On Military Culture: Theory, Practice and African Armed Forces - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1775820661 ISBN 13: 9781775820666

Publisher: University of Cape Town Press, 2014

Synopsis

Offering a contemporary perspective on military culture within Africa and with contributions from scholars and practitioners from around the world, this work presents the argument that African armed forces need to come to terms with the elements of military culture if they want to become more professional. To this end, the book first focuses on the theory of military culture, its implications for civil–military relations, and the role of the armed forces in society before examining a number of cases, from Canada, Australia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Namibia. This work ends with a detailed discussion of the South African military culture and an examination of its post-apartheid vision. In a post-colonial world, discussions about the role of the military are regarded with suspicion, but if the role of the modern soldier is to serve society as well as to fight war, then scholarship is needed to determine the military culture of the 21st century, and On Military Culture provides such an analysis.

About this title

About the Author

Abel Esterhuyse is an associate professor of strategy at the South African Military Academy. He is the editor of Scientia Militaria: South African Journal of Military Studies. He has published numerous articles on contemporary military issues and South African military history. Francois Vreÿ is an associate professor at the South African Military Academy. He is the assistant editor of Scientia Militaria: South African Journal of Military Studies and has been published in a number of academic journals and other publications on the topic of African maritime security.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

On Military Culture

Theory, Practice and African Armed Forces

By Francois Vrey, Abel Esterhuyse, Thomas Mandrup

Juta and Company Ltd

Copyright © 2013 UCT Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-77582-066-6

Contents

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES, 
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS, 
LIST OF ACRONYMS, 
INTRODUCTION Abel Esterhuyse, Francois Vre and Thomas Mandrup, 
CHAPTER 1 Strategising in an era of conceptual change: Security institutions and the delivery of 'security' in the 21st century Kim Hudson and Dan Henk, 
CHAPTER 2 Military contributions to non-traditional missions: The challenges to military culture and how to overcome them Christopher Dandeker, 
CHAPTER 3 On strategic culture: Some perspectives on theory and practice Francois Vrey, 
CHAPTER 4 Aligning societal and military culture Alan Okros, 
CHAPTER 5 Hamlet's glass and the radical reality of security culture: Religion, authorised violence and sacrifice Michael McKinley, 
CHAPTER 6 The professionalism of small things: The institutional culture of the Australian army Nick Jans, 
CHAPTER 7 Morphing mirror images of military culture and the nation-state insecurities in Kenya Musambayi Katumanga, 
CHAPTER 8 Armies and democratic transitions: Challenges and prospects of building a professional army in Ethiopia Mulugeta Gebrehiwot Berhe, 
CHAPTER 9 Military culture and the South African armed forces: A historical perspective Ian van der Waag, 
CHAPTER 10 Snapshots, synapses, and silences: Social theory and military studies Peter Vale, 
CHAPTER 11 Forging the post-apartheid military culture in South Africa Laurie Nathan, 
CHAPTER 12 Institutional culture: The South African military and its search for organisational stability Abel Esterhuyse, 
CHAPTER 13 South African officers' views on aspects of military culture: Grappling with change and realising what needs to be done Lindy Heinecken, 
CHAPTER 14 Conclusion: Reflecting on military culture Abel Esterhuyse, Francois Vre and Thomas Mandrup, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

STRATEGISING IN AN ERA OF CONCEPTUAL CHANGE:

SECURITY INSTITUTIONS AND THE DELIVERY OF 'SECURITY' IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Kim Hudson and Dan Henk

Introduction

From the earliest beginnings, violence and coercion have been features of the human condition. Adherents of the Abrahamic religions recall these unfortunate proclivities in the rivalry between the first two siblings, ending when the homicidal Cain slew his brother Abel in a fit of jealous rage. Culturally sanctioned violence has a similarly hoary legacy: myths of origins in many cultures recall significant armed conflict, sometimes hyped into present identity. Seminal defeats or victories are part of historical narratives: dramatic examples include Thermopylae (480 BC), the Roman sack of Jerusalem (AD 70) and the battles of Kosovo Polje (1389) and the Boyne (1690). A glorification of sanctioned violence is evident even in the national anthem of France, a nation which finds value in resistance to an obscure early 19th-century naval bombardment. Humankind has seemingly always maintained institutions whose primary role is to apply violence for personal or cultural ends, often taking great pride in the capacity of those institutions to apply (or defy) irresistible force. Modern military establishments are the progeny of this all-too-human heritage.

