Requests for battlefield euthanasia have, no doubt, occurred on battlefields as long as there have been battlefields. When men have taken up arms against one another, for whatever reason, there have always been those wounded who do not die immediately, but clearly cannot live for long, either because of their wounds or their circumstances. This can generate the desire to hasten their inevitable death, by both the wounded soldier as well as their comrades. These situations have probably occurred throughout history.’ Mercy killings, those lethal actions carried out to relieve suffering, enacted by soldiers upon wounded enemy combatants during and after combat have been evidenced since the earliest recordings of armed conflict. An action which was taken from necessity due to inadequate medical knowledge and resources and also because of the existence of a less humane, but perhaps more practical society, are now considered as a criminal act. However, the act is often carried out from compassion and a feeling of sympathy towards the victim. Meanwhile, public values, the common law and legislation dealing with euthanasia have all developed in the domestic civilian setting. Mercy killings have traditionally been dealt with in a confusing manner by the courts, using ill-fitting doctrines such as diminished responsibility to alleviate the criminal stigma placed upon the defendant. In other situations the application of the law has created uncertainty concerning the demarcation between whether an act constitutes murder or manslaughter. This uncertainty is compounded when the law developed to deal with civilian situations is juxtaposed on a mercy killing carried out by a soldier on another combatant in a battlefield setting. These situations present circumstances beyond the comprehension of civil domestic law. To implement it correctly requires a strained alignment between the pressures facing the soldier in combat and the pressures facing the defendant in peacetime, and there is a high likelihood that by doing so an injustice shall be served to the soldier and the victim. The potential trial processes faced by the soldier who has carried out a battlefield coup de grace are also questionable. To try the soldier in a civilian court is to place the deliberation of his actions into the hands of those who are not his military or cultural peers and who will judge his actions in accordance with a belief system contrary to those the defendant is indoctrinated with through his military training. However, implementing civil criminal law in a court martial alongside military discipline offences for crimes which represent serious operational misconduct, creates conflict between which values should be prioritised. The values of military discipline are in competition with the values of the criminal law. The court martial also carries with it the aura of unfairness due to its inherent bias, and there are concerns over its partiality. However, it also offers potentially the best place for the soldier to face trial because the case is deliberated upon by a Board of military personnel, his peers, who understand the unique culture of the soldier. By comparing the professional soldier with medical professionals, who are also involved with end of life decision making a better sense of the ‘wrongness’ of the action can be found. In the medical context consent can be used to legitimise many actions which may lead to death, and even without it the doctor may act in the patient’s best interests in a manner which avoids liability but results in death. The practice of double effect allows a physician to deliver pain relief even though there is a foreseeable consequence of death. The soldier’s actions exhibit many of the same motives but are never legally justified. The comparison serves to change the perception of the action, from merely legally wrong to morally legitimate. Although difficulties exist in arguing that mercy killing actions should be made legal, the wider consideration of the influences and behaviours can show that such actions can be morally legitimate and that it is not just to punish the soldier too harshly, nor is it just to hold him to account to laws which ill-fit the circumstances, be they domestic criminal laws, international criminal laws or military offence.

No description available.

