This article aimed at studying how the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research's intention of digitalization and specific primary goals of learning and teaching issued in 2017 could be retrieved in the overarching documents related to education in the Norwegian Armed Forces (NAF). A second aim was to investigate if digitalization and any digital tools were mentioned in the Norwegian Defence University College (NDUC) organization's study programs and subject plans for teaching, or if specific goals of digitalization was lost (...) from the NAF to the NDUC documents. Finally, a third aim was to investigate if digital tools were implemented in the new NAF Basic Officer's Education, as this would reflect the level of intention of digitalization and specific primary goals of learning and teaching. A mixed methods approach was used in the study as we first investigated documents issued from the government issued for the university and college sector in Norway, the NAF and the NDUC to see if the overall plan for digitalization from the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research could be traced. In addition, we investigated the answers that officer cadets had given to questions in three course evaluations related to the use of digital tools in their education. Our three hypotheses were the following: Hypothesis 1: Several of the original demands regarding digitalization from the Norwegian government is lost through the dissemination down through the governing documents issued from the ministry to the NAF Basic Officer's Education. Hypothesis 2: No plan has been prepared as part of the educational change process for the introduction and implementation of new digital tools in the NAF Basic Officer Education. Hypothesis 3: It is up to single individuals to introduce and implement the use of new digital tools in the NAF Basic Officer Education. Support for all three hypotheses were received. The article discusses some leadership challenges that are actualized based upon the results we found. (shrink)

Military employees face all sorts of moral dilemmas in their work. The way they resolve these dilemmas—how they decide to act based on their moral deliberations—can have a substantial impact both on society and on their personal lives. Hence, it makes sense to support military employees in dealing with these dilemmas. Military organizations already support their personnel by adopting compliance‐based approaches that focus, for instance, on enforcing moral rules. At the same time, however, they struggle to develop (...) value‐based approaches that could foster moral learning by improving employees' understanding of personal values, others' values, and their responsibility for others. Consequently, military employees are not adequately supported in their ethical decision‐making when confronted with complex situations. To address this issue, drawing on a design research approach, we develop and evaluate the use of a value‐based reflection tool to support military employees with their moral decision‐making. The design and evaluation of the value‐based reflection tool were informed by five semistructured interviews, notes on 45 joint reflection meetings with trainers, and evaluation notes of 755 participants. Our findings suggest the value‐based reflection tool is a promising way to foster actors' moral competence in organizational settings by triggering the social mechanisms of reflection, empathy, and psychological safety. This study is the first to illustrate that value‐based ethics support can complement compliance‐based ethics support in a military organization. Furthermore, it demonstrates design research's potential to develop actionable knowledge for ethics support practices in organizations. (shrink)

How can military personnel be prevented from using force unlawfully? A critical examination of typical methods and the suitability of virtue ethics for this task starts with the inadequacies of a purely rules-based approach, and the fact that many armed forces increasingly rely on character development training. The three investigated complexes also raise further questions which require serious consideration – such as about the general teachability of virtues. First, the changing roles and responsibilities of modern armed forces are used (...) to refute the notion that timeless, “classic” military virtues exist, for example physical courage. With regard to today’s missions, virtues of restraint seem more necessary. Reflecting on the four interrelated and less military-specific cardinal virtues of courage, wisdom, temperance and justice could bring the military and civil society closer together. At the same time, this would be a logical step towards promoting personality development. Respect is one example of such a “contemporary” inclusive virtue that some armed forces have adopted into their canon of values. Apparently, however, it often refers only to members of one’s own organization. And it is no less inappropriate to use it to justify moral relativism or excuse immoral practices, such as the widespread sexual abuse of Afghan boys by men in positions of power (“boy play”). Finally, the essay asks about the general suitability of a virtue-based approach in ethical education, since social psychological research has shown that situational factors strongly influence behavior. The research findings do not render such an approach worthless, but they should be integrated into military personality training. (shrink)

