Strategic culture drives patterns of national statecraft, which in turn drive military strategy. Grand strategy also derives from strategic culture, which emerges from geographical, economic, and historical circumstances. A nation’s circumstances give rise to a distinctive manner of perceiving national power – including the use of military force. Strategic culture is ethnically and nationally driven, derived from a combination of factors. It may be national or subnational, and it may be based on real or imagined traits. It tends to be both enduring and unexamined. It involves intersectionality between national, subnational, and organizational cultures, and it may invoke fictive and contingent identities. It manifests in how individuals and organizations make sense of reality. Individuals and subgroups are presumed to self-ascribe to a certain identity, to absorb distinctive attitudes about force, and thus to adopt a “way of war.” Organizational and ethnic cultures coexist, and any military unit may have multiple subcultures. But strategic culture, since it derives from ethnic and national characteristics, precedes and supersedes organizational culture. Strategic culture influences the organizational culture of a national military, with ethnic and historical factors setting the parameters within which organizational culture and individual initiative operate. Ethnic culture frames strategic culture, which in turn interacts with organizational structure, institutional form, and individual incentives to create military organizational culture.

This chapter explores the organizational culture of Iraq’s army between its founding in 1921 and its collapse by the time of the American invasion in 2003. During this eighty-two-year history, the organizational culture of the Iraqi Army moved from the face of a foreign occupation in the 1920s, to a political tool of internal social and political coercion, to “probably the most potent military ever wielded by an Arab government.” However, by the time American troops pulled down the statue of Saddam in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, the army’s organizational culture was but a faint echo of not only its Iran-Iraq War pinnacle but also its historic norm. Saddam’s role was the critical factor in this change. Saddam needed professional military officers competent in developing and employing a large modern armed force, but he preferred the counsel of “violent and ignorant personalities.” Saddam could never reconcile the fundamental difference between what he called tribal and civilized (or state) warfare and the professional elements of the Iraqi armed forces could not survive in his shadow.

This chapter describes how the world’s first independent air force, led by Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, reacted to the threats to its existence by maximizing the Royal Air Force’s (RAF) operational utility and financial efficiency, while simultaneously contriving a credible narrative about its future strategic potential. In pursuing these twin narratives, the RAF developed a unique culture of beliefs and taken-for-granted attitudes that thrived because of the conceptually incurious nature of the men it selected to become officers. Few of these technically able "practical men" were willing to challenge their superiors’ intuitive and speculative belief that the morale of civilian populations was especially vulnerable to bombing. Instead, like their leaders, they became consciously complicit in acceding to the societal prophecies, articulated in books, films, and newspapers, that bombing would have apocalyptic effects, and that civil societies subjected to its effects would wish to sue for peace. The chapter concludes by analyzing how this culture impeded the realization that the anticipated outcomes were not being achieved and explains how this stymied options to pursue alternative strategies.

The American Civil War presented an exceptional state of affairs in modern warfare, because strong personalities could embed their own command philosophies into field armies, due to the miniscule size of the prior US military establishment. The effectiveness of the Union Army of the Tennessee stemmed in large part from the strong influence of Ulysses S. Grant, who as early as the fall of 1861 imbued in the organization an aggressive mind-set. However, Grant’s command culture went beyond simple aggressiveness – it included an emphasis on suppressing internal rivalries among sometimes prideful officers for the sake of winning victories. In the winter of 1861 and the spring of 1862, the Army of the Tennessee was organized and consolidated into a single force, and, despite deficits in trained personnel as compared to other Union field armies, Grant established important precedents for both his soldiers and officers that would resonate even after his departure to the east. The capture of Vicksburg the following summer represented the culminating triumph of that army, cementing the self-confident force that would later capture Atlanta and win the war in the western theater.

Dissatisfaction with the Royal Navy’s World War I performance led a generation of officers to analyze the fleet’s wartime record. This analysis revealed three problems: over-centralization of authority, a reluctance to fight night actions, and an overly defensive use of destroyers. In an effort to correct these issues, the Royal Navy made changes to its doctrine, training, and professional military education that improved the Navy’s World War II performance, especially in surface warfare. Reforms flowed from a variety of sources, including First Sea Lord Adm. David Beatty, contributors to the Naval Review, and Mediterranean Fleet exercise. The interwar reforms reflected an organizational culture that pursued improvement and learning in response to the perception that in World War I, the Navy failed to live up to historical standards of success.

The story of Red Army military culture in 1917–1945 is a story of selective continuity with centuries of Russian military tradition, as well as dramatic innovation and discontinuity. The Bolshevik Party set out to create a new kind of state, a new kind of army, even a new kind of human being, the New Soviet Man. It never achieved the total transformation it envisioned, but the attempt shaped a unique military culture that blended new ideals with old traditions. For all the discontinuities in the revamped Red Army, the military culture of the Soviet era cannot be considered sui generis; continuities with the old imperial army were also in evidence. However, it was not the intention of the new Soviet state to allow such continuity. In fact, the state had intended just the reverse. Military culture in the Soviet period was dynamic. There were attempts to "change everything" with dramatic pendulum shifts from one end of the spectrum to the other, in terms of organization, recruitment, hierarchies, and political oversight. Most of those efforts settled somewhere in the middle through a long process of debate and compromise. This produced a unique dialectic that distinguished Soviet military culture in 1917–1945 from any other.

