Book Review Abstract – Jasen J. Castillo, Endurance and War: The National Sources of Military Cohesion.

Since the earliest thinkers of ancient Greece and China, theorists have speculated about the nature of warfare; what drives men to war, what determines victory, and what are the implications of victory or defeat? Theorists from Sun Tzu to Carl Von Clausewitz all offered theories about the conduct of warfare with changing political and technological environments.

Jasen J. Castillo offers his piece, Endurance and War: The National Sources of Military Cohesion, to the millennia-long dialogue and proposes his theories on how armies stay cohesive when facing dire situations. Endurance and War: The National Sources of Military Cohesion focuses on theoretical components of military conduct rather than the actions of militaries. Therefore this book is more comparable to works such as Michael Farrell’s theoretical piece Modern Just War Theory: A Guide to Research than conventional histories such as Gordan Corrigan’s The Second World War: A Military History. Castillo argues that we can explain how militaries fight in suboptimal conditions using a few models of combat cohesion. Castillo’s models of combat cohesion emphasize two positive correlations: a positive correlation between the military’s organizational autonomy and their combat ability, and a positive correlation between a regime’s control over its population and the degree of cohesion within their military. The independent variables, which are regime control and organizational autonomy, affect their respective dependent variables, which are combat cohesion and combat effectiveness respectively. Castillo highlights these relationships with five case studies: Germany from 1944-1945, France in 1940, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1941, North Vietnam from 1965-1973, and the United States of America (USA) from 1968-1972.