What Is a Skillful Soldier? An Epistemological Foundation for Understanding Military Skill Acquisition in (Post) Modernized Armed Forces

Abstract

How do we understand military skill/skills, what is it to be militarily skilled, and how do we acquire military skill/skills? Answering these three questions is essential to understanding the ongoing military transformation of developed Western countries. Universalism and contextualism (two competing ethical/epistemological positions) are used to sketch out a typological framework for explaining how different military paradigms/concepts treat “good” soldiering. Universalism is strongly connected with the traditional military paradigm of static invasion-based defense, while contextualism is connected to flexible expeditionary force-based defenses of the twenty-first century. Transformative changes over the past decade illustrate the value of the contextualist paradigm, suggesting that the universalist paradigm may no longer be useful for a twenty-first century expeditionary force.