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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 (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,191
Discovery Miles 11 910
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The Combat Soldier - Infantry Tactics and Cohesion in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (Paperback)
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How do small groups of combat soldiers perform on the battlefield
and maintain their cohesion under fire? Why are they willing to
fight for each other? These questions have 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, this book puts forward a novel and
challenging answer to this question. Against the common presumption
of the virtues of the citizen soldier, the author 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 change not only in
the armed forces but in civilian society as well. This book is a
project of the Oxford Programme on the Changing Character of War.
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