Fascinating session at Wolfson College yesterday on the relationship between the military and medicine. Especially interesting was Simon Wesseley on war and mental health – particularly his mention of two classics I’d been reading; SLA Marshall’s book Men Against Fire, and Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz on ‘Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht’. The thrust of both pieces is that the small group loyalties of the platoon and section bolster commitment and fighting power. Here’s Marshall:
Man is a gregarious animal. He wants company. In his hour of greatest danger, his herd instinct drives him toward his fellows. [...] During combat the soldier may become so gripped by fear that most of his thought is directed toward escape. But if he is serving among men whom he has known for a long period or whose judgment of him counts for any reason, he will strive to hide his terror from them.
And here are Shils and Janowitz:
It appears that a soldier’s ability to resist is a function of the capacity of his immediate primary group (his squad or section) to avoid social disintegration. When the individual’s immediate group, and its supporting formations, met his basic organic needs, offered him affection and esteem from both officers and comrades, supplied him with a sense of power and adequately regulated his relations with authority, the element of self-concern in battle, which would lead to disruption of the effective functioning of his primary group, was minimized.
It’s a very similar argument to the one advanced by Andrew Silke in respect of terrorist cells – much of what we do is shaped by our understanding of what the referent group wants.
Much, but not all: there’s also some leeway for other influences on our attitudes. The close-knit combat unit may be a powerful influence, but we all have multiple groups in our lives – family, country, religion … you name it. Add, in addition, some more hardwired and/or encultured emotional responses – not least our reaction to being shot at and shooting at others, but also fatigue, stress, sleep deprivation – and you’ve a complicated mix of motivations for behaviour in combat.
Still, this early social psychology has provided a robust understanding of group behaviour, and it’s one that has relevance for those grappling with counterinsurgency. If you read back through the classics – Galula, Trinquier, Thompson and so on, you find, a basic understanding of the group. Admittedly there too often seem to be only three parties involved – authorities, insurgents, and the ‘population’ – the latter is frequently treated as a homogeneous mass, passively awaiting persuasion from one of the other actors. But there’s also, albeit intermittently apparent, an understanding of the variety of possible groups and their dynamism. Groups can change, and we can have loyalties to more than one at any time. Why? It depends on circumstance, but also on their valence – what does being in the group do for us? That’s why communist insurgents advocated a broad popular front and watered down the communism – they wanted a big tent, initially at least. Thompson and Galula come up with a similar list of motivations for group membership, national, ethnic, religious, economic, village and so on. Creating and promoting groups, especially through control and commitment (two big themes for the French writers, in particular) was a large part of counterinsurgency. Sounds totalitarian, perhaps, but there it was.
Two omissions are in the classic works are interesting – first, reference to the wider body of experimental and field research on groups – stuff like Festinger, Asch, Sherif and so on. These practical men of action clearly aren’t sitting on the dusty verandahs of Empire thumbing back copies of Public Opinion Quarterly or Human Relations. Which is a shame since, as Shils and Janovitz note, their paper can be profitably read by the propagandist as much as the military historian. As a result, they got much right, but missed a few tricks too.
Also undercooked is the idea of war as an emotional, as well as a social phenomenon. On that, Thomas Rid and Thomas Keaney conclude their recent collection on counterinsurgency with a hat tip to the incomparable Peter Paret:
“War,” Peter Paret pointed out “is not only a complex social, organisational, technological and political reality, its ambiguous character engages emotion as well as reason.”
Not half. The psychology of groups is there in classic counterinsurgency writing; but that of emotions, like fear and love, is largely missing from the literature – and that’s odd, because those emotions go a long way to explaining who wins.
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
Anything which rests on SLA Marshall is suspect, given the very real possibility that his findings were fraudulent.
The idea that primary unit cohesion is the most important factor influencing peoples’ willing to fight is commonly accepted, but there are some significant problems with it. As Peter Olsthoorn noted in an article in Journal of Military Ethics a couple of years ago, ‘according to most research, social cohesion has no clear correlation with performance’ (the reference here is an article by McCoun and others in Armed Forces and Society, 2006). He also notes how the study of combat motivation in Iraq saw only 14% of those soldiers mention their immediate comrades as a motivating factor.