Abstract The institution of war is the broad framework of rules, norms, and organizations dedicated to the prevention, prosecution, and resolution of violent conflict between political entities. Important parts of that institution consist of the accountability arrangements that hold between armed forces, the political leaders who oversee and direct the use of those forces, and the people in whose name the leaders act and from whose ranks the members of the armed forces are drawn. Like other parts of the institution, (...) these arrangements are responsive to changes in military technology and needs, to geopolitical facts, and to moral and political norms. In particular, they are sensitive to the forms that military organization takes. Since the emergence of modern states in Europe some 500 years ago, there have been three main such forms: private providers?in the form of mercenaries, in early modern Europe?then professional standing armies, which in turn developed into citizen armies. Although elements of the three organizations have coexisted in many armies, the citizen army model has dominated until recently. That model brought with it a particular conception of the accountability relations between the army, the state, and the people. The state had authority over and directed the army, which was accountable to it. In turn the state was accountable for its use of the army to the people, on whose behalf it acted. The dominance of state authority over the military is now under strain, with the professional and private elements?in the form of private military and security companies (PMSCs)?having increasing importance. As those elements increase in power and presence, so it becomes more difficult to make the state accountable to the people for its use of the military, and more difficult for the people to act as a restraining force on the way in which the military used. In this essay, I outline and assess these developments?with particular emphasis on the emergence of PMSCs?in the light of a liberal view of (political) violence. The essay focuses on the situation in the United States, which possesses by far the most important military force in the world today, and in which the use of PMSCs is most developed. The paper has three main sections and a brief conclusion: the first section sketches the liberal view of violence and its implications for organizations dedicated to its use; the second outlines the salient characteristics of the three historically dominant forms of armies; and the third looks at the current situation in which the three forms coexist uneasily. (shrink)

This study challenges the conventional boundaries of philosophy by asserting that organizations can function as legitimate subjects within philosophical discourse. Western philosophy, epitomized by Descartes, has long assumed that individual human beings are the fundamental units of thought and moral agency. However, in a significant oversight, this belief overlooks the idea that organizations can think independently, leading to both virtuous and malevolent results. Epistemology lacks a clear prioritization of morally sound knowledge over potentially harmful knowledge. The advent of artificial intelligence (...) (AI) has also transformed the landscape of cognition from a primarily individual human endeavor into a joint undertaking where humans collaborate with AI entities in collective thinking and decision-making. Nevertheless, AI lacks the innate ability to discern between ethical and unethical actions. This symbiosis creates organizations as fundamental philosophical subjects, marking a significant shift in philosophical emphasis where the organization takes the center stage. Accordingly, within this emerging field, we advance four propositions as the core subjects of organization philosophy: organizations can think, organizations can create knowledge, AI can be part of an organization, and humans in the organization control moral discipline. These propositions guide the ethical coexistence of AI and human agents in organizations, emphasizing the importance of ethical deliberation in knowledge use. Moreover, the malicious use of profound knowledge hinders human progress, as illustrated in this study by an ethical examination of military institutions within organization philosophy. (shrink)

In addition to the traditional reliance on rules and codes in regulating the conduct of military personnel, most of today’s militaries put their money on character building in trying to make their soldiers virtuous. Especially in recent years it has time and again been argued that virtue ethics, with its emphasis on character building, provides a better basis for military ethics than deontological ethics or utilitarian ethics. Although virtue ethics comes in many varieties these days, in many texts (...) on military ethics dealing with the subject of military virtues the Aristotelian view on virtues is still pivotal. Developing virtues is by some authors seen as the best way to prevent misconduct by military personnel, it being considered superior to rules or codes of conduct imposed from above. The main argument these authors offer is that these solutions are impotent when no one is around, and lack the flexibility often thought necessary in today’s world. Finally, rules and codes try to condition behavior, leaving less room for personal integrity. At first sight, then, there is a great deal to say in favor of virtue ethics as being the best way of enhancing the chances of soldiers behaving morally. However, this preference for steering conduct by means of promoting certain desirable dispositions is not without any problems that, as it stands, are hardly ever addressed. To begin with, there are a few practical concerns. For instance, even if we assume that military virtues can assist military personnel to do their work in a morally sound manner, it is still not clear to what extent virtues can, in fact, be taught to them. It is an assumption of virtue ethics that they can, but is this really the case? And if so, how should they be taught? – virtues are supposedly developed by practicing them, yet how much room is there for practicing virtues in for instance the ethics education as followed in military academies and school battalions? Secondly, it appears that the traditional military virtues, such as honor, loyalty, courage, and obedience, are, especially in their common interpretation, mainly beneficial to colleagues and the organization, not so much to the local population of the countries military personnel are deployed to. Changes in the military’s wider environment have led to a shift from traditional of self-defense tasks to new, more complex tasks, and especially in today’s missions one could expect that the proper virtues are not necessarily solely the more martial ones. (shrink)

In this study, we analyse the public perception of military AI in Estonia, a techno-optimistic country with high support for science and technology. This study involved quantitative survey data from 2021 on the public’s attitudes towards AI-based technology in general, and AI in developing and using weaponised unmanned ground systems (UGS) in particular. UGS are a technology that has been tested in militaries in recent years with the expectation of increasing effectiveness and saving manpower in dangerous military tasks. (...) However, developing weaponised systems often raises questions about their safety and accountability. While there have been public debates about the possible outcomes of AI-based civilian technologies like self-driving cars, equivalent discussions have not been held about military technologies. A discourse on potentially sensitive technologies can diminish biased representations and the distribution of worst-case scenarios. The results of this study reveal that an overall positive attitude towards AI-driven technologies is related to a positive perception of military AI systems. However, trustworthiness and human control are the main aspects that are expected from military technologies. (shrink)