Many Royal Marine recruits are plagued by physical injuries during the arduous 32 week training course at Commando Training Centre. Not all recruits recover from their injuries; some choose to leave the rehabilitation unit prematurely. Furthermore, some recruits experience unnecessarily lengthened recovery times that are unexplained by physical factors. As such, it seemed plausible that psychological theory might explain variance in rehabilitation outcome and recovery time. A number of empirically well-tested and validated psychological theories were reviewed and protection motivation theory was selected as the over-arching theoretical framework to guide this programme of research. The model was extended to include the constructs fear-avoidance, athletic identity (modified to measure marine identity) and organisational commitment. Measures of the intensity and impact of pain were also incorporated into the extended model. These constructs were identified as being potentially important in the prediction of behaviour, as well as being complementary to the model as a whole. The primary purpose of this research programme was to establish the effectiveness of the extended model of protection motivation theory. This was achieved through a large-scale, prospective study. The secondary purpose was to develop and test measures of implicit attitude in order to combat some of the difficulties associated with traditional methods of attitude measurement such as social desirability response bias. This was achieved through three method development studies, a cross-sectional study, and a prospective study. Analysis of the longitudinal data revealed that each of the components of the extended model of protection motivation theory predicted outcome of rehabilitation. Self-efficacy and perceived severity of the injury explained 16.1% of the variance in outcome of rehabilitation. Furthermore, 10.4% of the variance in extended recovery time was explained by a combination of age and perceived severity. The implicit measure of organisational commitment explained 69% of successful training outcome in the cross-sectional study, which is remarkable in implicit attitudinal research. Despite the vast literature linking attitudes and rehabilitation adherence behaviours, until now, the psychological effects of injury on rehabilitation outcome and recovery time have rarely been investigated, and have never been examined in the context of Royal Marines’ training. In addition, implicit measures have never been applied in a specific health psychology context, nor have they ever been developed in such a bespoke way. Thus it is concluded that this thesis has made a theoretical as well as applied contribution to the study of psychology, injury and rehabilitation.

The thesis focuses on military crisis management and strategy.

This portfolio thesis describes work undertaken by the author under the Engineering Doctorate program of the Institute for System Level Integration. It was carried out in conjunction with the sponsor company Teledyne Defence Limited. A radar warning receiver is a device used to detect and identify the emissions of radars. They were originally developed during the Second World War and are found today on a variety of military platforms as part of the platform’s defensive systems. Teledyne Defence has designed and built components and electronic subsystems for the defence industry since the 1970s. This thesis documents part of the work carried out to create Phobos, Teledyne Defence’s first complete radar warning receiver. Phobos was designed to be the first low cost radar warning receiver. This was made possible by the reuse of existing Teledyne Defence products, commercial off the shelf hardware and advanced UK government algorithms. The challenges of this integration are described and discussed, with detail given of the software architecture and the development of the embedded application. Performance of the embedded system as a whole is described and qualified within the context of a low cost system.

In recent years, the most technologically advanced militaries in the world have toiled against guerrilla forces. Counterinsurgent doctrine focuses on a government’s lack of popular support to explain this. Academic literature, however, currently treats popular mobilisation as a dependent variable, rather than using it as a framework for understanding the dynamics and outcomes of civil wars. This thesis represents a first step to address this disparity and incorporate popular support into the comparative study of civil war outcomes. I explore what popular support provides conflict actors, what determines population behaviour and how the ability of conflict actors to generate support determines the dynamics and outcome of a conflict. I conclude that popular support, or the battle for ‘hearts and minds’, is crucial to the power of conflict actors, but only when it is understood as a contribution, not shared preferences. Based on this analysis I propose a framework for studying civil conflict that focuses on the regenerative capacity of the two belligerents. The key battleground in any civil war is rebel efforts to degrade the sovereign structures the government uses to generate support from the population. If rebels can achieve this, the government collapses and the rebels can win the war even if they are smaller or fail to score any battlefield successes. I test this model using a quantitative analysis of 65 civil wars and four in-depth cases studies. Overall there is strong empirical support for the model of conflict developed in this thesis, raising a number of theoretical and practical implications. Most importantly, I find that strengthening institutions of governance, be they formal or informal, is the best method for governments to defeat rebel groups, while rebels win by undermining socioeconomic activity.

No description available.