In researching my own book on war and honour, I read the diaries and letters of Confederate soldiers in the ACW and of British soldiers in WWI, and specifically looked for indicators of motivation. None of the letters/diaries I looked at mentioned the primary unit or immediate comrades, though many spoke of duty and of the desire not to look bad in the eyes of the folks back home, indicating that soldiers were motivated by internal standards and that the ‘honour group’ was more remote than the primary unit. Indeed, in prolonged wars such as ACW and WWI and WWII, the primary unit was destroyed over and over again, so that it was difficult to form strong attachments to comrades. I may be confusing the source, but I think that it is James McPherson in ‘for Cause and Comrades’ who notes that primary unit cohesion was not the most important factor in combat motivation in the ACW precisely for this reason, and that soldiers after a while actually did their best to distance themselves from colleagues on the grounds that they didn’t want to be too close to somebody who would soon be gone. Yet most kept on fighting.
That’s not to say that primary unit cohesion is not an important factor, but the scale of its importance is exaggerated by Shils and Janowitz’s statement that ‘a soldier’s ability to resist is a function of the capacity of his immediate primary group (his squad or section) to avoid social disintegration’. There are very many factors which contribute to the capacity to resist.
Paul
Thanks Paul – briefly:
>>That’s not to say that primary unit cohesion is not an important factor
You’re right. Hence my para that starts: ‘much but not all’. Capacity to resist rests on multiple factors drawn from among those three components of fighting power: moral, physical and conceptual. On motivations – first, I suspect we have a self-esteem tendency to underestimate how shaped we are by the group. We like the idea of free will to much.
Second, if group norms form quickly (and findings of psychologists from Sherif to Tajfel suggest they can), then loyalty can persist through churn. I suspect it helps if that primary group forming process is aided by leadership and shared organisational culture too (sometimes referred to as secondary group cohesion).
On Marshall’s results, I’ve heard that too, from an eminent psychiatrist, whose response was – ‘ah well, dodgy method, right findings’ – not great, but better that than the other way about, I suspect… and, as you note, there’s a fair body of work to support those findings. Guy Siebold’s 2007 paper in Armed Forces and Society has a good overview, for anyone interested.
“Guerrilla war is not dependent for success on the efficient operation of complex mechanical devices, highly organized logistical systems, or accuracy of electronic computers. It can be conducted in any terrain, in any climate, in any weather; in swamps, in mountains, in farmed fields; its basic element is man, and man is more complex than any of the machines. He is endowed with intelligence, emotions, and will. Guerrilla warfare is therefore suffused with, and reflects, man’s admirable qualities as well as his less pleasant ones. While it is not always humane, it is human, which is more than can be said for the strategy of extinction.”
Samuel B. Griffith II in his introduction to “On Guerrilla Warfare: Mao Tse-Tung.”
Top quote SNLII – added to the list.
Well, KP, if you should like that, then consider some other gems from the COIN literature.
Kilcullen in his “28 Articles” advises junior leaders that when seeking their harvest of hearts and minds “(c)alculated self-interest, not emotion, is what counts.” This also has bugged me because he goes on to suggest that “trust” between the various peoples and the counter-revolutionary is the ultimate goal, but I’ve always found that “trust” is struck more by bonhommie endeavors and, should they fail, an offer the person can’t refuse.
In 2009, he came back to note that emotions must remain secondary to this relationship because what really matters is an ability to deliver safety (weasel word, of course) to the population. Should they like you but can’t count the counter-revolutionary, Kilcullen argues, the “people” will come to see you as “pathetic.”
Again, a scientific means to corral emotions, perhaps in the spirit of T.S. Eliot’s “general mess of imprecision and feeling, undisciplined squads of emotion …” — lest they turn on the combat commander.
Or you could just go with Weber and his dichotomy between “meaningful” and “reactive” behavior. The loaded language perhaps explains the social scientist’s perspective on the issue.
