Thesis (M.S.)--Missouri State University, 2009. / "May 2009." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 92-99). Also available online.

This thesis focuses on the development of strategic culture in Slovenia and Croatia since independence. Croatia and Slovenia are small countries in the Western Balkans. Both countries became independent in 1991 and since then they became important regional actors in the Western Balkans. This thesis traces Slovenia and Croatia's historical position within the former SFR Yugoslavia's defence system. The empirical analysis in the thesis examines official documents of both countries to find basic notions of the strategic culture of Croatia and Slovenia. The thesis' research focuses on finding how both countries' goal of Euro-Atlantic integration influenced the development of their strategic culture. Keywords: Strategic Culture, Slovenia, Croatia

With 16 ongoing peacekeeping operations currently deploying almost 100,000 troops, United Nations peacekeeping is the largest single source of multilateral military intervention in conflict zones. Because UN peacekeeping is entirely dependent on voluntary contributions from Member States, there a pressing need to better understand why nations contribute peacekeeping troops in the first place. Individual national rationales for peacekeeping contribution vary significantly, and incentives may include regional hegemonic aspirations, positive economic benefits from peacekeeping, desiring a seat at the Security Council, or a combination of any number of incentives. This has made it difficult to provide a generalized explanation about why states provide peacekeepers. This thesis proposes a model for understanding the peacekeeping contribution issue under the lens of strategic culture. The strategic culture approach focuses on elite beliefs about the objectives of the use of force, with national factors such a geography, history, domestic politics, and bureaucracy forming into cohesive and competing norms about the purpose of the military. Drawing on the fourth generation of strategic culture literature, this dissertation argues that strategic culture serves as an intermediary variable that can be measured by discourse analysis to help understand changes in specific strategic behaviour, such as military peacekeeping contributions. By understanding the dynamic way that a country views the use of force – in short, by understanding how a country views its military as being useful in achieving policy goals -- we work towards a better understanding of why a country may contribute troops to United Nations peacekeeping.

<p>I denna uppsats prövas orsakssambandet mellan USA:s militärstrategiska kultur och dess armédoktrin <em>FM 1 </em><em>(Field Manual 1)</em>. Syftet är att påvisa i vilken grad som den militärstrategiska kulturen påverkat utformningen av doktrinen och om detta element kan sägas utgöra en självklar grund till doktrinens kontext. I uppsatsen förklaras den strategiska kulturens innebörd, bland annat utifrån Colin S. Grays tes. Denna tes utgör sedermera uppsatsens teoriansats. Utifrån teorin skapas indikatorer för att genom en kvalitativ textanalys avgöra graden av överensstämmelse mellan den strategiska kulturen och doktrinen. Studiens resultat visar att USA:s armédoktrin endast har viss grad av överensstämmelse med dess militärstrategiska kultur. Detta beror bland annat på att armén anpassats efter rådande hotbild i mycket hög takt, efter terrorattentaten mot World Trade Center den elfte september 2001.</p> / <p>This thesis examines the causal relationship between the U.S. military's strategic culture and its Army doctrine <em>FM 1 (Field Manual 1)</em>. The aim is to demonstrate the degree to which the military strategic culture influenced the development of the doctrine and whether this element can be said to constitute a natural basis for a doctrine context. The paper explains the significance of strategic culture, in particular from Colin S. Gray's theory. This theory is later used as the essay theory approach. Based on the theory, indicators will be created and used for a qualitative text analysis, in order to determine the degree of correlation between strategic culture and the doctrine. Study findings show that U.S. Army doctrine only has a certain degree of compliance with its military strategic culture and that this in particular depends on the army’s very high rate of adaptation to current threats, after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11th 2001.</p>

I denna uppsats prövas orsakssambandet mellan USA:s militärstrategiska kultur och dess armédoktrin FM 1 (Field Manual 1). Syftet är att påvisa i vilken grad som den militärstrategiska kulturen påverkat utformningen av doktrinen och om detta element kan sägas utgöra en självklar grund till doktrinens kontext. I uppsatsen förklaras den strategiska kulturens innebörd, bland annat utifrån Colin S. Grays tes. Denna tes utgör sedermera uppsatsens teoriansats. Utifrån teorin skapas indikatorer för att genom en kvalitativ textanalys avgöra graden av överensstämmelse mellan den strategiska kulturen och doktrinen. Studiens resultat visar att USA:s armédoktrin endast har viss grad av överensstämmelse med dess militärstrategiska kultur. Detta beror bland annat på att armén anpassats efter rådande hotbild i mycket hög takt, efter terrorattentaten mot World Trade Center den elfte september 2001. / This thesis examines the causal relationship between the U.S. military's strategic culture and its Army doctrine FM 1 (Field Manual 1). The aim is to demonstrate the degree to which the military strategic culture influenced the development of the doctrine and whether this element can be said to constitute a natural basis for a doctrine context. The paper explains the significance of strategic culture, in particular from Colin S. Gray's theory. This theory is later used as the essay theory approach. Based on the theory, indicators will be created and used for a qualitative text analysis, in order to determine the degree of correlation between strategic culture and the doctrine. Study findings show that U.S. Army doctrine only has a certain degree of compliance with its military strategic culture and that this in particular depends on the army’s very high rate of adaptation to current threats, after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11th 2001.

