University Press, 1994), 417–34; Hew Strachan, The Politics of the British Army
(Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
7. Martin Edmonds, ‘‘Great Britain,’’ in Central Organizations of Defense, ed. Martin
Edmonds (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985), 85–107, 99–103.
8. Martin L. van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and US Army Performance, 1939–1945
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 62; S.J. Lewis, Forgotten Legions: German Army
Infantry Policy, 1918–1941 (New York: Praeger, 1985), 62; Showalter, ‘‘Caste, Skill, and
Training,’’ 427.
9. Paul Y. Hammond, Organizing for Defense: The American Military Establishment in the
Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961); Steven L. Canby, Mili-
tary Manpower Procurement: A Policy Analysis (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1972),
43–45.
10. G.F.R. Henderson, The Science of War: A Collection of Essays and Lectures, 1892–1903
(London, New York, and Bombay: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1905).
11. Frederic Charles Bartlett, Psychology and the Soldier (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1927).
12. Norman Copeland, Psychology and the Soldier (Harrisburg, PA: The Military Service
Publishing Company, 1942).
13. James Hugh Toner, Morals Under the Gun: The Cardinal Virtues, Military Ethics, and
American Society (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2000).
14. Charles McMoran Wilson Moran, The Anatomy of Courage (London: Constable,
1945).
15. Frank M. Richardson, Fighting Spirit: A Study of Psychological Factors in War (London:
Cooper, 1978), 95.
16. Charles Horton Cooley, Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind (New York: C.
Scribner’s Sons, 1909), 23.
17. Elmar Dinter, Hero or Coward? Pressures Facing the Soldier in Battle (London: Frank
Cass, 1985), 92.
18. Henderson, Cohesion: The Human Element, xviii, 46–47, 97.
19. Anthony Kellett, Combat Motivation: The Behavior of Soldiers in Battle (Boston, MA:
Kluwer-Nijhoff, 1982), 46.
20. Richardson, Fighting Spirit, 80–88.
21. Ibid., 124.
22. United States and Department of the Army, Introduction to Military Personnel
Management (Washington, DC: US GPO, September 15, 1979); United States and
Department of the Army, Military Personnel Management and Administrative Procedures: Indi-
vidual Assignment and Reassignment Procedures (Washington, DC: US GPO, September 1,
1983).
23. Paul F. Hogan, ‘‘Overview of the Current Personnel and Compensation System,’’ in
Filling the Ranks: Transforming the U.S. Military Personnel System, ed. Cindy Williams (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 29–54, 30.
24. Nadler, Tushman, and Nadler, Competing by Design, 143–44. The popular acceptance
of these theories may reflect an ahistorical and legalistic culture that treats individuals as
fundamentally reasonable and interchangeable. Colin S. Gray, ‘‘National Style in Strategy:
The American Example,’’ International Security, 6, no. 2 (Fall 1981): 21–47, 43–46.
25. Donald E. Vandergriff, Path to Victory: A Critical Analysis of the Military Personnel
System and How It Undermines Readiness (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 2002), 23–53.
Notes 163
26. John Halpin Burns, Psychology and Leadership: Submitted As a Study in Individual
Research (Fort Leavenworth, KS: The Command and General Staff School Press, 1934), 27.
27. Henry Lewis Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New
York: Harper, 1948), 40.
28. James E. Hewes, From Root to McNamara: Army Organization and Administration,
1900–1963 (Washington, DC: US Army, Center of Military History, 1975), 115–20; Van
Creveld, Fighting Power, 62–65.
29. Hewes, From Root to McNamara, 336–37.
30. Such predictive failures were not unique to human resources. Less than one-quarter of
the ammunition manufactured by the United States during the Second World War was ever
expended; only one-half of it was ever sent overseas. Wilbur D. Jones, Arming the Eagle: A His-
tory of U.S. Weapons Acquisition Since 1775 (Fort Belvoir, VA: Defense Systems Management
College Press, 1999), 259.
31. Peter R. Mansoor, The GI Offensive in Europe: The Triumph of American Infantry
Divisions, 1941–1945 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 252.
32. Lee B. Kennett, G.I.: The American Soldier in World War II (Norman, OK: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 175; Van Creveld, Fighting Power, 77–78.
33. R.R. Palmer, The Procurement and Training of Ground Combat Troops (Washington,
DC: Historical Division, Dept. of the Army, 1948); Ralph Elberton Smith, The Army and
Economic Mobilization (Washington, DC: United States, Department of the Army, Office of
the Chief of Military History, 1959); Byron Fairchild and Jonathan Grossman, The Army
and Industrial Manpower (Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, Dept. of the
Army, 1959); James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 343–55; Stephen E. Ambrose, The Supreme Commander: The War
Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 583–84; Van
Creveld, Fighting Power, 70–71.
34. Van Creveld, Fighting Power, 55–61.
35. Cohen, ‘‘Toward Better Net Assessment,’’ 77.
36. Douglas A. Macgregor, Breaking the Phalanx: A New Design for Landpower in the 21st
Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997); Vandergriff, Path to Victory.
37. David French, Raising Churchill’s Army: The British Army and the War Against
Germany, 1919–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 64, 68.
38. Philip Ewart Vernon and John B. Parry, Personnel Selection in the British Forces
(London: University of London Press, 1949).
39. Brian Lavery, Hostilities Only: Training the Wartime Royal Navy (London: National
Maritime Museum, 2004), 195–97.
40. Stephen D. Badsey, ‘‘The American Experience of Armour 1919–53,’’ in Armoured
Warfare, ed. J.P. Harris and F.H. Toase (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 124–44, 132.
41. Kellett, Combat Motivation, 55.
42. Lavery, Hostilities Only, 66, 194, 280–81.
43. John Christopher Malcolm Baynes, Morale: A Study of Men and Courage. The Second
Scottish Rifles at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, 1915 (London: Cassell, 1967); Shelford Bidwell,
Modern Warfare: A Study of Men, Weapons and Theories (London: Allen Lane, 1973).
44. Van Creveld, Fighting Power, 45; Lewis, Forgotten Legions, 8; Peter Tsouras, Changing
Orders: The Evolution of the World’s Armies, 1945 to the Present (New York: Facts On File,
1994), 114–16, 248–49.
45. Strachan, ‘‘British Way in Warfare,’’ 430–34.
164 Notes
46. Dietz, Last of the Regiments, 56.

