As armies across Europe are currently developing capabilities to fight a high-intensity conventional war against a peer adversary, these armies will have to develop units that can fight independently ...in a complex environment, with limited direction from higher levels of command. Integral to this process is the need for a competent practice of mission command, viewed as a key component of maneuver warfare. The article identifies a set of enablers that need to be present in a military organization in order to practice mission command efficiently, including shared understanding and trust; initiative; a tolerant approach to failure, success, and learning; and the acceptance of mission command as an all-encompassing practice. The article then presents data from interviews with Swedish army officers focusing on the presence and significance of these enablers in their professional context. The article concludes that the increasing complexity of the peacetime tasks performed by military officers give rise to conflicting leadership demands. Consequently, exercising mission command and socializing younger colleagues into the practice is a far from straightforward process, which frequently competes with other demands placed on officers by their colleagues, the organization that they are part of, or the broader societal context.
Military sociology being a special discipline has resulted in the establishment of a permanent study group with contributors in the shape of academic scholars and military officers. Based on the ...works of military profession theorists, modern militaries have adopted a more flexible and technologically advanced outlook with emphasis on professionalism through training, education, mentoring, and ethics in order to address and live up to the challenges of the 21st century. In these changing and testing times one resounding constant has emerged in the shape of human being and his will to fight as a single most determining factor between winning and losing.
Principalele motive în alegerea carierei militare sunt legate de caracteristicile vieţii socioeconomice (68%), şi numai
32% – de cele de profesie. Motivaţia studenţilor pentru cariera militară ...depinde de nivelul dezvoltării aptitudinilor pro-
fesionale şi de condiţiile concrete.
Relaţie pozitivă a fost stabilită între: motivaţie şi scalele Realist, Convenţional ale Inventarului de Interese şi testele
Aptitudine numerică, Aptitudine spaţială ale Bateriei Factoriale la studenţii motivaţi pentru cariera militară (clasterul I);
motivaţie şi scalele Artistic, Social ale Inventarului de Interese şi testele Fluenţă Verbală ale Bateriei Factoriale la studenţii
orientaţi spre caracteristicile vieţii socioeconomice (clasterul II).A REVIEW ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE MOTIVATION AND PROFESSIONAL SKILLS
The main reasons for the military career choice are linked to socio-economic characteristics of life – 68%, and 32% –
of the profession. The motivation of students with military profile depends on the development of professional skills
and specific conditions.
The positive relationship has been established between: Realistic motivation scales, Conventional Interest Inventory
and Numerical Aptitude tests, Aptitude Battery space to motivated students for a military career (cluster I); Artistic mo-
tivation scales, Social Interest Inventory and Battery oral fluency tests to students oriented to socio-economic characte-
ristics of life (cluster II).
Over the past decade, the American armed services have witnessed a near-constant stream of so-called ethical lapses. Spanning rank, specialty, and service, these “lapses” have given rise to a flood ...of criticism by journalists and piercing calls for reform from politicians. In response, American military leaders have pointed to the paired concepts of profession and professionalism as the solution. In this article, we use classical conceptualizations of the military profession to resituate the problem of ethical lapses as instead one of the three fault lines of the contemporary American military profession, unfolding alongside crises in military expertise and identity. The three fault lines reveal at once the large scale of the challenges facing the American armed services and our very limited social scientific understanding of those problems. We end by emphasizing the need for future research to establish an updated empirical baseline for theories of the military profession in America.
The article explores the processes of transformation of Russian cadets’ motivation and value orientations during the last decade, as well as the dynamics of their motivational and value sphere ...throughout the period of study at military educational organizations. The analysis of scientific literature, public opinion polls and author’s own research showed the restoration of the prestige of the military profession, improving of socio-economic status of military personnel, enhancing of students’ confidence about their choice of profession. Military professional motives for enrolling in military education organization are dominating throughout the period of observation. The system of value coordinates also remains stable; cadets are generally proud of service in the Armed forces and share the norms and values of military service. The use of correspondence analysis allowed the author to identify the relationship between different motives and values and to measure the proximity between cadets of different courses in the motivation and value space. The author concludes that cadets’ motivational system is being gradually transformed as they grow up. First-year students are more attracted by pragmatic, material advantages of military service. The second, third and fourth courses take an intermediate position; this stage is characterized by the process of rethinking professional choice. Graduates have the most formed military and professional orientation, the greatest value for them is the interest to the chosen military specialty.
Wider Officer Competence Roennfeldt, Carsten F.
Armed forces and society,
01/2019, Letnik:
45, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Identifying and developing officer competence is important to a nation’s security and a crucial attribute of a legitimate military establishment. Critics have claimed that the U.S. officer corps ...favors a narrow conception of expertise that limits the armed forces’ utility as an instrument of policy. Drawing from the dialogue between Huntington and Janowitz, as well as Aristotle’s notion of practical wisdom, this article proposes a wider understanding of officer competence consisting of four distinct conceptual categories. The U.S. defense establishment favors “military skill” over other categories of competence. As a result, the officer corps is poorly prepared for 21st-century warfare. To remedy this situation, professional military education should cultivate military leaders that, in addition to military skill, have sociopolitical competence and practical wisdom. In this context, this article suggests strategies to develop such competencies that officers need to be able to achieve a diversity of national political goals.
Outsourcing Public Security Heinecken, Lindy
Armed forces and society,
10/2014, Letnik:
40, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Since the end of the Cold War, there has been an exponential growth in the use of private military and security companies. Few have debated the long-term consequences outsourcing of security holds ...for the military profession. The first section of this article outlines the evolution of military outsourcing. From here the focus shifts to how outsourcing affects the armed forces’ ability to retain the monopoly over their “own” knowledge and skills base, and how it affects their autonomy, corporateness, and service ethic. The implications that this has for the armed forces and the military profession are deliberated. The conclusion is reached that extensive growth and use of private security have affected the intellectual and moral hegemony of the armed forces as providers of public security. The long-term implications of this in terms of the social structure and the identity of the military profession are not yet fully realized.
The rise of private military and security companies (PMSCs) challenges our notion of military professionals. PMSCs bring new claims to professional status and legitimacy outside military institutions ...and represent an increasing diffusion of - and competition over - military and security expertise. In light of this development, understanding the formation of professional identities in military and private security organisations is as an important undertaking. This paper contributes to this endeavour by analysing professional self-images in the Swedish Armed Forces and how these relate to PMSCs. The study is based on data collected from official documents, semi-structured interviews and a small-scale survey among senior military officers. Focusing on military understandings of PMSCs and contractors, the analysis provides much-needed insight into relational aspects of professional identity formation outside the US context. Furthermore, it points to discrepancies in organisational and group levels in understandings of commercial security actors, and paves the way for future research.
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