There is a complex interaction between familial functioning and veteran mental health, with familial relationships often being affected. Family therapy is not routinely recommended or offered for veterans in the UK. This study used a narrative approach to explore the experiences of veterans and spouses having received family therapy. Specifically, this study aimed to explore what stories individuals in an ex-military family would tell of their experience of family therapy, what narrative themes occurred and what the perceived impact on familial relationships was following family therapy. Individual narrative interviews were conducted with four veterans and five spouses. Individual interviews were followed by joint couple interviews with two couples. Main findings suggested that typically veterans would tell a ‘romance’ story while spouses were more likely to tell a ‘tragedy’ or ‘epic’ story. Narrative themes occurring from veterans, spouses and couples included: family therapy helpful, lack of support, changes in veteran, impact of difficulties on family relationships and military culture and transitioning. Finally the study found that family therapy had positively impacted familial relationships, particularly highlighting improvements in couple communication and shared or alternative perspectives to be important. Limitations, clinical implications and future directions are discussed.

Military computer games continue to evoke a uniquely contradictory public, intellectual, and critical response. Whilst denigrated as child’s play, they are played by millions of adults; whilst dismissed as simplistic, they are used in education, therapy, and military training; and whilst classed as meaningless, they arouse fears over media effects and the propagandist influence of their representations of combat. They remain the object of intense suspicion, and as part of a new and growing mass medium, they are blamed for everything from obesity to falling literacy standards, and from murder to Abu Ghraib. Much of the suspicion surrounding military computer games has been caused by the development of the military-entertainment complex - the relationship between the computer game industry and the U.S. military which has seen the production of dual-use games, co-produced by the military and the computer game industry and released for both military training and commercial sale. This relationship has placed military computer games at the centre of an intensely politicized debate in which they have become characterized as a mass medium which functions under the control of the military and political establishment and which promotes the militaristic ideals of the neoconservative Bush administration. This thesis serves as a fundamental reevaluation of such preconceptions and prejudices, and in particular, a complete reevaluation of the understanding of the relationship between computer games and American militarism. Its analysis focuses on three main areas: firstly, the content of military computer games; secondly, the determinants which affect the production and representation of war in computer games; and thirdly, the contribution of the representation of war in computer games to the misunderstandings and misconceptions concerning warfare which, in turn, have supported American militaristic beliefs.

Much has been written about Mikhail Nikolaevich Tukhachevsky. His development of the “Deep Battle” military theory in the late 1920s and 1930s, the attendant mechanisation of the Red Army and his role in the development of the Soviet military/industrial complex have been well-researched. The “Tukhachevsky Affair”, the discussion surrounding his execution in the military purge of 1937, continues to attract interest. However, a detailed analysis of his early life and Civil War command career has never been completed. This gap is filled by this thesis. Tukhachevsky’s early life is explored to provide background, but also to provide a biographical account and to illustrate who he was when he joined the Red Army and Bolshevik Party in 1918. The thesis demonstrates that he was not a communist at this stage. However, his command experiences during the Civil War, combining military tactics of continuous manoeuvre warfare with constant frontline mobilisations, political agitation and repression, allowed him to develop a theory of class warfare and saw his conversion to a belief in the efficacy of Marxist principles when applied to military methods. Tukhachevsky’s success in the Civil War is compared to his failure in the Polish-Soviet War and the basis for the latter is that his continuation of class warfare methods were unsuitable for the conflict in Poland. The success of Tukhachevsky’s class warfare methods is explained by their relevance to the situation and social fabric of Russia at the time. The retention of these principles to form the basis of the operational side of “Deep Battle” is argued, as is Tukhachevsky’s openness to innovation in weaponry and tactics gleaned during his Civil War command. Tukhachevsky’s role in the early Red Army formulation is detailed, as is his development of the concept of “unified command” involving the creation of Red Commanders. The Communist Party leadership’s use of Tukhachevsky as a “troubleshooter” to deal with prioritised areas during the Civil War, leading to his service on every major Front at crucial stages is highlighted, as are the connections he made on the Civil War battlefields, friendly and hostile. It is shown that during his Civil War commands he met with those with whom he would later work and that their collaboration and experimentation began almost immediately.