47. Savage and Gabriel, ‘‘Cohesion and Disintegration.’’
49. Clarence Stone Yoakum and Robert Mearns Yerkes, Army Mental Tests (New York: H.
Holt, 1920); Edwin Garrigues Boring, ed., Psychology for the Armed Services (Washington, DC:
Infantry Journal, 1945), 12–13, 231.
50. Norman Charles Meier, Military Psychology (New York, London: Harper & Brothers,
1943), 98–102; Lincoln R. Thiesmeyer, John Ely Burchard, and Alan Tower Waterman,
Combat Scientists (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1947), 149.
51. Boring, Psychology for the Armed Services, 18; Charles William Bray, Psychology and
Military Proficiency: A History of the Applied Psychology Panel of the National Defense Research
Committee (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948).
52. Meier, Military Psychology, 85–98; Boring, Psychology for the Armed Services, 17, 232–
57; Palmer, Procurement and Training, 14, 71–72; Robert Ladd Thorndike, Personnel Selection:
Test and Measurement Techniques (New York: John Wiley, 1949); Ginzberg, Ineffective Soldier,
157–58, 273; Van Creveld, Fighting Power, 70–71.
53. U.S. Army soldiers are received at reception centers or induction centers before being
sent for training. Basc, or Initial Entry, Training is conducted at Basic Training Centers. Basic
Training Centers date back to the First World War induction centers established for new con-
scripts, who received most of their individual training from field units. During the Second
World War, centralized training centers performed most of the soldier’s individual training.
In 1940, Basic Training Centers were supplemented (for trainees earmarked as replacements)
by RTCs (Replacement Training Centers). The U.S. Army established twenty-one RTCs dur-
ing the Second World War. Training was conducted within training regiments, each normally
consisting of four training battalions, each of three or four companies, each company offering
a capacity of about 240 trainees. These training units were effectively depopulated at the end
of the training period. In 1953, the U.S. Army distinguished between Basic and Advanced
Individual Training, the latter usually conducted at a different centralized training center,
although sometimes, particularly during wartime, combat units were tasked with training
graduates of basic training.
54. Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990), 14.
55. Boring, Psychology for the Armed Services, 232–57; Kellett, Combat Motivation, 61.
56. Sledge, With the Old Breed, 52.
57. Vandergriff, Path to Victory, 5.
58. L.H. Ingraham and F.J. Manning, ‘‘Cohesion: Who Needs It, What It Is and How Do
We Get It to Them?’’ Military Review, 61, no. 6 (June 1981): 2–12, 9.
59. James P. Kahan and others, Individual Characteristics and Unit Performance: A Review
of Research and Methods (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, R-3194-MILITARY, February 1985),
41–43.
60. Bryan A. Hallmark and others, System for Determining Training Proficiency at the
Combat Training Centers (CTCs) (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, AB-418-A, June 2000), 25.
61. Ruth H. Phelps and Beatrice J. Farr, eds., Reserve Component Soldiers As Peacekeepers
(Alexandria, VA: US Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, 1996),
xix–xx.
62. According to the U.S. Army dictionary, a MOS ‘‘is a grouping of duty positions
possessing such close occupational or functional relationship that an optimal degree of
Notes 165
interchangeability among persons so classified exists at any given level of skill.’’ http://
www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/ar310-25.pdf.
63. Cindy Williams, ed., Filling the Ranks Transforming the U.S. Military Personnel System
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 6.
64. Morris Janowitz, ‘‘Military Organization,’’ in Handbook of Military Institutions,
ed. Roger William Little (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1971), 13–51, 19; Defense
Management Study Group on Military Cohesion, Cohesion in the U.S. Military (Fort Leslie
J. McNair, Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1984), 11–12; Gray, War,
Peace, and Victory; Colin S. Gray, Weapons Don’t Make War: Policy, Strategy, and Military Tech-
nology (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1993); Lieutenant General Walter F. Ulmer
Jr, ‘‘Leaders, Managers, and Command Climate,’’ in Military Leadership in Pursuit of
Excellence, ed. Robert L. Taylor and William E. Rosenbach (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
2000), 77–84.
65. Kennett, G.I.: The American Soldier, 48–49; Van Creveld, Fighting Power, 72–74.
66. Galbraith, Designing Organizations, 18.
67. Richard Holmes, Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle (New York: Free Press,
1985), 37.
68. Williamson Murray, The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1938–1939: The
Path to Ruin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 222; Mansoor, GI Offensive
in Europe, 14.
69. Badsey, ‘‘The American Experience of Armour 1919–53,’’ 133.
70. French, Raising Churchill’s Army, 68; Lavery, Hostilities Only, 197.
71. Stephen G. Fritz, Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II (Lexington, KY:
University Press of Kentucky, 1995), chap. 2.
72. Samuel J. Newland, ‘‘Manning the Force German Style,’’ Military Review, 67, no. 5
(May 1987): 36–45.
74. French, Raising Churchill’s Army, 22, 59, 159.
75. Ibid., 169–74; Timothy Harrison Place, Military Training in the British Army, 1940–
1944; From Dunkirk to D-Day (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 18–39.
76. French, Raising Churchill’s Army, 159–60, 179.
77. Ibid., 145, 203–6.
78. Place, Military Training in the British Army, 82, 87–89; French, Raising Churchill’s
Army, 68.
79. French, Raising Churchill’s Army, 205–6; Place, Military Training in the British Army,
41–79.
80. French, Raising Churchill’s Army, 232–34.
81. Ibid., 188, 217, 227.
82. Ludovic Fortin, British Tanks in Normandy (Paris: Histoire & Collections, 2005),
132–33.
83. Brian Cloughley, A History of the Pakistan Army: Wars and Insurrections (Karachi, New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
84. Lavery, Hostilities Only, 280–81.
85. Badsey, ‘‘The American Experience of Armour 1919–53,’’ 132.
86. John Sloan Brown, Draftee Division: The 88th Infantry Division in World War II
(Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1986).
87. Dick, ‘‘Operational Employment,’’ 120.
166 Notes
88. Bernhard R. Kroener, ‘‘Squaring the Circle: Blitzkrieg Strategy and Manpower
Shortage, 1939–1942,’’ in The German Military in the Age of Total War, ed. Wilhelm Deist
(Leamington Spa, UK, Dover, NH: Berg Publishers, 1985), 282–303, 295–96; David C. Isby,
ed., Fighting the Invasion: The Germany Army at D-Day (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books,
2000), 116, 153.
89. French, Raising Churchill’s Army, 64; Lavery, Hostilities Only, 24–33.
92. Mansoor, GI Offensive in Europe, 11–12.
93. Samuel Andrew Stouffer, The American Soldier (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1949), II, 103.
95. Gerald F. Linderman, The World Within War: America’s Combat Experience in World
War II, 288–89.
96. Van Creveld, Fighting Power, 77.
97. Ulysses Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops (Washington, DC: Center of Military
History, United States Army, 1966).
98. Thiesmeyer, Burchard, and Waterman, Combat Scientists, 150.
99. Stouffer, The American Soldier, II, 451; Van Creveld, Fighting Power, 96.
100. Reuven Gal, ‘‘Unit Morale: From a Theoretical Puzzle to an Empirical Illustration—
An Israeli Example,’’ Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 16, no. 6 (1986): 549–64,
559.
101. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948),
334.
102. Gregory Belenky and Franklin D. Jones, ‘‘Introduction: Combat Psychiatry—An
Evolving Field,’’ in Contemporary Studies in Combat Psychiatry, Gregory Belenky (New York:
Greenwood Press, 1987), 1–7, 4.
103. J. J. Harris and D.R. Segal, ‘‘Observations from the Sinai: The Boredom Factor,’’
Armed Forces and Society, 11, no. 2 (Winter 1985): 235–48, 246.
104. J. Michael Polich, Bruce R. Orvis, and W. Michael Hix, Small Deployments, Big Prob-
lems (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, IP-197, 2000).
105. Guy L. Siebold, ‘‘Small Unit Dynamics: Leadership, Cohesion, Motivation and
Morale,’’ in Reserve Component Soldiers As Peacekeepers, ed. Ruth H. Phelps and Beatrice J. Farr
(Alexandria, VA: US Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, 1996),
237–86, 282.
106. Paul T. Bartone and Amy B. Adler, ‘‘Cohesion Over Time in a Peacekeeping Medical
Task Force,’’ Military Psychology, 11, no. 1 (1999): 85–107, 89–90.
107. Newland, ‘‘Manning the Force German Style.’’
108. Karl Münch, Combat History of Schwere Panzer-Jäger-Abteilung 654: In Action in the
East and West With the Ferdinand and the Jagdpanther (Winnipeg, Canada: J.J. Fredorowicz,
2002), 241–42.
109. Van Creveld, Fighting Power, 43–45; Lewis, Forgotten Legions, 149.
110. Münch, Combat History of Schwere, 245.
111. Charles W. Snydor, Soldiers of Destruction: The SS Death’s Head Division, 1933–1945
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 46, 121–53, 202–61, 302, 325–46.
113. Ibid., 68.
Notes 167
114. Ibid., 185–89, 199–200, 244; Place, Military Training in the British Army, 58; Carlo
D’Este, Decision in Normandy (New York: Dutton, 1983), 262–63.
115. P.G. Griffith, ‘‘British Armoured Warfare in the Western Desert 1940–43,’’ in Arm-
oured Warfare, ed. J.P. Harris and F.H. Toase (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 70–87,
83–84; French, Raising Churchill’s Army, 217.
116. D’Este, Decision in Normandy, 252–70.
118. Fortin, British Tanks in Normandy, 137.
119. Sebastian Roberts, ‘‘Fit to Fight: The Conceptual Component. An Approach to
Military Doctrine for the Twenty-First Century,’’ in The British Army, Manpower, and Society
into the Twenty-First Century, ed. Hew Strachan (London, Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2000),
191–201, 194.
120. Stouffer, The American Soldier, II, 457; Van Creveld, Fighting Power, 90–91; Kennett,
G.I.: The American Soldier, 223.
121. Andrew F. Krepenevich, The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1988), 205–10, 229, 251, 273.
122. R. L. Swank and W. E. Marchand, ‘‘Combat Neuroses: Development of Combat
Exhaustion,’’ Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 55 (1946): 236–46.
123. Jon A. Shaw, ‘‘Psychodynamic Considerations in the Adaptation to Combat,’’ in Con-
temporary Studies in Combat Psychiatry, ed. Gregory Belenky (Westport, CT: Greenwood,
1987), 117–32, 120.
124. Ginzberg, Ineffective Soldier, 275–79; Van Creveld, Fighting Power, 93–95.
125. Gary A. Linderer, Eyes Behind the Lines: L Company Rangers in Vietnam, 1969 (New
York: Ivy Books, 1991), 25, 27, 36, 77, 169, 181, 204, 215, 230, 232, 239.
126. Stouffer, The American Soldier, II, 103; Linderman, World Within War, 356.
127. Lavery, Hostilities Only, 272–73.
129. Ibid., 91–96.
130. Thiesmeyer, Burchard, and Waterman, Combat Scientists, 143–46.
131. French, Raising Churchill’s Army, 153.
132. Robert J. Schneider, ‘‘Stress Breakdown in the Wehrmacht: Implications for Today’s
Army,’’ in Contemporary Studies in Combat Psychiatry, ed. Gregory Belenky (Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 1987), 87–101, 94.
133. John D. Winkler, Anders Hove, and W. Michael Hix, Stability and Cohesion: What
Does the Army Need? (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, PM-1146-A, January, 2001), 8.
134. A.J. Glass, ‘‘Psychiatry in the Korean Campaign,’’ United States Army Medical Bulle-
tin, 4, no. 10 (October 1953): 1387–401; Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, ‘‘Psychiatry in the
Korean War: Perils, PIES, and Prisoners of War,’’ Military Medicine, 167, no. 11 (November
2002): 898–903.
135. Bernard Weinraub, ‘‘Therapy on the Fly for Soldiers Who Face Anxiety in the Battle-
field,’’ New York Times, April 2003, B4.
136. Winkler, Hove, and Hix, Stability and Cohesion, 2.
137. Lavery, Hostilities Only, 14–15, 121–22, 199–200.
138. Ibid., 132.
140. Canby, Military Manpower Procurement, 17; Captain Derek T. Hasty and Captain
Robert M. Weber, ‘‘Ineffective Leadership and Military Retention,’’ in Military Leadership in
168 Notes
Pursuit of Excellence, ed. Robert L. Taylor and William E. Rosenbach (Boulder, CO: Westview
Press, 2000), 211–22; Polly LaBarre, ‘‘The Agenda: Grassroots Leadership,’’ in Military
Leadership in Pursuit of Excellence, ed. Robert L. Taylor and William E. Rosenbach (Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 2000), 223–32.
141. Linderman, World Within War, 284–85.
144. Elizabeth A. Stanley-Mitchell, ‘‘The Military Profession and Intangible Rewards for
Service,’’ in Filling the Ranks: Transforming the U.S. Military Personnel System, ed. Cindy
Williams (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 93–118, 112–13.
145. Hogan, ‘‘Overview of the Current Personnel,’’ 38.
146. Loren Baritz, Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and
Made Us Fight the Way We Did (New York: W. Morrow, 1985).
147. Anthony Kellett, ‘‘The Soldier in Battle: Motivational and Behavioral Aspects of the
Combat Experience,’’ in Psychological Dimensions of War, ed. Betty Glad (Newbury Park, CA:
Sage Publications, 1990), 215–35, 232.
148. Hasty and Weber, ‘‘Ineffective Leadership and Military Retention,’’ 213.
149. Canby, Military Manpower Procurement, 17.
150. LaBarre, ‘‘The Agenda: Grassroots Leadership,’’ 231.
151. Linderman, World Within War, 226.
152. Sledge, With the Old Breed, 170; Linderer, Eyes Behind the Lines, 169.
153. Stanley-Mitchell, ‘‘Military Profession and Intangible Rewards,’’ 110, 113.
154. Krepenevich, The Army and Vietnam, 195, 251.
155. Bartlett, Psychology and the Soldier.
156. Richardson, Fighting Spirit, 80–88.
157. Moran, The Anatomy of Courage.
158. Copeland, Psychology and the Soldier, 36.
159. Vandergriff, Path to Victory, 222, 17.
160. Paul F. Secord and Carl W. Backman, ‘‘Leadership,’’ in A Study of Organizational
Leadership ed. United States, Military Academy, West Point, and Office of Military Leadership
(Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1976), 184–98, 187; Denise R. Silverman and others,
A Combat Mission Team Performance Model: Development and Initial Application (Brooks
Air Force Base, TX: USAF Armstrong Laboratory, 1997), 2; Mary Omodei, Alexander
Wearing, and Jim McLennan, ‘‘Relative Efficacy of an Open Versus a Restricted Communica-
tion Structure for Command and Control Decision Making: An Experimental Study,’’ in
The Human in Command: Exploring the Modern Military Experience, ed. Carol McCann and
Ross Pigeau (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2000), 369–86.
161. David D. Van Fleet and Gary A. Yukl, Military Leadership: An Organizational
Behavior Perspective (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1986), 5–6.
162. Galbraith, Designing Organizations, 19–21.
163. Nadler, Tushman, and Nadler, Competing by Design, 139–60; Albert A. Robbert and
others, Differentiation in Military Human Resource Management (Santa Monica, CA: RAND,
1997), 45.
165. From 1947 onward, all British Army officers have been trained at one officer school
(the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst). In the past, two schools served different regiments
and branches, after which the regiments and branches finished off their officer’s training.
Notes 169
The Royal Military Academy at Woolwich (1741–1939) trained officers destined for the
Royal Engineers (for the best third of the graduates) or the Royal Artillery—later also the
Signals Corps or Tank Corps. The course lasted eighteen months, after which the officer
received six months training at his branch. Brian Wyldbore-Smith, March Past: The Memoirs
of a Major-General (Spennymoor: Memoir Club, 2001), 21–24. The Royal Military College
trained officers destined for infantry or cavalry regiments.
167. Ibid., 59, 73–76, 131.
168. Andrew Wilson, Flame Thrower (London: W. Kimber, 1956), 23, 22. Wilson’s
regiment was the 141st Regiment, Royal Armoured Corps, The Buffs.
170. Ibid., 125.
171. Fortin, British Tanks in Normandy, 134–36.
172. Place, Military Training in the British Army, 126; French, Raising Churchill’s Army,
162.
174. Ibid., 78, 202–3, 217, 229–31, 252; A.J. Smithers, Rude Mechanicals: An Account of
Tank Maturity During the Second World War (London: Grafton, 1989), 221–22.
175. Wyldbore-Smith, March Past: The Memoirs of a Major-General. Montgomery
assigned Wyldbore-Smith as a battery commander to 5th Royal Horse Artillery and later to
179th Field Regiment (Worcestershire Yeomanry).
177. Ibid., 55.
179. Donna Winslow, ‘‘Misplaced Loyalties: Military Culture and the Breakdown of
Discipline in Two Peace Operations,’’ in The Human in Command: Exploring the Modern Mili-
tary Experience, ed. Carol McCann and Ross Pigeau (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum
Publishers, 2000), 293–309; Donna Winslow, The Canadian Airborne Regiment in Somalia:
A Socio-Cultural Inquiry (Ottawa, Canada: Canadian Government Publishing, 1997).
Chapter 3
1. Special operations forces are often considered to rely on ‘‘special’’ personnel skills, which
may be described by the other eight categories or may describe capabilities beyond the pre-
vious categories. For completeness, this project treats special operations personnel capabilities
as a separate category. Thus, special operations capabilities are examined in a distinct chapter.
2. Basil Henry Liddell Hart, Strategy: The Indirect Approach (London: Faber and Faber,
1954), 333.
3. [UK] Joint Doctrine and Concepts Centre, British Military Doctrine, Joint Warfare
Publication 0-01, 2nd ed. (Shrivenham, Wiltshire: Joint Doctrine and Concepts Centre,
October 2001), 1.2, 1.4.
4. US Joint Forces Command, Joint Operations, Joint Publication 3-0 (Suffolk, VA: Joint
Doctrine Group, 17 September 2006), II-2. Available at http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/
new_pubs/jp3_0.pdf.
5. Glenn A. Kent and William E. Simons, A Framework for Enhancing Operational
Capabilities (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 1991), 8–15.
6. Biddle, Military Power, ix.
7. Ibid., 18.
170 Notes
8. US Joint Forces Command, Joint Operations, II-2d, GL-31; US Joint Forces Command,
DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, Joint Publication 1-02 (Suffolk, VA: Joint
Doctrine Group, 12 April 2001, amended 8 August 2006). Available at http://www.dtic.mil
/doctrine/jel/doddict/.
9. [UK] Joint Doctrine and Concepts Centre, British Military Doctrine, 1.2.
10. Colin S. Gray, Modern Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 17.
11. Liddell Hart, Strategy: The Indirect Approach, 335.
12. [UK] Joint Doctrine and Concepts Centre, British Military Doctrine, 1.2.
13. Margiotta, Brassey’s Encyclopedia, 1003.
14. US Joint Forces Command, Joint Operations, GL-29; US Joint Forces Command,
DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms.
15. Richard K. Betts, ‘‘Should Strategic Studies Survive?’’ World Politics, 50, no. 1
(October 1997): 7–33, 8–9; John Baylis and James J. Wirtz, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Strategy in
the Contemporary World, ed. John Baylis, James Wirtz, Eliot Cohen, and Colin S. Gray
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1–14, 12.
16. Gray, War, Peace, and Victory, 33.
17. Strategy is studied within two particular fields in two different disciplines: ‘‘marketing
strategy’’ (a field of marketing) and ‘‘strategic management.’’
18. Lawrence Freedman, ‘‘The Future of Strategic Studies,’’ in Strategy in the Contemporary
World, ed. John Baylis, James Wirtz, Eliot Cohen, and Colin S. Gray (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 328–42, 336.
19. Edward Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire from the First Century A.D.
to the Third (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 1–2.
20. William J. Fanning Jr, ‘‘The Origin of the Term ‘Blitzkrieg’: Another View,’’ Journal of
Military History, 61, no. 2 (April 1997): 283–302.
21. Lewis, Forgotten Legions, xii–xiv, 45–55; Karl-Heinz Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende: Der
Westfeldzug 1940 (Muenchen: R. Oldenbourg, 1995).
22. Allan R. Millett, Williamson Murray, and Kenneth H. Watman, ‘‘The Effectiveness of
Military Organizations,’’ in Military Effectiveness, ed. Allan Reed Millett and Williamson Mur-
ray, vol. 1, The First World War (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 1–30, 3.
23. J.P. Harris and F.H. Toase, Armoured Warfare (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 2.
24. Kim R. Holmes, ‘‘Measuring the Conventional Balance in Europe,’’ International
Security, 12, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 166–73, 166.
25. Paul Kennedy, ‘‘Military Effectiveness in the First World War,’’ in Military Effectiveness,
Allan Reed Millett and Williamson Murray (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988): 329–50,
330–32.
26. Samuel J. Newland, Victories Are Not Enough: Limitations of the German Way of War
(Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2005).
27. John I. Alger, The Quest for Victory: The History of the Principles of War (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1982).
28. Krepenevich, The Army and Vietnam, 37. NATO defines doctrine as the ‘‘fundamental
principles by which military forces guide their actions in support of objectives.’’ The U.S. and
British militaries repeat this definition, although the British military goes on to define British
doctrine as ‘‘the best estimation of the way the UK’s Armed Forces, and those who command
them, should go about their military business.’’ [UK] Joint Doctrine and Concepts Centre,
British Military Doctrine, 1.1, 3.1; US Joint Forces Command, DOD Dictionary of Military
and Associated Terms.
Notes 171
29. Paul Johnston, ‘‘Doctrine Is Not Enough: The Effect of Doctrine on the Behavior of
Armies,’’ Parameters, 30, no. 3 (Autumn 2000): 30–39.
30. Griffith, ‘‘British Armoured Warfare,’’ 86; Place, Military Training in the British Army,
168; French, Raising Churchill’s Army, 159–234.
31. Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, 2.
32. See, for instance, Liddell Hart, Strategy: The Indirect Approach.
33. Gray, War, Peace, and Victory, 153.
34. John J. Mearsheimer, Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
35. Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, 3.
36. Richard K. Betts, ‘‘Conventional Deterrence: Predictive Uncertainty and Policy
Confidence,’’ World Politics, 37, no. 2 (January 1985): 153–79.
37. George Day and David J. Reibstein, eds., Wharton on Dynamic Competitive Strategy
(New York: John Wiley, 1997), 127–202.
38. Roger Evered, ‘‘So What Is Strategy?’’ Long Range Planning, 16, no. 3 (June 1983):
57–72.
39. Henry Mintzberg and James A. Waters, ‘‘Of Strategies: Deliberate and Emergent,’’
Strategic Management Journal, 6, no. 3 (July–September 1985): 257–72; Henry Mintzberg,
‘‘The Design School: Reconsidering the Basic Premises of Strategic Management,’’ Strategic
Management Journal, 11, no. 3 (March–April 1990): 171–95; Richard T. Pascale, ‘‘The
Honda Effect,’’ California Management Review, 38, no. 4 (Summer 1996): 80–91; Henry
Mintzberg and Joseph Lampel, ‘‘Reflecting on the Strategy Process,’’ Sloan Management
Review, 40, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 21–30.
40. Michael C. Mankins and Richard Steele, ‘‘Turning Great Strategy into Great Perfor-
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41. J. David Singer and Melvin Small,Correlates of War Project: International and Civil War
Data, 1816–1992 ([Computer file] Ann Arbor, MI: J. David Singer and Melvin Small [pro-
ducers], 1993. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research
[distributor], 1994).
42. Richard K. Betts, ‘‘Is Strategy an Illusion?’’ International Security, 25, no. 2 (Fall 2000):
5–50.
43. Biddle, Military Power, 49–50.
44. Place, Military Training in the British Army, 170–75; French, Raising Churchill’s Army,
242–46, 283–84; D’Este, Decision in Normandy, 259.
45. The U.S. Army defines command as ‘‘the authority that a commander in the
military service lawfully exercises over subordinates by virtue of rank or assignment.’’
[US] Department of the Army, Army Leadership: Competent, Confident, and Agile,
Field Manual 6-22 (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 12 October 2006),
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46. Alger, Quest for Victory, 180–81; Peter Paret, ‘‘Military Power,’’ Journal of Military His-
tory, 53, no. 3 (July 1989): 239–56, 239, 255; Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch, Military Mis-
fortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War (New York, London: Free Press, Collier Macmillan,
1990), 36–38.
47. Leon Alfred Pennington, Romeyn Beck Hough, and H.W. Case, The Psychology of
Military Leadership (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1943), 9–49.
48. Cohen and Gooch, Military Misfortunes, 37.
49. John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Viking Press, 1976).
172 Notes
50. Basil Henry Liddell Hart, A Greater Than Napoleon: Scipio Africanus (Edinburgh: W.
Blackwood & Sons, 1926); Basil Henry Liddell Hart, Great Captains Unveiled (Edinburgh:
W. Blackwood & Sons, 1927); Basil Henry Liddell Hart, Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American
(New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1929); J.F.C. Fuller, The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant
(London: J. Murray, 1929); J.F.C. Fuller, General Grant: A Biography for Young Americans
(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1932); J. F. C. Fuller, Grant & Lee: A Study in Personality and
Generalship (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1933).
51. George E. Reed, ‘‘Toxic Leadership,’’ Military Review, 84, no. 4 (July–August 2004):
67–71.
52. Martin L. Van Creveld, Command in War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1985).
53. Gray, ‘‘National Style in Strategy,’’ 32; Russell Frank Weigley, Eisenhower’s Lieutenants:
The Campaign of France and Germany, 1944–1945 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1981).
54. Cohen and Gooch, Military Misfortunes, 39–40.
55. Richard J. Overy, Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet War Effort, 1941–1945 (New
York: Penguin, 1998), xv, 328–30.
56. David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army
Stopped Hitler (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 285.
57. Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil–Mili-
tary Relations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957).
58. Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany Between
the World Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984).
59. Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002).
60. Griffith, ‘‘British Armoured Warfare,’’ 85–86; French, Raising Churchill’s Army, 217.
61. Krepenevich, The Army and Vietnam, 271, 275.
62. Paul B. Stares, Command Performance: The Neglected Dimension of European Security
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1991), 21.
63. Philip C. Jessup, Elihu Root (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1938); Richard
William Leopold, Elihu Root and the Conservative Tradition (Boston, MA: Little, Brown,
1954).
65. A. Wildavsky, The Politics of the Budgetary Process (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1964),
140; Niskanen, ‘‘The Defense Resource Allocation Process,’’ 17–20; McKean, ‘‘Remaining
Difficulties in Program Budgeting,’’ 70–72, 81; Bailey, ‘‘Defense Decentralization Through
Internal Prices,’’ 342.
66. Place, Military Training in the British Army, 147–52; French, Raising Churchill’s Army,
19–23, 55–56, 161, 192, 210, 218, 228, 246; Fortin, British Tanks in Normandy, 134–36.
67. Uhle-Wetter, ‘‘Auftragstaktik: Mission Orders and the German Experience’’; Widder,
‘‘Auftragstaktik and Innere Fuhrung: Trademarks of German Leadership.’’
68. Keith Spacie, ‘‘Leadership—The Centre of Command,’’ in The Human in Command:
Peace Support Operations, ed. Peter Essens, Ad Vogelaar, Erhan Tanercan, and Donna Winslow
(Amsterdam: Mets and Schilt, 2003), 37–51, 48.
70. The U.S. Army defines leadership as ‘‘the process of influencing people by providing
purpose, direction, and motivation while operating to accomplish the mission and improving
the organization.’’ [US] Department of the Army, Army Leadership, 1.2.
Notes 173
71. Paul M. Bons, ‘‘An Organizational Approach to the Study of Leadership,’’ in A Study of
Organizational Leadership, ed. United States, Military Academy, West Point, and Office of
Military Leadership (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1976), 13–26, 18.
72. Burns, Psychology and Leadership, 48; Ordway Tead, The Art of Leadership (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1935).
73. E. A. Fleishman and E. F. Harris, ‘‘Patterns of Leadership Behavior Related to
Employee Grievances and Turnover,’’ Personnel Psychology, 15, no. 2 (1962): 43–56; Elizabeth
W. Skinner, ‘‘Relationships Between Leadership Behavior Patterns and Organizational-
Situational Variables,’’ Personnel Psychology, 22, no. 4 (1969): 489–94; James G. Hunt and
Lars L. Larson, Leadership the Cutting Edge: A Symposium Held at Southern Illinois University,
Carbondale, October 27–28, 1976 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press,
1977); Paul C. Nystrom, ‘‘Managers and the Hi-Hi Leader Myth,’’ Academy of Management
Journal, 21, no. 2 (June 1978): 325–31; Van Fleet and Yukl, Military Leadership, 2–12,
31–44.
74. Baylis and Wirtz, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 29.
75. W.J. Wood, Leaders and Battles: The Art of Military Leadership (Novato, CA: Presidio
Press, 1984), 301–3.
76. Steven Metz, ‘‘The Mark of Strategic Genius,’’ Parameters, 21, no. 3 (Autumn 1991):
49–59.
77. Robert D. Kaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (New York:
Random House, 2002).
78. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, 74–76.
79. Bernard Law Montgomery, Montgomery of Alamein, The Path to Leadership (New
York: Putnam, 1961).
80. S. L. A. Marshall, ‘‘Leaders and Leadership,’’ in Military Leadership in Pursuit of
2000), 16–26, 22.
81. Reed, ‘‘Toxic Leadership.’’
82. Williamson Murray and Allan Reed Millett, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second
World War, 1937–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
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83. Samuel C. Kohs and K.W. Irle, ‘‘Prophesying Army Promotion,’’ Journal of Applied
Psychology, 4 (1920): 73–87; Helen H. Jennings, Leadership and Isolation: A Study of Personality
in Interpersonal Relations (New York: Longmans, Green, 1943); Pennington, Hough, and
Case, The Psychology of Military Leadership, 102–4; William O. Jenkins, ‘‘A Review of Leader-
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(1947): 54–79; Ralph M. Stogdill, ‘‘Personal Factors Associated With Leadership: A Survey
of the Literature,’’ Journal of Psychology, 25 (1948): 35–71; C.A. Gibb, ‘‘Leadership,’’ in Hand-
book of Social Psychology, ed. Gardner Lindzey (Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1954); R.D.
Mann, ‘‘A Review of the Relationship Between Personality and Performance in Small Groups,’’
Psychological Bulletin, 56 (1959): 241–70; Marshall Sashkin and William E. Rosenbach,
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Taylor and William E. Rosenbach (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 50–72.
84. Jay Alden Conger, Learning to Lead: The Art of Transforming Managers into Leaders
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992), 14–36.
85. Dan Horowitz, ‘‘Flexible Responsiveness and Military Strategy: The Case of the Israeli
Army,’’ Policy Sciences, 1, no. 2 (Summer 1970): 192–205.
174 Notes
86. Maurice Roumani, ‘‘The Military, Ethnicity, and Integration in Israel Revisited,’’ in
Ethnicity, Integration, and the Military, ed. Henry A. Dietz, Jerrold Elkin, and Maurice
M. Roumani (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 51–79.
87. Gregory Belenky, Shabtai Noy, and Zahava Solomon, ‘‘Battle Stress, Morale, Cohe-
sion, Combat Effectiveness, Heroism, and Psychiatric Casualties: The Israeli Experience,’’ in
Contemporary Studies in Combat Psychiatry, Gregory Belenky (New York: Greenwood Press,
1987), 11–20; Ben Shalit, The Psychology of Conflict and Combat (New York: Praeger, 1988).
88. Sidney Forman, The Educational Objectives of the US Military Academy: A Historical
Study of the Basic Academic, Physical and Character Training Aims of the United States Military
Academy (West Point, NY: United States Military Academy Printing Office, 1946).
89. Amy Waldman, ‘‘GIs: Not Your Average Joes. What the Military Can Teach Us About
Race, Class, and Citizenship,’’ in Military Leadership in Pursuit of Excellence, ed. Robert
L. Taylor and William E. Rosenbach (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 101–14, 108.
90. Lieutenant-Colonel Martin Klingenberg, Offizierschules des Heeres, Dresden,
Germany, email to author, 9 May 2003.
91. Henry Curtis Herge, ed., Wartime College Training Programs of the Armed Services
(Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 1948); Stimson and Bundy, On Active
Service in Peace and War, 457–61; Kennett, G.I.: The American Soldier, 21.
92. Ginzberg, Ineffective Soldier, 113–16, 272.
93. The correlation is −0.2. I used ‘‘war outcome’’ as coded by the Correlates of
War (Dinter, Hero or Coward?) dataset (Singer and Small, Correlates of War Project). The cor-
relate I used for education was the number of students in secondary (high school) education
divided by the total population. This correlate does not measure the proportion of soldiers
with secondary education; there is no time-series data for that. To some extent the correlate
measures development and demographics but these influences should aggregate out in the
sense that while developed polities can afford to educate a larger proportion of their popula-
tion, underdeveloped polities might have a larger proportion of their population in high
school. Peter Flora, Franz Kraus, and Winfried Pfenning, State, Economy, and Society in
Western Europe 1815–1975: A Data Handbook in Two Volumes (Frankfurt am Main, Germany,
and Chicago, IL: Campus Verlag/St. James Press, 1983); B.R. Mitchell, International Histori-
cal Statistics: Europe, 1750–1988 (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan/Stockton Press,
1992); B.R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: The Americas, 1750–1993 (London,
New York: Macmillan/Stockton Press, 1998); B.R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics:
Africa, Asia & Oceania, 1750–1993 (London, New York: Macmillan/Grove’s Dictionaries,
1998).
94. Yoakum and Yerkes, Army Mental Tests; Boring, Psychology for the Armed Services,
12–13, 231.
95. Meier, Military Psychology, 98–102; Thiesmeyer, Burchard, and Waterman, Combat
Scientists, 149.
96. Boring, Psychology for the Armed Services, 18; Bray, Psychology and Military
Proficiency.
97. Pennington, Hough, and Case, The Psychology of Military Leadership, 123–24.
98. Palmer, Procurement and Training, 50.
99. Stouffer, The American Soldier, 125.
101. A ‘‘Social Quotient’’ did not appear until the 1950s and has never been used to
select U.S. soldiers. The Social Quotient was derived from the Vineland Social Maturity Scale.
Notes 175
The scale was first published in 1936 but was not fully developed until the 1950s. Edgar A.
Doll, The Measurement of Social Competence: A Manual for the Vineland Social Maturity Scale
(Minneapolis, MN: Educational Test Bureau, Educational Publishers, 1953); Norman Leslie
Munn, The Evolution and Growth of Human Behavior: A Revision of Psychological Development
(Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), 442–44.
102. Michael J.A. Howe, IQ in Question: The Truth About Intelligence (Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage Publications, 1997); Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test: The Secret History of the
American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999).
103. Daniel Goleman, ‘‘What Makes a Leader?’’ Harvard Business Review, 76, no. 6
(November–December 1998): 93–102; Lieutenant General John H. Cushman, ‘‘Challenge
and Response at the Operational and Tactical Levels, 1914–45,’’ in Military Effectiveness, ed.
Allan Reed Millett and Williamson Murray, vol. 3, The Second World War (Boston, MA:
Unwin Hyman, 1988), 320–40.
104. James Robert Flynn, Asian Americans’ Achievement Beyond IQ (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erl-
baum Associates, 1991); Nathan Glazer, ‘‘Disaggregating Culture,’’ in Culture Matters: How
Values Shape Human Progress, ed. Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (New
York: Basic, 2002), 219–30.
105. Yuichi Shoda, Walter Mischel, and Philip K. Peake, ‘‘Predicting Adolescent Cognitive
and Self-Regulatory Competencies from Preschool Delay of Gratification: Identifying Diag-
nostic Conditions,’’ Developmental Psychology, 26, no. 6 (November 1990): 978–86.
106. John H. McWhorter, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (New York: Free
Press, 2000); Orlando Patterson, ‘‘Taking Culture Seriously: A Framework and an Afro-
American Illustration,’’ in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, ed. Lawrence
E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (New York: Basic, 2002), 202–18.
107. Peter Salovey and David J. Sluyter, Emotional Development and Emotional Intelligence:
Educational Implications (New York: Basic Books, 1997); David H. Marshall and Marilyn
D. McShane, ‘‘First to Fight: Domestic Violence and the Subculture of the Marine Corps,’’
in Battle Cries on the Home Front: Violence in the Military Family, ed. Peter J. Mercier and
Judith D. Mercier (Springfield, IL: C.C. Thomas, 2000), 15–29; Peter Salovey, Christopher
K. Shee, and John D. Mayer, ‘‘Emotional Intelligence and the Self-Regulation of Affect,’’ in
Handbook of Mental Control, ed. Daniel M. Wegner and James W. Pennebaker (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993), 258–77; Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer, ‘‘Emotional Intel-
ligence,’’ Imagination, Cognition & Personality, 9, no. 3 (1990): 185–211; Daniel Goleman,
Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam Books, 1995).
108. Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York,
NY: Basic Books, 1993); Howard Gardner, Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice
(New York, NY: Basic Books, 1993).
109. Robert J. Sternberg, Beyond IQ: A Triarchic Theory of Human Intelligence (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
110. Wendy M. Williams and Robert J. Sternberg, ‘‘Group Intelligence: Why Some
Groups Are Better Than Others,’’ Intelligence, 12, no. 4 (October–December 1988): 351–77.
111. Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, 114–15.
112. Pew and Mavor, Modeling Human and Organizational Behavior, 302–3.
113. Randy J. Larsen, Ed Diener, and Russell S. Cropanzano, ‘‘Cognitive Operations
Associated With Individual Differences in Affect Intensity,’’ Journal of Personality & Social Psy-
chology, 53, no. 4 (October 1987): 767–74.
176 Notes
115. Frank Bernieri and Robert Rosenthal, ‘‘Interpersonal Coordination, Behavior

