The United Kingdom has, for two decades, had an unusually public conversation about the nature of military service and about soldiers’ and veterans’ relationship to society.Footnote 1 In 2000, the UK’s Ministry of Defence introduced the idea that ‘soldiering’ in the United Kingdom was governed by a ‘military covenant’ to which ‘the Nation, the Army, and each individual soldier’ are party. Pressed by the Chief of the General Staff and bolstered by an intensive lobbying campaign from civil society organisations, Prime Minister Tony Blair recognised the Covenant’s standing in 2007. Over the rest of the decade, accusations flew that the government had broken the Covenant, and the 2011 Armed Forces Act required the government to report annually to Parliament on its progress with respect to the Covenant’s goals.Footnote 2 A decade later, in December 2021, the Covenant became legally binding. Most recently, the Labour Government has promised ‘that all government departments will have to legally consider the needs of the Armed Forces community when making new policy’. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has reinforced the Government’s commitment to the Covenant: ‘Our Armed Forces Covenant will put our Armed Forces community at the very heart of government decision-making. Their courage, duty, and sacrifice are the foundation of our national values, and they deserve nothing less.’Footnote 3 Although the public’s awareness of the Covenant remains limited, it is politically salient, and its provisions are very popular.Footnote 4
The UK Armed Forces Covenant is a particularly prominent and formalised version of calls to ‘support the troops’ – implicitly, beyond the terms of their contract – that are popular across the English-speaking world and beyond.Footnote 5 However, we know little about how people respond to these messages. The UK Armed Forces Covenant, and ‘support the troops’ rhetoric more generally, rest on a wager: that they will foster among civilian members of the nation more sympathy for these exemplary citizens and generate more support for diverse programmes benefiting them. This article presents the first systematic test of whether ‘support the troops’ rhetoric actually yields tangible, concrete support for the troops, especially in nations with liberal political cultures.
The UK Armed Forces Covenant is an ideal case for evaluating the impact of ‘support the troops’ rhetoric and policies. First, as a two-decades-old formal government programme that has since been enshrined into law, it is an unusually prominent real-world case that explores these dynamics outside a wartime or deployment setting. Second, the Covenant is more than a slogan. It purports to assure soldiers’ and veterans’ access to material benefits such as housing and healthcare. Both of these considerations make the Covenant an ‘easy’ – and correspondingly informative – case. If knowledge of or exposure to the UK Armed Forces Covenant – which is relatively prominent in partisan politics, spelled out in legal provisions, and has concrete effects on policy – does not generate among members of the mass public greater concern for the well-being of soldiers, more support for combating discrimination against them, and greater backing for special benefits and prerogatives, then mere calls to ‘support the troops’ cannot possibly have such effects.
This article develops two contending theoretical logics, grounded in the liberal political culture from which the Covenant emerged, and tests them using unique observational data and a novel survey experiment. On the one hand, the Armed Forces Covenant highlights the abiding tensions, in liberal thought, between liberal ideals and the reality of military service. To reduce the resulting cognitive dissonance, people should reduce their support for military operations. At the same time, the Covenant underscores the debt that civilian citizens should feel they owe soldiers and the gratitude they should naturally express via greater support for additional military benefits. We call this first theoretical logic liberal contradictions theory. Although the Covenant’s backers did not explicitly articulate these theoretical claims, they are nevertheless consistent with advocacy of the Covenant. On the other hand, liberal polities have historically been enthusiastic participants in warfare, and they have therefore had to resolve their traditional discomfort with military service in a distinctively liberal way: by articulating a contractual bargain. We call this second logic military contract theory. From this theoretical vantage point, the Covenant reminds Britons that today’s professional soldiers are not the citizen-soldiers of the world wars.Footnote 6 Current soldiers signed up for service aware of that contract’s terms – the rights and benefits to which they were entitled, but also the risk of injury or death they would bear while in uniform. The resulting view of soldiers as consenting agents should bolster public support for military missions and undermine public support for additional military benefits.
To evaluate these contending claims, we fielded an original survey to a representative sample of the British public in May 2022. Our findings are less consistent with the classic liberal political theory that underpins the Covenant than with the alternative contractual theory. Knowledge of the Covenant was associated with more support for a prospective military operation and more casualty tolerance – even after controlling for respondents’ predilection for using military force (‘hawkishness’) and other dispositional and demographic variables. Knowledge of the Covenant was not systematically associated with support for more generous soldier or veteran benefits, nor for ‘special treatment’ in various domains.
However, it is possible that those who claimed prior knowledge of the Covenant were, in ways for which we did not control, systematically different from those who did not, and these differences might have been at least partly responsible for their singular constellation of policy preferences. Accordingly, alongside the observational survey, we fielded a novel experiment in which respondents were exposed to basic information about the Covenant in a mock news story. The experimental findings were very similar to those derived from the observational data. Respondents who received the Covenant prime were, compared to the control group, less sensitive to the prospect of casualties and largely more favourable towards the portrayed military operation, yet they were again not disposed systematically to grant additional benefits to soldiers and veterans.
This study of the UK Armed Forces Covenant has significant implications for larger debates in international security. First, it provides further evidence that existing models of public opinion on the use of force are excessively rationalist. The costs of using force (in blood and treasure) and the prospective benefits (the stakes and the likelihood of success, i.e., of reaping those gains) surely affect how publics respond to military operations.Footnote 7 But this study builds upon, and reinforces, recent literature that emphasises the cultural construal of soldiering and service as complementing, not supplanting, rationalist models.Footnote 8 Citizenship models are not merely theoretical abstractions. They are embodied in everyday social institutions and practices, even when (and even though) people cannot articulate these models’ critical foundations and elements.Footnote 9 Everyday citizenship practices set public expectations and affect how people adjudge matters of public concern. On occasion, those conceptual underpinnings are explicitly articulated, and the Armed Forces Covenant is a prominent case. Dominant everyday citizenship models shape not only matters of ‘low politics’ – such as welfare state provisions and tax policy – but also matters of ‘high politics’ – that is, the use of military force.
