Understanding the Impact of Social Research on the Military

Reflections and Critiques

Eyal Ben-Ari, Helena Carreiras, Celso Castro, Eyal Ben-Ari, Helena Carreiras, Celso Castro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000483208
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book seeks to chart and evaluate the impact of social research on the military itself.

By "impact", the authors in this volume simply mean that which has a marked effect or influence on changing military policy, practices, knowledge, skills, behaviour, or living conditions. The book comprises a series of reflective contributions from scholars who have conducted research on the military as external scholars with no formal ties to the armed forces, as "native" researchers formally linked to them, as well as various kinds of contracted social scientists enabled by the military to carry out their investigations. The authors were asked to make the question of the impact of social scientific research on the armed forces an object of study in itself and to situate their reflections in terms of wider analytical questions. As a result, the chapters can be divided, broadly speaking, into two types of orientation: some are centered on theoretical and analytical issues, while others focus on the researchers' lived experiences.

This book will be of interest to students of military studies, sociology, organisational studies, psychology and political science.

1 Truth in military studies: lessons for producers and consumers of research on the military¹

David R. Segal

University of Maryland

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165217-1

One of the major debates in the social sciences during the past three decades has been whether societies have transitioned from a modern to a postmodern era (Jencks, 1986). One facet of this prism has been the question of whether armed forces, which have frequently been viewed as modernizing institutions, have been part of this social transformation (Moskos et al., 2000).

The concept of a post-truth society is frequently seen as an attribute of postmodernism and its critique of reality, truth, and reason. Science, which has been committed to the pursuit of truth through the modern era, is an obvious target of postmodernists. Although trust in science, unlike other institutions, has remained fairly stable, in 2018, only 27% of US adults had great confidence that scientists would act in the best interest of society (Funk & Kennedy, 2019).

One of the characteristics of the modern era was the increasing role of rationality and science in the policy process and in the reciprocal influence of policy on science. This has been especially true in national security affairs. However, in recent years we have seen a rejection of science and of the concept of truth in the policy process in several modern nations.

In 2018, the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA) in the United States held a Science Policy Conference in Washington, and asked me to speak about social science and national security in the US, where we have had a willing clientele in the security community since World War I, when military psychologists developed the army’s first large scale selection and classification tests to measure the aptitudes of draftees. I participated in a panel on social science applications to enhancing security, drawing on a presentation I had given a decade earlier to two Congressional committees (Segal, 2008).

Two of the three plenary sessions at the COSSA meeting dealt with postmodern themes, addressing issues of “Post Truth: Communicating Facts, Not Fiction”, and “Reestablishing Trust in Social Science & Data”. This caused me to reflect both on the products that we provide to the policy clientele and how science has been used by this community, especially in the areas of diversity and cohesion. Issues of truth in the production and use of social science research, both by policymakers and others, have been part of the process since World War II. In this chapter, I discuss lessons learned from the reporting and application of research in these areas.

The cohesion theme

Three World War II research efforts achieved iconic status both within the social sciences and the national security policy community; each has lessons worthy of remembering. The first is S.L.A. Marshall’s Men Against Fire (Marshall, 1947), which for four decades following World War II was the most frequently cited study of combat in that war. Marshall reported, on the basis of about 400 group interviews with infantry companies conducted after combat, that no more than 15–25% of soldiers had fired their weapons in the direction of the enemy, denoting the so-called “ratio of fire”. However, in a number of subsequent presentations, both the percentages of soldiers firing their weapons and the number of infantry companies interviewed varied. SLAM, as S.L.A. Marshall was called, was a journalist by training and vocation and frequently expressed a dislike for statistics. It may be unfair to hold him to the standards of social science, even though this is how he was regarded and initially embraced by social scientists.

In the postwar years, Marshall’s work was widely cited, and his influence was not limited to the ratio of fire. When the racial integration of the US Army was discussed prior to the Korean War, and when gender integration of the army was debated in the early years of America’s all volunteer force, the concept of cohesion was used to resist diversity on the basis of the assumption that social homogeneity produces cohesion. Marshall’s work was widely cited with reference to the importance of cohesion (Segal & Kestnbaum, 2002). Marshall (1947, p. 42) had written that “…the thing that enables an infantry soldier to keep going…is the near presence or presumed presence of a comrade”.

By the late 1980s, questions about the veracity of his findings were being published, as some World War II veterans reported gaps between their experiences and Marshall’s reporting (Halloran, 1989; Smoler, 1989). Elements of his biography were also called into question. This might have been one of the first examples of a postmodern rejection regarding accepted wisdom. The controversy became so painful to the Marshall family that Marshall’s grandson took a year off from his employment as a journalist – a vocation in which he followed in his grandfather’s footsteps – to research the truth (Marshall, 1993).

The younger Marshall’s research suggested that the broad strokes of SLAM’s narrative held true. However, some important details such as the 15–25% ratio of fire figures and the number of companies interviewed, lacked support, and some biographical claims were untrue. SLAM still had his supporters in the army, and they characterized his misstatements of fact as “fibs” rather than lies, the distinction being that he reported things as he wanted them to be, rather than intending to deceive. Today, these might be called “alternate truths”.