Matching, and Interpersonal Synchrony,’’ in Fundamentals of Nonverbal Behavior, ed. Robert
S. Feldman and Bernard Rim (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991),
401–32.
116. Sledge, With the Old Breed, 266; Linderer, Eyes Behind the Lines, 290.
117. Lee C. Park and others, ‘‘Giftedness and Psychological Abuse in Borderline Personal-
ity Disorder: Their Relevance to Genesis and Treatment,’’ Journal of Personality Disorders, 6,
no. 3 (Fall 1992): 226–40.
118. Silverman and others, Combat Mission Team Performance, 2.
119. Williams and Sternberg, ‘‘Group Intelligence.’’
120. Secord and Backman, ‘‘Leadership,’’ 187.
121. Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and
Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
122. Dvir and others, ‘‘Impact of Transformational Leadership on Follower Development
and Performance: A Field Experiment.’’
123. Van Fleet and Yukl, Military Leadership, 11–13, 17–18; David M. Keithly and James
J. Tritten, ‘‘A Charismatic Dimension of Military Leadership?’’ in Military Leadership in
Pursuit of Excellence, ed. Robert L. Taylor and William E. Rosenbach (Boulder, CO: Westview
Press, 2000), 157–71, 163.
124. Jon J. Fallesen, ‘‘Developing Practical Thinking for Battle Command,’’ in
The Human in Command: Exploring the Modern Military Experience, ed. Carol McCann and
Ross Pigeau (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2000), 185–200, 187.
125. Lieutenant Colonel Bruce T. Woody Caine, ‘‘Leadership, Cohesion, and the Military
Novel,’’ Armor, 94, no. 5 (September–October 1990): 48–52.
126. James L. Stokesbury, ‘‘Leadership as an Art,’’ in Military Leadership in Pursuit of
2000), 141–56, 156.
130. Fritz, Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II, 12–13.
131. Vernon and Parry, Personnel Selection in the British Forces.
132. Bartlett, Psychology and the Soldier.
133. United States and Office of Strategic Services, Assessment of Men: Selection of Personnel
for the Office of Strategic Services (New York: Rinehart, 1948).
134. Angelo Mirabella, Guy L. Siebold, and James F. Lieutenant Colonel (US Army
retired) Love, ‘‘Self-Assessment of Command Performance and Feedback in Multiforce
Training,’’ in The Human in Command Exploring the Modern Military Experience, ed. Carol
McCann and Ross Pigeau (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2000),
249–62, 252.
135. Pfeffer, ‘‘Understanding Organizations: Concepts and Controversies,’’ 742–49.
136. Robin M. Dawes, Everyday Irrationality: How Pseudo-Scientists, Lunatics, and the Rest
of Us Systematically Fail to Think Rationality (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001).
137. Fallesen, ‘‘Developing Practical Thinking,’’ 188.
138. Pew and Mavor, Modeling Human and Organizational Behavior, 13.
139. Karol G. Ross and others, ‘‘The Recognition-Primed Decision Model,’’ Military
Review, 84, no. 4 (July–August 2004): 6–10.
Notes 177
140. Paul Fussell, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in With the Old Breed, at Peleliu and Okinawa,
E.B. Sledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), xvi.
142. Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (New York: Atlantic
Monthly Press, 1999), 233.
143. Walter Schneider and Richard M. Shiffrin, ‘‘Controlled and Automatic Human
Information Processing: I. Detection, Search, and Attention,’’ Psychological Review, 84,
no. 1 (January 1977): 1–66; Richard M. Shiffrin and Walter Schneider, ‘‘Controlled
and Automatic Human Information Processing: II. Perceptual Learning, Automatic
Attending and a General Theory,’’ Psychological Review, 84, no. 2 (March 1977): 127–90;
Schneider and Shiffrin, ‘‘Detection, Search, and Attention’’; Shiffrin and Schneider,
‘‘Perceptual Learning, Automatic Attending and a General Theory’’; Gordon D. Logan,
‘‘Toward an Instance Theory of Automatization,’’ Psychological Review, 95, no. 4 (October
1988): 492–527.
144. Caroline E. Zsambok and Gary A. Klein, eds., Naturalistic Decision Making
(Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1997), 4.
145. William C. Howell, ‘‘Progress, Prospects, and Problems in NDM: A Global View,’’ in
Naturalistic Decision Making, ed. Caroline E. Zsambok and Gary A. Klein (Mahwah, NJ:
L. Erlbaum Associates, 1997), 37–46.
146. Joseph E. LeDoux and William Hirst, Mind and Brain: Dialogues in Cognitive Neuro-
science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Michael S. Gazzaniga and
Joseph E. LeDoux, The Integrated Mind (New York: Plenum Press, 1978); Joseph E. LeDoux,
The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1996).
147. Daniel P. Bolger, Savage Peace: Americans at War in the 1990s (Novato, CA: Presidio,
1995), 318; Bowden, Black Hawk Down, 167.
148. Bowden, Black Hawk Down, 42.
149. Ibid., 63.
150. Kennett, G.I.: The American Soldier, 135.
151. Bowden, Black Hawk Down, 150–55, 345–46.
152. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi, Optimal Experience:
Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988); Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and
Invention (New York: Harper Collins, 1996); Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow: The
Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 1997); Mihaly Csiks-
zentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990);
Susan A. Jackson and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow in Sports (Champaign, IL: Human
Kinetics, 1999).
154. Jean A. Hamilton, Richard J. Haier, and Monte S. Buchsbaum, ‘‘Intrinsic Enjoyment
and Boredom Coping Scales: Validation with Personality, Evoked Potential and Attention
Measures,’’ Personality and Individual Differences, 5, no. 2 (1984): 183–93.
156. Linderer, Eyes Behind the Lines, 166.
157. Jon Christian Laberg and others, ‘‘Coping with Interrogations,’’ in The Human in
Command: Exploring the Modern Military Experience, ed. Carol McCann and Ross Pigeau
(New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2000), 333–44.
178 Notes
158. Gary Klein, ‘‘An Overview of Naturalistic Decision Making Applications,’’ in

