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Samuel Huntington’s objective control model of civil-military relations has had profound effects on contemporary norms of military professionalism. Huntington anticipated that objective control, premised on a clearly defined division of responsibility between the military and civilians, would create an apolitical ethos among officers. The military’s apolitical character then would ensure its deference to civilian authority and reinforce its professional character. The approach would also enable the military to cultivate expertise in the “management of violence” and guarantee its effectiveness in armed conflict. Those norms, however, are more complex than is sometimes appreciated. They exhibit four paradoxes, producing the very behaviors and outcomes they aim to prevent: they can promote actions and mindsets within the officer corps that work to facilitate political behavior, subvert civilian control of military activity, compromise strategic effectiveness, and even undermine some aspects of military professionalism itself.

This chapter begins the discussion of the professional soldier, assessing the definitions of professionalism propounded by Huntington, Janowitz, and Moskos. It argues that in the professional force not only has infantry doctrine been refined so that specific actions at each point of an infantry assault are specified comprehensively but the professional soldier is also sufficiently well trained to execute these drills in practice. The chapter draws on interviews, observation of training, and recent published accounts of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the famous Gatigal ambush, to illustrate the inculcation and implementation of battle drills. The chapter concludes with a discussion of ‘close-quarters battle’, the most advanced urban combat techniques initially developed by Special Forces in the 1970s, to highlight contemporary developments in infantry drills.

The chapter begins with a summary of the central thesis of the book and goes on to consider the cases of China, Russia, and Brazil in order to explore the question of whether the emerging professionalism of western militaries is also evident elsewhere in the world. Tentatively, it is suggested that while all three powers retain conscription, professionalism (and its associated impact on cohesion) is gaining ground. The book finishes by considering whether professionalism and professional solidarity are more widely evident in civilian society through the examination of industry and sport, concluding that there may indeed be an advance in professionalism across these sectors to parallel military developments. Finally, and against Putnam’s assertions of the decay of community, it is claimed that perhaps the rise of professionalism may represent the emergence of a new, shared value which unites the individuals and groups of an increasingly diverse, multiple, and globalized society.

Though historians have recognized how important books were for the eighteenth-century British army and its officer corps, they have not established which books on war the British officers preferred. This book attempts to provide the basis for a comprehensive understanding of the importance of books on war for British army officers in the age of the American Revolution. Based on the list of books preferred and neglected by forty-two officers, it demonstrates how their choice of books can provide a better understanding about the development of military professionalism and the art of war in the eighteenth-century army.

The eighteenth-century British army is often associated with empire and national identity; but it was a European institution, and British and Irish males did not see the British army as the only military in which they might serve. This chapter surveys British and Irish military involvement on the Continent and the service of the British army alongside allies and auxiliaries from other parts of Europe. It looks particularly at the place of British and Irish soldiers in an international occupational fraternity, based on the transfer of personnel, ideas, and institutional forms between armies, and a common set of martial values. This soldierly fraternity, here called ‘military Europe’, might unite not simply allies and auxiliaires, but even enemies — anyone, in fact, who shared the same code and fought by the same rules.

This chapter revisits the in bello necessity principle. It challenges the current dichotomy between the two pillars—mistakenly assumed to be polar opposites—of the law of armed conflict: necessity and humanity. It embraces the idea that a well-trained military has an inherent interest in enhancing its operational effectiveness and constraining unnecessary brutality. The exercise of brute force by militaries, though common, reflects professional incompetency. The prevailing law of armed conflict, generally ignores the constraining effect of the necessity principle, which was originally intended to allow only the minimally necessary use of force on the battlefield. Consequently, the prevailing law places the burden of restricting the exercise of brute military force upon humanitarian considerations. Humanitarianism alone, however, cannot deliver the goods and substantially reduce war’s hazards. This chapter therefore calls for the transformation of the military’s actual or potential self-imposed professional constraining standards into a revised legal standard of necessity.

This chapter examines the professional politics of the U.S. and German naval elites that underwrote the making of navalism as a distinct set of ideas, agendas, and practices concerning global politics, maritime warfare, and nation-state formation. Positioning themselves as servants of their nation-states, naval officers claimed to have acquired special knowledge in naval affairs and global politics and to have uncovered the laws governing the conduct of navies, economies, and states. This chapter considers how the sciences of sea power and military strategy fed directly into a transatlantic movement of ideas between its adherents, and how their development was underwritten by a shared attachment to the type of military professionalism that had become associated with the Prussian–German army. This general attachment further differentiated the professional militarism of the U.S. and German navies from their British counterpart.

The architecture of objective control has informed a great deal of the development of civil-military norms and the professional education of military officer corps, particularly in the democratic West. But while this idealized vision of civil-military relations has been influential, it is incomplete in its accounting of the moral, ethical, legal, and political structures surrounding the military service member. In practical terms, it is not a simple task to divide problems into purely military and purely political aspects, nor is it easy to determine how to reconcile conflicting imperatives. This chapter attempts to provide a comprehensive typology of the various loyalty structures within which military personnel are located and the various ways in which these structures can conflict. It discusses how democratic theory and classical principal-agent models may prescribe different outcomes for such conflicts and provide a granular understanding of the sources of civil-military friction.

The figure of the ‘digger’—the nickname originally given to Australian soldiers in the First World War—is a potent symbol in Australian society. The supposed values of those first diggers—courage, endurance, mateship, irreverence, and a disdain for authority—not only underpin commemoration of Australian wartime experience but are also advanced as a pillar of national identity. The historical diggers, however, were citizen soldiers, and traditions originating with them occupied a problematic position within the professional Australian Army that deployed to Afghanistan. This chapter explores the concept of the digger in the modern Australian community, the way contemporary Australian soldiers see themselves, and the role that these assumptions, expectations, and attitudes played in cohesion and combat motivation in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2013.