Militaries increasingly experiment with data-driven technologies to enhance readiness and prepare for future warfare. Yet developing these technologies in-house poses significant challenges, particularly given the limited opportunities for real-world experimentation. This paper examines the Land Information Manoeuvre Centre (LIMC), an experimental Dutch army innovation hub active during the COVID-19 pandemic but without a formal legal mandate. The objective is to analyse the motivations and promises that drove this unit, to better understand dilemmas surrounding legitimacy in military experimentation. Through the conceptual lens of experimentation practices (driven by visions and imaginaries of military innovation), legitimacy (as entangled law and ethics), and soldiers' lived experiences, the study shows that experimentation is not only about testing technical functionalities, but also about shaping social, legal, and ethical frameworks. The analysis reveals that military experimentation can challenge legal and moral boundaries, potentially generating dilemmas and moral disorientation among soldiers. These findings contribute to broader studies of experimenting in security contexts by providing a framework that integrates both legal and ethical dimensions of legitimacy. Moreover, by demonstrating how visions and imaginaries inform experimentation practices and lived experiences, the paper shows how such imaginaries can be strategically mobilized to justify actions as moral obligations, allocate resources, and steer investments. Ultimately, we argue that experimentation reshapes how innovation in warfare is legitimized at political and strategic levels, and how soldiers make sense of and justify their actions.

Legitimacy, responsibility and the reflexive military organisation The different contributions in this special issue discuss various contemporary developments surrounding the military organization and their implications for governance and public administration, such as technological development, geopolitical transition and fundamental changes the nature of military work. Because of its task and command and control structure, the military organization is a unique public organisation. It operates within the boundaries of political authority that define the ambitions, goals as well as possibilities and limitations of its operations. For an organisation that may use force in the performance of its tasks, these limitations define the legitimacy of the military organisation's operational activities. However, given the nature of its main tasks, the military organisation is potentially deployed in particularly dangerous, uncertain, ambiguous and changeable circumstances. This creates a tension whereby the moral responsibility of military professionals consists of reconciling compliance with political authority with local conditions. This requires reflexivity from military professionals at various levels. The central theme of this issue is thus ‘Legitimacy, responsibility and the reflexive military organisation’.

Challenges facing the military organisation of the future In the concluding reflection, the editors look back at the contributions, discuss salient connections and identify future challenges for the military organisation. The articles indicate that the military organisation will have to be able to navigate much more between its various main tasks than before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while at the same time it appears that technological changes are making military deployment more complex. The proverbial gap between thinking and doing plays a central role in the dynamics between legitimacy, accountability and reflexivity. In addition, it appears that the military organisation is becoming increasingly intertwined with a larger ‘governance network’ of external and internal parties, which also creates dependencies from parties not associated with political authority. Ultimately, a research agenda with three main themes is formulated. The various developments point to the importance of thinking about designing the military organisation of the future. The growing complexity of the governance networks surrounding the armed forces leads to questions about organising responsibility. Finally, the importance of organising a ‘democratic dialogue’ about the future of the military is discussed in which the various questions of legitimacy, responsibility and reflexivity can be addressed in a transparent manner.

AbstractThe psychological demands of the military profession have been a focal point of reflection in military studies, yet not from the perspective of organizational science. This chapter explores the relevance of the systems psychodynamic perspective for the military organization. It discusses historical examples to reflect on the differences between armed forces that sustained both a form of social psychological integration and operational effectiveness and those that did not. Subsequently, it focuses on contemporary missions and considers how their characteristic structural configurations influence the ability of operators to deal with the psychological demands of such missions. In doing so, it considers the relationship between structural features of military organizations and the means available to operators for dealing with the psychological demands intrinsic to their profession.

Abstract This chapter draws together the contributions of this book, which reflected on violence in extreme conditions and on related ethical issues at the micro, meso and macro levels. Whilst violence often leaves us speechless, we do speak about it. And for the same reasons that we are repelled by violence, we are fascinated by it. Violence is senseless and meaningful at the same time. Naming different manifestations of violence (physical, psychological, structural and symbolic) as violence is important to understand parallels in their dynamics and impact. Doing so can counterintuitively help to protect the concept of violence from an all-encompassing inflation. It allows us to better define the specific mechanisms of violence and the specific ethical challenges that come with it.