Naturalistic Decision Making, ed. Caroline E. Zsambok and Gary A. Klein (Mahwah, NJ:
L. Erlbaum Associates, 1997), 49–60; Janis A. Cannon-Bowers and Herbert H. Bell,
‘‘Training Decision Makers for Complex Environments: Implications of the Naturalistic
Decision Making Perspective,’’ in Naturalistic Decision Making, ed. Caroline E. Zsambok
and Gary A. Klein (Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1997), 99–110.
159. Klein, ‘‘An Overview of Naturalistic Decision Making Applications’’; Gary A. Klein,
Intuition at Work: Why Developing Your Gut Instincts Will Make You Better at What You Do
(New York: Currency/Doubleday, 2003); Ross and others, ‘‘The Recognition-Primed
Decision Model.’’
161. Ibid., 154–61.
Chapter 4
1. Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, 83–86; Stress was first examined by Hans Selye. Hans
Selye, The Stress of Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956).
2. J. Frank Yates, Roberta L. Klatzky, and Carolynn A. Young, ‘‘Cognitive Performance
Under Stress,’’ in Emerging Needs and Opportunities for Human Factors Research, ed. Raymond
S. Nickerson (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1995), 262–90, 263.
3. Tead, The Art of Leadership, 219–20; Meier, Military Psychology, 186–89.
4. Carl R. Rogers, Counseling and Psychotherapy: Newer Concepts in Practice (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1942), 11–13; Robert Dick Gillespie, Psychological Effects of War on
Citizen and Soldier (New York: W. W. Norton, 1942), 166–216.
5. Kennett, G.I.: The American Soldier, 28–29.
6. Yates, Klatzky, and Young, ‘‘Cognitive Performance Under Stress,’’ 268–69.
7. David Mark Mantell, True Americanism: Green Berets and War Resisters. A Study of Com-
mitment (New York: Teachers College Press, 1974), 7.
8. Pennington, Hough, and Case, The Psychology of Military Leadership, 171–77; Boring,
Psychology for the Armed Services, 363–68; Elliot Duncan Cooke, All But Me and Thee
(Washington, DC: Infantry Journal Press, 1946), 63; Bray, Psychology and Military Proficiency,
74–83; Palmer, Procurement and Training, 14, 71–72; Bernard J. Wiest and Donald A. Davis,
‘‘Psychiatric and Social Work Services,’’ in Handbook of Military Institutions, ed. Roger
William Little (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1971), 319–45, 325; Belenky and Jones,
‘‘Introduction: Combat Psychiatry,’’ 3.
10. Thiesmeyer, Burchard, and Waterman, Combat Scientists, 143–46; Linderman,
World Within War, 356. The U.S. Army discharged 470,000 soldiers as psychologically
‘‘ineffective’’ between 1942 inclusive and the end of the war in 1945. Ginzberg, Ineffective
Soldier, 20. An ‘‘ineffective soldier’’ was defined ‘‘as any man whom the army discharged
prior to demobilization for reasons of psychoneurosis, psychosis, inaptitude, or traits of
character which made him unsuitable for retention in military service.’’ Ginzberg, Ineffective
Soldier, 19.
11. Van Creveld, Fighting Power, 95.
12. Gillespie, Psychological Effects of War; Carl R. Rogers and John L. Wallen, Counseling
with Returned Servicemen (New York, London: McGraw-Hill, 1946). In July 1944, the United
States activated field research into the supposed opportunity to demoralize the enemy by
Notes 179
manipulating the psychological effects of weapons. Thiesmeyer, Burchard, and Waterman,

Combat Scientists, 143–46.
13. C.R. Snyder and others, ‘‘The Will and the Ways: Development and Validation of an
Individual-Differences Measure of Hope,’’ Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 60, no. 4
(April 1991): 570–85; Philip R. Magaletta and J.M. Oliver, ‘‘The Hope Construct, Will, and
Ways: Their Relations With Self-Efficacy, Optimism, and General Well-Being,’’ Journal of
Clinical Psychology, 55, no. 5 (May 1999): 539–51.
14. Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1991).
15. Albert Bandura, Self-Efficacy in Changing Societies (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1995); Albert Bandura, Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control (New York:
W.H. Freeman, 1997).
16. Waldman, ‘‘GIs: Not Your Average Joes.’’
17. Keith S. Dobson, ‘‘A Meta-Analysis of the Efficacy of Cognitive Therapy for
Depression,’’ Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 57, no. 3 (June 1989):
414–19.
18. Shelley E. Taylor and others, ‘‘Maintaining Positive Illusions in the Face of Negative
Information: Getting the Facts Without Letting Them Get to You,’’ Journal of Social &
Clinical Psychology, 8, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 114–29.
19. Colonel Olen D. Thornton, ‘‘The Vietnam Connection,’’ in Human Relations in the
Military: Problems and Programs, ed. George Henderson (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1975),
163–75.
21. Jerome L. Singer, Repression and Dissociation: Implications for Personality Theory,
Psychopathology, and Health (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
23. Shabtai Noy, ‘‘Stress and Personality as Factors in the Causation and Prognosis of
Combat Reaction,’’ in Contemporary Studies in Combat Psychiatry, ed. Gregory Belenky
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 21–29; Shabtai Noy, ‘‘Combat Psychiatry: The Ameri-
can and Israeli Experience,’’ in Contemporary Studies in Combat Psychiatry, ed. Gregory
Belenky (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 69–86.
24. Noy, ‘‘Combat Psychiatry,’’ 77.
25. Robert J. MacCoun, ‘‘What Is Known About Unit Cohesion and Military
Performance,’’ in Sexual Orientation and U.S. Military Personnel Policy, Options and Assessment,
Bernard D. Rostker and Scott A. Harris, study group directors (Santa Monica, CA: RAND,
MR-323-OSD, 1993, 1993), chap. 10, 297.
26. P.D. Bliese and R.R. Halverson, ‘‘Individual and Nomothetic Models of Job Stress: An
Examination of Work Hours, Cohesion, and Well-Being,’’ Journal of Applied Social Psychology,
26 (1996): 1171–89; James Griffith, ‘‘Test of a Model Incorporating Stress, Strain, and
Disintegration in the Cohesion-Performance Relation,’’ Journal of Applied Social Psychology,
27, no. 17 (1997): 1489–526.
27. Sledge, With the Old Breed, 125–26.
28. Ibid., 217.
30. Ibid., 176.
31. S. L. A. Marshall, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future
War (Washington, DC, and New York: Infantry Journal/William Morrow & Co., 1947),
123–24; Kennett, G.I.: The American Soldier, 135.
180 Notes
32. David H. Marlowe, Psychological and Psychosocial Consequences of Combat and Deploy-
ment with Special Emphasis on the Gulf War (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001), 123.
36. Ibid., 157.
38. Leon Festinger, ‘‘Informal Social Communication,’’ Psychological Review, 57 (1950):
271–82, 274.
39. B. Mullen and C. Copper, ‘‘The Relation Between Group Cohesion and Performance:
An Integration,’’ Psychological Bulletin, 115, no. 2 (1994): 210–27, 210.
40. MacCoun, ‘‘What Is Known About Unit Cohesion,’’ 287.
41. Siebold, ‘‘Small Unit Dynamics,’’ 240.
42. Ibid., 12.
43. Ibid., 112.
44. Guy L. Siebold and Twila J. Lindsay, ‘‘The Relation Between Demographic Descrip-
tors and Soldier-Perceived Cohesion and Motivation,’’ 11, no. 1 (1999): 109–28, 112.
45. Guy L. Siebold, ‘‘The Evolution of the Measurement of Cohesion,’’ Military Psychol-
ogy, 11, no. 1 (1999): 5–26, 6.
46. Laurel W. Oliver and others, ‘‘A Quantitative Integration of the Military Cohesion
Literature,’’ Military Psychology, 11, no. 1 (1999): 57–83, 79.
47. Taik-Young Hamm, Arming the Two Koreas: State, Capital, and Military Power
(London, New York: Routledge, 1999), 48.
48. Boring, Psychology for the Armed Services, 335–37.
49. Gal, ‘‘Unit Morale’’; Reuven Gal and Frederick J. Manning, ‘‘Morale and Its Compo-
nents: A Cross-National Comparison,’’ Journal of Applied Social Pyschology, 17, no. 4 (1987):
369–91.
51. Ingraham and Manning, ‘‘Cohesion: Who Needs It?’’ 6.
52. James Griffith, ‘‘The Measurement of ‘Soldier Will,’’’ in New Manning System Field
Evaluation: Technical Report No. 1, David H. Marlowe, Theodore P. Furukawa, James E. Grif-
fith, Larry H. Ingraham, Faris R. Kirkland, James A. Martin, Robert J. Schneider, and Joel M.
Teitelbaum (Washington, DC: Department of Military Psychiatry, Walter Reed Army
Institute of Research, AD-A162 087, November 1, 1985), chapter V.
53. Anthony Kellett, ‘‘Combat Motivation,’’ in Contemporary Studies in Combat Psychiatry,
ed. Gregory Belenky (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987), 205–32, 206.
54. Ibid., 206.
56. James Griffith and Mark Vaitkus, ‘‘Relating Cohesion to Stress, Strain, Disintegration,
and Performance: An Organizing Framework,’’ Military Psychology, 11, no. 1 (1999): 27–
55, 38.
57. Defense Management Study Group on Military Cohesion, Cohesion in the U.S.
Military, ix.
58. Henderson, Cohesion: The Human Element, 4.
59. British Army Directorate General of Development and Doctrine, Army Doctrine Pub-
lication, Volume 1, Operations (London: Directorate General of Development and Doctrine,
Army Code No. 71565, June 1994), para. 0217.
Notes 181
60. Siebold, ‘‘The Evolution of the Measurement of Cohesion,’’ 20–21.