Second, this study of the Covenant bears on ongoing debates about how to sustain democratic civil–military relations in an era marked by voluntary recruitment, professionalism in the officer corps and the enlisted ranks, and an ever-shrinking tooth-to-tail ratio. Existing literature advises promoting military officers’ professionalism, inculcating democratic norms among officers, installing systems of military monitoring and punishment, and cultivating common values among military and civilian elites.Footnote 10 Although public opinion lurks in the background of important theories of civil–military relations – for Huntington, as potentially limiting military professionalism and its distinctively illiberal culture, and for Feaver, as potentially preventing civilians from punishing the military for ‘shirking’ and insubordination – the contending theories and policy recommendations centre on elite dynamics. This article, however, suggests the dangers of idealising the armed forces, sanitising their image, and boosting popular trust in them – including through government initiatives like the Armed Forces Covenant.Footnote 11 Public adherence to norms of democratic civil–military relations is fragile enough without top-down programmes promoting veneration of the armed forces.Footnote 12
The policy implications are also significant. We do not doubt the good intentions of the Covenant’s supporters, and many Britons – including many military personnel and veterans – welcome its codification. The Covenant’s legal assurance of preferential access to valued services may also offer real material benefits. Yet our findings suggest that the success of efforts to make the Covenant a permanent feature of British civic discourse, and enshrine it in law, may be double-edged. For Britons, the language of the Covenant evokes an image of the citizen-soldier at odds with the professionals who currently staff the armed forces. Sitting in profound tension with the realities of contemporary military life, the Covenant likely has not made the British public more supportive of benefits for military personnel and veterans, and it may even have encouraged them to be less hesitant to deploy military force and to be more willing to risk soldiers’ lives. In short, our findings suggest that the Covenant exposes British troops to greater-than-anticipated risk for less-than-intended gain. But the policy implications extend beyond the United Kingdom. While the UK has been unusually explicit in articulating and debating the terms of government and society’s covenant with its soldiers, such covenants implicitly govern the government–society–military triad in all liberal states. If this explicit, ‘easy’ case does not generate the desired benefits for British soldiers – at least not in terms of public backing – it suggests that similar Covenant exercises in the Anglo world and beyond will also fall short.
The rest of this article proceeds in five sections. First, we briefly present the history of the UK Armed Forces Covenant and the ambitions and expectations of its backers. Second, we set out the theory, rooted in classical liberal thought, that underpins the Covenant and an alternative theory, grounded in the lived reality of ‘the liberal military contract’. Third, we describe our survey design and methods. Fourth, we present the observational and experimental results bearing on the competing theories. We conclude with further reflections for both policy and scholarship.
The UK Armed Forces Covenant: Codifying a compact
The notion that a compact links soldiers and citizenry is neither new nor uniquely British.Footnote 13 What is new and particular to the contemporary United Kingdom, however, is the codification of such a compact as an explicit article of government policy that specifies the nature of the society–military relationship, the sentiments it should generate, and the policy outcomes that should follow.Footnote 14 It is not especially surprising that the UK proved particularly fertile terrain for the Armed Forces Covenant. Historically, war has been the essential glue of British national identity,Footnote 15 and Thomas Colley has argued that, in the twenty-first century, British citizens not only narrate their nation’s history as one of ‘continuous war’ but also see Britain’s contemporary military interventions as ‘ordinary, normal, almost banal’.Footnote 16 Britons of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often felt ‘repugnance and antipathy to the soldier’, and the ‘respectable working-class’ was hesitant to join the Regulars and objected to the establishment of military depots in their vicinity. But from the late nineteenth century on, the British soldier as an abstraction became ‘an icon held in growing public esteem’.Footnote 17 The First World War mobilised such large swaths of young Britons across traditional class divides that it no longer was possible to treat soldiers and the army, as the Victorians had, as ‘socially and morally … beyond the pale’.Footnote 18 The First World War transformed British citizenship, centring civic worth in military service and battlefield sacrifice.Footnote 19
However, the second half of the twentieth century reconfigured the relationship between the UK armed forces and its surrounding society. By 1961, Britain had abandoned the peacetime draft, and military service had become a profession once again. This transformation, which Anthony King has analysed incisively, had substantial implications for military tactics, training, and discipline,Footnote 20 but it also distanced Britons from the military. By the end of the twentieth century, the British military feared that the public no longer understood the nature of military life and its peculiar demands or appreciated the achievements and sacrifices of soldiers.Footnote 21 The Army therefore introduced the Armed Forces Covenant in 2000. But Army Doctrine Publication 5, Soldiering: The Military Covenant, spoke of soldiering and its relationship to society as if little had changed since 1950, when the ranks were populated with conscripted citizen-soldiers. The Covenant asserted a ‘mutual obligation’ between ‘soldiers’ and ‘the Nation’:
Soldiers will be called upon to make personal sacrifices – including the ultimate sacrifice – in the service of the Nation. In putting the needs of the Nation and the Army before their own, they forego some of the rights enjoyed by those outside the Armed Forces. In return, British soldiers must always be able to expect fair treatment, to be valued and respected as individuals, and that they (and their families) will be sustained and rewarded by commensurate terms and conditions of service.Footnote 22
More generally, the Covenant signalled that the Army recognised that Carl von Clausewitz’s famous ‘trinity’ – the armed forces, the government, and the people – still governed warfare. They believed that public opinion remained a critical element affecting the success of military operations and that UK officials had for too long taken the British public’s support for granted.Footnote 23
