Military Mission Formations and Hybrid Wars

New Sociological Perspectives

Thomas Vladimir Brønd, Uzi Ben-Shalom, Eyal Ben-Ari, Thomas Vladimir Brønd, Uzi Ben-Shalom, Eyal Ben-Ari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000207507
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This volume explores and develops new social-scientific tools for the analysis and understanding of contemporary military missions in theatre.

Despite the advent of new types of armed conflict, the social-scientific study of militaries in action continues to focus on tools developed in the hey-day of conventional wars. These tools focus on such classic issues as cohesion and leadership, communication and unit dynamics, or discipline and motivation. While these issues continue to be important, most studies focus on organic units (up to and including brigades). By contrast, this volume suggests the utility of concepts related to mission formations – as opposed to 'units' or 'components' – to better capture the (ongoing) processual nature of the amalgamations and combinations that military involvement in conflicts necessitates. The study of these formations by the social sciences – sociology, social psychology, anthropology, political science and organization science – requires the introduction of new analytical tools to the study of militaries in theatre. As such, this volume utilizes new approaches to social life, organizational dynamics and to armed violence to understand the place of the armed forces in contemporary conflicts and the new tasks they are assigned.

This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, sociology, security studies and International Relations in general.

Part I

Introduction and Reflections on the Field

1 Introduction

Mission formations and a new agenda for the study of military units in action¹

Eyal Ben-Ari, Uzi Ben-Shalom, Thomas Brond and Carmit Padan

Since the end of the Cold War, the world has seen the advent of what have variously been called the “New Wars” or “Hybrid Wars” (Hoffman, 2007; Kaldor, 2005; Munkler, 2005). These labels refer to conflicts combining differing forms of fighting (such as conventional, irregular or disruptive) in ways that blur their purportedly discrete nature. Thus, they may include a mixture of armed confrontations resembling conventional battles or skirmishes (pitting more or less regular forces against each other), anti-insurgency and policing campaigns, or efforts such as humanitarian assistance or reconstruction. Furthermore, they often encompass military and police units, civilian state organizations and multinational frameworks and non-state actors. For the armed forces, these kinds of conflicts imply that to older, conventional tasks have been added many new missions ranging between strictly military tasks, security-related assignments and civilian undertakings. What is striking about these missions, however, is that they are undertaken by specially created ‒ and temporary ‒ organizational formations, each of which is “tailored” to the missions at hand.

Yet, despite the advent of these new armed conflicts, much of the social scientific study of militaries-in-action seems to be “stuck” with tools developed in the heyday of conventional wars (dating back to the two World Wars and the Cold War). These social scientific tools focus on such classic issues as cohesion and leadership, communication and unit dynamics or discipline and motivation (Matthews, 2014; Schilling, 2019). Although all of these issues continue to be important, the problem is that almost all of these studies persist in focusing almost exclusively on organic units (up to and including brigades). In contrast, our volume suggests the utility of concepts related to mission formations ‒ rather than “units” or “components” ‒ to better capture the nature of the amalgamations and combinations that today’s military missions involve. These new configurations link a variety of military units and a diverse set of governmental and non-governmental entities.

Yet these configurations – often temporary and constructed for specific missions – are analyzable as they are oriented towards goals, have internal structures and are marked by specific social and organizational characteristics. Our volume takes as its focus precisely these formations. Hence, it explores and develops new social scientific tools for the analysis and understanding of contemporary military action, that is, of armed forces in theater. Accordingly, it seeks to present and advance newer ‒ or combinations of newer and older ‒ analytical tools, methodologies and theories for the study of the military forces on deployment. For instance, whereas previous experiences of multi-nationality usually implied coordination at headquarters and the actual combat in uni-national formations, today even small units may find themselves interacting with other national units and civilian entities that may be characterized by different ethical codes, value systems and professional socialization.

To analyze these diverse mission formations ‒ those relatively impermanent, modular frameworks constructed for specific missions ‒ the contributions and the volume as a whole utilize innovative social scientific approaches developed over the past three or so decades. In other words, we show how the new wars provide empirical, methodological and theoretical opportunities for social scientists. In the rest of this introduction, we explain the empirical and analytical importance of mission formations, the older and newer social scientific tools that we draw upon and the main issues that are opened up for study and we introduce the chapters.

What are mission formations? Why study them?

By mission formations, we refer to combinations, fusions and blends of “tactical” units of the ground forces with a variety of specialized military forces and civilian entities in temporary, usually mission-specific amalgams within the context of contemporary conflicts. In formal military jargon, “tactical” refers to the level of war at which battles are planned and executed to accomplish objectives, and to forces organized to function in combat as self-contained entities. Because our aim is social scientific (and not doctrinal), however, we use this military term only as shorthand to underscore the kinds of structures and relations on which we focus ‒ basically up to and including brigades. The sociological scientific study of these formations refers to the study of their composition, structures, interactions, processes and practices. We use sociology as an umbrella term referring to the disciplines – sociology, social psychology, anthropology, political science and organization science – that are relevant to the study of such mission formations.

The concept of mission formations ‒ rather than “units”, “elements” or “components” ‒ is intended to capture the (ongoing) processual nature of the amalgamations, assemblages or combinations that military involvement in conflicts necessitates. These configurations are oriented towards goals and seek information about their environments, have internal (sometimes contradictory) structures and are marked by specific social and organizational characteristics and by different degrees of temporariness. In organizational parlance, they are action sets (Czarniewska, 2004, 2005). The concept of mission formations is used to underscore how militaries are becoming more akin to flexible organizations characterized by the relative loosening of internal and external boundaries.

