Broadening the Perspective on Military Cohesion

• Author: Ilmari Käihkö
• DOI: 10.1177/0095327X18759541
• Published date: 01 October 2018
• Date: 01 October 2018
• Subject Matter: Forum on Cohesion

Forum on Cohesion
Armed Forces & Society
2018, Vol. 44(4) 571-586
Broadening the
ª The Author(s) 2018
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Perspective on Military
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X18759541
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Cohesion
Ilmari Ka¨ihko¨1,2
Abstract
It is difficult to underestimate the importance of cohesion for armed groups or
organizations specialized and engaged in organized violence. This article argues that
the recent debate on military cohesion has been far too narrow as it focused on
Western state militaries during the 20th and 21st centuries, and even then only on
the microlevel. It is necessary to broaden the perspective in order to construct
theories that encompass even the vast majority of armed groups—the non-
Western, nonstate, and nonmodern. This article advocates two ways of doing so:
the investigation of cases that belong to these three types and broadening analysis to
two new levels of analysis—the meso-level of armed groups and the macro-level,
which contains state and society. Cohesion is established through harmonizing these
three levels, which necessitates including them in the analysis in the first place.
Keywords
Armed groups, Eurocentrism, military cohesion, military sociology, militias, primary
groups, rebel groups
As discussed in the introduction to this special issue (Ka¨ihko¨, 2018), it is difficult to
underestimate the importance of cohesion for armed groups specialized in organized
1 Swedish Defence University, Stockholm, Sweden
2 Department of Sociology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
Corresponding Author:
Ilmari Ka¨ihko¨, Department of Security, Strategy and Leadership, Swedish Defence University, Stockholm,
Sweden; Department of Sociology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden.
Email: ilmari.kaihko@soc.uu.se

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violence. It is not an exaggeration to argue that cohesion stands at the core of
strategy of all armed groups: Cohesion is an important part of the creation of force,
but even its subsequent control and use. As a result, all armed groups need to
consider cohesion and invest resources in fostering it.
Practitioners and researchers alike recognize the importance of military
cohesion. Both military planners in armed forces and rebel commanders need to
figure out how they can prepare the men and women fighting in their forces for
challenges to come. In the academia, the study of military cohesion became a
pressing question immediately after the Second World War. The colossal war
provided many opportunities to learn about human behavior in war not only in
this conflict but also in the ones to come. The subsequent research however largely
focused on the narrow importance of primary groups, which catered to soldier’s
immediate needs. While broader and critical views have since been presented, the
microlevel explanations of military cohesion persist. The most recent debate on
cohesion, centered on the pages of the Armed Forces & Society and other works by
King (2006, 2013) and Siebold (2007) and that has dominated the discourse on
military cohesion for the past decade, also serves to illustrate the dominance of
these microlevel dynamics.
While this debate has substantially increased our understanding of military
cohesion, it nevertheless suffered from several limitations regarding the concept.
This was perhaps inevitable, considering the way military cohesion was investi-
gated in 20th- and 21st-century Western state militaries. While this allowed the
focus on microlevel dynamics, it simultaneously assumed the existence of societ-
ies and states similar to those in the Western nation-states. This in turn limits these
theories’ usefulness in the analysis of armed groups, including historical, non-
Western, and nonstate. Considering that the vast majority of armed groups belong
to these three categories, it is clear that the perspective on military cohesion needs
to be broadened.
This article seeks to do two things. It first traces the origins of military cohesion
and argues that the recent debate on military cohesion is in dire need of a broader
perspective. The second part of this article in turn focuses on providing this
broader perspective, as necessitated by the need to understand armed groups
belonging to the three categories mentioned above alone. As cautioned by Shils
(1950)—one of the founders of the primary group thesis—analysis of the micro-
level alone cannot explain cohesion within meso-level armed groups. The military
primary groups form larger armed groups, which in turn are embedded in broader
sociocultural contexts. This requires the investigation of macro-level factors,
which in most cases cannot be assumed to be the same as in Western nation-
states. Ultimately, cohesion is established through harmonizing these three levels,
which necessitates including them in the analysis in the first place. A more com-
prehensive framework with these three levels—micro, meso, and macro—is thus
put forward for future testing.

