The Combat Soldier: Infantry Tactics and Cohesion in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Combat Soldier: Infantry Tactics and Cohesion in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries By Anthony King Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013 538 pages $107.00 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] After more than a decade of continuous conflict, Anthony King, a Cambridge graduate and professor of sociology at Exeter University, authored a superb and in-depth look at today's soldiers. King's research passion, the examination of the sociological phenomenon collective action--how and why groups form and sustain themselves--ranges from sports teams to the military. In Combat Soldier, Kang meticulously explores how cohesion and combat performance, often assumed unchanging and universal across wars, may have changed in the course of the last century, as armies have moved away from the citizen towards the all-volunteer professional model. King examines how armies in Western-like, democratic societies behave and maintain cohesion in the face of the hellish experience of combat. He does so by deftly analyzing how the multiplicity of factors including comradeship, political motivation, doctrine, tactics, and training (39) affected combat performance in battle from World War I to the present. Rather than a macro perspective, he studies the phenomenon from the grassroots level using the infantry platoon as his unit of analysis to identify what motivates these soldiers to act in unison in a combat environment. His method includes comparing citizen army platoons from World War I to Vietnam against the modern, professional army platoons which have fought from the Falklands to the most recent operations in Afghanistan. By design, his emphasis focuses on six armies: Australia; Canada; France; Germany; the United Kingdom; and the United States, and applicable infantry platoons from their marine ground units. Precise definitions and disciplined social science methodologies aid King's objectivity in analyzing the conditions affecting combat performance. Consequently, he challenges commonly held notions of citizen armies, both positive and negative, in comparing their performance across countries and wars to make his findings more comparable and generalizable. S.L.A. Marshall's research based on 30 years of study on combat soldiers serves as King's starting point. Marshall, widely regarded as the expert on soldiers in combat, came under attack over the past 25 years. Criticisms cast doubt on his methodology and objectivity, discrediting the findings in his seminal work, Men against Fire. While addressing criticisms of Marshall's research, King examines and defends the essence of Marshall's surprising and controversial findings--one in four combat soldiers actually fired weapons in battle. In the chapter, The Marshall Effect, King reestablishes the efficacy of Marshall's work and uses it to serve as his foundation for exploring the differences in combat performance between citizen armies of the twentieth century and professional armies of the current century. King explains how armies formerly appealed to masculine honour, nationalism, ethnicity and patriotic duty (97) to inspire soldiers to fight in the citizen armies of the 20th century. However, he argues new factors have emerged, as a result of the shift from mass to modern tactics due largely to advances in technology and the changing nature of modern warfare. Such factors account for significant increases in the effectiveness of today's combat soldier--a direct result of the shift to all-volunteer, professionalized armies. …

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