The Covenant was obscure when it was first published, but the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq elevated its public and political profile.Footnote 24 Facing critics’ contention that British troops’ equipment, housing, and other conditions were inadequate, Tony Blair declared in 2007 that ‘the covenant between Armed Forces, Government and the people has to be renewed’.Footnote 25 His successor, Gordon Brown, similarly faced criticism over troops’ treatment, framed explicitly as a breach of the Covenant, from the Opposition leader who would succeed him, David Cameron.Footnote 26 An active campaign from civil society groups, including the Royal British Legion – which, in a rare overt political intervention, accused the UK Government of failing to uphold the CovenantFootnote 27 – and newly formed organisations, such as the ‘Help for Heroes’ campaign, garnered widespread public prominence.Footnote 28 Retired senior officers, including notably former Chief of the General Staff Sir Richard Dannatt, were also instrumental in promoting the Covenant.Footnote 29
While leading the Opposition, Cameron convened a Commission on the Military Covenant that criticised the incumbent Labour government for inflicting irreparable damage on the armed forces.Footnote 30 Once in Government, Cameron appointed an official Task Force on the Military Covenant.Footnote 31 Having reportedly dallied with incorporating the Covenant into law,Footnote 32 Cameron’s coalition government ultimately opted instead, as part of the 2011 Armed Forces Act, to mandate an annual report to Parliament on the Covenant’s fulfilment.Footnote 33 HM Government articulates ‘the nation’s commitment’ under the Covenant as ‘a pledge that together we acknowledge and understand that those who serve or who have served in the armed forces, and their families, should be treated with fairness and respect in the communities, economy and society they serve with their lives’.Footnote 34 Following sustained political pressure, a decade later the 2021 Armed Forces Act enshrined the Covenant in law.Footnote 35
The express purpose of the Covenant had originally been merely to ensure that current and former military personnel were not disadvantaged through their service. However, the annual Covenant reports proudly detailed numerous public-sector veterans’ programmes and private-sector discounts and hiring initiatives that went well beyond that narrow mission. Comments on these reports by interested parties, notably the Confederation of Service Charities and the Royal British Legion, made clear that they wished the Covenant would stipulate preferential treatment. The Legion and others warned in 2012 of the danger that ‘no disadvantage, which should be the bare minimum, [will] becom[e] the gold standard by which access to statutory and non-statutory services is judged. It is vital that this does not happen if the nation is genuinely to honour the Covenant.’Footnote 36 Politicians also often framed the Covenant as calling for preferential treatment. Thus Cameron, in 2011, affirmed the Covenant because ‘it is right that as a country we do everything we can [i.e. beyond a mere “no-disadvantage” position] to support and stand by our brave Service men and women’.Footnote 37 In line with this more expansive vision, the 2021 Armed Forces Act’s formalisation of the Covenant placed ‘a legal obligation on public bodies to consider the welfare of service personnel and veterans alike, giving them improved access to crucial services that we all rely on every day’.Footnote 38 The Government also stated that it ‘is committed to supporting the armed forces community by working with a range of partners who have signed the covenant’, including businesses, charities, and the general public – although the legal duty applied specifically to public bodies.Footnote 39 To that end, it established a Defence Employer’s Recognition Scheme to reward non-military employers who support soldiers and veterans, a Covenant Fund to provide financial aid to community projects, and an Aged Veterans’ Fund to assist former service personnel in later life.Footnote 40 These programmes, and many others, revealed an expansive Covenant mission that significantly exceeded combating unintentional discrimination against current and former military personnel.Footnote 41
Implementation of the Armed Forces Covenant has focused, over the last fifteen years, on the benefits and services, government and private sector, available to active-duty soldiers and veterans. However, the Covenant originally came to public attention as British troops in Iraq suffered horrific bodily injuries. Critics, including the service charities, charged that the Ministry of Defence had sent the troops into battle without adequate gear. They invoked the Covenant not to condemn the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but rather to remind the government that it could not deploy forces with little regard for their safety and to alert Britons to the needs of British forces and veterans of these conflicts. Its alleged failures in this regard were thus cast as a violation of a sacred compact. As British forces withdrew from Iraq and then Afghanistan, these concerns receded, but the Covenant, as originally conceived, was less about the forces’ treatment at home than their conditions of deployment abroad.Footnote 42 In addition, the core audience for the Covenant was, according to many backers, less government and corporations than the public, and it arguably even sought to shift responsibility for care of soldiers and especially veterans from government to society.Footnote 43 As Dannatt put it in 2007, ‘a great deal has been made of the military covenant in recent weeks, mostly in terms of work load, equipment, accommodation and pay … but the real covenant is with the population at large – the Nation’.Footnote 44 The Covenant’s defenders saw themselves as engaged in a campaign for public opinion, hoping to establish thereby an enduring basis for policies that would ‘do right’ by the nation’s soldiers and veterans, on the battlefield and at home.
The Covenant’s impact, therefore, must be judged by these broader standards. In one sense, its impact has been profound. In less than ten years, the Covenant went from being an obscure concept, invoked in internal government debates to prevent civilian standards from being applied to the Army on matters ranging from sexual orientation to the status of women to health and safety,Footnote 45 to being a prominent political cudgel, wielded at the highest levels of British politics, and a powerful tool for civil society mobilisation. Thousands of organisations, including every local authority in Britain, signed the Covenant, many local authorities appointed ‘Armed Forces Champions’ to ensure that Covenant commitments were fulfilled, dozens of healthcare providers became ‘veteran aware’, and hundreds of corporations received a Gold Award under the Defence Employer Recognition Scheme.Footnote 46 What had started as a set of vague principles acquired concrete programmatic form and ultimately became binding law.
But what about the Covenant’s impact on public opinion? Public attitudes towards the UK armed forces have been very warm, despite low and wavering support for its missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even though British citizens report knowing little about the military as an institution or about soldiers’ daily lives.Footnote 47 Has the Covenant affected how Britons think about what they owe those who risk so much for them? On this score, the Covenant’s impact is uncertain.
