The MacCoun, Kier, and Belkin critique of Why They Fight: Combat Motivation in the Iraq War is based on the incorrect assumption that the outcome variable of the study is combat performance. Why They Fight seeks to investigate combat motivation—not battlefield performance. Why They Fight examines why soldiers continue in battle despite obvious risk to personal safety. Referencing a well-established body of literature and using a methodology appropriate for analyzing combat motivation, Why They Fight concludes that today’s soldiers, just as those in the past, fight for each other. Why They Fight also reports, however, that today’s soldiers are motivated in combat by notions of freedom and democracy
Leonard Wong, Thomas A. Kolditz, Raymond A. Millen, and Terrence M. Potter, Why They Fight: Combat Motivation in the Iraq War (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, July 2003), 1-1, http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?PubID=179. Subsequent quotations from soldiers are from this source.
2.
S. L. A. Marshall, Men against Fire (New York: William Morrow, 1947).
3.
and Charles C. Moskos Jr., The American Enlisted Man: The Rank and File in Today’s Military (New York: Russell Sage, 1970).
4.
David R. Segal and Joseph H. Lengermann, “Combat Effectiveness,” in Combat Effectiveness: Cohesion, Stress, and the Volunteer Army, ed. Sam C. Sarkesian (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1980), 182-182.
5.
Bell Irwin Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (Indianapolis, IN: Wiley, 1943), 309-309.
6.
Bell Irwin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Indianapolis, IN: Wiley, 1952), 39-40.
7.
Stoufferet al., American Soldier, 111-111.
8.
Ibid., 150.
9.
Marshall, Men against Fire, 161-161.
10.
Stoufferet al., American Soldier, 107-107.
11.
Ann Scott Tyson, “Oceans Away, US Troops Crave Approval at Home,”The Christian Science Monitor, April 8, 2003, A1-A1.
12.
The reasons are derived from James M. McPherson, What They Fought For: 1861-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 4-4.
13.
See Mark J. Eitelberg, “The All-Volunteer Force after Twenty Years,” in Professional on the Front Line: Two Decades of the All-Volunteer Force, ed. J. Eric Fredland, Curtis Gilroy, Roger D. Little, and W. S. Sellman (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1996), 66-98.