I ascribe Kilcullen’s perspective to his immersion in the social sciences — for all their Galula-esque blather about COIN as 80 percent politics, as social scientist COINdinistas refuse to contemplate the role emotions necessarily play in politics. There’s something transient and obscure about emotions, certainly not the bedrock of motives, social networks and economic interest.
This was abetted by the Marxists, with Lenin, Trotsky and the like seeking material explanations for mass behavior, even in the throes of revolution.
Other insurgents, however, don’t necessarily see things like this. In his “Political Process and the Development of a Black Insurgency, 1930 – 1970,” Doug McAdam notes that emotions not only motivate individual activism play major roles in sculpting mass political actions and revolutions, but likely “shape both the assessment of potential gains and costs involved in any line of action … and to motivate action, even in the face of extreme risks and seemingly no hope for pay-off.”
Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper and Francesca Polletta edited an entire book, “Passionate Politics,” about how emotions shaped mass social movements and the revolution and counter-revolution in El Salvador and other places (Elisabeth Jean Wood wrote the chapter on the “emotional benefits of insurgency in El Salvador”).
There is a school of thought that has concentrated on the emotional benefits available only to those willing to join with the insurgency, even when this choice seemed to be less rational than other courses of action. I’m not competent enough to discuss it, but I’m literate enough to pick through it without moving my mouth too often.
Yes indeed – but social science is getting a bit better with emotions. Behavioural economics is all the rage (pardon the pun), and work on emotional beliefs is a cottage industry in IR – Jonathan Mercer, Neta Crawford and a few others. I really like – and have blogged on Stephen Rosen’s War and Human Nature. Theoretical rationality is so last century… and even strategic studies will have to catch up eventually.
DK hits the spot with social psychology, however, in Thomas’s book: ‘populations in insurgency negotiate a complex process of continuously morphing identity, where each person’s or group’s status (friend, enemy, neutral, ally or opponent, bystander, sympathizer) changes moment by moment depending on the nature of the groups with which it is interacting’.
Another interesting perspective for cohesion in COIN is that of the insurgent–Paul Staniland’s study of Kashmir and Pakistan for example.
Ken,
Thanks, an interesting post. Just a quick comment; Paul is absolutely right, the value of the primary group thesis has been challenged from several perspectives. In purely psychological terms, there is a dispute about individual versus group reactions in combat (see the article by David Smith in Journal of Strategic Studies, 25/3, 2002). Then there is the classic debate between primary group theorists and those who consider ideology more important (see, in particular the two books by Omer Bartov on the Wehrmacht). Finally, as has already been said, much empirical work contradicts both approaches. Not only do soldiers fail to mention comrades when talking about why they fight, but the whole approach cannot explain fully cases of fragging. I am surprised you find it odd that Shils et al and the COIN theorists failed to consider emotions – they were committed to either the science of psychology or the science of war. Rationalism and emotions don’t really mix!
Hola Huw, thanks for this.
Rationalism and emotions don’t mix? Come again? Take a look at Mercer (in IO, 2010) on emotional beliefs for a summary of the neuroscience and some thoughts on how that relates to social science, and war. On rationalism and emotion, try Damasio, Descarte’s Error. Or William James from back in the day. Emotions are part of rationality, not an aberration from it, or a layer on top of it. Like I said, arid and flawed ‘rational’ actor models are, thankfully, on their way out.
As for the science of psychology versus the ‘science’ of war – they’re not mutually exclusive. Consider Clausewitz on the passions of the people, or Thucydides on fear, honour and interest. What could be more psychological than the fear, anger, exhaustion and stress of war, or the exhiliration, vengeance, lust and love in it for that matter? Why wouldn’t those things affect the behaviour of individuals and groups?
On the small group and combat motivation, I would venture that similar psychological processes are at work in combat as in every other type of human activity – i.e. a combination of social and cognitive psychology. As for the balance, it’s certainly open to debate – and debate there is. But measuring it by whether or not people mention their comrades, or even like them, is flawed methodology. People don’t like to think they behave the way they do because of group norms – it’s bad for your self-esteem to think you’re a sheep, but there’s a wealth of evidence that we are.
