Abstract
This chapter explores the concept of military duty in the context of contemporary war. It focuses on the recent developments in the normative and strategic frameworks of Western military operations, which emphasize that mission effectiveness is largely dependent on the security and wellbeing of the local population. This has seemingly stretched the traditional notion of military duty, which is to master and apply organized military force to achieve political objectives and defeat the enemy on the battlefield. Based on empirical insights from the U.S. military and its recent missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the chapter argues that this development has created tensions between political and military understandings of duty, as well as between organizational and individual notions of duty within the U.S. military. Conflicting notions of military duty hold important policy implications to both domestic civil-military relations and U.S. military power abroad because they challenge the integrity of political objectives and threaten military cohesion and unity of effort with regard to the management of local populations during war.
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Notes
- 1.
In September 2015, more than 150,000 military personnel were deployed to peace operations worldwide (Center for International Peace Operations 2015).
- 2.
This is not to say that political expectations on military duty toward foreign populations are necessarily clear-cut. For instance, Western political leaders tend to place operational caveats upon national troop contributions to international military operations and allocate extensive resources to force protection, even though such actions tend to favor the safety of military personnel over the local population. Relatedly, studies have shown that Western populations, in general, care less about foreign civilian war casualties than about their own national military losses (Shaw 2005).
- 3.
The majority of military personnel deployed to international UN peacekeeping missions are, however, from non-Western states. For a list of troop-contributing countries, see United Nations 2016.
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Ekman, L. (2017). Fighting for Strangers? Military Duty in Contemporary War. In: Holenweger, M., Jager, M., Kernic, F. (eds) Leadership in Extreme Situations. Advanced Sciences and Technologies for Security Applications. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55059-6_10
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