Theorising the Covenant’s consequences
While enormous scholarly literatures examine public opinion on the military and especially the use of force, their theoretical frameworks and empirical findings do not yield clear answers to the question of the Covenant’s effects on public opinion. Scholars attribute public trust in the military to, among other factors, the military’s battlefield performance, its distance from politics, mass distrust of political institutions, partisanship, and social desirability bias,Footnote 48 but they have not explored the efficacy or theoretical logic of state-backed campaigns that frame the military in a particular light or that promote public regard for the military.Footnote 49 Existing research explains public support for military operations largely by pointing to their objectives, their expected efficacy and the prospects for victory, their casualties, and how the burdens of military service and the costs of operations are distributedFootnote 50 – but generally not to representations of the armed forces, service-members, or officers.Footnote 51 Recent scholarship has examined the impact, in the US context, of implied or explicit military endorsements of operations, and the limits of public admiration for the uniform in a time of heightened partisanship,Footnote 52 but it has not examined or experimentally manipulated different images of the military and its members.
In short, existing literatures on public opinion and the military do not suggest logics, arguments, or hypotheses that can be readily applied to the UK Armed Forces Covenant’s possible effects on public opinion and discourse. To theorise the impact of the Covenant on public opinion towards the use of force, casualty sensitivity, and benefits/preferential treatment, we start by considering the liberal political cultural context in which it was composed. From that foundation, we develop two contending theoretical logics and corresponding sets of linked hypotheses.
1. Military service, liberal contradictions, and social debt. A traditional view from classical liberal political theory is that liberal polities, especially in the Anglo-American tradition, are uncomfortable with the demands that states make of their citizens, including and notably military service. From the standpoint of classical liberalism, the state is a necessary evil.Footnote 53 It exists to provide protection from the violence and predation that characterise human interaction in the state of nature and to create and sustain the institutional and legal conditions within which individuals can exercise agency and flourish. The state is therefore essential to preserving individuals’ security and liberty, but liberals also worry that the state may threaten individuals’ security and liberty. Scepticism of arbitrary state power is ‘the first and earliest liberal layer … [and] the most durable of them all’.Footnote 54 Consequently, liberal discourse lacks a persuasive theoretical and discursive basis for imposing civic or political obligations on citizens.Footnote 55 When theorists have wished to temper respect for individual rights with conceptions of individuals’ responsibilities to society, they have been compelled to look outside the liberal tradition.Footnote 56 Consequently, liberal states have avoided demanding compulsory military service except in times of existential threat and absolute necessity.Footnote 57 The liberal polity’s need for soldiers to provide citizens with protection in an illiberal and dangerous world is marked by paradox. The freedom of individual citizens to engage in commerce and politics then rests on a hierarchical, illiberal organisation, which could not effectively perform its core tasks if its members were allowed the same freedom of choice, expression, and action to which civilian citizens are entitled. Citizens who join the armed forces are asked to risk death for a state whose express purpose is to preserve their right to life and liberty. The prospect of their death in uniform is in tension with the very basis of the liberal social contract.
From this standpoint, the UK’s Armed Forces Covenant highlights the liberal polity’s discomfort with military service. The Covenant reminds citizens that, even as the armed forces are needed to secure life and liberty, service in the military can threaten both. It renders more salient the contradictions between liberal ideals and military realities, and it therefore impels people to reduce the resulting cognitive dissonance. They can bring the two into closer alignment by either revising their understanding of liberal ideals or reducing support for military operations – that is, by making it less likely that soldiers will die on the battlefield. The latter solution is simpler, less far-reaching, and generally more appealing.
At the same time, the Covenant also highlights the other side of the equation: what the citizenry owes its soldiers. Sociologists highlight the particular challenges posed by circumstances of diffuse reciprocity, in which significant periods of time can intervene between an individual’s provision of some benefit and their eventual payment, and of indirect reciprocity, in which the recipient of the benefit does not themselves pay the provider.Footnote 58 In his influential work, Gouldner argued that strong norms of reciprocity govern well-ordered societies. Debts are ultimately repaid because, as long as the relationship in question lies under ‘the shadow of indebtedness’, it imposes obligations on the debtor for repayment.Footnote 59 Recent research has emphasised the powerful role of gratitude in sustaining generalised reciprocity.Footnote 60
The relationship between society and its soldiers is a condition of diffuse, indirect reciprocity par excellence. Volunteer soldiers recruited on the open labour market receive compensation for their service. But the Armed Forces Covenant suggests that formal compensation packages represent only a partial repayment of society’s debt to its military servicepeople. When the burdens of service are borne by relatively few – as in countries like the UK, where voluntary recruitment results in relatively small, professional armies – the sacrifices of soldiers cast the shadow of indebtedness widely. Because different categories of soldiers run different levels of risk, society’s debt to them varies accordingly. Fellow citizens (should) feel more obliged to, and more sensitive to the needs of, soldiers who have served in warzones in a combat function, where the level of risk is much higher than other service roles. In response to the widespread shadow of indebtedness, citizens are expected to express their gratitude to the nation’s soldiers.