By 1918, Japan had achieved lofty goals conceived more than fifty years previously by those known in the West as the oligarchs, and in Japan as genro (elder statesmen). Over the next twenty-five years, these gains were lost as Japan experienced crises at home and launched disastrous military adventures abroad. In Japan, power had long adhered to those close to the emperor, who, himself, seldom ruled and who stood for no particular ideology. Japanese society consisted of many autonomous, competing groups. The father of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA), Yamagata Aritomo, equipped it with several advantages in this competition, allowing it to eventually seize control of the state. The IJA led the nation into war with Manchuria, then China, and then the Allies. Its organizational culture produced tough, proficient, and courageous soldiers, who won three conventional conflicts. But its culture left it unable to deal with military losses; it was a culture that prized reputation over public honesty, ritualized death and placed its own judgment above question. According to its own creed, the IJA should have “done its utmost to protect the state.” Instead its soldiers are remembered in Japan and much of the world as “beasts.”

From 1914 through 1945, the British Army displayed extraordinary heroism on the sharp end, while leadership at the higher levels was less than satisfactory. To a considerable extent, this was a result of a peculiar regimental culture that had developed over the nineteenth century when the army served as a constabulary force with its regiments spread across the empire. The result was a military culture that focused downward and that devalued the serious study of war as crucial to the development of military professionalism. The result was that at the sharp end, British regiments produced extraordinary brave and tough soldiers. However, at the higher levels, British generalship was less than impressive. The two exceptions to that rule, Field Marshals William Slim and Bernard Law Montgomery, spent substantial portions of their careers during the interwar period either as students or as instructors at the staff colleges. Moreover, both were serious students of military history.

German military history of 1871 to 1945 is often seen as a direct continuation of Prussian military history. Taking a closer look at the organizational and cultural background of German military forces produces a slightly more nuanced picture and makes it possible to divide the history of the German Army into five phases. Initially, the German Empire effectively had four different forces – the Prussian, Bavarian, Saxon, and Württemberg armies – united only in times of war. During the First World War, these German "armies" increasingly lost their prewar independence, while the war itself had a unifying effect on German society and on its armed forces. Following the defeat of 1918, the army of the newly founded Weimar Republic was developed as a small, elite force exclusively based on Prussian traditions. The 1936 rearmament then turned this force into a mass army, the Wehrmacht, which, while still sticking to Prussian traditions, struggled with various issues caused by rapid expansion. Finally, during the Second World War, the Wehrmacht evolved from a purely German force into one in which significant numbers of foreigners from all over Europe served as volunteers, resulting in an army transcending the boundaries of the nation-state.

When Gen. Robert E. Lee assumed command of the Army of Northern Virginia on June 1, 1862, it was essentially an amalgamation of units, not a united force. Lee gave the army a distinctive organizational culture based on his belief that if the Confederacy were to win the war, it would have to do so quickly. This necessitated an operational strategy that emphasized seizing the initiative, even though his army always faced a numerically superior foe. Implementation of this strategy required aggressive leadership at all levels, particularly among Lee’s top subordinates. Lee secured this kind of leadership by systematically ridding himself of senior lieutenants who proved cautious in battle while forgiving mistakes, even expensive ones, on the part of subordinates who showed themselves to be offensive-minded. This “embedding mechanism,” as specialists in management science would call it, sent an unmistakable signal to the rest of the army’s leaders that they were expected to be bold in action. Lee’s aggressive strategy sought to destroy the enemy army, but his ultimate goal was to demoralize Northern public opinion, which he regarded as the Union’s center of gravity. Although he failed to accomplish this, Lee's many battlefield victories made his army the focus of Confederate nationalism, so that his surrender at Appomattox equated with the death of the Confederacy.

Two kinds of war have characterized the development of US Air Force culture. The first has involved struggles for air supremacy and decisive impact against a series of opponents, from Germany to Japan to Vietnam to Iraq. The second has involved bureaucratic fights against the US Army and the US Navy in the halls of Congress and the Pentagon. Combined, these fights have led to emphasis on recurring elements across the history of Air Force culture, including information precision, technological dominance, and decisive effect. These concentrations have structured how the US Air Force has fought its opponents, foreign and domestic, from before organizational independence in 1947 to the present day.

The dispute between India and Pakistan over the State of Jammu and Kashmir is the United Nations’ longest running and among its most intractable problems, beginning in 1947 and still continuing more than 70 years later. Australia was involved in trying to resolve this dispute for almost half this time. As a fellow member of the Commonwealth, Australia had an early interest in contributing to diplomatic negotiations, and an Australian, Owen Dixon, was the first UN mediator. Another Australian, Major General Robert Nimmo, was appointed Chief Military Observer in 1950 and remained in the job for a further 15 years. Meanwhile, Australian military observers served in Kashmir (as Jammu and Kashmir were often described) for some 35 years until the Australian Government withdrew them in 1985. Also, between 1975 and 1979, Australia provided an aircraft with crew to support the UN observer mission. This chapter describes the early diplomatic efforts; later chapters are devoted to the observer mission and the Air Force contribution.