Protecting deployed servicemen makes sound military sense. For as long as war has been around, commanders and comrades have had a vested interest in preserving their own side's fighting power in order to defeat their enemies. As such, they have drawn upon technological developments and tactical agility to reduce the vulnerabilities of their own troops whilst aiming to exploit the weaknesses of adversaries. This activity, labelled force protection in common military parlance, has often been overlooked by commentators in favour of other fields of war and warfare. However, attitudes which influence each state's individual approach towards force protection stem from extremely diverse groups. Force protection transcends the traditional notions of levels of war possibly as much as any other military activity. As a function during warfare it has the potential to trouble individuals at the lowest and the highest levels of a state. Depending on one's point of view, force protection can be perceived as a purely military function or as a political imperative of paramount importance. Either view garners the attention of the domestic population which also has potential to impact on the approach to protecting deployed servicemen. Combined, the sub-cultures of the government, the military and the people form a state's strategic culture. However, these sub-cultures are often at odds and view similar problems through different lenses resulting in tensions which create a difficult backdrop for military commanders to assess. Since strategic culture is the key origin of influence for approaches to force protection, it is the natural extension that each state approaches this activity in different ways. Moreover, just as strategic culture evolves in reaction to perceptions and events, so does a state's attitude towards force protection. This study traces the period 1999 to 2010 from UK and US perspectives. It finds that both states evolved in their attitudes and approaches to force protection and indeed approached this element of war in strikingly different ways. The British approached Operation Allied Force in 1999 with a confident attitude towards force protection. UK politicians and senior commanders, backed up by a public that appeared at ease with sending British servicemen into danger, favoured tactical prowess as the means to achieve the conditions for force protection. However, this hubris was out of context as the sensitive political conditions of the US-led NATO operation demanded a 2 more technological approach; an approach which the British military struggled to match. Despite this very public experience, British strategic culture maintained its viewpoint in the early stages of the Iraq war. As UK troops set out to war in 2003, once again tactical superiority was the prescription for force protection. However, insurgent tactics, mismatched force ratios and inferior equipment all tested the UK approach. Domestic sensitivity increased during the course of this commitment and by 2006 UK politicians became more involved in the force protection dimension. As the second half of the decade progressed, with a combative domestic political landscape and UK servicemen involved in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, political micromanagement came to characterise the British approach to force protection. This was consistent with the reports of senior UK military leaders who acknowledged the political nature of this most sensitive element of war. Nevertheless, despite such a tense domestic backdrop, British strategic culture remained unchanged as the evolving attitudes failed to manifest in shifts in behaviour. UK force protection remained the domain of military professional and tactical prowess was the favoured method of achieving it. The US journey highlights the political imperative which was placed upon force protection during the build-up and execution of Operation Allied Force. Despite widespread criticism this approach, which in practise involved politicians dictating the conduct of tactical activity, resulted in no US losses and thereby achieved one of the stated measures of success. Nevertheless, such an approach was found to be wholly unsuitable for the early stages of the Iraq war. The US initial approach to force protection was the traditional one of relying on armour, firepower and distance to remain out of the reach of one's adversaries. Insurgents were challenged to develop new munitions and tactics in order to outwit the superpower as onlookers anticipated that the US strategic community would balk in the face of rising casualties. Meanwhile, Iraqi civilians were caught in the middle of a seemingly unending fire fight as the US, tasked with providing security for Iraqis, appeared to be more concerned with their own welfare. In many ways this period confirmed the traditional narrative of US strategic culture as well as US force protection. However, as the second half of the decade unfolded, the work of figures including General David Petraeus served to turn around this losing battle. The widely-acknowledged Surge of US troops, resolute political backing by President Bush and steady support of the US public provided the conditions for US forces, armed with a fundamentally new doctrinal approach to conduct a significant shift in their approach to force protection. Although some in the US strategic community remained culturally attuned to their old ways, most acknowledged that recent successes in Iraq and Afghanistan were inextricably linked to the US approach to force protection. The year 2009 brought a change of Administration in the White House and a change of senior military commander at the helm of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan. However, despite a certain amount of domestic political turbulence and a seemingly unstoppable escalation in US casualties there appeared no signs of an alteration to the recent evolutions in the US strategic cultural approach to force protection. Force protectionism had been substituted for risk acceptance and courageous restraint.