Following a well-known characterisation, military professionals in the United States are said to exercise the state monopoly on the 'management of violence' (Huntington, 1957:13–18; Lasswell, 1941:455–468), a role which remains important in the early 21st century. Yet managing and applying violence are manifestly not the only expectations of contemporary military establishments and may no longer be their primary roles. There is a striking modern irony in the escalating transformation of institutions created to win armed conflict into those now equally responsible for attenuating or preventing it. While this evolution is by no means comprehensive, irreversible, definitive or inevitable, it is sufficiently remarkable that national policy-makers and military professionals can scarcely ignore it.

Assuming that security agencies (military, police and intelligence) remain the repositories of the state's most deadly and expensive capabilities, the ongoing conceptual shift has at least three important implications:

1) The definition and prioritisation of the ends that these establishments may now be expected to serve

2) How best to shape, develop and resource security establishments (especially military forces) to serve those ends

3) The locus and quality of decisions on committing and employing security agencies.

These implications point to the desirability of clear long-range thinking, ethically informed choices and productive civil-military relations.

This chapter will explore some of the conceptual shifts behind the changes in roles and missions of security-sector actors, as notions of security have broadened significantly over the past several decades. It will note that expectations of the international community may now exceed the legacy capacity of those actors. It will suggest that strategists seeking to align expectations and capabilities increasingly are obliged to match realistic security ends with feasible ways and available means. Those feasible ways and means almost inherently involve significant change in the security sector itself, including changes in structure, focus and ethos. The chapter will also briefly examine the prospects for such change in a part of the world where security (however defined) is profoundly challenged — the African continent.

What is changing, and why?

In the early 21st century security sectors around the world were under increasing scrutiny — and pressure for change — from attentive publics (Ikenberry & Slaughter, 2006). Some scholars attributed this to the evolving nature of human conflict. They called attention to a contemporary transition away from state-centric 'industrial war', with its emphasis on technology, and towards 'war amongst the people', with an emphasis on shaping human will (Hoffman, 2007; Kaldor, 2001; Smith, 2005). They noted that such change was rupturing widely shared earlier assumptions about conflict as competition over the interests of nation-states, a comfortable older model now giving way to the ambiguities of struggles between a dizzying array of state and non-state actors driven by widely divergent motivations (Hoffman, 2007; Kaldor, 2001; Smith, 2005). But a change in the nature of human conflict — assuming it was correctly identified and consisted of more than a temporary anomaly — would not in itself motivate societies to demand significant revisions of security-sector roles. The analysis begs the question of what, exactly, was changing and why it would stimulate intense interest in security-sector renovation. Or put another way, if security sectors are means to particular ends, the question immediately arises whether the societies of the world were rethinking the issue of strategic ends and demanding a greater prerogative to define them.

It is precisely here that another broad stream of recent scholarship may offer more helpful insights. Since the early 1980s scholars, intellectuals and practitioners have engaged in a fascinating series of debates about the meaning of security (Baldwin, 1997:5–26; Burgess & Owen, 2004; Buzan, Waever & De Wilde, 1998; Matthews, 1989:162–177; Walt, 1991:211–239). These debates have overlapped and eddied with scholarly treatment of related concepts such as development, 'liberal peace' and (later) Responsibility to Protect (R2P) (Richmond, 2006:291–314). Initially, the new ideas were offered as analytical frameworks to identify the root causes of human suffering, but they quickly jumped the boundaries of academe into communities of human rights advocates and policy-makers. They were embraced by groups who saw an opportunity to reframe the conversation about — and the definition of — security. Since 'security' commands a substantial share of public-sector resources in most states, the prospects for redirecting resources were apparent to many interested observers.

