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The Combat Soldier
Infantry Tactics and Cohesion in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Anthony King
560 pages
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Contains over 40 photographs
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234x156mm
978-0-19-965884-8
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Hardback
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21 February 2013
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- Provides unique ethnographic material on modern urban combat, supported by photographs
- Embedded within historical literature on cohesion and the armed forces
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.Readership: Scholars and students of international relations, war studies, security studies, sociology, and military history
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Anthony King, Professor of Sociology, University of Exeter Anthony King has written extensively on social theory, football, and the armed forces, including his most recent book 'The Transformation of Europe's Armed Forces: from the Rhine to Afghanistan', published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. As a result of his research, he has developed close relations with the armed forces, especially the Royal Marines. He has co-written parts of current British military doctrine on stabilisation and has advised on the campaign in Afghanistan as a member of NATO's Regional Command South Headquarters in Kandahar in 2009-10. He was recently appointed as a mentor by the Army's Force Development and Training
Command as it tries to reform and restructure the army. He has contributed to public debates about contemporary security and defence policy, giving evidence on operations in Afghanistan to the Parliamentary Defence Committee, writing and speaking for some think-tanks. He is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Exeter.
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Preface
1: The Elementary Forms of the Military Life
2: Cohesion
3: The Marshall Effect
4: Combat Motivation
5: Mass Tactics
6: Modern Tactics
7: The Persistence of Mass
8: Battle Drills
9: Training
10: Professional Solidarity
11: The Female Soldier
12: The Professional Society
Bibliography
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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