61. Griffith and Vaitkus, ‘‘Relating Cohesion to Stress,’’ 38.
62. Guy L. Siebold and Dennis R. Kelly, Development of the Platoon Cohesion Index (Alex-
andria, VA: Army Research Institute, Technical Report 816, October 1988), 2.
63. Siebold and Lindsay, ‘‘Demographic Descriptors and Soldier-Perceived Cohesion,’’
113.
64. Bliese and Halverson, ‘‘Individual and Nomothetic Models,’’ 1174.
66. Siebold and Kelly, Development of the Platoon Cohesion Index, 2.
113.
68. Bliese and Halverson, ‘‘Individual and Nomothetic Models,’’ 1174.
72. Kellett, ‘‘Combat Motivation,’’ 211–12.
74. Robert Rielly, ‘‘The Darker Side of the Force: The Negative Influence of Cohesion,’’
Military Review, 81, no. 2 (March–April 2001): 58–64, 67.
76. R. W. Little, ‘‘Buddy Relations and Combat Performance,’’ in The New Military:
Changing Patterns of Organization, ed. Morris Janowitz and Russell Sage Foundation (New
York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1964), 195–224.
77. Savage and Gabriel, ‘‘Cohesion and Disintegration’’; Charles C. Moskos, ‘‘Vietnam:
Why Men Fight,’’ in A Study of Organizational Leadership, ed. United States, Military
Academy, West Point, and Office of Military Leadership (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole
Books, 1976), 291–308; Sam Charles Sarkesian, Combat Effectiveness: Cohesion, Stress, and
the Volunteer Military (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1980).
78. George, ‘‘Primary Groups,’’ 306; Henderson, Cohesion: The Human Element, 6, 11.
79. Bartone and Adler, ‘‘Cohesion Over Time,’’ 101; Siebold and Lindsay, ‘‘Demographic
Descriptors and Soldier-Perceived Cohesion,’’ 126; Paul T. Bartone and others, ‘‘Factors
Influencing Small-Unit Cohesion in Norwegian Navy Officer Cadets,’’ Military Psychology,
14, no. 1 (2002): 1–22, 16.
80. Elizabeth Kier, ‘‘Homosexuals in the US Military—Open Integration and Combat
Effectiveness,’’ International Security, 23, no. 2 (Fall 1998): 5–29, 15–17.
82. Margaret C. Harrell and Laura L. Miller, New Opportunities for Military Women: Effects
Upon Readiness, Cohesion, and Morale (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, MR-896-OSD, 1997),
53–54.
85. Mullen and Copper, ‘‘Group Cohesion and Performance,’’ 221, 224.
86. Griffith, ‘‘Test of a Model Incorporating Stress.’’
126.
89. Harris and Segal, ‘‘Observations from the Sinai.’’
182 Notes
90. Bartone and Adler, ‘‘Cohesion Over Time,’’ 102–3.

91. Leonard Wong, Why They Fight: Combat Motivation in the Iraq War (Carlisle Barracks,
PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2003), 10.
92. Oliver and others, ‘‘Quantitative Integration of the Military Cohesion,’’ 79.
94. Mullen and Copper, ‘‘Group Cohesion and Performance,’’ 213.
95. James Griffith, ‘‘Multilevel Analysis of Cohesion’s Relation to Stress, Well-Being,
Identification, Disintegration, and Perceived Combat Readiness,’’ Military Psychology, 14,
no. 3 (2002): 217–39, 235.
96. Bibb Latané, ‘‘The Psychology of Social Impact,’’ American Psychologist, 36, no. 4
(April 1981): 343–56.
97. Siebold and Kelly, Development of the Platoon Cohesion Index, 2.
113.
99. Griffith and Vaitkus, ‘‘Relating Cohesion to Stress,’’ 39; Griffith, ‘‘Multilevel Analysis
of Cohesion’s Relation,’’ 222.
101. Kellett, ‘‘Combat Motivation,’’ 208.
102. John P. Meyer and Natalie J. Allen, ‘‘Testing the ‘Side Bet Theory’ of Organizational
Commitment: Some Methodological Considerations,’’ Journal of Applied Psychology, 69, no. 3
(1984): 372–78.
103. Laurel W. Oliver, Ronald B. Tiggle, and Stephanie M. Hayes, ‘‘Reasons for Volun-
teering and Anticipated Deployment Effects,’’ in Reserve Component Soldiers As Peacekeepers,
ed. Ruth H. Phelps and Beatrice J. Farr (Alexandria, VA: US Army Research Institute for
the Behavioral and Social Sciences, 1996), 97–116, 99.
104. Fred A. Mael, Robert N. Kilcullen, and Leonard A. White, ‘‘Soldier Attributes for
Peacekeeping and Peacemaking,’’ in Reserve Component Soldiers As Peacekeepers, ed. Ruth H.
Phelps and Beatrice J. Farr (Alexandria, VA: US Army Research Institute for the Behavioral
and Social Sciences, 1996), 29–57, 35.
105. Fred A. Mael and Cathie E. Alderks, ‘‘Leadership Team Cohesion and Subordinate
Work Unit Morale and Performance,’’ Military Psychology, 5, no. 3 (1993): 141–58.
106. Oliver and others, ‘‘Quantitative Integration of the Military Cohesion,’’ 71.
107. Ibid.
108. Gal and Manning, ‘‘Morale and Its Components,’’ 43.
109. Kellett, ‘‘Combat Motivation,’’ 205; Gal, ‘‘Unit Morale,’’ 549.
110. Jon W. Blades, Rules for Leadership: Improving Unit Performance (Washington, DC:
National Defense University Press, 1986).
111. Winkler, Hove, and Hix, Stability and Cohesion, 5.
112. Griffith and Vaitkus, ‘‘Relating Cohesion to Stress,’’ 42–43.
113. Mullen and Copper, ‘‘Group Cohesion and Performance,’’ 216, 219–20.
114. Ibid., 213, 224.
115. Oliver and others, ‘‘Quantitative Integration of the Military Cohesion,’’ 74–75.
116. Griffith and Vaitkus, ‘‘Relating Cohesion to Stress,’’ 40–41.
117. Savage and Gabriel, ‘‘Cohesion and Disintegration.’’
118. Frederick J. Manning and Lawrence H. Ingraham, ‘‘An Investigation into the Value of
Cohesion During Peacetime,’’ in Contemporary Studies in Combat Psychiatry, ed. Gregory
Belenky (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 47–68.
Notes 183
119. Oliver and others, ‘‘Quantitative Integration of the Military Cohesion,’’ 74–75.
120. Ibid.
126.
124. Bartone and others, ‘‘Factors Influencing Small-Unit Cohesion,’’ 17.
126. Siebold, ‘‘The Evolution of the Measurement of Cohesion,’’ 11–13.
127. Ibid., 20; Michael A. Hogg and Sarah C. Hains, ‘‘Intergroup Relations and Group
Solidarity: Effects of Group Identification and Social Beliefs on Depersonalized Attraction,’’
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, no. 2 (1996): 295–309.
128. Siebold, ‘‘The Evolution of the Measurement of Cohesion,’’ 19–20; Bartone
and others, ‘‘Factors Influencing Small-Unit Cohesion,’’ 19; Griffith and Vaitkus, ‘‘Relating
Cohesion to Stress,’’ 47–48.
129. Siebold, ‘‘The Evolution of the Measurement of Cohesion,’’ 22.
131. Bartone and Adler, ‘‘Cohesion Over Time,’’ 87.
132. Siebold, ‘‘Small Unit Dynamics,’’ 248–51.
125.
134. Bartone and Adler, ‘‘Cohesion Over Time,’’ 100.
135. Harris and Segal, ‘‘Observations from the Sinai,’’ 247.
137. Ingraham and Manning, ‘‘Cohesion: Who Needs It?’’ 8–9.
138. Bartone and others, ‘‘Factors Influencing Small-Unit Cohesion,’’ 15–16.
139. Griffith, ‘‘Multilevel Analysis of Cohesion’s Relation,’’ 236.
140. Bartone and Adler, ‘‘Cohesion Over Time,’’ 101; Siebold and Lindsay, ‘‘Demo-
graphic Descriptors and Soldier-Perceived Cohesion,’’ 126; Bartone and others, ‘‘Factors
Influencing Small-Unit Cohesion,’’ 16.
Chapter 5
2. Gal, ‘‘Unit Morale,’’ 549.
3. Marshall, Men Against Fire; Dave Grossman and Loren W. Christensen, On Combat:
The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace (Millstadt, IL: PPCT
Research Publications, 2004).
4. Tony Ashworth, Trench Warfare, 1914–1918: The Live and Let Live System (New York,
NY: Holmes & Meier, 1980); Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic
Books, 1984), chap. 4; Brown, Draftee Division, 93.
5. Stouffer, The American Soldier, II, 192; Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-
Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare, 236.
7. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
(Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1995).
8. Grossman, On Killing; Grossman and Christensen, On Combat.
184 Notes
9. Bourke, Intimate History of Killing.

