CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

oth in the UK and the US. This issue with respect to the UK’s Territorial Army and
the US National Guard will be addressed further below.
S.L.A. Marshall is very much an adherent to the ‘small group cohesion’ theory of
combat motivation: ‘I hold it to be one of the simplest truths of war that the thing which
enables an infantry soldier to keep going with his weapon is the near presence or the
presumed presence of a comrade.’ 241 And: ‘He is sustained by his fellows primarily and
by his weapons secondarily.’ 242 Marshall admits that ideology and other such moral
motivations play a part but enjoins commanders to understand their limitations: ‘It
should not be expected that pride in a uniform or belief in a national cause are of
themselves sufficient to make a soldier steadfast in danger and to persuade him to give a
good account of himself in battle ….’ 243
To bring this survey of combat motivation fully up to date, the Strategic Studies
Institute’s study of combat motivation in the 2003 Iraq War 244 , acknowledges
Marshall’s conclusions as still valid and yet found that soldiers today ‘understand the
moral dimensions of war.’ Among their combat motivators they ‘cited ideological
reasons such as liberation, freedom, and democracy as important factors.’ 245 Among the
Iraqi regular soldiers interviewed (all them prisoners of war), the study concluded that
coercion by and fear of the Baath party and the Fedayeen Saddam were the common
motivators.
Interviews uncovered no evidence of higher order concepts such as commitment
to national service or the Arabic obligation to withstand (Sumoud) among the
Iraqi soldiers interviewed. The soldiers never invoked Iraqi nationalism or the
need to repel Americans as an invading army in response to questions about why
they were in the Army, or what would cause them to try their hardest in battle. 246
This might seem surprising of soldiers who, however much they may have been
conscripts in the Army of an oppressive regime, were fighting to repel an invader. Of
course, (and as the report concedes) these responses may have been conditioned by
circumstances: prisoners were seeking to gain favour with their captors by claiming to
have been forced to fight; but the report’s authors hold it just as likely that with freedom
evidently close (PW releases were already beginning) the Iraqis felt able to speak freely.
141