The composers of the UK Armed Forces Covenant seem to have intuited this theoretical logic, for words like ‘obligation’ and ‘duty’ suffuse the Covenant and its associated documents. Because soldiers risk making the ‘ultimate sacrifice’, the Covenant avers, their fellow citizens have ‘an obligation to recognise that contribution’ and ‘a long-term duty of care towards service personnel and their families’.Footnote 61 The document launching the Opposition’s Military Covenant Commission in 2008 declared, ‘We ask our service personnel to do extraordinary things. In doing so, they make many sacrifices, including in some cases their lives. So it is only right that we do all that we can to ensure that they are well looked after and that their families are cared for. It is not much to ask from us in return for what they do for us.’Footnote 62 Defence Secretary Liam Fox similarly in 2011 summarised the Covenant as follows: ‘We have a duty as a nation to give our Armed Forces the best support we can in return for the sacrifices they are prepared to make in our name.’Footnote 63 Indeed, the document’s framing as a sacred ‘covenant’, rather than a mere ‘contract’, accentuates society’s debt to its soldiers.Footnote 64
The UK Armed Forces Covenant reminds Britons that, although conscription ended in 1961, the fact that soldiers and veterans ever since have been volunteers does not absolve the British people of enduring obligations, beyond the letter of the law. Those with prior knowledge of the Covenant are more aware of what, according to the Covenant, the state and society owe servicepeople and veterans. Those exposed, via experimental treatment, to the Covenant are primed to be more sensitive to society’s collective debt. Therefore, knowledge of or exposure to the Armed Forces Covenant should – compared to those who lack of knowledge of or exposure to the Covenant – be associated with, according to this logic:
• H1a: less support for sending an active-duty serviceperson on a dangerous military operation
• H1b: more sensitivity to casualties
• H1c: more support for additional benefits and preferential treatment for military servicepeople and veterans, especially those who served in a warzone
2. The liberal military contract. Liberal governments, however, confronted the reality of warfare from the start. For at least the last 250 years, liberal states have been born, and grown to maturity, ‘in the shadow of war’Footnote 65 – war in defence of the nation of course, but also war to conquer imperial domains, subdue restive natives, spread freedom and other universal liberal truths, and defeat autocracy. Liberal states have been deeply shaped by preparation for and the practice of warfare,Footnote 66 and liberal theory has consequently had to come to terms with both the ever-present possibility and the lived reality of military service. The resulting ‘liberal military contract’ emerged over time to legitimise military service,Footnote 67 and it in turn yields an alternative set of hypotheses.
Citizens in liberal regimes, no more or less than their counterparts in illiberal regimes, are always potential soldiers. But the demands of soldiering, and its expected risks and sacrifices, must be legitimated in distinctively liberal ways. Military service in liberal polities is justified and governed in terms of a ‘liberal military contract’ that bears a marked resemblance to the UK Armed Forces Covenant. That contract articulates the mutual obligations that hold among the Clausewitzian trinity of citizen-soldiers, (civilian) society, and the state – in contrast to the one-sided demands made by illiberal regimes. The precise slate of mutual rights claims has varied over time and space, but broadly it guarantees citizen-soldiers that they will not be sent into harm’s way needlessly and that they are entitled to material benefits during and after service. The ‘liberal military contract’ grants soldiers a reasonable ‘right to life’: their lives may be risked, but they are not forfeit. The state should do its utmost to avoid deploying soldiers into dangerous situations with inadequate equipment or training, and policymakers should not dispatch them into circumstances of graver peril than the strategic stakes necessitate.Footnote 68 In exchange, citizen-soldiers promise to serve the state, obey orders, risk their lives, and adhere to the norms of democratic civil–military relations. While this contract does not fully resolve the deep tensions between liberal theory and the realities of military sacrifice, it does sufficiently smooth the rough edges to make military service not only possible but also seem natural.
However, inserting an Armed Forces Covenant into the national conversation when citizen-soldiers constitute the enlisted ranks is quite different from doing so when professionals populate the army. Under such circumstances, the Covenant does not highlight what society and state owe citizen-soldiers and suppress public support for military missions. Rather, it reminds Britons that professional soldiers and officers signed up for service fully aware that it was an ‘unlimited liability’ contractFootnote 69 and that they might well have to hold up their end of the bargain.Footnote 70
The psychology of empathy bolsters this dynamic. At the heart of the liberal military contract is the myth that all soldiers willingly enlist. The state rarely needs to exercise compulsory power, because the good citizen is an active voluntary participant who, of their own volition, provides public goods for their community.Footnote 71 They freely and knowingly grant their consent to whatever sacrifices they may have to make on the battlefield. If the conscripted citizen-soldier is actually a freely consenting agent, all the more so is the volunteer professional soldier. This understanding of soldiers affects how people respond to military operations and their dangers. As social beings, humans are typically hard-wired for some (albeit variable) level of empathy – that is, identifying cognitively and emotionally with others and, to some extent, adopting others’ beliefs, perceptions, and feelings as their own.Footnote 72 Empathy is reflected in the folk wisdom embodied in ‘the golden rule’ and its ethic of reciprocity: to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Empathetic human beings are more likely to endorse potentially costly policies – such as sending troops into dangerous circumstances – when those who bear those costs do so willingly. They are not opposed in general to the use of force, but rather respond to prospective military operations based on what they believe soldiers themselves want. Because professional soldiers have entered the military aware that they may be sent into combat, they are presumed likely to support their deployment.Footnote 73
The same logic also suggests greater scepticism about the effects of the Covenant on the public’s receptivity to professional soldiers’ and veterans’ claims for increased benefits or preferential treatment. By making explicit and evoking the tradition of the ‘liberal military contract’, the Covenant reminds Britons that professional soldiers and veterans consented to military service under particular terms, well aware of the privileges to which they were entitled, and those terms cannot be renegotiated after the fact. Britons owe these professional soldiers nothing, therefore, beyond the terms to which they agreed at the time of enlistment or termination. The terms of service may be generous – adherents of this position may still believe that a motivated and professional force requires and/or deserves ample compensation – but there is not, in this view, an implicit societal obligation to go beyond the contracted exchange. This logic further does not distinguish between those who embrace assignment to combat arms and those who avoid combat, or between those deployed into a warzone and those who had the good fortune to avoid war. Those who demonstrate valour on the battlefield may merit special symbolic recognition, such as a medal, but, from this standpoint, they are not entitled to greater material or social benefits.
According to this logic, knowledge of or exposure to the Armed Forces Covenant should – compared to those who lack of knowledge of or exposure to it – therefore be associated with:
• H2a: more support for sending an active-duty serviceperson on a dangerous military operation
• H2b: less sensitivity to casualties
• H2c: less support for additional benefits and preferential treatment for military servicepeople and veterans, regardless of whether they served in a warzone
Both these contending logics derive from liberal political philosophy, in either its classical pristine state or its more lived and practical form. Both see the UK Armed Forces Covenant as ‘mattering’ to public opinion. However, their implications for using force and expanding benefits are opposed. The first logic, which we henceforth call liberal contradictions theory, suggests that the Covenant, by highlighting the tensions between military service and liberal discourse and by priming Britons to think about soldiering in terms of debt and obligation, works precisely the way its backers envision. The second logic, which we henceforth call military contract theory, suggests that the Covenant, by priming Britons to think about soldiering in terms of the contract to which especially professional soldiers have freely consented, has unintended consequences that can operate to soldiers’ detriment.