The notion that each state in the international system approaches matters of war and peace somewhat differently because they each possess a unique strategic culture is not a new or obscure one – but it nevertheless remains controversial. While some scholars dismiss the utility or practicality of examining states’ cultures when seeking to explain or predict those states’ patterns of strategic decision-making, even amongst those who accept that we should pay attention to cultural differences between states when carrying out strategic analysis there remains a frustratingly eclectic range of offerings from scholars regarding how best to do so. In short, significant uncertainty remains regarding both whether strategic culture should be used as an analytical tool and, if it is so utilized, how one should go about doing so. This thesis therefore explores the concept of strategic culture in great detail, both theoretical and empirical. The opening three chapters examine why the more traditional rationalist/materialistic theories should not exclusively dominate strategic analysis, then the various existing strategic cultural offerings are considered and critiqued and, finally, a new conceptual model for strategic cultural analysis is proposed which draws from the hitherto largely neglected psychological and sociological literature. Both of these fields, it is submitted in Chapter 3, have spent more time and effort developing ways of understanding and analyzing culture than the field of IR has to date, and therefore the models and methods debated and developed in these fields should, it is argued, be ‘imported’ into IR to drive further strategic cultural research. The thesis then moves in the following six chapters to consider Australia’s strategic culture. The purpose of this part of the thesis is two-fold: first, it illustrates how the model offered in Chapter 3 works and, by implication, suggests how scholars may go about applying it to other cases. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the latter six chapters explore the twists and turns of Australia’s substantive strategic decision-making over the course of the last century or more, thereby explaining how Australia’s strategic history can be understood from a cultural perspective. / Thesis (Ph.D, Political Studies) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-15 11:17:19.326

The accession into NATO and the EU, from the perspective of the new Central and Eastern European members, symbolized their ‘return to Europe’. However, as the former outsiders have become insiders, they have become subjected to a new form of hierarchy. This is even reflected in international relations literature that studies the socialization of the new members into ‘European’ or ‘Western’ states (Checkel 2005; Gheciu 2005; Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005, etc.). The new members continue to be perceived as geographically and culturally on the ‘verge of Europe’, ‘not quite European’ or ‘in transition’ (Wolff 1994; Kuus 2004a; Mälksoo 2010; Zarycki 2014). Their status as ‘latecomers’ in Western institutions has become a stigma. This dissertation asks how stigmatization and subjection to tacit hierarchies, constructed through discourse, affect a state’s foreign policy. It focuses on the East-West relation in the European Union as one example of a hierarchy within this community of states. This dissertation looks at Poland’s foreign policy in the EU. Analytically, I build on the concept of strategic culture, a set of collective, historically shaped ideas and norms guiding a state’s pursuit of security. I go beyond the existing literature to argue that the guiding principle of a state’s strategic culture is the pursuit of not just physical but ontological security, which refers to stable subjectivity (Giddens 1991; Kinnvall 2004; Mitzen 2006a; Zarakol 2010). The recognition as a full member of the ‘Western’ and ‘European’ identity community is essential for Poland’s ontological security. This dependence on recognition makes Poland particularly sensitive to stigmatization within that community. In three case studies, the 2003 Iraq crisis, the 2008 Russo-Georgian war, and the 2013/4 Ukraine crisis, I study how its ‘latecomer’ stigma, and quest for recognition as a full-fledged member of ‘Europe’, and the ‘West’, affects Poland’s foreign policy. I show how Polish foreign policy-makers alternate between two possible responses to stigmatization, adaptation and contestation, and how, paradoxically, both of these strategies often reinforce stigmatization.

Recently, the volatile developments in Northeast Asia have put Japanese assertive policies on the spotlight and revived the necessity to understand the state's pacifist conduct that had been studied by scholars aiming to grasp its projection into foreign and security policies ever since the end of the Second World War. The academic debate between neorealism and constructivism gained momentum with the dissolution of the bipolar world order following the end of the Cold War. Yet, the examination of their respective approaches proved the inappropriateness of the rigid adherence to either of the IR stream when scrutinizing the Japanese case. Hence, the thesis expands in the field of analytical eclecticism by reconciling the outputs of the academic debate and consequently maps Japanese post-Cold War evolution through synthesis of concepts emanating from neoclassical realism and strategic culture. The thesis thereby acknowledges the crucial role of the system and its structure and, at the same time, understands the peaceful and antimilitarist principles as a driving force behind Japanese decision-making embedded in the state's strategic culture. Against the backdrop of the complex theoretical and methodological research design, the thesis examines the relevant empirical data within the timespan of almost...

The present thesis deals with the US strategic approach and posture to cybersecurity from a national point of view. On such a topic much has been written already, nonetheless the present work finds a degree of originality by tackling such object of analysis shifting the focus to a ideational perspective. By drawing insights from the meta-theory of Constructivism and the rich research tradition on strategic culture, the present thesis aims at understanding what kind of norms seem to be informing/mirroring what has been labelled the US "cyber strategic culture", and if it is possible to speak of a "shift", or at least track an evolution regarding them, in a historical timeframe that runs from the early 2000s up to the present days. To pursue the stated research agenda, a methodology grounded in discourse and thematic analysis is utilised, with an analytical framework centred around two opposite "thematic normative categories" (themes) called "defensiveness" and "offensiveness", each characterised by a "story" made up by three sub-themes, delineating specific strategic behaviours. A set of official strategies, all tackling cybersecurity and published during the mentioned timeframe by both the White House and the military, form the primary sources to which such methodology is applied, with particular...