Coming from the man who lent me his copy of Purify and Destroy, I’m a bit surprised! Still, you can definitely critique my paper before I send it in…
‘measuring it by whether or not people mention their comrades, or even like them, is flawed methodology. People don’t like to think they behave the way they do because of group norms’ – but in fact, from the records I’ve looked at, they are quite prepared to admit to being affected by group norms. The point is that the group in question is more often not the primary group; it has more often been the family, the community from which one comes, or society at large. Actually, the feeling that one should be morally autonomous and not affected by group norms (and thus not want to admit to being so affected) is quite modern, and not, I suspect, a position most people throughout history would have recognised.
Paul
Paul – that last is an interesting point. And, I’m sure too that attitudes to individual and collective behaviour vary culturally even in our day and age.
It’s perhaps less the ingrained norms of, say, what it means to be a good family man and patriot, or even ideological fanatic, that I’m suggesting shapes responses to terror and fear, and more what cues we can read from the reaction of others. Are they getting on with it, even appearing nonchalant, or running hellbent to the hills?
A very insightful post. Today’s review section of the WaPo had a quote from Teddy Roosevelt that chimed well with your thoughts:
“Odd things happen in a battle [and in war], and the human heart has strange and gruesome depths and the human brain still stranger shallows.” Keep up the good work.
Tipper:
Your reference to TR caused me to recall the earlier aside in this thread about the validity of the observation in spite of the questionable bona fides of SLA Marshall. I guess TR may have stated a “truth” (almost common sensical to me), but given his (IMHO) poseur status in terms of anything to do with real military knowledge and experience (notwithstanding his “Rough Rider” persona) I think the same skepticism suggested for SLAM would apply here as well .
Just only appreciation of the discussion on emotions. Tripper, please
send the exact souce of T. Roosevelt´s quote. I will ponder it, too.
Oh crumbs – I didn’t capture the source – but I am pretty sure it was in the Washington Post’s review of Nathaniel Philbrick’s book about Little Bighorn.
You are correct-it is there as well as Ruddy quotes it in his recent book on our first “Progressive” president. http://www.amazon.com/Theodore-Roosevelts-History-United-States/dp/0061834327/
The entire quote is:
“The most righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. It is primeval warfare, and it is waged as war was waged in the ages of bronze and iron. All the merciful humanity that even war has gained during the last two thousand years is lost. A sad and evil feature of such warfare is that the whites, the representatives of civilization, speedily sink almost to the level of their barbarous foes, in point of hideous brutality. Odd things happen in a battle, and the human heart has strange and gruesome depths and the human brain still stranger shallows. “
You, Sir, are a scholar for finding the source, thank you. The full quote immediately made me think of Frederick’s ‘Black Heart’s.’ Iraq in 05 may not have been war with ‘savages’; but it was terrible and inhuman. I must add Ruddy to my reading pile. Regards, T.
You are too kind but I am a mere wannabe in the presence of the other denizens of these threads who are true giants of academe.
If you do read Ruddy on Teddy (see what I did there), you may also see him a bit more clearly than he is so often portrayed as a sort of mustachioed “teddy bear” (I did it again, sorry) who jovially goes about the world with his big stick (and big gun killing big evil-but defenseless-creatures as “sport” for his very needy ego).
As his full quote indicates, his “progressive” world view drips with an arrogant elitism that is then manifested in racism among other things that we see repeated in grotesque fashion thereafter. This includes such “progressive” things as eugenics, the elevation of propaganda literally to an art form and various and sundry other wonderful innovations that contributed to a world war, a cold war, a war on poverty and other wonders. All of these have a common thread of consolidating political and economic power in the hands of various elites (either through force or more benignly through encouraging increasing reliance on our elite masters for our every need) at the expense of personal freedom and self-respect. But we should not complain as it is all for our “greater good.”