The Armed Forces Covenant provides a unique, real-world opportunity to test the relative power of these logics. Although governments in liberal regimes routinely specify the contractual terms of military service, and although politicians in liberal regimes often rhetorically genuflect towards soldiers and veterans, they have not routinely, explicitly, and formally embraced the principle of extra-contractual obligations towards soldiers and veterans. Beyond vague calls to ‘support the troops’ and ritualistic incantations thanking soldiers and veterans for their service, they have not suggested that society, beyond the state, has such obligations as well, nor have they formalised such a statement of principle into law or adopted concrete policies to promote such social norms. The United Kingdom, through the Armed Forces Covenant, is a notable exception. A survey of British public opinion has the advantage of asking about respondents’ actual knowledge of, and agreement with, government policy – not merely their theoretical agreement with hypothetical propositions. The survey experiment below thus has the advantage of verisimilitude and external validity.
Research design and methods
The preceding hypotheses cannot be evaluated with existing data. Available opinion surveys have not asked questions about the UK Armed Forces Covenant.Footnote 74 Thus, to assess these hypotheses, we fielded an original survey in May 2022. The sample was largely comparable to existing UK national benchmarks.Footnote 75
In the survey experiment, respondents were randomly assigned one of two vignettes portrayed as an edited selection from a real online news article ‘describing the deployment of UK forces overseas’.Footnote 76 Respondents in both the treatment and control groups were told that ‘the names of individuals, military branches, and countries have been changed from the original article so that you may read it as open-mindedly as possible’. Both vignettes described an interview with a soldier awaiting deployment on a prospective military mission to ‘Martesia’, which had requested British forces to ‘bolster its defences’ in response to ‘attacks across its southern border’. Respondents assigned to both vignettes read that government officials ‘support intervention because it would uphold the UK’s treaty with Martesia, strengthen international law, and further the UK’s strategic interests’, and a spokesperson for the government declared that ‘we will deploy troops in line with our foreign policy’.Footnote 77
Only respondents in the treatment group were provided with information regarding the Armed Forces Covenant:
The spokesperson also reinforced the commitment made to soldiers deployed to Martesia under the Armed Forces Covenant. ‘The first duty of Government is defence of the realm. Our Armed Forces fulfil that responsibility on behalf of the Government, sacrificing some civilian freedoms, facing danger, and sometimes, suffering serious injury or death as a result of their duty’, the spokesperson said. ‘In return, the whole nation has a moral obligation to the members of the Armed Force. They deserve our respect and support, and fair treatment.’
Respondents in the control group were provided with basic information about Martesia to keep the vignettes around the same length.Footnote 78 Respondents in both groups were also asked, at the end of the survey, whether they had previously heard of the Armed Forces Covenant. We utilise the control group’s responses to this question for our observational analyses, since these respondents were not primed regarding the Covenant.
The survey included two primary groups of dependent variables: operation-related and benefits-related. Regarding operation-related variables, we asked respondents: (1) their support for the prospective operation, measured on a seven-point scale, and (2) their tolerance for UK force casualties, measured on a five-point scale. To assess casualty sensitivity, we followed existing studies in asking respondents if they would support the operation at a particular casualty level, and – if the respondent said yes – iteratively repeating the question with a higher number of casualties until respondents either reached the maximum number of casualties offered or no longer favoured the operation.Footnote 79 To evaluate support for additional benefits, we presented respondents with ten statements related to social and material benefits, particularly those highlighted in the Armed Forces Covenant (see Table 1). We included statements that referenced all members of the UK armed forces as well as statements that referenced only those who have ‘served on the front-lines in warzones’.
Benefits questions.
To ascertain whether respondents had grasped the experimental manipulation, we asked a simple true–false question, post-treatment, regarding the content of the vignette. The survey asked the treatment group whether the article described the UK Armed Forces Covenant, and it asked the control group whether the article described the size of Martesia’s population. Of respondents, 77 percent – 71.2 percent in the treatment group and 82.3 percent in the control group – answered this question correctly. Because this manipulation check was so minimal, it also acted as an attention and basic comprehension check. We restrict our primary analyses in-text to respondents who answered this question correctly, and we present the results of the full sample in the online appendix.Footnote 80
To avoid introducing post-treatment bias into the statistical analyses, respondents read all questions measuring control variables before their randomly assigned vignette. These included controls for demographic factors including age, sex, income, education, and race/ethnicity. The survey also contained controls for party identification, political ideology, warmth towards the military, and hawkishness. We further asked respondents about their personal and household military status. We also asked additional questions that feature only in the robustness-check analyses located in the appendix. Notably, the survey included batteries to gauge respondents’ ‘blind patriotism’, ‘right-wing authoritarianism’, and ‘social dominance orientation’.Footnote 81 Because prior research has found that respondents have relevant prior beliefs about enlistment motivations, which can in turn have significant effects on the dependent variables,Footnote 82 respondents were, before reading the treatment, asked to identify soldiers’ primary reasons for enlisting. Finally, respondents were asked a series of questions to gauge their knowledge of military affairs. We utilise these questions to create a military knowledge variable.Footnote 83
Findings and discussion
We organise our discussion of the findings substantively and thematically. We first present the results regarding the effects of knowledge of the UK Armed Forces Covenant – both prior knowledge and primed exposure – on respondents’ support for the prospective military operation and on their tolerance of casualties, and we then present findings on their attitudes towards the adequacy of current benefits packages and towards preferential treatment for active-duty soldiers and veterans. Within each section, we first present the observational results (prior knowledge of the Covenant), followed by the experimental findings (primed exposure to the Covenant).