Values and virtues play an important role in military organizations. In particular, armies can be understood as institutions that are guided by values and virtues, endeavoring to promote them. A common understanding within the military organization relating the relevant values and virtues is therefore essential. In many armed forces, there are lists of relevant values and virtues that have mostly grown historically. In the context of this volume, special emphasis has been devoted to the value and virtue (...) culture and its importance within a military organization. Specifically, the dimensional structure of values and virtues was analyzed. Through a systematic survey of the military target groups and a factor analytical assessment within the Swiss Armed Forces, the core values and virtues were categorized and defined. These values and virtues describe the current culture of the Swiss Armed Forces and contribute to a more binding support of the objectives of military education. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to justify the feasibility and prospects of including case technology in the process of independent training of cadets in a military higher educational institution. Scientific novelty lies in justifying the increase in the effectiveness of independent training through the implementation of case study technology. The article analyzes the impact of case technology on the development of professionalism of future officers, determines the stages of work on cases, examines the activities of cadets and the (...) tasks that are solved during each stage. As a result, the approaches to the organization of independent training of cadets in the process of implementing the case-training technology are identified; the capability of case technology, as a means of forming competencies such as design, organizational and communicative, is indicated; the features of the cadets' activity aimed at the formation of the above-mentioned competencies are revealed. (shrink)

When the U.S. conducts warfare, elements of a force are drawn from different services and work together as a single team to accomplish an assigned mission. To achieve such unified action, it is necessary that the doctrines governing the actions of members of specific services be both consistent with and subservient to joint Doctrine. Because warfighting today increasingly involves not only live forces but also automated systems, unified action requires that information technology that is used in joint warfare must be (...) aligned with joint doctrine. It requires also that the separate information systems used by the different elements of a joint force must be interoperable, in the sense that data and information that is generated by each element must be usable (understandable, processable) by all the other elements that need them. Currently, such interoperability is impeded by multiple inconsistencies among the different data and software standards used by warfighters. We describe here the on-going project of creating a Joint Doctrine Ontology (JDO), which uses joint doctrine to provide shared computer-accessible content valid for any field of military endeavor, organization, and information system. JDO addresses the two previously mentioned requirements of unified action by providing a widely applicable benchmark for use by developers of information systems that will both guarantee alignment with joint doctrine and support interoperability. (shrink)

The article deals with the problem of military chaplaincy service formation in the period of independence of Ukraine as one of the priority directions of relations between the state and religious organizations in Ukraine. The current state of military pastoral care is analyzed directly in the context of Catholic churches activities in Ukraine in this aspect. In particular, the institutional component of the Catholic churches is clarified, statistics demonstrating the quantitative and percentage composition of the Catholic churches in (...) the religious network of Ukraine are provided. The results of sociological surveys of the religious situation in Ukraine and the identification of religiosity of the population in the context of Catholic churches are analyzed. The opinion of the population of Ukraine regarding the trust in religious organizations, religious leaders and the military formations of Ukraine is examined. The opinion of the population on the expediency of establishing a military chaplaincy institute in Ukraine is also clarified. The organizational division of the internal structure of the Catholic churches in Ukraine is presented, and it is also clarified which structural units are responsible for coordination with the Ukrainian power structures and organization of pastoral work. Attention is drawn to the review of the cooperation of the Catholic churches in Ukraine with the military formations of Ukraine in the aspect of pastoral activity. Special attention is paid to the coverage of the various areas of pastoral work directly by the military chaplains of the Catholic churches and the coordination of this work by the relevant structural units of the Catholic churches. In particular, conferences, meetings, trainings, pilgrimages on the organization and implementation of pastoral work in the field of military chaplaincy. Also, consideration is given to the activities of the advisory body on military chaplaincy at the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine and its contribution to the establishment of the Institute of Military Chaplaincy in Ukraine. The inter-denominational cooperation of the churches in Ukraine, including the Catholic ones, was considered in establishing a military chaplaincy institution in independent Ukraine through the activities of interfaith associations. It has been found that the issue of legislative securing of the Institute of Military Chaplaincy in the Armed Forces of Ukraine remains urgent. In this regard, the legislative work in this area and the involvement of Catholic churches in Ukraine are highlighted. (shrink)

