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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > International relations
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The Combat Soldier - Infantry Tactics and Cohesion in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R4,379
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The Combat Soldier - Infantry Tactics and Cohesion in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (Hardcover)
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How do small groups of combat soldiers maintain their cohesion
under fire? This question has long intrigued social scientists,
military historians, and philosophers. Based on extensive research
and drawing on graphic analysis of close quarter combat from the
Somme to Sangin, the book puts forward a novel and challenging
answer to this question. Against the common presumption of the
virtues of the citizen soldier, this book claims that, in fact, the
infantry platoon of the mass twentieth century army typically
performed poorly and demonstrated low levels of cohesion in combat.
With inadequate time and resources to train their troops for the
industrial battlefield, citizen armies typically relied on appeals
to masculinity, nationalism and ethnicity to unite their troops and
to encourage them to fight. By contrast, cohesion among today's
professional soldiers is generated and sustained quite differently.
While concepts of masculinity and patriotism are not wholly
irrelevant, the combat performance of professional soldiers is
based primarily on drills which are inculcated through intense
training regimes. Consequently, the infantry platoon has become a
highly skilled team capable of collective virtuosity in combat. The
increasing importance of training, competence and drills to the
professional infantry soldier has not only changed the character of
cohesion in the twenty-first century platoon but it has also
allowed for a wider social membership of this group. Soldiers are
no longer included or excluded into the platoon on the basis of
their skin colour, ethnicity, social background, sexuality or even
sex (women are increasingly being included in the infantry) but
their professional competence alone: can they do the job? In this
way, the book traces a profound transformation in the western way
of warfare to shed light on wider processes of transformation in
civilian society. This book is a project of the Oxford Programme on
the Changing Character of War.
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