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Ka¨ihko¨
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The Origins of Military Cohesion
Etymologically, the concept of cohesion has dual origins. The first comes from the
16th-century French cohe´rence, introduced to English as coherence by William
Shakespeare ca. 1590 to indicate a figurative “association other than material”
(Oxford English Dictionary, 2018a). The second and more literal origin comes from
cohesion—“the action or condition of cohering; cleaving or sticking together”—first
used in English by philosopher Thomas Hobbes in 1678 in a discussion on gravity
(Oxford English Dictionary, 2018b). Like many other military concepts devised
during the 19th century, the origins of military cohesion too thus lie in physics.
While cohesion is a seemingly universal phenomenon—witness that four of the
seven factors which Tzu (2012, p. 6) claimed could predict victory are connected
to it—an investigation of some of the most important military literature of the
19th century proves that as a concept, it is of relatively recent provenance. For
instance, although Carl von Clausewitz used the term Koha¨sion once in his classic
Vom Kriege, posthumously published in 1832–1834, he preferred the terms
Zusammenhang (hanging together) and Zusammenfu¨gung (putting together). Impli-
cit in his choice of words is a more mechanistic order, where soldiers assumed the
role of cogs or automata within a larger military machine: Clausewitz (2004, p. 40)
envisaged soldiers kept together by the will of their commander who “stands above
the masses and continues to be their master” moving “like a well-oiled machine.”
That cohesion was a new term is not only demonstrated by the way Clausewitz had
not fully adopted it to his vocabulary but also by the way the term was not yet used in
the military sense it would later acquire: Clausewitz used the term to describe an
enemy state rather than its military force.
The second part of 19th century saw cohesion increasingly make its way into the
military sphere. James John Graham, who later translated On War to English, simi-
larly employed the term cohesion just once in his Military Ends and Moral Means,
published in 1864. His use of cohesion referred to a force without which “the whole
mass [of society] would crumble into dust” or the way individuals were profession-
ally self-interested, yet united “in one general development . . . all fancying they are
only following their personal impulses” (Graham, 1864, p. 52). For Graham, cohe-
sion was not mechanistic and furthermore concerned societies instead of states or
their armies. Yet when his translation of On War was published in 1873, cohesion
appeared 9 times, varyingly used to describe armies, ideas, and states (Clausewitz,
2004). To take a final example that illustrates how cohesion had within a century
become a common military term, one can take Ardant Du Picq’s Battle Studies. First
published posthumously in 1880, its English translation from 1921 has often been
used in discussions of morale, and hence military cohesion. This should not be
surprising, since the work mentions cohesion no less than 17 times in its main text.
Discussing both technological changes that had required the dispersion of soldiers
and societal changes that prohibited draconian punishments, Du Picq continued to
perceive commanders as the crucial factor in combat (1921/2013, p. 60): “Victory

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Armed Forces & Society 44(4)
belongs to the commander who has known how to keep them [troops] in good order,
to hold them, and to direct them.” While he ultimately saw that commanders on
lower levels had acquired unprecedented independence on battlefields, unlike Clau-
sewitz, he also recognized contemporary battles as “battles of men.” While wary of
loosening commanders’ control over their soldiers, Du Picq (2013, pp. 60–61)
ultimately argued that combat required what he called “moral cohesion, a unity
more binding than at any other time.” While Du Picq thus had by no means forfeited
the view that emphasized the importance of organizations and iron discipline, he is
often better remembered for forming the concept of military cohesion in the manner
most people associate it with today: Cohesion denotes bonds—and especially bonds
of solidarity and comradeship—between soldiers and furthermore has a direct influ-
ence on performance in war (Du Picq, 2013). Through Du Picq, cohesion thus turned
from its more mechanical origins to the later affinitive roots better captured by the
term coherence.
While Du Picq’s treatise was, and continues to be, used as an example of the
importance of cohesion, it was the...