At a time when the Greek army is on the verge of annihilation, the Iliad tells us, two warriors have detached themselves from the fight. Idomeneus, having accompanied a wounded man back to the ships, and Mērionēs, on his way to fetch himself a new spear, meet at the former's hut. They stand and talk for a while, assuring one another that they are afraid of nothing and no-one, and finally decide to plunge into battle again, though only after discussing (...) at some length whether to go to fight in the centre or at the left of the front line. At first sight their behaviour might not seem particularly strange, but when one realises that the poet has told us more than once that these two are the leaders of the Cretan contingent, some four thousand warriors strong, one may begin to wonder. How could a poet, if he had even the slightest notion of what armies and battles were like, let these men behave as if they were alone on the field, leaving the fight for trivial reasons, re-entering it when and where it suits them, not even bothering to return to their own leaderless countrymen? Such doubts have led scholars to argue that, in fact, the poet did not have the slightest notion of what he was talking about. Some seek to show that epic society is vague and unreal — ‘Homeric kings are like the king and the prince in Cinderella — they reveal nothing about any social structure in the real world’ — and have suggested that the historian may dismiss it as literary fiction. (shrink)

Master Sun's _The Art of War_ is by no means the only ancient Chinese treatise on military affairs. One chapter in the _Huainanzi_, an important compendium of philosophy and political theory written in the second century B.C.E., synthesizes the entire corpus of military literature inherited from the Chinese classical era. Drawing on all major, existing military writings, as well as other lost sources, it assesses tactics and strategy, logistics, organization, and political economy, as well as cosmology (...) and the fundamental morality of warfare. This powerful work set out to become the last word on military matters, subsuming and replacing all preceding literature. Written under the sponsorship of Liu An, king of Huainan, the _Huainanzi_'s "military methods" emphasize the preservation of peace as the ultimate value to be served by the military, insisting that the army can be effectively and rightly used only when defending the sacred hereditary position of the emperor and his vassals. This position stands in stark contrast to that of _The Art of War_, which prioritizes the enrichment and empowerment of the state. Liu An's philosophy also argues that military success depends on the personal cultivation of the commander and that deception is not enough to secure victory. Only a commander with the exceptional qualities of insight and cognition, developed through a program of meditative practice and yogic refinement, can effectively control and interpret the strategic situation. Andrew Seth Meyer offers both a full translation of this text and an extensive analysis of its historical context. His thorough treatment relates Liu An's teachings to issues in Chinese philosophy, culture, religion, and history, helping to interpret their uncommon message. (shrink)

Abstract The rapidly growing presence of private military and security contractors (PMSCs) in armed conflict and post-conflict situations in the last decade brought corresponding incidents of serious misconduct by PMSC personnel. The two most infamous events?one involving the firm formerly known as Blackwater and the other involving Titan and CACI?engendered scrutiny of available mechanisms for criminal and civil accountability of the individuals whose misconduct caused the harm. Along a parallel track, scholars and policymakers began examining the responsibility of states (...) and international organizations for the harm that occurred. Both approaches have primarily focused on post-conduct accountability?of the individuals who caused the harm, of the state in which the harm occurred, or of the state or organization that hired the PMSC whose personnel caused the harm. Less attention, however, has been paid to the idea of pre-conduct accountability for PMSCs and their personnel. A broad understanding of ?accountability for? PMSCs and their personnel encompasses not only responsibility for harm caused by conduct, but responsibility for hiring, hosting, and monitoring these entities, as well as responsibility to the victims of the harm. This article provides a comprehensive approach for analyzing the existing international legal regime, and whether and to what extent the legal regime provides ?accountability for? PMSCs and their personnel. It does so by proposing a practical construct of three phases based on PMSC operations?Contracting, In-the-Field, and Post-Conduct?with which to assess the various bodies of international law. (shrink)

In addition to a person's character and training, the organization's ethical work climate (EWC) can assess how the organization influences an individual's ethical decision-making process by examining the individuals' perception of "what is the right thing to do" in a particular organizational environment. Relatively little research has explored which EWCs dominate military units and the impact of organizational role and environmental uncertainty on individuals in the military and their ethical decision making. In this study, we examined (...) the predominant EWCs among military units and found that certain organizational influences are associated with the specific EWCs. Based on these discoveries, we discuss the implications of EWC studies and the influence of organizational role and environmental uncertainty for researchers, as well as military leaders. (shrink)

This study analyzes the ideals of responsibility and accountability, asking such questions as when it is legitimate to blame top officials of an organization for mistakes made by personnel below them in the bureaucratic hierarchy; when things go wrong in a large and complex organization like the Canadian Forces, who is responsible and accountable; and whether a plea of ignorance is a good excuse. The study also analyzes the doctrine of ministerial responsibility in both the British and Canadian (...) parliamentary traditions, asking whether it is realistic to expect that a government minister should be held responsible for everything that goes wrong in his/her department. Finally, traditional military values are examined, considering the kinds of attitudes and values expected from Canada's armed forces and the differences between the military and civilian sectors. (shrink)