Empirically, mission formations include relatively long-lasting forms such as peacekeeping frameworks (Autesserre, 2014), multinational expeditionary forces (van Fenema, 2009; Leonhard et al., 2008; Moelker et al., 2007; Shields, 2011; Tomforde, 2009; Tresch, 2007; de Ward & Kramer, 2010) or frameworks created within the US Department of Homeland Defense (Fosher, 2008), temporary creations such as battle-groups (King, 2011), combined arms assault teams (Ben-Ari, 2015; King, 2010a), amalgamations of military units and police forces (Banks, 2016) or indeed much more ephemeral mergers as in an ad hoc combination of forces that join and rejoin an armed effort, structures composed for delivering food and medical aid or ad hoc joining of interpreters to organic forces (Hajjar, 2017; Van Dijk, Soeters & de Ridder, 2010). In addition, we would include organizational arrangements between armed forces and other state agencies, as well as non-governmental and international organizations (Osinga & Lindley-French, 2010, p. 24; Ben-Ari, 2018).

All these organizational forms contain fewer fixed structures and more temporary systems than “organic” units, and their constituent elements, people and technologies are assembled and disassembled according to the shifting needs of specific projects. Hence, mission formations include various forms of distributed teams or configurations of units from different arms and services or civilian agencies that are often put together in an ad hoc manner for specific tasks and missions, including violent encounters (Bollen & Soeters, 2010).

In focusing on mission formations, we go beyond an emphasis on multinational forms or jointness that still assumes relatively homogeneous, bounded (“textbook”) units joined to other such units (Ruffa, 2018; Friesendorf, 2018). Rather, we emphasize the integration of diverse elements in a dynamic manner that may constantly change and that often include civilian components. To emphasize then, for our purposes, an infantry company calling in air support becomes, for the duration of the cooperation, a provisional combat formation. Similarly, an artillery officer and his signaller calling in direct fire have become a small team, coordinating a diversity of fire as the result of improved communication but for only a limited period of time (King, 2011, p. 255). More broadly, to provide another military example, we refer to such formations as the rapid reaction forces in contemporary Europe studied by Anthony King (2006, pp. 268–9) who notes that:

They are no longer properly light infantry brigades, but have developed into hybrid, mobile brigades capable of maneuvering on a dispersed battlefield. At the same time, they are becoming joint organizations, with horizontal relations developing into supporting assets often from the air and maritime components. Finally, in light of the new operations, these brigades have recognized the centrality of new forms of intelligence and, indeed, information operations to the conduct of their missions.

In this view, in place of fronts, the “battlespace” consists of independent “lozenges” of discrete tactical activity: battle-groups – our mission formations – that are coordinated by a higher command may operate substantially independently of one another against threats which may come from any direction using distal but accurate fire power.

To be sure, such formations are not that new, but we suggest that, for analytical purposes, it may be fruitful to look at their dynamics rather than, as most sociology of military action has done, their constituent organic units. Theoretically, then, the crucial point of our formulation is that of a move from a sociology of combat units to a sociology of mission formations (in the dual sense of the word in English – as a noun and as a verb). If the platoon–company–battalion nexus was the focus of the older sociology (Moskos, 1984; Siebold, 2001), the new one focuses on combinations or assemblages of forces and entities for specific missions.

There are four reasons for focusing on this level of analysis: one historical and three analytical. First, from the perspective of the industrial democracies, the period after 9/11 has been one in which suddenly “everyone” was fighting or at least deployed to areas marked by armed conflict. For some militaries such as the American, British, French or Israeli armed forces, the conflicts were a continuation of previous armed engagements. But for many others, such as most of the European countries or Japan and South Korea, deploying troops to Iraq or Afghanistan (and other places) represented a first after the end of the Cold War. Thus, this period saw a significant enlargement of a “family” of fighting militaries participating in actual armed conflicts. But, because so many contemporary deployments are multinational and more often than not include civilian components, the armed forces have found themselves carrying out their assigned tasks in mission formations.

Second, analytically this is the level where the macro processes charted out by scholars ‒ casualty aversion, marketization, technologization or juridification, to mention only a few ‒ shape the use of organized state-sanctioned violence (the core of the military's expertise). Although the effects of these processes can be seen across the armed forces, in this volume we are interested in how they shape (and are shaped) at the level of militaries-in-use, in concrete operations. The idea is that, although there are continuities between the way the ground forces carry out their missions today and the way they have done so in the past, as new social environments have emerged, they have had a significant influence on the ways in which soldiers operate. Hence, if we want to chart how macro-sociological trends such as changed forms of legitimacy for using armed state violence, the social distribution of death or the impact of human rights on military action (Shaw, 2005; Levy, 2019) actually influence the level at which units perform, then this level is the most suitable. Similarly, the increasing concentration and internationalization of forces are long-term trends that need to be systematically analyzed at the level of mission formations (King, 2011).

Third, this level of analysis is characterized by forms of social organization and processes that are analytically distinct from higher levels. In other words, what goes on at this level is influenced by, but cannot be reduced to, external factors (Gazit & Ben-Ari, 2017). Macro approaches to the study of the armed forces do not suffice to analyze the kinds of interactions, emergent properties and logics of action that are found in mission formations because they tend to focus on the level of states and governing institutions, civil–military relations or the social origins of troops. In other words, whereas the macro social scientific approaches center on war or broad strategic issues, we ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Lists of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• PART I Introduction and Reflections on the Field
• PART II New Organizational Forms and Processes
• PART III Methodologies for the Study of Military Formations
• PART IV Glocalized Mission Formations
• PART V Bringing it all Together
• Index