Peshmerga Battlefield Participation

In studying the diversity of international warfare, it’s easy to overlook the fundamental constant: people, mostly young men, facing the possibility of death on the battlefield as they try to kill one another. Building on existing literature, I argue that effective training can increase battlefield participation by making soldiers calculate that their odds of surviving and achieving the mission are higher on the battlefield than they were without training. By uniting the analysis of training and combat motivation into the framework of battlefield participation, we can better understand individual and collective propensities to engage in the dangerous work of combat or to shirk in the face of danger. This article tests this theory battlefield participation through a survey of 2,301 Peshmerga (Kurdish soldiers) at bases inside the Kurdistan Region of Iraq in the summer of 2017, after three years of combat against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Around a third of the Peshmerga had been trained in basic tactics and marksmanship by the anti-ISIS coalition of Western countries. Coalition-trained Peshmerga reported higher levels of battlefield participation and confidence than their untrained counterparts but did not vary in their self-reported cognitions during combat or their assessment of social cohesion in their unit. These results support the proposed theory and offer a new paradigm for understanding an age-old question.