This paper investigates four questions related to ethical issues associated with the involvement of engineers and scientists in 'military work', including the influence of ethical values and beliefs, the role of gendered perspectives and moves beyond the purely technical. It fits strongly into a human (and planet)-centred systems perspective and extends my previous AI and Society papers on othering and narrative ethics, and ethics and social responsibility. It has two main contributions. The first involves an analysis of the literature (...) through the application of different ethical theories and the application of gendered analysis to discussion of masculinities in engineering and the military. The second is a survey of scientists and engineers to investigate their opinions and experiences. The conclusions draw together the results of these two contributions to provide preliminary responses to the four questions and include a series of recommendations covering education and training, ethical approval of work not involving human participants or animals, the need for organisational support, approaches covering wider perspectives and the encouragement of individual ethical commitment. (shrink)

This essay discusses the challenges faced by veterans returning to society in light of the current organization and structure of the military, veterans', and overall U.S. health care systems. It also addresses the need for an integrated health care financing and delivery system to ensure a continuum of care for service members, veterans, dependents, and other family members. The health care systems of both the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs execute their responsibilities to active (...) duty service members, while their families and retirees/veterans are under separate legal authorities. Although they perform their mandates with extraordinary commitment and demonstrably high quality, both systems need to explore improved communication, coordination, and sharing, as well as increased collaboration with the Department of Health and Human Services programs serving the same populations, far beyond current efforts. The health care-related missions and the locus of health care delivery of each agency are admittedly unique, but their distinctions must not be permitted to impede system integration and coordination of a continuum of care provided to the men and women who serve the nation, and their families. (shrink)

Leaders are faced with ethical and moral dilemmas daily, like those within the military who must span from large-scale combat operations to security cooperation and deterrence. For businesses, these dilemmas can include social and environmental impact such as those in mining; and for governments, the social and economic impact of their decision-making in their response to COVID-19. The move by Western defence forces to align their foundational principles, policies, and “soldier” dispositions with the changing values of the countries they (...) serve are starkly illustrative of challenges faced by all leaders. While admirable, such changes face the apparent contradiction of enhancing individual moral agency within a hierarchical organization that maintain enforceable codes of conduct. Ethical leadership theory provides aspirational goals, but lacks empirically based guidance on how to implement policies that facilitate values-based behavior. Using a discourse theory analysis of a moral dilemma vignette with Royal Australian Air Force personnel, this research identifies important aspects of agency and subject position that must be addressed if such policies are to succeed. These findings show that the potential contradiction can be addressed by acknowledging the contrasting tendency to bureaucratic process by leaders at upper levels, while lower-level leaders address moral issues by incorporating their subjectivity and making a conscious deontological choice between humanity and comrade loyalty. (shrink)

In First-World-War Britain, women's ambition to perform noncombatant duties for the military faced considerable public opposition. Nevertheless, by late 1916 up to 10,000 members of the female volunteer corps were working for the army, laying the foundation for some 90,000 auxiliaries of the official Women's Services, who filled support positions in the armed forces in the second half of the war. This essay focuses on the public debate in which the volunteers overcame their critics to understand how they obtained (...) sufficient popular consent for their martial work. I explain the process in terms of shifting hegemonic understandings of space. As critics' arguments in the debate indicate, the gender attribution of war participation was organized and represented spatially, assigning men to the warlike “front” as warriors and women to the peaceful “home” as civilians. To redefine the meaning of these gendered wartime spaces, women volunteers deployed rival spatial discourses and practices in their campaign for martial employment. The essay explores the progress of these competing definitions through feminist and spatial theories, including gender performativity, discursively constructed and constructive spaces, and heterotopias. I argue that the upheaval caused by the war in gender and spatial norms undermined absolute conceptualizations of space with dichotomous binary areas on which critics drew for their arguments and reinforced more recent, relative spatialities, including the cultural construction of militarized heterotopic sites in between and paralleling both “home” and “front” for soldiers in training or recovery. The volunteers' efforts to gain access to military employment both contributed to and were supported by this shift. Heterotopic sites offered ideal discursive locations for constructing the new gender role of auxiliary soldiering through the performance of martial training and work, and competing spatial definitions provided arguments through which they could justify their activities to both critics and supporters. (shrink)