Those arguing for radical change now offered models emphasising the safety of individuals and the well-being of local communities. Their conceptions of security included economic, social and ecological dimensions. To them, traditional security paradigmata were particularly defective in their failure to focus on the comprehensive well-being of people, and this conviction motivated them to argue for a much broader definition of international peace and security (see, inter alia, Stahn, 2007). As the new ideas became increasingly mainstream, even the influential International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) weighed in, arguing that true security included 'physical safeties, economic and social well-being, respect for the dignity and worth of human beings and the protection of ... human rights and fundamental freedoms [of individuals]' (Evans & Sahnoun, 2001). The overall effect of the new ideas was a sea change in the thinking of the international community about the 'referent object' of security, no longer automatically or exclusively taken to be the nation-state. Rather, local communities — or even individuals — assumed centre stage as rights-bearing entities.

By the early 1990s much of this new security thinking had coalesced under the rubric of 'human security', a formula which achieved widespread currency with the publication of the 1993 Human Development Report. The concept became something of a benchmark for the broadest conceptions of security emerging worldwide (United Nations Development Program, 1993). As envisioned by the UN, the new security was 'people-centred'. Its most basic components were 'freedom from fear and freedom from want'. In addition to protection from physical violence, it includes safety from chronic threats such as hunger, disease, severe economic deprivation and political repression. By 2003 the UN had broadened its security formula to include a concern for 'populations on the move' and adequate conditions of 'knowledge' (Commission on Human Security, 2003). This new vision of security emphasised economic development, mandated the creation of a safe and secure environment for all, and prescribed international humanitarian intervention to protect against various traumas.

The new thinking was captured in various consultations and documents intended to influence policy. The concept of the individual as the referent object of security was particularly highlighted in three key documents:

1) The 2001 Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), which set out the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) as:

'the emerging principle ... that intervention for human protection purposes, including military intervention in extreme cases, is supportable when major harm to civilians is occurring or imminently apprehended and the state in question is unable or unwilling to end the harm, or is itself the perpetrator'

2) The follow-on Security Council resolution (S/RES/1674) on the protection of civilians in war

3) A 2004 report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility promulgated by the United Nations Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.

The last document argued that threats to international peace and security included 'any event or process that leads to large scale death or lessening of life chances and undermines states as the basic unit of the international system', notably identifying poverty, infectious disease, and environmental degradation as such threats. The principles of R2P were unanimously affirmed by all participants in the Outcome Document of the United Nations High-level Plenary Meeting (the 2005 World Summit).

Before the appearance of these key documents, human security advocacy had been significantly advanced by international agreement on the Rome Statute (1998) and the resulting institution of the International Criminal Court, by which the international community withdrew almost any grounds for individual claim to impunity for atrocity crimes in war (Human Security Report Project, 2011). The bedrock value underlying all of these developments was a prioritisation of the individual human being. In this new norm of behaviour the value of the state as a sovereign actor was at least implicitly contingent on its ability to provide at least a minimal level of human security to each member of its citizenry. In this view maintaining effective safeguards for individuals was an inherent obligation of individual states, and even of the international community.

Nor was security limited to absence of violence. In the broadest of the new paradigmata, security was a holistic concept, consisting of a variety of necessary components. These included:

• access to a decent standard of living for all members of a community (income security)

• availability of sufficient food and clean water to adequately nourish all members of a community (food security)

• access to adequate health care and freedom from the scourge of epidemic disease (health security)

• an environment that is non-toxic and from which all members of the community receive equitable benefits (environmental security)

• freedom from violence to persons, property and dignity (personal security)

• respect and protection for individual human rights of all members of the community

• safeguarding of community norms and values against rapid, destabilising change

• governance accountable to all members of the community, including universal access to justice and fair dispute mediation.