10. Place, Military Training in the British Army; French, Raising Churchill’s Army, 155.
11. Paolo Tripodi, ‘‘Peacekeepers of the Twenty-First Century: A Comparison Between
Professional Soldiers and Draftees in Peace Support Operations,’’ Small Wars and Insurgencies,
14, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 71–86, 72–73.
12. Charles Jean Jacques Joseph Ardant du Picq, Battle Studies: Ancient and Modern Battle
(New York: Macmillan, 1921).
13. Keegan, The Face of Battle, 72.
15. Harry J. Gilman, ‘‘Military Manpower Utilization,’’ in Defense Management, ed.
Stephen Enke (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 246–66.
16. Bourke, Intimate History of Killing, 120.
18. J. H. Johns, ed., Cohesion in the US Military (Washington, DC: National Defense
19. Stanley-Mitchell, ‘‘Military Profession and Intangible Rewards,’’ 113.
20. Micha Popper, ‘‘Leadership in Military Combat Units and Business Organizations: A
Comparative Psychological Analysis,’’ in Military Leadership in Pursuit of Excellence, ed. Rob-
ert L. Taylor and William E. Rosenbach (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 172–83, 179.
24. Richard J. Buddin, Building a Personnel Support Agenda: Goals, Analysis Framework,
and Data Requirements (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1998), xix, 45.
25. Kellett, ‘‘Soldier in Battle,’’ 232.
27. Richard A. Gabriel, Military Incompetence: Why the American Military Doesn’t Win
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 198–99.
28. Martin Van Creveld, The Art of War: War and Military Thought (London: Cassell,
2000), chap. 1–3.
29. Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), bk. 1,
chap. 1, 3, bk. 3, chap. 4–5.
30. Cherrie, ‘‘Human in Command,’’ 23.
31. Ralph Peters, Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? (Mechanicsburg, PA:
Stackpole, 2001), 46, 197, 199.
32. Robert S. Robins and Jerrold M. Post, Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 279.
33. Isby, Fighting the Invasion, 95.
34. Ibid., 158.
35. Albert Seaton, The German Army, 1933–45 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 87–
112; Kroener, ‘‘Squaring the Circle’’; Lewis, Forgotten Legions, 64.
36. Keegan, The Face of Battle, 114–16.
37. Clausewitz, On War, bk. 1, chap. 3; Patrick Mileham, ‘‘Fighting Spirit: Has It a
Future?’’ in The British Army, Manpower, and Society into the Twenty-First Century, ed. Hew
Strachan (London, Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2000), 242–57; Roberts, ‘‘Fit to Fight,’’ 194.
38. James William Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1994).
Notes 185
39. United States and Department of the Army, Military Leadership (Washington, DC:
United States, Department of the Army, July 31, 1990), 54.
40. Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czece, ‘‘A Comprehensive View of Leadership,’’ in
Military Leadership in Pursuit of Excellence, Robert L. Taylor and William E. Rosenbach
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 27–36, 34, 36; James T. Hirai and Kim L. Summers,
‘‘Leader Development and Education: Growing Leaders Now for the Future,’’ Military Review,
85, no. 3 (May–June 2005), 86–95, 89; United States and Department of the Army, Training
the Force (Washington, DC: United States, Department of the Army, October 22, 2002), 1–6,
Glossary-17.
41. Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (New
York: Henry Holt, 1998), 117.
42. Colonel Canadian Army M.D. Capstick, ‘‘Command and Leadership in Other Peo-
ple’s Wars,’’ in The Human in Command Exploring the Modern Military Experience, ed. Carol
McCann and Ross Pigeau (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2000), 83–92,
87; Christopher Bellamy, ‘‘Combining Combat Readiness and Compassion,’’ NATO Review,
49 (Summer 2001): 9–11.
43. Captain William M. Connor Jr, ‘‘Developing the Warrior Spirit in Ranger Training,’’
Infantry, 89, no. 2 (May–August 1999), 45–47, 46; Lieutenant General US Army Walter F.
Ulmer Jr, ‘‘Military Leadership into the 21st Century: Another ‘Bridge Too Far?’’’ in Military
Leadership in Pursuit of Excellence, Robert L. Taylor and William E. Rosenbach (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 2000), 233–57, 234, 248.
44. Bourke, Intimate History of Killing, 4–31.
46. Sledge, With the Old Breed, 257–58.
47. Jonathan Stevenson, Losing Mogadishu: Testing U.S. Policy in Somalia (Annapolis, MD:
Naval Institute Press, 1995), 11–12.
48. Bowden, Black Hawk Down, 21, 51, 75, 109, 117, 125, 216–17, 234, 257,
272.
49. Hans Joachim Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace
(New York: A. A. Knopf, 1948), 138.
50. Kennett, G.I.: The American Soldier, 84; George A. Kourvetaris and Betty A. Dobratz,
Social Origins and Political Orientations of Officer Corps in a World Perspective (Denver, CO:
University of Denver, 1973).
51. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political
Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955).
52. Gray, ‘‘National Style in Strategy,’’ 24.
54. Alfred Vagts, A History of Militarism: Civilian and Military (New York: Meridian
Books, 1959), 13.
55. Kourvetaris and Dobratz, Social Origins and Political Orientations, 9–14; George C.
Herring, ‘‘Preparing Not to Refight the Last War: The Impact of the Vietnam War on the
US Military,’’ in After Vietnam: Legacies of a Lost War, ed. Charles E. Neu (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 56–84, 82–84; Michael C. Desch and Peter D.
Feaver, ‘‘Civilian Control of the Military: The Changing Security Environment,’’ American
Political Science Review, 94, no. 2 (June 2000): 506–7; Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn,
Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
186 Notes
56. Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the
South (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).
57. Waldman, ‘‘GIs: Not Your Average Joes,’’ 108.
58. Huntington, Soldier and the State.
59. Samuel P. Huntington, ‘‘New Contingencies, Old Roles,’’ Joint Force Quarterly,
Autumn 1993, 38–43; Andrew J. Bacevich, ‘‘Neglected Trinity: Kosovo and the Crisis in US
Civil–Military Relations,’’ in War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age, ed. A.J.
Bacevich and Eliot A. Cohen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 155–88,
183–84.
60. Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait (Glencoe, IL:
Free Press, 1960); Allen Guttmann, The Conservative Tradition in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1967); Marcus Cunliffe, Soldiers & Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America,
1775–1865 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1968), 387–404; Canby, Military Manpower
Procurement, 48–49.
61. Krepenevich, The Army and Vietnam, 215–60.
62. Linderer, Eyes Behind the Lines, 238–39.
63. Shalit, The Psychology of Conflict and Combat.
64. Richard J. Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 23, 324–25;
Overy, Russia’s War, 328–30.
65. James Brown, ‘‘Greece and Turkey: The Military and Social Integration,’’ in Ethnicity,
Integration, and the Military, ed. Henry A. Dietz, Jerrold Elkin, and Maurice M. Roumani
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 81–104, 90–91.
68. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, 57–60; Ambrose, Supreme Commander, 322.
69. Stouffer, The American Soldier, II, 108–10.
70. Place, Military Training in the British Army, 57; French, Raising Churchill’s Army, 126,
133.
71. Emlio Willems, A Way of Life and Death: Three Centuries of Prussian-German
Militarism. An Anthropological Approach (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1986),
133.
72. Daniel Lerner, Psychological Warfare Against Nazi Germany: The Sykewar Campaign,
D-Day to VE-Day (Cambridge, MA: Institute of Technology Press, 1949); Van Creveld,
Fighting Power, 84–87; Willems, Way of Life and Death, 142.
73. Alexander L. George, Propaganda Analysis: A Study of Inferences Made from
Nazi Propaganda in World War II (Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson, 1959); William Chapman
Bradbury, Samuel M. Meyers, and Albert D. Biderman, Mass Behavior in Battle and Captivity:
The Communist Soldier in the Korean War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Amos
A. Jordan Jr, ‘‘Troop Information and Indoctrination,’’ in Handbook of Military Institutions,
Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society and Roger William Little (Beverly
Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1971), 347–71, 357.
76. Overy, Russia’s War, xvi–xix; Glantz and House, When Titans Clashed, 288–90.
77. Isby, Fighting the Invasion, 12.
78. James D. Morrow, ‘‘Social Choice and System Structure in World Politics,’’ World
Politics, 41, no. 1 (October 1988): 75–97, 81–83.
Notes 187
79. Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of
Property and Nations (New York: Atheneum, 1966), 236–37.
80. Jensen, Explaining Foreign Policy, 216.
81. Robins and Post, Political Paranoia, 89–112.
82. Ginzberg, Ineffective Soldier, 113–272; Charles C. Moskos Jr, ‘‘Minority Groups in
Military Organization,’’ in Handbook of Military Institutions, ed. Roger William Little (Beverly
Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1971), 217–89, 279; Dale E. Wilson, ‘‘Recipe for Failure: Major
General Edward M Almond and Preparation of the US 92d. Infantry Division for Combat in
World War II,’’ Journal of Military History, 56, no. 3 (July 1992): 473–88.
84. T.A. Heathcote, ‘‘The Army of British India,’’ in The Military in British India: The
Development of British Land Forces in South Asia, 1600–1947 (Manchester, UK: Manchester
85. Raju G. C. Thomas and Bharat Karnad, ‘‘The Military and National Integration in
India,’’ in Ethnicity, Integration, and the Military, ed. Henry A. Dietz, Jerrold Elkin, and Mau-
rice M. Roumani (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 127–49.
87. Gillespie, Psychological Effects of War, 168.
88. Kellett, Combat Motivation, 308–9.
89. Lieutenant Colonel Karen O. Dunivin, ‘‘Military Culture: Change and Continuity,’’
in Military Leadership in Pursuit of Excellence, ed. Robert L. Taylor and William E. Rosenbach
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 27–36, 90.
91. Sangmie Choi Schellstede and Soon Mi Yu, Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex
Slaves of the Japanese Military (New York: Holmes & Meier, 2000); Margaret D. Stetz and
Bonnie B.C. Oh, Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe,
2001); George L. Hicks, The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in
the Second World War (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995).
92. Alexandra Stiglmayer, Mass Rape: The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); Beverly Allen, Rape Warfare: The Hidden
Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996).
93. Brian Mitchell, Weak Link: The Feminization of the American Military (Washington,
DC: Regnery Gateway, 1989). Some subscribers to this position are women: Marie DeYoung,
This Woman’s Army: The Dynamics of Sex and Violence in the Military (Central Point, OR:
Hellgate Press, 1999); Stephanie Gutmann, The Kinder, Gentler Military: Can America’s
Gender-Neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars? (New York: Scribner, 2000). Even Jacqueline
Cochran, former director of the (US) Women’s Air Force Service Pilots, used gender roles in
arguing against the U.S. military’s integration in the 1970s. Lance Janda, ‘‘‘A Simple Matter
of Equality’: The Admission of Women to West Point,’’ in A Soldier and a Woman: Sexual
Integration in the Military, ed. Gerard J. De Groot and C. M. Peniston-Bird (New York:
Pearson Education, 2000), 305–19, 307.
94. Miriam Cooke, ‘‘Subverting the Gender and Military Paradigm,’’ in It’s Our Military,
Too! Women and the U.S. Military, ed. Judith Stiehm (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University
Press, 1996), 235–69.
95. Robert B. Edgerton, Warrior Women: The Amazons of Dahomey and the Nature of War
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000).
188 Notes
96. Laurie Stoff, ‘‘They Fought for Russia: Female Soldiers of the First World War,’’ in
A Soldier and a Woman: Sexual Integration in the Military, Gerard J. De Groot and
C.M. Peniston-Bird (New York: Pearson Education, 2000), 66–82.
97. Bruce Myles, Night Witches: The Untold Story of Soviet Women in Combat (Novato,
CA: Presidio, 1981); Anne Noggle, A Dance With Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II
(College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1994); Kazimiera Janina Cottam, Women
in Air War: The Eastern Front of World War II (New York, Ottawa: Legas, 1997); Reina
Pennington, ‘‘‘Do Not Speak of the Services You Rendered’: Women Veterans of Aviation in
the Soviet Union,’’ in A Soldier and a Woman: Sexual Integration in the Military, ed. Gerard
J. De Groot and C.M. Peniston-Bird (New York: Pearson Education, 2000), 152–71.
98. United States and Office of Strategic Services, Assessment of Men; Elizabeth P.
McIntosh, Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press,
1998).
99. Catherine Taylor, ‘‘‘And Don’t Forget to Clean the Fridge’: Women in the Secret
Sphere of Terrorism,’’ in A Soldier and a Woman: Sexual Integration in the Military, ed. Gerard
J. De Groot and C. M. Peniston-Bird (New York: Pearson Education, 2000), 294–304;
Kathryn M. Coughlin, ‘‘Women, War and the Veil: Muslim Women in Resistance and Com-
bat,’’ in A Soldier and a Woman: Sexual Integration in the Military, ed. Gerard J. De Groot and
C.M. Peniston-Bird (New York: Pearson Education, 2000), 223–39.
100. Charles Moskos, ‘‘Army Women: A Look at the Life, the Sentiments, and the Aspira-
tions—Including, for Some, Combat—of Women in the U.S. Army,’’ Atlantic Monthly, 266,
no. 2 (August 1990): 70–78; Barbara Ehrenreich, ‘‘Men Hate War Too,’’ Foreign Affairs, 78,
no. 1 (January–February 1999): 118–22.
101. D. Ann Campbell, ‘‘Women in Combat: The World War II Experience in the United
States, Great Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union,’’ Journal of Military History, 57, no. 2
(April 1993): 302–23.
102. Barbara Jancar-Webster, Women & Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945 (Denver,
CO: Arden Press, 1990).
103. Svetlana Aleksievich, War’s Unwomanly Face (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1988).
104. Margaret Collins Weitz, Sisters in the Resistance: How Women Fought to Free France,
1940–1945 (New York: J. Wiley, 1995).
105. Jane Slaughter, Women and the Italian Resistance, 1943–1945 (Denver, CO: Arden
Press, 1997).
106. Janet Hart, New Voices in the Nation: Women and the Greek Resistance, 1941–1964
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).
107. Sandra C. Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War: Fighting for Ho Chi Minh and the
Revolution (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1999).
108. Gillespie, Psychological Effects of War, 168.
109. Dunivin, ‘‘Military Culture: Change and Continuity,’’ 89.
110. Copeland, Psychology and the Soldier.
111. Margaret Mead, And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (New
York: W. Morrow, 1942); Howard Gardner and Emma Laskin, Leading Minds: An Anatomy of
Leadership (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1995), 84.
112. Peters, Fighting for the Future, 171–98.
113. Robins and Post, Political Paranoia, 141–78.
114. Keith Wright, Religious Abuse: A Pastor Explores the Many Ways Religion Can Hurt As
Well As Heal (Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada: Northstone, 2001).
Notes 189
115. Ariel Merari, ‘‘The Readiness to Kill and Die: Suicidal Terrorism in the Middle East,’’
in Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind, ed. Walter Reich
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 192–207, 198.
116. Tead, The Art of Leadership, 257–66; Copeland, Psychology and the Soldier, 86.
117. General Matthew B. Ridgway, ‘‘Leadership,’’ in Military Leadership in Pursuit of
Excellence, Robert L. Taylor and William E. Rosenbach (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
2000), 6–15, 7, 9, 15.
118. Wass de Czece, ‘‘A Comprehensive View of Leadership,’’ 28.
119. Edgar F. Puryear, American Generalship: Character Is Everything. The Art of Command
(Novata, CA: Presidio Press, 2000); Edgar F. Puryear, Nineteen Stars: A Study in Military Char-
acter and Leadership (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1981); Edgar F. Puryear, Stars in Flight: A
Study in Air Force Character and Leadership (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1981).
121. Alger, Quest for Victory, 188.
122. Peters, Fighting for the Future, xiv.
123. Douglas C. Waller, The Commandos: The Inside Story of America’s Secret Soldiers (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 217.
124. Chris Ryan, The One That Got Away (London: Century, 1995), 150–51; Daphne
Lockyer, ‘‘Danger Man,’’ Times Magazine, September 2002, 37–39, 37.
125. Andy McNab, Bravo Two Zero: The True Story of an SAS Patrol Behind Enemy Lines in
Iraq (London: Bantam Press, 1993), chap. 11.
127. Toner, Morals Under the Gun.
128. Forman, Educational Objectives of the US Military Academy.
129. DeYoung, This Woman’s Army.
130. Overy, Why the Allies Won, 23.
131. Van Fleet and Yukl, Military Leadership, 11–13, 17–18.
132. Buddin, Building a Personnel Support Agenda, 10–11.
133. Mady Wechsler Segal and Jesse J. Harris, What We Know About Army Families
(Alexandria, VA: U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences,
1993); Robbert and others, Differentiation in Military Human Resource Management, 22;
Doreen Drewry Lehr, ‘‘Military Wives: Breaking the Silence,’’ in Gender Camouflage: Women
and the U.S. Military, ed. Francine D’Amico and Laurie Lee Weinstein (New York: New York
University Press, 1999), 117–31; James A. Martin and Peggy McClure, ‘‘Today’s Active Duty
Military Family: The Evolving Challenges of Military Family Life,’’ in The Military Family: A
Practice Guide for Human Service Providers, ed. James A. Martin, Leora N. Rosen, and Linette
R. Sparacino (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 3–24; Stephen J. Brannen and Elwood R. Ham-
lin II, ‘‘Understanding Spouse Abuse in Military Families,’’ in The Military Family: A Practice
Guide for Human Service Providers, ed. James A. Martin, Leora N. Rosen, and Linette R. Spar-
acino (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 169–83; Peter J. Mercier and Judith D. Mercier, Battle
Cries on the Home Front: Violence in the Military Family (Springfield, IL: C.C. Thomas, 2000).
134. United States and Department of Defense (DOD), Joint Ethics Directive (Washing-
ton, DC: DOD, August 30, 1993), chap. 2, sec. 3, paragraph 2-301.
135. Geert Hofstede identified an individualism–collectivism cultural dimension. Hof-
stede defined individualism as a philosophy which stresses ‘‘I’’ before ‘‘we’’ and explains success
through personal achievement. The collectivist philosophy believes individuals should belong
to a group that will secure its members’ well-being in exchange for loyalty and occasional
190 Notes
self-sacrifice. The United States was the most individualist in Hofstede’s dataset, followed by
Britain. Geert H. Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related
Values (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1980); Geert H. Hofstede, Cultures and Organ-
izations: Software of the Mind (London, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991); Geert H. Hofstede,
Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across
Nations (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000). There is evidence that an individual-
ist–collectivist cultural dimension affects civilian performance. Herschel W. Leibowitz,
D. Alfred Owens, and Robert L. Helmreich, ‘‘Transportation,’’ in Emerging Needs and Oppor-
tunities for Human Factors Research, Raymond S. Nickerson, National Research Council (U.S.
), and Committee on Human Factors (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1995),
241–61, 253.
136. Warren G. Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of
Creative Collaboration (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 1.
137. Keegan, The Face of Battle, 74.
138. McKinley, Democracy and Military Power, 341.
139. Mead, And Keep Your Powder Dry.
140. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, 453.
141. Mansoor, GI Offensive in Europe, 15, 237.
142. Ulmer, ‘‘Leaders, Managers, and Command Climate,’’ 82.
144. Kellett, Combat Motivation, chap. 7; John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, ‘‘Looking
Ahead; Preparing for Information-Age Conflict,’’ in In Athena’s Camp: Preparing for Conflict
in the Information Age, ed. John Arquilla and David F. Ronfeldt (Santa Monica, CA: Rand,
1997), 439–501.
145. Henderson, Cohesion: The Human Element, xx.
146. Kenneth M. Pollack, Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948–1991 (Lincoln, NE:
University of Nebraska Press), 2002.
147. Kellett, Combat Motivation, chap. 5.
148. French, Raising Churchill’s Army, 1–2, 22, 45–46, 48, 56–57, 129.
150. Stouffer, The American Soldier, II, 547; Linderman, World Within War, 231.
151. Bourke, Intimate History of Killing, 159–202; Robin Neillands, In the Combat Zone:
Special Forces Since 1945 (Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1998), 113.
152. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (London: T.F. Unwin,
1897); W. Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (London: T.F. Unwin, 1916).
153. Burns, Psychology and Leadership; Boring, Psychology for the Armed Services, viii.
154. Bray, Psychology and Military Proficiency.
156. F.D.G. Williams and Susan Canedy, SLAM: The Influence of S.L.A. Marshall on the
United States Army (Fort Monroe, VA, and Washington, DC: United States Army Training
and Doctrine Command, Office of the Command Historian, 1990); John Whiteclay Cham-
bers II, ‘‘SLA Marshall’s Men Against Fire: New Evidence Regarding Fire Ratios,’’ Parameters,
33, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 113–21; Kennett, G.I.: The American Soldier, 137.
157. Marshall, Men Against Fire.
158. Stouffer, The American Soldier, II, chap. 3.
159. Jesse Glenn Gray, a civilian writer, identified combat relationships, which he called
‘‘comradeship,’’ as one of three combat motivations, the others being ‘‘spectacle’’ and
Notes 191
‘‘destruction.’’ Soldiers may be drawn to the spectacle of war because it is a unique, fascinating,
historical event. They may be drawn to the destruction because it is usually their only oppor-
tunity to engage in legitimate destruction on such a scale. Of these three combat motivations,
only ‘‘comradeship’’ is generalizable and subject to management. J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors:
Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), 28–29, 51.
160. Cooley, Social Organization, 23.
161. George, ‘‘Primary Groups,’’ 297.
162. Wass de Czece, ‘‘A Comprehensive View of Leadership,’’ 31.
163. Michael Whine, ‘‘Cyberspace: A New Medium for Communication, Command, and
Control by Extremists,’’ Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 22, no. 3 (1999): 231–46; Michele
Zanini, ‘‘Middle Eastern Terrorism and Netwar,’’ Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 22, no. 3
(1999): 247–56; Dorothy E. Denning, ‘‘Activism, Hacktivism, and Cyberterrorism:
The Internet as a Tool for Influencing Foreign Policy,’’ in Networks and Netwars: The Future
of Terror, Crime, and Militancy, ed. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt (Santa Monica, CA:
RAND, 2001), 240–88.
164. Edward A. Shils and Morris Janowitz, ‘‘Cohesion and Disintegration in the
Wehrmacht in World War II,’’ Public Opinion Quarterly, 12, no. 2 (Summer 1948):
280–315.
165. Van Creveld, Fighting Power.
166. Kellett, ‘‘Combat Motivation,’’ 206.
167. Peter G. Bourne, Men, Stress, and Vietnam (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1970).
168. Moskos, ‘‘Vietnam: Why Men Fight,’’ 297.
169. Ibid., 294–97.
170. Krepenevich, The Army and Vietnam, 268–69; Herring, ‘‘Preparing Not to Refight
the Last War,’’ 61.
171. Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991), 57.
172. Ibid., 37.
173. Ibid., 41.
174. Lewis, Forgotten Legions, 64.
175. Bartov, Hitler’s Army, 43.
176. Ibid., 37. Peter Mansoor repeated Bartov’s mistake years later: Mansoor, GI Offensive
in Europe, 255.
177. Bartov, Hitler’s Army, 40.
Chapter 6
2. North Callahan, The Armed Forces As a Career (New York: Whittlesey House, 1947),
71–72; Ed Ruggero, Duty First: West Point and the Making of American Leaders (New York:
Harper Collins, 2001).
3. Bettie J. Morden, The Women’s Army Corps, 1945–1978 (Washington, DC: Center of
Military History, U.S. Army, 1990), 323; D’Ann Campbell and Francine D’Amico, ‘‘Lessons
on Gender Integration from the Military Academies,’’ in Gender Camouflage: Women and the
U.S. Military, ed. Francine D’Amico and Laurie Lee Weinstein (New York: New York Univer-
sity Press, 1999), 67–79; Janda, ‘‘A Simple Matter of Equality,’’ 317–18.
4. Morden, The Women’s Army Corps, 1945–1978, 277–79.
192 Notes
5. Linda Bird Francke, Ground Zero: The Gender Wars in the Military (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1997), 248–49.
6. Georgia Clark Sadler, ‘‘Women in Combat: The US Military and the Impact of the
Persian Gulf War,’’ in Wives and Warriors: Women and the Military in the United States and
Canada, ed. Laurie Lee Weinstein and Christie C. White (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey,
1997), 79–97, 82–83.
7. Lucinda Joy Peach, ‘‘Behind the Front Lines: Feminist Battles Over Women in
Combat,’’ in Wives and Warriors: Women and the Military in the United States and Canada,
ed. Laurie Lee Weinstein and Christie C. White (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1997),
99–135.
8. U.S. Department of Defense, Dictionary of Military Terms, as amended through 31
August 2005, available at http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/.
9. Charles M. Simpson and Robert B. Rheault, Inside the Green Berets: The First Thirty
Years. A History of the U.S. Army Special Forces (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1983); Aaron
Bank, From OSS to Green Berets: The Birth of Special Forces (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1986);
Anna Simons, The Company They Keep: Life Inside the U.S. Army Special Forces (New York:
Free Press, 1997).
10. Charlie A. Beckwith and Donald Knox, Delta Force (San Diego: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1983); James Adams, Secret Armies: The Full Story of SAS, Delta Force & Spetsnaz
(London: Hutchinson, 1987); Terry Griswold and D.M. Giangreco, Delta: America’s Elite
Counterterrorist Force (Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International, 1992); Waller, Commandos:
The Inside Story.
11. Dick Couch, The Warrior Elite: The Forging of Seal Class 228 (New York: Crown
Publishers, 2001); Dennis C. Chalker and Kevin Dockery, One Perfect Op: One Man’s Extraor-
dinary Account of His Involvement in the Navy’s Elite and Top-Secret Special Forces Teams (New
York: Morrow, 2002).
12. Philip D. Chinnery, Any Time, Any Place: Fifty Years of the USAF Air Commando and
Special Operations Forces, 1944–1994 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1994).
13. Shelby L. Stanton, Green Berets at War: U.S. Army Special Forces in Southeast Asia,
1956–1975 (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1985); Francis J. Kelly, The Green Berets in Vietnam,
1961–71 (Washington: Brassey’s [US], 1991).
14. McPherson, ‘‘The United States,’’ 219.
15. Alfred H. Paddock, US Army Special Warfare: Its Origins. Psychological and Unconven-
tional Warfare, 1941–1952 (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1982);
Frank R. Barnett, B. Hugh Tovar, and Richard H. Shultz, eds., Special Operations in US Strategy
(Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1984); Steven Emerson, Secret Warriors:
Inside the Covert Military Operations of the Reagan Era (New York: Putnam, 1988); Tim Weiner,
Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget (New York, NY: Warner Books, 1990); Prados, Pres-
idents’ Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations from World War II Through the Persian
Gulf; Susan L. Marquis, Unconventional Warfare: Rebuilding U.S. Special Operations Forces
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1997); Thomas K. Adams, US Special Operations
Forces in Action: The Challenge of Unconventional Warfare (London: Frank Cass, 1998).
16. Adams, Secret Armies: The Full Story; Peter Darman, SAS: The World’s Best (London:
Sidgwick and Jackson, 1994); John Newsinger, Dangerous Men: The SAS and Popular Culture
(London: Pluto Press, 1997).
17. Terry White, Swords of Lightning: Special Forces and the Changing Face of Warfare
(London: Brassey’s, 1992), 234.
Notes 193
18. Tom Clancy, General USA retd. Carl Stiner, and Tony Koltz, Shadow Warriors: Inside
the Special Forces (New York: GP Putnam’s Sons, 2002), 61.
19. Franz Kurowski, The Brandenburgers: Global Mission (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada:
J.J. Fedorowicz, 1997); Eric Lefevre, Brandenburg Division: Commandos of the Reich (Paris,
France: Histoire & Collections, 2000).
20. Glenn B. Infield, Skorzeny: Hitler’s Commando (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981);
Otto Skorzeny, Skorzeny’s Special Missions: The Memoirs of the Most Dangerous Man in Europe
(London: Greenhill Books, 1997).
21. Rolf Tophoven, GSG 9: Kommando Gegen Terrorismus (Koblenz, Germany: Bernard &
Graefe, 1984).
22. William H. McRaven, Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare: Theory and
Practice (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1995), 388.
24. Neillands, In the Combat Zone, 231.
25. Waller, Commandos: The Inside Story, 216.
26. David E. Jones, Women Warriors: A History (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1997).
27. Lockyer, ‘‘Danger Man,’’ 39.
28. Andy McNab, Immediate Action (London: Bantam, 1995), 379–81.
29. McRaven, Spec Ops: Case Studies, 391.
30. Mantell, True Americanism.
31. Eliot A. Cohen, Commandos and Politicians: Elite Military Units in Modern Democra-
cies (Cambridge, MA: Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 1978).
32. McRaven, Spec Ops: Case Studies, 390.
33. Allard, Somalia Operations: Lessons Learned, 53; Bowden, Black Hawk Down, 4, 16,
37–39.
34. McNab, Bravo Two Zero; Ryan, The One That Got Away.
35. Linderer, Eyes Behind the Lines, 258; McNab, Bravo Two Zero, chap. 3; Bowden, Black
Hawk Down, 34–35, 173–74.
36. Emerson, Secret Warriors; Weiner, Blank Check.
37. White, Swords of Lightning, 242.
38. Martin Dillon, The Dirty War (London: Hutchinson, 1988); Newsinger, Dangerous
Men.
Conclusion
1. John Arquilla, Dubious Battles: Aggression, Defeat, and the International System
(Washington, DC: Crane Russak, 1992).
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INDEX
Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 15 Betts, Richard K., 13