In the article, some problems of organization attempts of ‘spring campaign‘ to the USSR, which have been conducted by members of ‘first wave‘ monarchist emigration, are studied. A special place is given to the efforts in this trend of monarchist-legitimist members who relied on growth of monarchist sentiments in emigration and inside of USSR. On the example of activities and plans of ‘Union of Russian Royal People‘ named in honor the Grand Duchess Kira Kirillovna in Bulgaria under the leadership (...) of colonel G. I. Dementjev, attempts of search financial resources in USA, involvement into antibolshevik activities emigrant-officers in European countries are attentively examined. Undisputed interest is about project of parachute landing into USSR by aircraft designer I. I. Sikorsky that submitted to legitimist emigrant’s leaders in 1927. There is a brief review of I. I. Sikorsky biography, of his way as a constructor in Russia before the Revolution in 1917 and of period of his emigration in USA when he invented the helicopter in 1939. In conclusion the analysis of failures by organization of military resistance against of Soviet Russia as result of absence of financial resources and the decline of interest by ordinary emigrants to activities of their leaders is given. (shrink)

The Chacoan road system is an understudied aspect of a very unique culture in New Mexico. The extensive roads present important evidence to the social structure of the Chaco people. A few theories have been presented about the reason for the roads, such as economic, administrative and religion. This paper argues that the roads were used for military purposes, because the roads provided quick access to all satellite townships in the region.

Instructional technology, and the cognitivist and systems paradigms that underpin it, grew out of the military-industrial complex during the Cold War. Much as the Pentagon and this military complex defined the architecture of the Internet, they also essentially created, ex nihilo, the fields of instructional technology and instructional design. The results of the ongoing dominance or influence of the Pentagon in these specific disciplines have been traced in research that appeared during the final phases of the Cold War. (...) But this research has not been updated to reflect circumstances now most definitive of the post–Cold War world: the rapid development of Internet infrastructures and applications, and the aggressive expansion of US military spending and activity. Tracing the imprint left by the US military on instructional technology and design, this paper considers how this influence may now extend, like the Internet itself, into schools and the university. It will conclude by stressing that the end of the Cold War, along with more recent developments concerning the US military, presents a juncture offering both opportunity and challenge to the evolving field of educational technology or “e-learning.”. (shrink)

This text provides a unique collection of case studies across a wide range of organizations (higher education, K-12 education, military, state and local government administration, non-profit institutions, and agency management, etc.). These cases examine ethical decision-making and organizational and leadership behavioral concepts that are practiced in these organizations. The cases cover topics facing our workforce today and ask the reader to solve the dilemma. Through a discussion of these cases, students apply decision making and organizational and leadership strategies to (...) analyze each case and therefore gain a better understanding of how to effectively lead and manage within their organizations. This text challenges students to think critically and analytically. Students are encouraged to reflect on options a practitioner could use to solve the problem. All of the cases end with an open scenario and a set of questions, allowing students to offer a wide range of opinions and participate in reflective and robust discussions. (shrink)

This book is a selection of papers from a conference which took place at the University of Keele in July 1982. The conference was an extraordinarily enjoyable one, and we would like to take this opportunity of thanking all participants for helping to make it so. The conference was intended to allow scholars working on different aspects of symbolic behaviour to compare findings, to look for common ground, and to identify differences between the various areas. We hope that it was (...) successful in these aims: the assiduous reader may judge for himself. Several themes emerged during the course of the conference. Some of these were: 1. There is a distinction to be made between those symbol systems which attempt, more or less directly, to represent a state of affairs in the world (e. g. language, drawing, map and navigational skill) and those in which the representational function is complemented, if not overshadowed, by properties of the symbol system itself, and the systematic inter-relations that symbols can have to one another (e. g. music, mathematics). The distinction is not absolute, for the nature of all symbolic skills is, in part, a function of the structure of the symbolic system employed. Nonetheless, this distinction helps us to understand some common acquisition difficulties, such as that experienced in mathematics, where mental manipulation of symbols can go awry if a child assumes too close a correspondence between mathematical symbols and the world they represent. 2. (shrink)

In the article, becoming civil democratic control is considered above military powers of Russian Federation, certainly the factors of influence in relation to forming of political model of the civilly soldiery relations.

