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Civil-military relations and the autonomy of the military profession in Sweden have varied over time depending on the perceived level of external threats. In this article, we set out to conduct an analysis of Swedish civil-military relations over a period of more than twenty-five years from 1984 to 2011. Our analysis is made from the perspective of civil-military control of (1) the military officer rank system and (2) the professional officer education system, for all three services. The analysis is based on Samuel Huntington's and Morris Janowitz's theoretical discussion of "objective" and "subjective" civilian control over the military and will give answers on how the Swedish armed forces have been effected by objective and subjective civilian control during the late Cold War era and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The findings of this study confirm the assumption that civil-military relations vary over time because of perceived external threats but also because of new threats, new tasks, and increased globalization and cooperation in multinational international operations. [Reprinted by permission; copyright Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society/Sage Publications Inc.]

The debate on the effectiveness of Private Security Contractors (PSCs) in Iraq has been waged ever since their first appearance. Statists have argued that they are much less effective than regular troops, while neoliberals consider them an effective supplement to regular troops. However, so far, both schools alike have drawn on anecdotal evidence only; yet, such evidence is prone to a high margin of error and does not allow a comparison of different actors. This article addresses these shortfalls by providing hard data, drawn from the Wikileaks "Iraq War logs" data set, on the conduct of PSCs in Iraq and comparing their performance to that of regular troops, that is, the US and Iraqi armed forces. In general, if PSCs are co-deployed alongside regular troops and oversight is institutionalized, their performance supersedes that of poorly trained military personnel, such as the Iraqi military, and in many cases even that of the highly capable US military.

This article examines Army spousal attitudes toward senior civilian leaders in the United States. Based on the 2004 Military Families Survey, it investigates the demographic, political, and institutional factors that structured the job approval ratings of then-President George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Colin Powell. Partisanship, race and ethnicity, and opinions about the war in Iraq were consistently significant predictors; experiences directly related to the Iraq war were not. For instance, while Republicans and Latinos were highly likely to support the leadership, past and present deployments were not significant. In addition, Army spouses appear to have distinguished between the three leaders. The results have implications for researchers interested not only in military families but also the role of race and ethnicity in the armed forces, retention dynamics, the civil-military gap, and the Army in a time of war. [Reprinted by permission; copyright Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society/Sage Publications Inc.]

This article presents a small state's perspectives on military socialization by examining military interactions at political and strategic, operational, and tactical as well as educational tiers. Transnational military socialization creates learning and socializing environments for militaries. However, the transnational military socialization process in Asia has received little scholarly attention, although its nature changed dramatically after the Cold War and 9/11. A small state often enters into asymmetric socialization with major powers. Mongolia presents an interesting case to capture these changes and impacts of transnational military interactions. The Mongolian military internalized Soviet military norms, ideas, and values during its seventy-year military socialization process. Since then, it has been attempting to disconnect from its communist past by internalizing the Western military norms, ideas, and culture even though it is isolated from the Western world. Interactions between Sino-Mongolian militaries over the past two decades have not resulted in any in-depth exchanges of ideas due to political, historical, and cultural factors. In the absence of explicit pressures from these three major powers, today the Mongolia military has consolidated a new identity, similar to a Western military. It has increased its contribution to peace support operations while attempting to disconnect its Soviet past and avoiding absorption from the growing Chinese military initiatives toward Central Asia. At the same time, Mongolia's military socialization with Russian or American militaries often triggers uncertainty for Chinese security. [Reprinted by permission; copyright Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society/Sage Publications Inc.]

The question this article addresses is how and to what extent international military forces can support nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in armed conflicts and postconflict arenas. As non-state actors, NGOs have serious security problems and their current protection is not sufficient to secure humanitarian operations. The Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO) was established in 2002 to solve this problem. The ANSO innovation resulted in a new NGO-military security collaboration mechanism. In particular, the article examines whether the NGO-military security collaboration mechanism established between NATO International Security Assistance Force, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, and the ANSO could be a fourth way in narrowing NGOs' security gap in addition to the existing three ways (judicial, theoretical, and practical). I would argue international military forces need to take into account ANSO model organizations for fulfilling their responsibility to secure NGOs in armed conflicts and postconflict arenas. [Reprinted by permission; copyright Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society/Sage Publications Inc.]

In the past several decades, the US military has increasingly relied on civilian contractors to provide a variety of core functions. Lagging behind this increased reliance on contractors is an understanding of how the presence of contractors influences civilian and military personnel. This research addresses this question using a unique study of US Department of Army civilians and military personnel serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. We find a substantial degree of ambivalence among both groups regarding the impact of contractors on the military and comparisons with contractors, but we also find a noticeable trend of comparative discontent beneath this apparent ambivalence. Results are discussed in the context of using ambivalence as a starting point for building a theoretical approach to more systematically understanding the role and effects of contractor integration in the military. [Reprinted by permission; copyright Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society/Sage Publications Inc.]

There is recent concern about what becomes of Armed Forces leavers. This is most apparent among leavers themselves and is a feature of short careers that compel individuals to find replacement jobs and lifestyles. Concern for one's civilian future rises to prominence in the preexit period and is confronted in resettlement processes during this time. Based on qualitative analysis of interviews with twenty-eight UK regular Army career soldiers and officers, the article argues that the final year of service-though mostly a practical endeavor-is also an important time for tackling matters of identity. The work is underpinned theoretically by a combination of Mead's pragmatism and Ricoeur's hermeneutics and constructs a typology of preexit orientation. This is an approach that casts some doubt about the utility of projecting oneself into unknown civilian futures from the context of distinctive and familiar Army relations. [Reprinted by permission; copyright Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society/Sage Publications Inc.]

In an attempt to explain the democratic peace phenomenon, existing studies postulate institutional and normative models but treat them as contending and mutually exclusive explanations. This approach is both theoretically and empirically flawed. Extant institutional models fail to acknowledge that institutional factors have an impact only in the presence of requisite normative factors. Similarly, normative models fail to acknowledge that normative factors have the hypothesized impact only in combination with institutional factors. Since the possibility of such an interaction effect is overlooked, existing empirical models of the democratic peace are misspecified. This study fills the gap by introducing a multiplicative interaction model. This study presents evidence that, ceteris paribus, for democratic dyads in which the interaction effect of institutional and normative constraints is high, the likelihood of interstate disputes is lower than for nondemocratic dyads. Consequently, the democratic peace phenomenon should be seen primarily as an outcome of institutional and normative constraints working together. [Reprinted by permission; copyright Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society/Sage Publications Inc.]