This broad, holistic new model was by no means the final word, and security remained a contested concept among scholars, practitioners and policy-makers. In 2012 the world's attentive public was in far from complete accord on the definition of security, the elements that comprised it or the things that truly threatened it, nor was it agreed on the prerogative of particular actors to define and deliver 'security'. Policy-makers agonised over the conflicting mandates of protecting state interests and sovereignty, on the one hand, while fulfilling the growing global demand for a broad new vision of security — including issues of human security — on the other. Some voices argued against abandoning a traditional state-centred security focus, while others challenged the utility of the broad new definitions themselves.

Even the proponents of human security differed substantially among themselves. Some scholars remained very uncomfortable with the state embrace of human security altogether, preferring to see the paradigm remain a conceptual tool for scholarly analysis (see, inter alia, Edstrom, 2003:209–225; Ferreira & Henk, 2008; Human Security Report Project, 1999). Even the most zealous human security advocates often tended to characterise it more as a normative vision than a practical policy tool (Dalby, 1997:12–8; Dorff, 1994:27; Henk, 2005:91–106; Williams, 2005). By no means all agreed with the UN prioritisation or its taxonomy of component parts. However, it was the question of accountability and responsibility that proved particularly difficult to resolve. Even assuming a broad international consensus on principles, who specifically would be willing, able and authorised to enforce the popular will?

Scholars such as Carla Bagnoli, Allen Buchanan, Kok-Chor Tan and Michael Walzer argued that where states fail to provide human security to their citizenry, or where the state itself is the perpetrator of atrocities, and where intervention is permissible in a 'Just War' calculus, intervention by external actors is obligatory. However, these scholars disagree as to who bears that responsibility and how it arises. Walzer stipulates, 'who can, should'. In his view the duty of intervention is an imperfect duty, falling on nobody in particular, and allowing wide flexibility in compliance (Walzer, 2002). Bagnoli and Tan argue against this position. They assert that the duty falls on everyone and is a perfect duty (Bagnoli, 2004; see also Tan, 2004). Meanwhile, international co-operation in human rights crises typically has been hobbled by unresolved disagreement between proponents of realpolitik and the nation-state as the referent object of security and those committed to advancing human security. Buchanan argues that states are obligated to fix the existing international institutions so they might successfully respond to mass atrocities, for example by creating rapid response forces, but this has occurred only fitfully and in small measure (Buchanan, 2004; Mulugeta, 2008). Where states are unable or unwilling to comply with the broad new visions of security within their borders, the international community may now recognise a responsibility to protect, but the 'international community' has no army to enforce it.

Still, the various controversies, disagreements and enforcement dilemmas do not obviate the significance of the conceptual shift in the human family. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the ongoing change, and foolish to ignore the level of attention now being paid by some of the world's deepest thinkers (McCormack, 2008:113–128). In fact, the enthusiastic embrace of the new ideas by the United Nations in the early 1990s (along with policy-makers in a number of states) has resulted in at least two rather different communities: the United Nations Development Programme, 1994; and the United Nations High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, 2004. Policy-makers in some G-77 nations and in the (former) 'non-aligned' community worry that the new ideas threaten previously inviolable international norms of sovereignty and non-intervention. In practice Security Council members also have been leery of challenging national sovereignty in favour of human security. In contrast activists and policy-makers in a number of nations, most notably Japan and South Africa, along with at least one grand alliance, the European Union, have sought to make human security a guiding principle of all their public activities (see, for instance, Liotta & Taylor, 2006:85–102).

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Cape Town Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1775820661
• ISBN 13: 9781775820666
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Esterhuyse Abel, Vreÿ Francois