Even of that, I cannot elaborate. He joined the Irgun National Military Organization as a youth, joined its headquarters as a teenager, and went abroad on a mission at the age of 22, from which he returned a decade later, after his chief political activity was over. I cannot describe all that now. I will sum it up briefly. His life work had two great achievements and two heartbreaking failures. The struggle to rescue the Jews of Europe during (...) the Holocaust and the Declaration of Israel’s Independence were both his achievements and his failures. (shrink)

Integrity is generally considered to be an important military virtue. The first part of this article tries to make sense of integrity’s many, often contradicting, meanings. Both in the military and elsewhere, its most common understanding seems to be that integrity requires us to live according to one’s personal principal values and principles we have a moral obligation to do so, and it is a prerequisite to be able to ‘look ourselves in the mirror.’ This notion of integrity (...) as upholding personal values and principles is a very problematic one in itself, especially to those working in the military. For several reasons, perhaps the role that the virtue of integrity has in a military organization could in fact be better played by other virtues. (shrink)

The end of the Cold War, technological changes and social-cultural evolution have brought about the end of the mass army. In most of the countries where there still exists a conscription system, i.e. almost everywhere in continental Europe, the debate on the end of the draft is now open. Among these nations, Belgium was the first to decide to adopt an all-volunteer force. It is also the country where the transition to an AVF will be the quickest. The article first (...) describes the content of the present reform of the Belgian military organization and its various aspects. It then analyzes its structural and internal causes. (shrink)

On the fictional level, La Route des Flandres deploys a world in the process of complete disintegration. The manifestly privileged situation is the debacle of the French army in 1940 in which a number of the novel's protagonists are involved: George, the narrator; his cousin, Captain de Reixach; Iglésia, previously the Captain's jockey, now his orderly; Blum, Wack, and their horses. The havoc wrought by the military debacle can be subdivided into five categories. With the dissociation and decimation of (...) the army . . . and the disintegration of the discipline which had consolidated it . . . an entire military order is in the course of demolition. The breakdown of the military organization is accompanied by a parallel dissolution of the social order. Scattered along the roads, the civilians have lost their essential function, their trade. And, in an incident which occurs in front of the captain, when a peasant threatens the deputy mayor with his hunting rifle, we detect a direct reversal of the civic order. In the mechanical order, the all but dismembered automobiles . . . and the dismantlement of their motors contribute to the general tide of dilapidation and decay. The spatial order, represented here by the traditional military space, endowed with significance and hierarchically divided into front and rear, becomes depolarized with the disappearance of the battle lines and the inextricable entanglement of the two armies . . . The temporal order, the chronological arrangement of events, is subject to a similar vitiation. Jean Ricardou is equally well known for his fiction, including L'Observatoire de Cannes , La Prise de Constantinople , Les Lieux-dits , and his criticism, including Problèmes du Nouveau Roman , Pour une Theorie du Nouveau Roman , and Le Nouveau Roman ."ARTISTS ON ART: Birth of a Fiction" appeared in the Winter 1977 issue of Critical Inquiry. Erica Freiberg regularly translates Jean Ricardou's works. She holds degrees in French and Italian, philosophy and modern literature from the University of Paris and the University of Geneva. (shrink)

On the fictional level, La Route des Flandres deploys a world in the process of complete disintegration. The manifestly privileged situation is the debacle of the French army in 1940 in which a number of the novel's protagonists are involved: George, the narrator; his cousin, Captain de Reixach; Iglésia, previously the Captain's jockey, now his orderly; Blum, Wack, and their horses. The havoc wrought by the military debacle can be subdivided into five categories. With the dissociation and decimation of (...) the army... and the disintegration of the discipline which had consolidated it... an entire military order is in the course of demolition. The breakdown of the military organization is accompanied by a parallel dissolution of the social order. Scattered along the roads, the civilians have lost their essential function, their trade. And, in an incident which occurs in front of the captain, when a peasant threatens the deputy mayor with his hunting rifle, we detect a direct reversal of the civic order. In the mechanical order, the all but dismembered automobiles... and the dismantlement of their motors contribute to the general tide of dilapidation and decay. The spatial order, represented here by the traditional military space, endowed with significance and hierarchically divided into front and rear, becomes depolarized with the disappearance of the battle lines and the inextricable entanglement of the two armies... The temporal order, the chronological arrangement of events, is subject to a similar vitiation. Jean Ricardou is equally well known for his fiction, including L'Observatoire de Cannes, La Prise de Constantinople, Les Lieux-dits, and his criticism, including Problèmes du Nouveau Roman, Pour une Theorie du Nouveau Roman, and Le Nouveau Roman."ARTISTS ON ART: Birth of a Fiction" appeared in the Winter 1977 issue of Critical Inquiry. Erica Freiberg regularly translates Jean Ricardou's works. She holds degrees in French and Italian, philosophy and modern literature from the University of Paris and the University of Geneva. (shrink)