Mission support and casualty sensitivity
As Table 2 outlines, we find, observationally, that respondents’ self-declared knowledge of the Covenant was associated with more support for a prospective military operation and more casualty tolerance, which is consistent with the military contract theory’s hypotheses 2b and 2c – and is at odds with liberal contradictions theory’s hypotheses 1b and 1c. In simple models, as well as in models that include demographic and ideological controls, knowledge of the Covenant was statistically significant at conventional levels.Footnote 84 While the inclusion of full controls weakened the statistical significance of respondents’ knowledge of the Covenant on their support for the mission (Table 2, Model 2), the very fact that the variable retained any significance, given the included demographic and dispositional controls, is striking. Knowledge of the Covenant was also substantively significant, associated with about a half-point increase in operation support on the 0–7 scale. The predicted probability of tolerating any casualties among the Covenant-knowledgeable was 65 percent, while it was only 43 percent among the Covenant ignorant, as Figure 1 shows.Footnote 85 In short, respondents who claimed knowledge of the Covenant were more inclined to support the use of force, at higher costs, than were those who did not report knowledge of the Covenant.
Predicted probabilities of tolerating casualties based on knowledge of the UK Armed Forces Covenant.
Knowledge of the UK Armed Forces Covenant and operation support and casualty sensitivity.
Control respondents who passed manipulation check.Footnote 86
Standard errors in parentheses. Models 1–2 are OLS models, while Models 3–4 are logistic regressions.
+ p < 0.10, * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.0001
Perhaps, though, professed knowledge of the Armed Forces Covenant is more product than cause. It seems likely that respondents who are, whether by disposition or ideological commitment, more likely to support the use of force are also, for those same reasons, more likely to be aware of the Covenant. About one-fifth of the total sample reported prior knowledge of the Armed Forces Covenant.Footnote 87 Figure 2 shows that, consistent with intuition, those with greater interest in and experience with the military were more likely to report knowledge of the Covenant: respondents who were more hawkish, more highly educated, more knowledgeable about military affairs in general, and more likely to have served in the military themselves or to have had a family member serve were all also more likely to claim prior knowledge of the Covenant. Women, whom many studies have found to be more likely to oppose the use of military force,Footnote 88 were less likely to report prior knowledge of the Covenant. Less intuitively, so too were older respondents. However, when we included all these predictors of Covenant knowledge in our observational models, it was still a robust predictor of operation support and casualty sensitivity. Moreover, it is telling that few of these covariates were significant predictors of operation support and casualty sensitivity when Covenant knowledge was included in the observational models.Footnote 89 All this suggests that knowledge of the Covenant may be even more important with respect to public support for the use of force than demographic and dispositional factors often associated in scholarly literature with attitudes towards military force.
Coefficient plot – covariates of knowledge of the UK Armed Forces Covenant.
Finally, prior knowledge of the Covenant was associated with greater agreement with an explicit statement of the logic of consent embedded in military contract theory. Respondents were asked to what extent they agreed with the statement, ‘When soldiers enlist, they agree to be sent into dangerous situations in which they may die’. The Covenant-knowledgeable were more likely to concur, in both simple models and models with full controls. In contrast, when presented with a statement encapsulating the logic of social debt derived from liberal contradictions theory – ‘Because soldiers make sacrifices on my behalf, I owe it to them to be especially cautious about putting them in harm’s way’ – the Covenant-knowledgeable were no more likely to express agreement than were the Covenant-ignorant.Footnote 90 This association is also suggestive of the greater power of military contract theory.
The experimental results were also more consistent with military contract theory than liberal contradictions theory. Per the results reported in Table 3 (Models 3–4), and in line with the observational findings, respondents who received the Covenant vignette were, relative to those in the control group, more casualty tolerant (at the p < 0.10 level) – at odds with hypothesis 1c and in line with hypothesis 2c.Footnote 91 In other words, when first presented with a news story outlining the Armed Forces Covenant, respondents were more willing to support the portrayed operation in Martesia at the cost of British military casualties, compared to those who received the control treatment with no mention of the Covenant (Model 3). Substantively, among Covenant treatment group respondents, the predicted probability of tolerating any level of casualties was 51 percent, while, among control group respondents, the predicted probability was 44 percent.Footnote 92 This finding was robust to the inclusion of controls (Model 4).
UK Armed Forces Covenant prime and operation support and casualty sensitivity.
Note: Table 3 based on analysis only of respondents who passed the manipulation check.Footnote 94
Standard errors in parentheses. Models 1–2 are OLS models, while Models 3–4 are logistic regressions.
+ p < 0.10, * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.0001.
However, respondents who were exposed to the Covenant prime were not significantly more (or less) likely to support the operation overall – per the insignificant Covenant prime coefficient in Table 3 (Models 1–2). Given the previous finding on casualty sensitivity, this null result is not easily explained. One possibility is that respondents who had prior knowledge of the Covenant were ‘pre-primed’ – that is, their views on the military operation had already taken the Covenant into account, the experimental treatment was less likely to affect these respondents, and their inclusion was weakening the experimental results. However, we found no significant interaction between prior Covenant knowledge and the experimental prime: the Covenant-knowledgeable did not respond to the prime differently than did the Covenant-ignorant.Footnote 95 Nevertheless, because those with prior knowledge of the Covenant have more knowledge of and, presumably, more interest in military affairs, it remains possible that these respondents would, without prior knowledge, have been especially responsive to the prime – and thus, in that counterfactual world, the experimental results would have been stronger. Although we cannot test this proposition, it seems to us the most likely explanation for this puzzling null result. Moreover, it is worth noting that the variable’s coefficient was consistently positive, providing suggestive evidence in support of hypothesis 2b. Overall, while the experimental results were somewhat weaker than the observational results, they too were more consistent with the premise that the Covenant reminds respondents that professional volunteer soldiers have freely consented to military service.
