Military law, justice, and culture in the British Army.

• Author: Kirke, Charles
• Position: Report

1. Introduction

   As members of a disciplined force, British soldiers (1) of all ranks live under rules. Formal published rules abound in their daily experience, and they are expected to comply with and obey them. For example, at the organisational level of the unit (the regiment or battalion (2)), Daily Routine Orders are published which give details of 'reveille' (the time to wake up), where soldiers are to be, when, what they are to wear, and the timing of meals, amongst other things. At an intermediate level there are rules that cover soldierly duties and procedures, and set limits to options for what soldiers may do. Examples of such rules are Formation (3) Standing Orders, Standing Instructions, and Standing Operating Procedures, all of which apply at unit level and above, depending on what level they are published at. Globally, within the institution of the British Army, there are orders and instructions from Military Commands and the Ministry of Defence level, and at the highest level of all there is the Army Act 1955, an Act of Parliament (4). This and associated domestic and international law is published or referenced in the Manual of Military Law (MOD, 1972) with further explanations and guidance to avoid ambiguities. Soldiers are required to know and obey all these orders and instructions and can be subject to sanction if they do not. The law also requires soldiers to obey all lawful orders given to them by a superior officer. An order is only unlawful if it would cause the soldier to violate either national or international law. It follows that the giving and taking of orders is a regular and constant feature of life in the Army.

   The formal apparatus of orders of all kinds is played out through the rank structure which places each individual at a particular level in the military organisation (see, for example, Hockey, 1986: 3; von Zugbach, 1988: 15). However, this apparently highly structured system is tempered to some extent by the existence of 'chains of command' which limit the business of making and taking orders to those in the same segments of the organisational system. Chains of command thus establish for each individual their own set of seniors and juniors for the business of normal organisational life. Thus whilst a visiting senior officer might be legally entitled to give an order to a private soldier from another unit s/he would not expect, or be expected, to do so as they would not be in the same organisational segment (the unit).

   An outsider may therefore be forgiven for deducing that life in the British Army is dominated by rules with the force of law which severely constrain soldiers' freedom of action, but this is not the case. Room for manoeuvre is created in the processes of daily life not only in the formal definition of chains of command but also by common practices embedded in the Army's organisational culture. This article explores the existence of regimes of practice which lie between the exercise of the law and culturally founded concepts, especially those of justice and fair play, as lived in the context of the British Army's organisational culture within a particular time slot (1990 to 2000). It does so by taking an incident and exploring the formal and informal options as it proceeds through the legal process.

2. The Research Base

   The research for this article was founded in the author's extensive experience in the British Army as a serving officer of thirty-six years, and was carried out during long periods of insider anthropology. The term 'insider anthropology' is not well defined in the literature, but in the context of this article it means that the researcher shares, at the start of the project, at least some aspects of the culture of the group being studied. Different studies show different degrees of 'insiderness'. For instance, in some cases the researcher is a full participating member of the group being studied, as in the case of Young's (1991) study of the Northumbria Police Force and Collins' of Quakers (1998, 2002). On the other hand, in other cases, the researcher is already familiar with the culture in question at the start of their research but is not actually a full member of the group. Examples of this latter case are Forsythe's work on employees in artificial intelligence laboratories (2001), a field in which her parents were deeply immersed but to which she did not belong, and Irwin's research on a Canadian infantry company carried out when she was a reservist from a different part of the Canadian Armed Forces (2002). In the case of the events described in this article, the researcher was somewhere in between these two types, in that these events took place in a culture which he knew well as a long-term member, but he was not at the time a full participating member of the particular military group(s) involved.

   The advantages and limitations that were experienced in carrying out this insider study were much in line with those described by Labaree (2002). These included useful interpretive insights arising from shared experience of, and practice within, the organisational culture being studied and easy access to a deeper understanding of the nuances in the social dynamics of the group. On the other hand, there were difficulties in maintaining objectivity and accuracy and in the preservation of sharpness of observation in what to the researcher was a mundane environment. These were accounted for in the research as far as possible by careful recording of events combined with persistent self-reflection, self-questioning and discussion with others.

   The author's research on the organisational culture of the British Army took place in a number of phases. Initially, he served for a year and a half as a junior officer in the Royal Artillery before taking a degree in Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University, graduating in 1974. During the time at Cambridge he reflected on his experiences with soldiers and came to the conclusion that their organisational culture was distinctive, of great potential anthropological interest, and never previously studied using social anthropological techniques. He set himself the task of applying what he had learned to this field, deciding to carry out participant observation and to make fieldnotes whenever possible. The research was thus not only 'insider' but was self-organised and carried on over a period of several years in parallel with a military career. The longest continuous period of immersion in the field (5) was thirteen years, during which the majority of the time was spent in units of the Royal Artillery.

   Twenty years after this research began, he returned to Cambridge for an intensive, full time, one-year period of research from the Department of Social Anthropology. This research centred on interview-based studies (supported by observation) with a number of different units representing a cross-section of the British Army, in combination with reflection and further analysis of the fieldnotes. The same pattern was followed, if less intensively, for the next ten years as the opportunities arose, providing a rich and varied body of data.

   One of the strands that emerged throughout the research was the variety of ways in which soldiers of all ranks behaved in different contexts. One moment they were stiff and formal, at another they were relaxed and informal, at other times they showed a fixed concentration on the task in hand as the top priority, and so on. Consistency in this apparently chaotic behaviour only became apparent when it was analysed against the assemblage of contexts in which they took place, each of which appeared to have its unique pattern of norms, expectations, and assumptions. Thus, action and practice that were perfectly appropriate in one set of circumstances were inappropriate in another. Conversely, different contexts were associated with different practices. British Army culture at unit level, therefore, appeared to have within it a variety of structured, or at least patterned, ways of behaving, none of which necessarily predominated, and none of which provided an overarching 'right' way to behave at all times. Such conditions provide what might be called 'wriggle room' in the face of what might otherwise appear to be a tight and inflexible, legally embedded, rule system.

   The rest of this article presents an illustrative case study which explores how these conditions were worked out in practice. The events described and analysed are set in a time frame some time between 1990 and 2000, during the intensive part of the research. This deliberately vague setting is recent enough for the cultural elements still to be of research interest, but not so recent as to imply that the details described are common practice at the time of writing. These events do not represent a true history in the form it is described here, and neither are the protagonists real individuals. Rather it is an amalgamation of various bona fide incidents and enacted processes encountered during the research. An actual incident cannot be described for legal and ethical reasons: for example, this incident involves the commitment of a military offence by one of the principal dramatis personae, but such an offence does not attract a criminal record and remains a private internal disciplinary matter for the MOD. It would therefore be invidious for the person to be identifiable. However, it is possible, as here, to assemble an ersatz incident from actual reported or observed events that are consistent and coherent with the organisational culture in which it is set. The result is a case study which is sufficiently close to reality for the purpose of this article and demonstrates significant general principles and the practices which flowed from them, but avoids the complex legal and ethical difficulties involved in reporting the actions of real individuals in real circumstances.

   Although the author has had a long...