Many militaries envision a technologically advanced future with a strong innovative capability and therefore invest in so-called innovation hubs focused on experimenting with new modes of operation with drones and (semi-)autonomous vehicles. However, there appears to be a discrepancy between these military visions and soldiers’ lived experiences on the ground. This article presents an ethnographic study of one innovation hub: the Robots and Autonomous Systems unit of the Dutch Army. Examining this unit through an analytical framework of sociotechnical imaginaries and expectations, we first outline how “innovation” and “military” imaginaries are integrated so that technological innovation is presented as necessary, desirable, and inevitable for military futures. Second, we explore soldiers’ experiences of military innovation, identifying friction between the strategic and operational levels. At the strategic level, soldiers experience meaning and purpose in their work whereas, at the operational level, soldiers’ expectations, practices, and experiences do not align with the “innovative military future” imaginary, resulting in disillusionment. With this empirical study, we contribute to a better understanding of how large-scale visions of technological “progress” play out in military practice.

Purpose Emergency organizations allocate specific tasks to responders in an attempt to resolve increasingly complex incidents. Many studies take a pragmatic perspective by studying how emergency organizations can more effectively compartmentalize response tasks. Yet, the effects of compartmentalization on responders' sensemaking of moral issues (i.e. moral sensemaking) has received almost no attention. Design/methodology/approach Based on existing research, the authors bring together different insights on the relation between compartmentalization and emergency responders’ sensemaking of moral issues. Findings The authors demonstrate that emergency organizations may undermine the moral sensemaking of responders through introducing moral blind spots and moral dissociation or, instead, enable moral sensemaking through enhancing moral agency and awareness. The authors argue that emergency organizations need to induce moral sense-discrediting among responders to enhance their moral sensemaking. Finally, the authors conclude with discussing two types of compartmentalizing tasks, functional concentration and the holographic metaphor, to show that the latter is most likely to enhance moral sensemaking among emergency responders. Originality/value This study introduces moral sensemaking to the emergency management literature and investigates how organizational design influences it.

Abstract‘There will be no development without security and no security without development’ (Annan, 2005). This mantra became the foundation for many missions—a combination of security forces and development strategies—and has been given various names, such as ‘comprehensive approach’, ‘whole of government approach’ and ‘3D -approach’. To date the future of this approach is far from certain. This chapter evaluates the application of the comprehensive approach of the last decades by connecting it to three perspectives on the human security concept, leading to the conclusion that the future of the comprehensive approach as a feasible option for military interventions depends on which version of human security becomes dominant in policy making.

The concept of moral injury, referring to the psychological impact of having one's moral expectations and beliefs violated, is gaining a firm place in research on military trauma. Yet, although moral injury has the recognized potential to extend the understanding of trauma beyond the individualizing and pathologizing focus of the clinical realm, most studies nevertheless focus on clinical assessment, diagnosis and treatment. This review aims to contribute to a better understanding of contextual dimensions of moral injury. To this end, it complements current theory on moral injury with a systematic review of literature relevant to contextual factors in moral injury. It draws together insights from psychology, philosophy, theology and social sciences into spiritual/existential, organizational, political and societal dimensions of moral injury. Thus an interdisciplinary theoretical foundation is created for context-sensitive research and interventions.

Boin (2019) argues that in transboundary crisis management it is almost impossible to achieve centralization and coordination. This article identifies three principles through which actors in a transboundary crisis can balance centralization with autonomy while shaping coordination along the way. We reanalysed three transboundary cases: the Dutch military mission in Afghanistan, the downing of MH17 and hurricane Irma striking Sint-Maarten. The principles we found are as follows: (a) reformulating key strategic priorities, (b) flexible adaptation of crisis management protocols and (c) the emergence of multifunctional units. With these three principles, we reflect on challenges in the Dutch crisis response to the corona outbreak and propose improvements for progressing current crisis management efforts.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide insight in how military expeditionary task forces cope with the dual challenge of organizing and learning, by reflecting on the experiences of Dutch expeditionary task forces in post-conflict missions in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Design/methodology/approach This paper reflects on the outcomes of a research project into the experiences of operators of different specific expeditionary task forces of the Dutch Armed Forces in dealing with everyday problems in their working environment. The case studies were based on interviews with military personnel of all ranks and focused on relating the process of making sense of environmental dynamics to characteristics of the organizational context. Findings The case studies indicate that designing and learning become intertwined in the realities of everyday problem-solving in the more complex missions. As task forces are essentially tailor-made for the purpose of specific missions, units initially need to be selected. Subsequently, the design of the task force needs to be adapted to suit local conditions. This challenge interrelates with the everyday challenge for operators of making sense of their environment and finding pragmatic solutions for the everyday problems they are confronted with. In pragmatically solving everyday problems, operators in the cases engaged in working out incomplete or ill-fitting aspects of the task force design. Practical implications The findings are relevant for military task forces and more in general for organizations that are confronted with dynamically complex environments that rely on temporary structures. Originality/value Existing literatures on learning and on organizing generally treat these as two related but essentially separate phenomena. In the expeditionary military task forces, operators that aimed to develop pragmatic solutions to everyday problems, the processes of learning and organizing became intertwined: units needed to organize to learn and to learn to organize. The paper ends by suggesting a combination of specific circumstances that influences the nature of the interrelation between these processes.

