Название: The Combat Soldier: Infantry Tactics and Cohesion in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Автор: Anthony King
Издательство: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198843771
Год: 2019
Формат: PDF
Страниц: 560
Размер: 5,9 МБ
Язык: Английский
How do small groups of combat soldiers perform on the battlefield and maintain their cohesion under fire? Why are they willing to fight for each other? These questions have long intrigued social scientists, military historians, and philosophers. Based on extensive research and drawing on graphic analysis of close quarter combat from the Somme to Sangin, this book puts forward a novel and challenging answer to this question. Against the common presumption of the virtues of the citizen soldier, the author claims that, in fact, the infantry platoon of the mass twentieth century army typically performed poorly and demonstrated low levels of cohesion in combat. With inadequate time and resources to train their troops for the industrial battlefield, citizen armies typically relied on appeals to masculinity, nationalism, and ethnicity to unite their troops and to encourage them to fight.