The Combat Soldier
Infantry Tactics and Cohesion in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 21 February 2013
- ISBN 9780199658848
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages554 pages
- Size 240x162x31 mm
- Weight 1056 g
- Language English
- Illustrations Contains over 40 photographs 0
Categories
Short description:
Combat Soldiers is a work of historical, comparative sociology examining the evolution of infantry tactics in the American, Australian, Canadian, British, French, German, and Italian armies from the First World War to the present in order to address a key question in the social sciences of how social solidarity (cohesion) is generated and sustained
MoreLong description:
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.
Professor King provides a well-written (perhaps too lengthy, sometimes rambling) and well-documented work of immense value, describing infantry tactics from WorldWar I up to the present time, with a clear depiction of the brutality of industrial age and urban warfare. Particularly, useful is his style of presenting a tactical problem and indicating what was done to address the problem.
Table of Contents:
Preface
The Elementary Forms of the Military Life
Cohesion
The Marshall Effect
Combat Motivation
Mass Tactics
Modern Tactics
The Persistence of Mass
Battle Drills
Training
Professional Solidarity
The Female Soldier
The Professional Society
Bibliography