Military education is for most people an unknown process that takes place behind closed doors. Based on text analysis, eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, and interviews at the Netherlands Defence Academy, this article seeks to understand military education as a dynamic process between the cadets' experience and the institute. As such, this study can be understood as an institutional ethnography, intending to open the black-box of military education. This study shows that military education affects cadets in a powerful way. They quickly learn to navigate the 'underlife' of the institute by carefully avoiding confrontation with the official structures. In a final discussion, we identify two remarkable paradoxes - perfect imperfection and individual in the system - that we consider exemplary for the learning environment at the NLDA. We argue that the Defence Academy constitutes, in essence, a paradoxical learning environment that influences the character development of the cadets - sometimes in unintended ways.

Abstract In this chapter, the relevance of a perspective on organizational vulnerability for improving safety in military taskforces is outlined. Research of the Netherlands Defence Academy has shown that military taskforces are systems with typical organizational vulnerabilities. More specifically, this research has shown that military taskforces had difficulties in developing and maintaining functional integration. This chapter analyzes whether the safety management system of the Netherlands Defence organization is useful for understanding such organizational vulnerabilities. After the conclusion that this focus on organizational vulnerabilities is lacking in this safety management system, existing theories on safety in organizations are analyzed. Based on a combination of insights from these theories, a theoretical avenue for understanding such vulnerabilities is proposed.

ABSTRACT In clinical circles, the concept of “moral injury” has rapidly gained traction. Yet, from a moral philosophical point of view the concept is less clear than is suggested. That is, in current conceptualizations of moral injury, trauma’s moral dimension seems to be understood in a rather mechanistic and individualized manner. This article makes a start in developing an adequately founded conceptualization of the role of morality in deployment-related distress. It does so by reviewing and synthesizing insights from different disciplines into morality and trauma. This discussion will lead to three positions: (1) values and norms are by definition characterized by conflict, (2) moral conflict may entail important social dimensions, and (3) moral conflict may lead to altered beliefs about previously held values. These insights provide important steps in further developing conceptions of the role of morality in deployment-related suffering.

In this chapter, the relevance of a perspective on organizational vulnerability for improving safety in military taskforces is outlined. Research of the Netherlands Defence Academy has shown that military taskforces are systems with typical organizational vulnerabilities. More specifically, this research has shown that military taskforces had difficulties in developing and maintaining functional integration. This chapter analyzes whether the safety management system of the Netherlands Defence organization is useful for understanding such organizational vulnerabilities. After the conclusion that this focus on organizational vulnerabilities is lacking in this safety management system, existing theories on safety in organizations are analyzed. Based on a combination of insights from these theories, a theoretical avenue for understanding such vulnerabilities is proposed.

Research indicates that soldiers struggling with PTSD under-utilize mental health care. Quantitative studies of barriers to care point to the importance of soldiers’ beliefs about mental health and mental health interventions in their care-seeking behavior, yet these studies still struggle to understand the particular beliefs involved and the ways they impact care-seeking behavior. This preliminary study makes a start in examining these questions through qualitative literature analysis. It maps out dominant messages surrounding PTSD in military mental health interventions, and explores how they can both shape and conflict with soldiers’ personal notions. It does so by analyzing these messages and notions as institutional and personal (illness) narratives. Institutional military PTSD-narratives, which draw on mainstream scientific and clinical models, appear to communicate contradictory notions on the meanings of violence and its psychological consequences, often without acknowledging these contradictions. As such, these narratives seem to shape struggles of soldiers, both within themselves and with the military institution. The identified conflicts indicate, contrary to the individualizing and decontextualizing focus of dominant PTSD-understandings, that soldiers’ struggles also have social and moral dimensions. This has important implications for both research into PTSD-interventions and understandings of PTSD as such.