affection between personnel, 91–93, Biddle, Stephen D., 14, 56, 83, 153
102–3 Blitzkrieg, 14, 57, 59
Afghanistan, 37, 137 Boredom, 96, 104–5
African-American soldiers, 36, 120 Bosnia. See Yugoslavia Wars
aggression, 108–10
alliances, 11 cadres. See training, cadres
American Civil War, 15, 22, 65, 70 Canada, 20, 51
applicatory method, 62 Cavalry, 13, 33
Aristotle, 13 China, 37
armies. See names of specific countries Churchill, Winston, 12, 65–66
armor: doctrine, 50; force employment, 58; civil affairs, 26
force structure, 33, 40–41; personnel civil–military relations, 1, 2, 116–17,
management, 30, 34, 37, 38, 49–50, 154–55
58, 68 Clausewitz, Carl von, 55–56, 69,
Army General Classification Test, 29, 34, 113–14
74. See also intelligence, quotient, tests of cohesion: causes: affection, 102–3;
artillery, 2, 33, 35, 58, 90, 110 familiarity, 102, 105; homogeneity, 102;
assignment of personnel, 19, 25, 34–35, leadership, 47, 105; shared training or
42, 53, 144, 149 stress, 105, 144; time, 103–5. and
Athens, ancient, 14 centralized personnel management, 24;
athleticism, 7, 8, 134–36, 140–41, 152–53 and decentralized personnel
atrocities. See war crimes management, 21–22, 26–28, 144, 152;
attrition, 13, 61 defined, 91–94. effects: motivation, 99–
Auftragstaktik, 67 100, 107, 128; performance, 100–101;
Australia, 20 stress management, 43, 89, 101. types:
autocracy. See politics, structure horizontal, 94–95; leadership team, 98;
206 Index
organizational, 91, 97–98; social, 8, 91, familiarity between personnel, 95–96,

94–97; task, 91, 93–97; vertical, 47, 102–3, 105
94–95 fear, 89–91, 109
cold war, 24, 46 fighting spirit, 21
combat, definition of, 3 flow, 80
combat personnel. See personnel and force employment, 6, 8, 13–14, 39, 55–61,
soldiers 83, 124, 151. See also strategy
combat skills, 22, 29–34 force stabilization, 24, 25, 37
Combat Training Center (CTC), 30 forces. See names of specific countries
combined arms, 33 France: force employment, 14, 61, 111;
command, 6, 8, 11, 49, 62–64, 68; military personnel, 61; political
centralized, 62, 66–67, 83; leadership, 12
decentralized, 62, 67–68, 83, 151; fratricide, 85
groups, 18, 30 free-rider problem, 27
communications: military, 27, 63, 67; Fuller, J.F.C., 63
skills, 47, 63, 74–76 fundamental attribution error, 63
conscientious objection, 112
Copeland, Norman, 21, 47, 124 gender, 7, 121–23, 125, 135–36, 142,
corporatism, 21, 27–28, 52, 97–98 153–54
counterrevolution, 67 General Staffs, 66–67, 70,
counterterrorism, 1, 17, 41, 138–39, 153. Germany: force employment, 14, 15, 57–
See also terrorism 58; navy, 26–27; political leadership, 13;
Crete, Battle of, 65, 140 Special Operations Forces, 139–40;
Crews, 30, 37, 95, 97 Waffen Schutzstaffel (SS), 39, 112, 120,
Crowd Theories, 128 140. army: mission command, 67;
culture, 18, 19, 28, 154 motivations, 15, 114–18, 124, 130–32;
structure, 20, 28; and World War I, 139;
decision-making, 6, 8, 60–61, 66–68, 152; and World War II, 17, 31–32, 38, 43,
models of, 77–83, 84 45, 48, 67, 118–19, 130–32, 139–40
defeat. See war, outcomes GI Bill of Rights, 71
democracy. See politics, structure Grant, Ulysses S., 63, 65, 70
departmentalization, 17 Gray, Colin S., 4, 56, 57, 59
discipline, 20, 21, 47, 126 Great Britain. See United Kingdom
doctrine, 32, 55, 58, 124 Great Person Theory, 68–70, 83
Greece, 72, 118
education, 8, 70–73. See also training Grenada, 138
Egypt, 40 Groups, 7, 20–22, 25–26, 34–42, 46–47,
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 37, 64, 70 53. See also primary group
emotional intelligence, 28–29, 47, 53, Guadalcanal, battle of, 115
74–77 Guards regiment and division, 33,
equal opportunities, 2, 153–54. See also 49–50
gender and ethnicity Gulf War (1991), 13, 61, 37, 139
esprit de corps, 21, 91–92, 97–98, 128 Gurkha regiment, 120
essentialisms, 4
ethnicity, 6, 36, 119–20 Henderson, G.F.R., Colonel, 20
extrinsic attributes. See personnel, Herd theories, 128
attributes of, extrinsic Hitler, Adolf, 39, 64–65, 114
Index 207
homogeneity of personnel, 102 leadership, 6, 8, 22, 43, 45–50, 68–77,