The esteem in which he had been held by military historians declined. The SLA Marshall Chair at the Army Research Institute, which had been established in 1986, was abolished. In the 1990s and the first decades of the twenty-first century, when policies regarding military sexual orientation integration and gender integration of ground combat units were debated, SLAM’s work had largely disappeared from the discussions of cohesion.

Lesson 1. If you want your research to have lasting relevance, tell the truth about what you found and how you found it. It’s the ethical thing to do and if you lie, you may eventually be caught.

The second piece of iconic World War II research from which we draw lessons on interpretation and application is Shils and Janowitz’s (1948) classic study of the Wehrmacht. This study suggested that it was interpersonal dynamics in military companies (primary group cohesion and leadership) rather than commitment to National Socialist ideology or ineffective allied propaganda – that accounted for the willingness of German soldiers to continue fighting after it was clear that Germany was losing the war. This paper has been cited more than 1,000 times and it continues to be cited, including more than 50 times a year for the past few years. Although Janowitz was not yet a sociologist at the time of his service (Segal, 2017b), Shils had been a sociology faculty member at the University of Chicago before the war, and Janowitz went back with him to Chicago as a doctoral student after demobilization. I cannot fault either the methods or the conceptualization of this paper. However, I do have concerns about the way it has been cited by social scientists.

A multitude of published studies refers to the “surveys” of German PWs (prisoners of war) conducted by Shils and Janowitz. In fact, as the authors noted, the Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF did conduct opinion polls of PWs to measure the effectiveness of propaganda and this was the subject of the only table in the article. However, their cohesion analysis was based on front-line interrogation of PWs and intensive psychological interviews in rear areas. Shils and Janowitz served with the Office of Special Services (OSS), a forerunner of the CIA, and their data were primarily intelligence interrogations. Many of them were part of the denazification process aimed at determining the order in which PWs would be released. The authors were explicit in admitting the lack of scientific rigor in their data collection. Citing the data from these interrogations as the results of sociological surveys suggests a lack of sensitivity to the difference between interrogations and surveys. The methodological issues raised by the former include reliability issues that may be very different from those raised by surveys. Under current American regulations regarding human subject research, PWs are a protected population who cannot be used as research subjects. It is possible, of course, that the authors of some of the papers that have cited Shils and Janowitz have not read the original text carefully (if at all).

Lesson 2. Read carefully and report honestly the research methods used in the research upon which you build.

The third iconic World War II research effort was reported in the four-volume series by Stouffer and his colleagues on Social Psychology in World War II, including the two volumes titled The American Soldier (Stouffer 1949a, 1949b).

Just as Shils, Samuel A. Stouffer had been a sociology professor at the University of Chicago before the war (Segal, 2017a). By the dawning of World War II, the army had realized that the attitudes of soldiers, such as morale, were as important as the aptitudes that had been studied since World War I in understanding military performance and effectiveness. Stouffer was asked to establish a research organization to contribute to such understanding; he recruited many of the major sociologists and social psychologists of his generation to develop a survey research program (Ryan, 2013). During the course of the war, the Information and Education Division’s Research Branch, which he headed, surveyed more than half a million American soldiers, and reported their findings regularly to senior army commanders. Following WWII, they published their four-volume series with foundation support.

In 1988, I was teaching a course on Armed Forces & Society at West Point. At the beginning of our discussion on the issue of cohesion, two of my cadets told me that they had learned in their Combat Leadership course that Stouffer had found that cohesion was the major factor that kept soldiers going in combat. I had repeatedly heard this assertion in policy discussions when cohesion was being used to argue against diversity in the army.

I told these young cadets to read Stouffer et al. (1949b), to determine (a) how Stouffer’s team measured cohesion; (b) whether in fact cohesion was the major combat incentive for soldiers; (c) what percentage of soldiers said that cohesion was the main factor; and (d) whether Stouffer’s data provided a basis for generalizing to the army. I also asked them to share what they found with their Combat Leadership instructor.

They found, to their surprise, that cohesion did not appear in the index of the American Soldier volumes, but that the researchers had asked a question that had face validity in getting at combat motivation. Generally, from your combat experience, what was most important to you in making you want to keep going and do as well as you could? They were interested to learn that the research team surveyed army units, but did no army-wide surveys and that frequently the results from two or more units were combined in one table. Nowadays, this would be regarded as meta-analysis, with protocols for such data aggregation that did not exist in the 1940s. The cadets also noted that sometimes there were subtle changes in question wording, which is not surprising, since the team was exploring how to do better surveys while they carried out their research. And the cadets picked up on the fact that officers were often asked different questions than enlisted personnel to measure the same variable. These issues had relevance for the generalizability of the data.

With regard to the primacy of cohesion as a combat incentive, the data presented (Stouffer et al., 1949b), based on a survey of a division that had been in combat in North Africa and Sicily, showed “Ending the task” to be the most commonly cited factor among enlisted personnel (39%). “Solidarity with the group” (cohesion) was the second most important but at a lower level (14%) than one might expect if one thought that cohesion was the primary driver. Among officers in the same unit, “Leadership and discipline” had been the most important (19% but selected only by 1% o...