As of September 2017, the United Nations alone deployed 110,000 uniformed personnel from 122 countries in fifteen peacekeeping operations worldwide. Soldiers in these missions are important actors who not only have considerable responsibility for implementing peace and stability operations but also have a concomitant influence on their goals and impact. Yet we know surprisingly little about the factors that prompt soldiers' behavior. Despite being deployed on the same mission under similar conditions, various national contingents display significant, systematic differences in their actions on the ground. In Military Cultures in Peace and Stability Operations, Chiara Ruffa challenges the widely held assumption that military contingents, regardless of their origins, implement mandates in a similar manner. She argues instead that military culture—the set of attitudes, values, and beliefs instilled into an army and transmitted across generations of those in uniform —influences how soldiers behave at the tactical level. When soldiers are abroad, they are usually deployed as units, and when a military unit deploys, its military culture goes with it. By investigating where military culture comes from, Ruffa demonstrates why military units conduct themselves the way they do. Between 2007 and 2014, Ruffa was embedded in French and Italian units deployed under comparable circumstances in two different kinds of peace and stability operations: the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon and the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Based on hundreds of interviews, she finds that while French units prioritized patrolling and the display of high levels of protection and force—such as body armor and weaponry—Italian units placed greater emphasis on delivering humanitarian aid. She concludes that civil-military relations and societal beliefs about the use of force in the units' home country have an impact on the military culture overseas, soldiers' perceptions and behavior, and, ultimately, consequences for their ability to keep the peace.

Chiara Ruffa argues that civil-military relations and societal beliefs about the use of force shape the military culture of an army in its home country and has an impact on soldiers' behavior overseas and their ability to keep the peace.

Conducting the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) and projecting United States (US) influence worldwide has meant an increasing number of US diplomats and military forces are assigned to locations around the world, some of which have not previously had a significant US presence. In the current security environment, understanding foreign cultures and societies has become a national priority. Cultural understanding is necessary both to defeat adversaries and to work successfully with allies.

For both the United States and United Kingdom counterinsurgency was a serious component of security policy during the Cold War and, along with counterterrorism, has been the greatest security challenge after September 11, 2001. In The Soul of Armies Austin Long compares and contrasts counterinsurgency operations during the Cold War and in recent years by three organizations: the US Army, the US Marine Corps, and the British Army.Long argues that the formative experiences of these three organizations as they professionalized in the nineteenth century has produced distinctive organizational cultures that shape operations. Combining archival research on counterinsurgency campaigns in Vietnam and Kenya with the author's personal experience as a civilian advisor to the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Soul of Armies demonstrates that the US Army has persistently conducted counterinsurgency operations in a very different way from either the US Marine Corps or the British Army. These differences in conduct have serious consequences, affecting the likelihood of success, the potential for civilian casualties and collateral damage, and the ability to effectively support host nation governments. Long concludes counterinsurgency operations are at best only a partial explanation for success or failure.

The primary thrust of the monograph is to explain the linkage of contemporary criminal street gangs (that is, the gang phenomenon or third generation gangs) to insurgency in terms f the instability it wreaks upon government and the concomitant challenge to state sovereignty. Although there are differences between gangs and insurgents regarding motives and modes of operations, this linkage infers that gang phenomena are mutated forms of urban insurgency. In these terms, these "new" nonstate actors must eventually seize political power in order to guarantee the freedom of action and the commercial environment they want. The common denominator that clearly links the gang phenomenon to insurgency is that the third generation gangs' and insurgents' ultimate objective is to depose or control the governments of targeted countries. As a consequence, the "Duck Analogy" applies. Third generation gangs look like ducks, walk like ducks, and act like ducks - a peculiar breed, but ducks nevertheless! This monograph concludes with recommendations for the United States and other countries to focus security and assistance responses at the strategic level. The intent is to help leaders achieve strategic clarity and operate more effectively in the complex politically dominated, contemporary global security arena.

This book examines change processes and the challenge of ambidexterity in military organizations. It discusses how military organizations can better adapt to the complex, and at times chaotic, environments they operate in by developing organizational ambidexterity. The authors identify various multiple tasks and functions of military organizations that require multi-dimensional and often contradictory operational, technological, cultural, and social skills. In analogy to the often-opposed functions performed by the right and left hand of the body, modern military organizations are no longer one-dimensional fighting machines, but characterized by a duality of tasks, such as fighting and peacekeeping which often make part and parcel of one and the same mission. The military is both a “hot” and a “cold” organization (a crisis management organization and a bureaucracy). As such, the book argues that these dualities are not necessarily opposed but can serve as complementary forces, like the yin and yang, to better the overall performance of these organizations. As a consequence, ambidextrous organizations excel at complex tasking and are adaptable to new challenges. Divided into four parts: 1) structures and networks; 2) cultural issues; 3) tasks and roles; 4) nations and allies, it appeals to scholars of military studies and organization studies as well as professionals working for governmental or military organizations.

This study provides a brief overview of the US military?s involvement in stability operations and draws out the salient patterns and recurring themes that can be derived from those experiences. It is hoped that a presentation and critical analysis of the historical record will assist today?s Army in its attempts, now well under way, to reassess its long-standing attitudes toward stability operations and the role it should play in them. The US military?s experience in the conduct of stability operations prior to the Global War on Terrorism can be divided chronologically into four periods: the country?s first century (1789-1898); the?Small Wars? experience (1898-1940)7; the Cold War (1945-1990); and the post-Cold War decade (1991-2001). Reference will be made to a group of 28 representative case studies. The list of these case studies can be found at appendix A; synopses of the cases, written by members of the Combat Studies Institute, are located in appendix B.

Understanding people, whether "knowing the other" or "knowing oneself, is not the kind of straightforward task with which military trainers and leaders are familiar. In fact, we often attempt to avoid the problem all together and look for technological solutions to human problems. This is in part a natural consequence of the U.S. military having held a decisive technical and industrial advantage on the battlefield for the past century. Yet in this advantage lies a corresponding weakness when faced with problems that cannot be solved by technology. Although our theory of war emphasizes that the human dimension of war is the most critical element, we often fail to sufficiently account for it in our training and planning. At the core of understanding people is culture, a concept that is both useful and ambiguous. In order to overcome our natural aversion to ambiguity and uncertainty, we must admit that a deliberate and persistent effort is required to develop competence in the art of understanding people through culture. This guidebook, an important step in adopting such a methodical approach to culture in operations, presents an evolutionary approach to understanding the human dimension. The concepts and skills presented here under the umbrella of Culture General provide leaders, trainers, and educators a pragmatic toolkit to prepare service members for global employment. The absolute diversity of spoken languages in the world, estimated to be around 6,900 by some methods, and cultures guarantee that no nation's military will ever be perfectly prepared to operate in foreign environments. Nonetheless, the deliberate application of Culture General knowledge and skills to specific cultures and regions will produce forces as prepared as possible to deal with the complexities of the current operating environment both as individuals and as units.We should take satisfaction in the idea that this guidebook positions us well to extend the Culture General approach more broadly across the services. Based on a solid interdisciplinary foundation and grounded in accepted social science methods, this guidebook provides a bridge to more effective operations across the range of military operations.

Examines how military culture forms and changes, as well as its impact on the effectiveness of military organizations.