This article addresses two questions related to the discrimination of homosexuals in the British Armed Forces as illuminated in the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights in the casesSmith and Grady v. the United KingdomandBeck, Copp and Bazeley v. the United Kingdom. First, how does the military organization obtain knowledge about its subjects? Two works by Michel Foucault concerning the thematic of confession—The Will to KnowledgeandAbout the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at (...) Dartmouth—provide a foundation for answering this question. Second, what happens when this knowledge obtained by the military organization comes into contact with the legal system? In relation to this question, Foucauldian theories of law are discussed, namely the so-called ‘expulsion thesis’ and ‘polyvalence theory’. It is argued that the production of knowledge in the context of these cases is intertwined with the technique of confession. However, the confession does not only operate at the level of the military organization but also as an internal practice of the individual. When this knowledge then encounters the legal system, it appears that the law puts up a certain resistance towards other forms of power, e.g. disciplinary power. It is argued that this resistance is due to the law’s ‘strategic openness’, i.e. the possibility to harness the law to different strategic purposes, due to which law can never be fully subordinated by external powers. (shrink)

In calling for the transformation of military medical education and training, the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission recommended relocating basic and specialty enlisted medical training to a single site to take advantage of economies of scale and the opportunity for joint training. As a result, a joint medical education and training campus (METC) has been established at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Two of METC's primary long-term goals are to become a high-performing learning organization and to seek accreditation (...) as a community college. Such goals require a clear model of organizational improvement with well-defined metrics for measuring its performance and using research and evaluation to assess and improve that performance. Lessons learned from a review of practices at institutions with similar missions -- such as community colleges, corporate universities, the UK's Defence Medical Education and Training Agency, and other federal agencies, such as the Veterans Health Administration -- establish a clear need for an office of institutional research to help METC attain its organizational goals. They also provide useful recommendations regarding the METC office's structure, scope, and governance. (shrink)

The nature of the Florentine economy during the era of plague and the so-called crisi del trecento has been the subject of a great deal of study and debate. The nuanced and sophisticated discourse has proceeded, however, without proper consideration of warfare, which coincided with the other crises, but has been relegated in the Anglophone scholarship to the lonely subfield of military history. Recent studies have helped improve the status quo and blur rigid disciplinary lines. But there remains a (...) stubborn tendency among scholars to separate Italian war from its societal milieu, to follow the lead of Machiavelli in treating armed conflict in moral terms, focusing on the use by states of mercenary soldiers, who were emblematic of a lack of native martial spirit and of bad warfare. The tendency is particularly marked for the middle years of the trecento, the era of the “companies of adventure,” when states relied on foreign soldiers from outside the peninsula arrayed in large bands. This was, as a recent scholar has asserted, “the lowest point” in the history of Italian military organization, a statement that renders warfare still less appealing as a topic of serious inquiry. (shrink)

The paper reviews the military policy of a new independent Republic of Tajikistan over 1991-2011. The smallest by territory Central Asian republic lived through a five-year civil war on its way to an independent sovereign democratic state which seven million people were wise enough to reach national reconciliation in 1997. The majority of Tajikistan population is on the verge of poverty, which is indicative of the inadequate social policy. The country is rich in Pamir water which is drawn from (...) eleven glaciers as well as cotton, electric energy and aluminum. Tajikistan secures its military power owing to cooperation with the CIS, the Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The Republic develops all-embracing cooperation with such Asian countries as India, Pakistan, Turkey, China and Iran. Among European countries it is Germany that allocated funds for strengthening the border with Afghanistan, which notably stands out. Cooperation with the NATO within the Partnership for Peace Program helps the military of the Republic to dispose of outdated ammunition as well as take part in NATO peacekeeping operations in accordance with resolutions of the United Nations Security Council. The Russian Federation having the largest foreign military alignment in the territory of the Republic remains the main strategic partner and guarantor of the national sovereignty of Tajikistan. The Republic still faces the problems of energy resources, terrorism and international drug trafficking. The internal political situation requires continuous international monitoring. UN observers left the country in 2000. The authoritarian government does not contribute to development of the democratic foundation of civil society. Today's Armed Forces of Tajikistan are of insignificant numerical strength and poorly-armed. The Army needs modernization and adaptation to a present-day environment. (shrink)

The term ḥašd is the most frequent word used by the Arab chroniclers refer to the Andalusians troops that practiced the ŷihād during the Umayyad emirate. Different authors have studied this matter, but doubts remain about how to define the subjects included under this term. This article attempts to resolve these questions and determine which role played the ḥušūd in the Umayyad military organization. To this end, thirty two events extracted from Arabic sources have been selected. The different (...) cases have been analyzed and classified according to their common characteristics. The study concludes that ḥašd/ḥušūd is an ambiguous term that makes reference to military mobilizations of different geographical reach where both regular soldiers and non-professional combatants can be included. The main feature of these rallies during the Umayyad emirate would be the local origin of their members. (shrink)