human resources, 4 152; definition, 68; political, 64–66;
human sciences, 5 reaction courses, 77; toxic, 46, 63, 70;
transactional, 47, 76; transformational,
ideology. See politics, ideology and social 8, 47–50, 53, 76, 84, 152
ideology Lebanon, 117
imagination, 69, 71, 73 Libya, 40
India, 20, 120 Liddell Hart, Basil, 55–56, 59, 63
Individual Replacement System (IRS), 22, Lincoln, Abraham, 65
29, 36–37, 42, 44, 45, 52 logic, 59–60. See also reasoning and
individualism, 27, 52, 126 intelligence, cognitive
induction of personnel, 26, 86 logistics, 20, 24, 64
infantry: personnel management, 28, 34, loss-exchange ratios, 3
40–41; training, 33
initiative, 11, 15, 126 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 13, 15, 113
innovation, 11, 22, 27, 126, 150 machine-guns, 58
insurgency, 155. See also terrorism Marshall, S.L.A., 70, 108, 128–29
intelligence: cognitive or reasoning, 6, 8, masculinity, 121. See also gender
25, 69, 74–77, 84, 129; emotional, 28– material endowments and resources, 3, 4,
29, 47, 53, 84, 87; quotient (IQ), tests 11, 150–51, 153
of, 23, 25, 29, 73–77. See also reasoning materialism, 4–5, 140–41, 153
intelligence, military, 22, 25–26, 60, 64, McClellan, George, 65
151 mess, regimental, 51
internalization, 88, 105 Middle East, 18
international relations theory, 1, 56 militarism, 116–17
interpersonal skills, 29, 34, 47, 74–76. See military capability, 1, 2, 10, 57
also emotional intelligence Military Occupational Specialty (MOS),
intrinsic attributes. See personnel, attributes 31
of, intrinsic military personnel. See soldiers
Iran, 138, 139 mission command, 67–68
Iraq War (2003–), 13, 37, 44–45, 117, Montgomery, Bernard Law, 50, 65–66, 70
119. See also Gulf War moral-hazard problem, 27
Israel, 71, 76, 100, 117, 127 morale, 20, 21, 47, 92, 107–8, 118, 125,
Italy, 12, 20, 43, 86 129
morality, 125
Japan, 20, 115, 121 Moran, Charles McMoran Wilson (Lord
Japanese-American soldiers, 120 Moran), 21, 47
job change, 34 motivations: and centralized personnel
Jordanian Army, 123 management, 24; and cohesion, 99–100,
107, 128; and decentralized personnel
Kampfgruppe, 38, 132 management, 21–23, 26, 152; defined,
key success factors, 4, 153 107; and democracy, 14–16; extrinsic,
kill ratios. See loss-exchange ratios 107–8, 128–30; and force employment,
kill, willingness to, 108–11, 128–29 61; and gender, 121–23; and
Korean War, 37, 41, 44, 52, 95, 118, homosexuality, 123; intrinsic, 107–27,
121 130–33; to kill, 108–11, 128–29;
Kuwait, 61 measuring, 86; and nationalism,
208 Index
118–19; political, 114, 117–18, 131– Poland, 32

32, 143; and tours of duty, 42 politics: beliefs and ideology, 6–7, 21, 117–
18, 130–32; domestic, 5; structure, 5, 7,
narcotics, 86–88, 105 10, 16, 143, 148, 155
nationality, 6 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),
net assessment, 2, 155 44–45, 85, 88. See also stress
New Zealand, 20 power, 4
Normandy, 33, 38, 40, 43 primary group: and cohesion, 92–93,
North Atlantic Treaty Organization 97–98, 103–4theory, 21, 129–30;
(NATO), 14, 123 process, definition, 18–19
North Korea, 37 promotion of personnel, 19, 45–50, 53,
Norway, 65 70, 144–45, 149
numerical resources, 4 psychiatric casualties, 42–45, 86–91. See
also post-traumatic stress disorder and
Okinawa, invasion of, 115 stress
organizational: behavior, 6; design, 18–19; psychology: discipline of, 8, 77;
orientation, 50–51, 53; structure, psychological stability, 85–86; social, 6
18–19 psychopaths, 109–10
orientation: internal, 51–52, 95, 145;
organizational, 50–51, 53; unit, rationality, 65, 69, 78–79, 84; and
51, 53 motivation, 111–12. See also reasoning
readiness, 2, 101
Pacifism, 108–10 realism, 13
Pakistan, 20, 33 reasoning, 6, 8, 77–78. See also intelligence,
Panama, 139 cognitive
Patton, George S., 86 recruitment of personnel, 19, 27–28, 52,
peace operations, 1, 17, 30, 37–38, 51, 143, 149
104, 115, 117, 153 regiment, definitions and examples of, 19,
Persia, 14 23
personality traits, 68–70 regimental theories, 5–6, 7, 17, 20–22, 47,
personnel: attributes of, extrinsic, 5, 7, 20, 148. See also personnel management
52, 54, 62; attributes of, intrinsic, 6, 7, religion, 71, 123–25
23, 25, 36, 45, 52, 54, 62, 68–70, 153– replacement of personnel, 19, 22, 30,
54; capabilities of, 3, 6, 8, 54, 61, 63; 34–41, 53, 144, 149
combat, 28, 52–53, 58; knowledge- Replacement Training Centers, 36
based, 28, 34, 35, 51, 53; military engi- repression, 88
neering, 25, 73, 84; military intelligence, republican philosophy, 15
25–26; noncombat, 25–27, 52–53; Reserve Officer Training Corps, 71–73,
performance of, 2, 9, 89, 96, 100–101; 116
turnover of, 30, 34, 37. See also retention of personnel, 101
soldiers Richardson, Frank M., 21–22, 47
personnel management, 5, 7, 17, 148–50; Rome, ancient, 59, 113
processes, 19, 54; structure, 6, 7, 18, 22– Root, Elihu, 23, 66
27, 28, 52, 148–50. See also specific rotation: of personnel, 19, 22, 37, 41–45,
processes 53; of units, 36–37, 42–45, 53, 144,
planning, 11 149
plurocracy, 13 Russia, 122
Index 209
Schwarzkopf, Norman, 61 terrorism, 41, 122, 124, 130, 155. See also
selection of personnel, 19, 24, 26, 28–29, counterterrorism
41–42, 52–53, 143, 149 Thebes, ancient, 123
self-categorization, 103 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 11
self-managing teams, 48, 145 tours of duty, 41–42, 52, 88, 106
self-mutilation, 87 training: cadres, 31, 34–35; centralized, 24,
sensory development, 80–81 29–31, 53; collective, 30; decentralized,
service and support units, 18, 24 19, 22, 26, 32–34, 53, 144, 149–52;
Sherman, William T., 63 defined, 29; duration, 31; experiential,
Singapore, 65 77, 81, 83; field, 31, 32, 53, 81; to kill,
situational awareness, 79, 84, 85 110–11; officer training, 72–73. See also
skills, combat, 22, 39–34, 61, 73 education
social ideology, 131 Turkey, 65, 123
socialization of personnel, 19, 50–52, 53, turnover, personnel, 30, 34, 37–38
145, 149
soldiers, definition of, 1, 2, 157 n.1. See also unit manning, 24, 37
personnel unit, military, 18. See also names of specific
Somalia peace operation, 51, 79–80, 89, countries
115–16, 124, 139, 144 unit orientation, 51
Somme, battle of, 114 United Kingdom: doctrine and force
Soviet Union, 13, 14, 39, 64; air force, employment, 55–58, 61, 67–68, 127;
122; army, 35, 36, 68, 118–19, 122 military officers, 48–51, 65–67, 70–73,
Spanish Civil War, 15 77; political structure and military
Sparta, ancient, 14, 123 capability, 11, 12, 20; Special
special operations, 7, 9, 28, 124–25, 131, Operations Forces, 137, 139. British
136–45, 153 Army: development of, 20; General
Stalin, Josef, 14, 64–65 Service Corps, 25, 33, 40; and mission
Stimson, Henry, 23 command, 67–68; recruiting, 28, 120;
strategy, 7, 13, 56–61, 83, 124; British, Special Air Service, 124–25, 139, 141–
59–61; culture, 59, 154; design model, 45; structure, 19–20, 24–26, 28;
60; grand, 55, 64; indirect approach, training, 31–33, 35, 77, 118, 127; and
59–61; process model, 60; tit-for-tat, World War I, 43; and World War II, 17,
109; top-down model, 60. See also force 31–35, 39–41, 43, 49–51, 58, 118, 121,
employment 124, 127, 139. Royal Air Force: training,
strategist, 8, 58–59 26; and World War II, 26, 35, 40, 41.
stress, 6, 8, 36–38, 53, 79; cohesion, Royal Marines and Royal Navy:
relationship with, 101, 105; defined, 85; promotions, 45, 77; recruitment, 28;
management of, 7, 22, 24, 41–45, 53, structure, 18; training, 26, 31, 33, 45,
87–91, 105–6, 152. See also post- 77; and World War II, 35, 40, 43, 45,
traumatic stress disorder 77, 139
structure, organizational, 18–19. See also United States: Air Force, 41, 138; Central
personnel management, structure Command, 18, 61; Central Intelligence
Agency, 77–145; Department of
tactics, 55. See also force employment Defense, 19, 125; doctrine and force
tanks. See armor employment, 55–56, 61, 117;
technology, military, 4, 31, 61, 110, 136, government, 12; military culture, 7–72,
153. See also specific weapons 116–17, 121, 123, 125–27; military
210 Index
officers, 45–46, 65–67, 76, 116–17; 47, 66; psychiatric services during, 44;
National Research Council, 4; Navy, 29, sensory development, 80–81; stress, 44,
73, 138, 143; Office of Strategic 52, 90, 101; tours of duty, 41–42, 44,
Services, 77; Special Operations Forces, 52, 131, 138; and United States military
137–39; universities, 71–73. army: culture, 117; war crimes, 119, 138, 145
Army Research Institute, 95; Civil Victory. See War, outcomes
Affairs, 26; Delta Force, 79, 89, 124,
138–39, 141, 143, 145; Field Artillery, Waltz, Kenneth N., 13
35; Intelligence Corps, 26; and Iraq War, war: causes of, 1, 2, 4, 11, 60, 155; crimes,
45; Rangers, 23, 79–80, 88, 90, 61, 124, 1, 119, 121, 124, 138, 145; definition,
138, 144; recruiting, 28, 126; Special 3; legitimacy, 107–8; outcomes, 2–4, 11,
Forces, 131, 138, 143–44; structure, 20, 14, 57–58, 60, 153, 155; small wars, 17;
22–24, 28, 51; training, 29–32; and and society, 64. See also names of specific
World War I, 3, 29, 72, 120; and World wars
War II, 17, 23–24, 28–32, 34–37, 41– warrior spirit, 114–16, 121
45, 66–67, 73–74, 118, 120, 127–30. Waterloo, battle of, 114
Marine Corps: and Iraq War, 37, 45; and weapons. See technology, military
mission command, 67; recruiting, 28, Will, Willpower, 21, 69–70, 113–14, 129
112; Special Operations Forces, 138, World War I: force employment, 57–58,
145; structure, 18; and World War II, 65, 109; methodological use of, 15;
30, 76, 80, 89, 115, 119. See also personnel management, 23, 43, 71–73;
Vietnam War stress management, 43, 85–86
World War II: combat reactions, 80, 108;
Vietnam: North, 122; South, 47, 52, 119, force employment, 57–58, 61, 64–66,
122 109, 111; methodological use of, 15, 17;
Vietnam War: drug abuse, 88, 101; combat personnel management, 23–25, 31–44,
reactions, 101; internal orientation, 95; 48–51, 61, 76; stress management, 43–
leadership failures during, 46–47, 127; 44, 86–87, 89
methodological use of, 15; motivations,
119, 122, 127, 131; politicians, role of, Yugoslavia Wars, 37, 119, 121
About the Author
BRUCE NEWSOME is a research policy scientist at RAND in Santa Monica,

California, where he has published on international relations, national security,
terrorism, personnel and operations management, training, and modeling and
simulations. He has a Ph.D. in Strategic Studies from the University of Reading,
England.

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Praeger Security International Advisory Board

PRAEGER SECURITY INTERNATIONAL

The paper used in this book complies with the

Why Study Combat Personnel?

What Do We Mean by ‘‘Performance and Capabilities’’?

Material Endowments Are Overstated

Military performance and capability is an area of vigorous theoretical and policy

Domestic Politics Are Too Remote

Personnel Management Is Key

Desirable Personnel Attributes Are Made, Not Born

with homogeneity in intrinsic attributes such as gender. Theories of combat motiva-

over intrinsic resources. There is no accepted list of combat personnel capabilities,

democracy’s greater propensity to choose one-sided wars or ally extensively. Sub-

International Political Prudence

an autocracy they would not be so constrained. Democratic elites may be unable to

In 1937, Churchill had given more detail as to why he believed parliamentary

Force Employment and Strategy

The assumption has a strong tradition in liberal political philosophy, particu-

subordinate personnel capabilities to other objectives. Democracies must attend to a

COMBAT PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT

Theories of combat personnel management assert that combat personnel capabilities

other resources is similarly structured. To describe the organization as centralized or

conceived as equilibrium outcomes resulting from historical path-dependency rather

groups,’’ ‘‘cohesive groups,’’ or ‘‘social organizations’’ characteristic of regimental

The U.S. Army’s ‘‘Individual Replacement System’’

administratively—but predictive models of supply and demand face new uncertain-

Centralized Selection, Training, and Assignment

Successful graduates are then assigned to individual military intelligence battalions.

best attributed to the remarkable decentralization of their management. Once

Personnel Management Processes

Recruitment and Corporatism

least combat-intensive branches, leading to some of their choices being refused.

Selection and Emotional Intelligence

Training and Combat Skills

Decentralized training is somewhat conditional on decentralized assignments,

Assignments and the Formation of Group Bonds

Replacements and the Preservation of Group Bonds

who conducted unsystematic research on U.S. troops in Europe in May 1945.98

interference in personnel management and in force employment sometimes

Rotation and Stress Management

Promotions and Transformational Leadership

Later centralization of officer selection and training was supposed to promote

Socializing Leaders and Organizational Orientation

Theoretically, internal orientation should be strongest under centralized systems,

FORCE EMPLOYMENT, COMMAND,

Biddle has presented empirical evidence that force employment is central to

The literature on military strategy often reifies strategy, treating it as determinant

Example: Indirect Strategies

Decision-makers are also constrained or enabled by their force’s capabilities. For

The Military Commander

with military capability but which commander is superior.49 This sycophancy is

The Political Leader

S. Grant, Montgomery’s appointment was coincident with friendly material prepon-

Ironically perhaps those of us[,] who served in counter-revolutionary operations in the

Despite a contrary reputation, Soviet command tended to increasing decentraliza-

Dan Horowitz’s assumption that the comparatively high civilian education of

Self-awareness and empathy both improve communication skills. Our thoughts

Selection by Emotional Intelligence

outcome. One of the reasons that reasoning intelligence is considered a vital

It may even overload.141 This is because ‘‘attentive processing’’ is demanding of cog-

With appropriate experience or training, decision-makers can rely on faster

Automaticity and Naturalistic Models

Even noncombat skills, such as resistance to interrogation, in which rational pro-