How western soldiers fight

Cornelius Friesendorf's book focuses on an interesting, important and timely phenomenon: similar military actors, when operating under the same mandate and within the same mission abroad, tend to respond differently to the same problems. Moreover, their responses have varying impact on the local population. The explanatory factor for these differences, Friesendorf demonstrates, is located in military actors' ability or inability to adapt their learned routines to the specific conflict environment they are facing. Contrary to existing studies and prevailing theories, Friesendorf's core message is that organizational analysis at the micro-level can reveal particular biases, preferences and learned routines that shape how armies behave in the field. The starting-point of the book is the observation that western militaries—in this case the American, British and German armed forces as well as the Italian Carabinieri—have struggled to come to terms with the realities of so-called ‘new wars’, specifically while undertaking tasks such as fighting crime, counter-insurgency and the protection of the local population. Not only do structurally similar military organizations respond very differently to these tasks and challenges, but, as the book also shows, dominant theories—such as realism, liberalism and constructivism—are ill-equipped to adequately explain these differences. Instead, as Friesendorf shows in one of the opening theoretical chapters, the answer lies in organizational routines

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