Despite the historically perceived importance of the cultural element in warfare, after the end of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and other culturally distant countries, it is believed that the cultural element has lost its importance. According to some experts, the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine marks a return to conventional warfare, in which a state's material military capabilities play the most significant role in determining its power. But in fact, in this war, soft interoperability, the most essential aspect of which is the cultural element, gained considerable prominence by demonstrating once again that understanding one's own culture and values comes before understanding others. This study aims to look at the cultural element more broadly through the prism of interoperability and, specifically, through soft interoperability and answer the question of how the cultural element, specifically the cultural competences of military personnel manifests in NATO military doctrines, given that NATO is an international security organization with obligations that extend beyond simple defence.
The end of the Cold War marks a changed nature of conflicts - in the modern world, asymmetric wars, counter-insurgencies and counter-terrorism are not only highly relevant threats but also the ones that require perhaps the greatest need for the knowledge of cultural factors. Though the significance of cultural and religious knowledge during international operations is ever more strongly acknowledged, however, the absence of the standardization of cultural awareness of military personnel at NATO level leaves the area of cultural awareness teaching of military personnel participating in international operations the responsibility of national states. This, in turn, exercises influence on countries working in a joint coalition while interpreting, in a different way, the military personnel’s cultural awareness and need for it during international operations. The article surveys the diversity of cultural awareness terms and concepts in both academic and military contexts. At the same time, making use of the model of cultural awareness competences formulated by Allison Abbe, the author analyses the manifestation of cultural awareness in the military doctrines and other documents regulating the activity of the armed forces and military service of major NATO states and Lithuania. Lithuania and three major NATO states - the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada - which have institutionalized cultural awareness teaching of military personnel, have been chosen as the object of the analysis. In this comparative context, the analysis of the Lithuanian case becomes a critical one: it enables one to compare and assess the contribution of a national state to the cultural development of military personnel in the context of major NATO states.
The article seeks to reveal the possibilities of a theoretical interpretation of power in the broad sense and military power in the narrow sense in the context of the realism paradigm, with a deep focus on including intangible resources in the interpretation of power. In the article, the interpretation of power is consciously grounded on the synthesis of power as resources and power as relation perspectives meanwhile applying this synthesis to the analysis of military power. Thus, military power is perceived as covering not only material but also non-material resources and as being contextual in nature. The article forms assumptions that the interpretation of military power depends on the security environment perception of the political and military elite: by changing warfare concepts and force employment methods they introduce military innovations, while military doctrines are an instrument of power conversion – through them the security environment perception is imparted and the structure of military power is changed. Such an interpretation of military power, combining different insights based on the paradigm of realism, allows the formation of an alternative approach to the interpretation of military power.
Although the issues of military studies are increasingly analysed in the framework of political science, the representatives of international relations and military studies use different ways of interpreting military power -one of the key aspects of military studies. With the intention of expanding the possibilities of applying theories of international relations to military studies, this article aims to show the need for a synthesis of theoretical insights into neoclassical realism and military studies for scientific interpretation and research of the military power structure. The inducement of inter-paradigmatic debates by revealing and comparing military power explanation methods reflects a theoretical attempt to expand the possibilities for the application of international relations theories on warfare studies. Although the application of neoclassical realism theory to the explanation of military power is not new, this study explores broader possibilities of the application of this theory. The study substantiates the influence of non-material resources and unit-level variables on the structure of military power while making the assumption that neoclassical realism creates conditions to reveal the process of military power conversion but not the content of military power.
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