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Modern Soldiers The Combat Soldier: Infantry Tactics and Cohesion in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries By Anthony King Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013 538 pages $107.00
After more than a decade of continuous conflict, Anthony King, a Cambridge graduate and professor of sociology at Exeter University, authored a superb and in-depth look at today's soldiers. King's research passion, the examination of the sociological phenomenon "collective action"-how and why groups form and sustain themselves-ranges from sports teams to the military. In The Combat Soldier, King meticulously "explores how cohesion and combat performance, often assumed unchanging and universal across wars, may have changed in the course of the last century, as armies have moved away from the citizen towards the all-volunteer professional model." (39)
King examines how armies in Western-like, democratic societies behave and maintain cohesion in the face of the hellish experience of combat. He does so by deftly analyzing how the "multiplicity of factors including comradeship, political motivation, doctrine, tactics, and training (39)" affected combat performance in battle from World War I to the present. Rather than a macro perspective, he studies the phenomenon from the grassroots level using the infantry platoon as his unit of analysis to identify what motivates these soldiers to act in unison in a combat environment. His method includes comparing citizen army platoons from World War I to Vietnam against the modern, professional army platoons which have fought from the Falklands to the most recent operations in Afghanistan. By design, his emphasis focuses on six armies: Australia; Canada;...