Benefits and preferential treatment
In the observational data, knowledge of the Covenant was not consistently associated with support for more generous soldier or veteran benefits. Those with knowledge of the Covenant were more supportive of special consideration for public- and even private-sector employment, but they were not distinguishable from Covenant-ignorant respondents with respect to other material benefits (e.g., compensation, pensions, NHS priority) or social benefits (respect).Footnote 96 The Covenant’s impact on public attitudes towards benefits was, at best, highly circumscribed, and it revealingly did not extend to those benefits that would have a greater impact on British taxpayers’ pocketbooks. These findings are at odds with the expectations derived from liberal contradictions theory. In addition, the results were strikingly similar regardless of whether the beneficiaries were ‘UK armed forces veterans’ in general or those ‘who have served on the front-lines in warzones’.Footnote 97 This secondary finding is also in tension with liberal contradiction logic, which implies significantly greater support for combat-veteran beneficiaries, per H1a. In sum, at odds with H1a, knowledge of the Covenant did not lead systematically or uniformly to greater support for more generous benefits or special treatment for active-duty soldiers or for veterans – whether they served in warzones or not.
The experimental results were even less supportive of H1a. Respondents who received the Covenant treatment were, relative to the control group, no more likely to endorse any of the statements suggesting that veterans were poorly compensated, entitled to special consideration in public or private sector hiring or by the National Health Service, or deserving of higher MoD pensions. They were not more likely to say that veterans did not receive sufficient respect from their fellow Britons. As a control variable, reported prior knowledge of the Covenant was associated with support for preferential hiring, but no other benefits, as in the observational study.Footnote 98 In addition, like the observational findings, these experimental results did not change when beneficiaries were cast as combat veterans – that is, those who have taken the greatest risks and to whom society is most indebted.
It must be acknowledged that, with respect to benefits and treatment, neither the observational nor the experimental findings provide strong support for the expectations derived from military contract theory. Contra H2a and its underlying logic of consent, respondents with Covenant knowledge or exposed to the Covenant treatment were not less likely to favour greater benefits or preferential treatment for soldiers and veterans compared, in the observational study, to those who lacked prior knowledge of the Covenant or, in the experiment, to the control group. However, given the express purposes of the Armed Forces Covenant and the stated ambitions of some of its backers, the lack of empirical support for H1a and the logic of social debt seems more important. Moreover, the fact that neither the observational data nor the experiment yielded any distinction between the benefits respondents wished to assign to those who served in warzones and to those who avoided combat poses a particular problem for liberal contradictions theory, but not for military contract theory.
Extensions: Interactive effects
We conducted a preliminary exploration of potential interactions between the treatment and control variables – political ideology, disposition to empathy – that seemed theoretically relevant. We did not theorise these interactive effects in advance of fielding the study. The resulting analyses are therefore more suggestive than authoritative, and they constitute preliminary and promising avenues for future research.
First, it seems plausible that political conservatives may be especially supportive of military operations when exposed to the Covenant treatment. Conservatives tend to be better disposed towards the armed forces and to be more inclined towards using force to address international challenges.Footnote 100 At the same time, they are also typically stronger believers in the virtues of the free market in all forms of exchange, including labour.Footnote 101 If military contract theory and its logic of consent is at work, conservatives should be more responsive to the Covenant treatment, which emphasises the contractual nature of military service and professional soldiers’ willing consent. That is what we find: conservative respondents who received the Covenant prime were especially likely to favour the operation in Martesia.Footnote 102 Figure 3 plots the predicted value of respondent support for the prospective operation across political ideology. For extreme liberals (0 on the x-axis), the treatment effect – that is, the gap between their support for the operation when exposed to the Covenant treatment and their support for it under the control condition – was quite small and statistically insignificant. Liberals were not very responsive to the Covenant treatment, and their support for the operation was largely unchanged regardless of which vignette they received. In contrast, among extreme conservatives (1 on the x-axis), the treatment effect was significant – over .4 points on the 7-point scale – and in the expected direction. Figure 3 suggests that exposure to the Covenant treatment had much more effect on conservatives than it did on liberals – consistent with military contract theory. In contrast, liberal contradictions theory does not suggest that respondents of a particular ideological bent would be especially affected by the Covenant treatment.
Interactive effect of the Covenant prime and political ideology on support for the operation.Footnote 99
Second, more empathetic respondents should be particularly sensitive to the prospect of military casualties when exposed to the Covenant treatment. Previous research has shown that empathetic individuals are especially open to using force when they think soldiers themselves support a deployment.Footnote 103 The Covenant does not suggest that soldiers themselves always approve of prospective operations, and therefore empathetic respondents who receive the Covenant treatment should not be especially favourable (or unfavourable) towards the operation.Footnote 104 But the Covenant treatment should remind respondents that soldiers risk their lives on the presumption that decision-makers will keep casualties to a minimum. Soldiers’ consent to deployment is contingent on state leaders upholding their end of the bargain and not sending them cavalierly into harm’s way. When exposed to the Covenant prime, empathetic respondents should therefore be particularly sensitive to the prospect of military casualties. Consistent with that line of reasoning, rooted in the logic of military contract theory, we find no statistically significant interactive effect between the Covenant prime and respondent empathy with respect to operation support in general, but we find a significant interactive effect regarding casualty tolerance: when exposed to the Covenant prime, empathetic respondents were particularly casualty sensitive.Footnote 105
Conclusion
This article’s findings suggest that the UK Armed Forces Covenant has not had the effects on public opinion that its backers had hoped. The observational and experimental results derived from analysis of our original survey are generally more consistent with military contract theory than with liberal contradictions theory. Knowledge of or exposure to the Covenant was associated with greater support for the use of force and greater tolerance of soldier casualties. Furthermore, and contrary to the explicit wishes of some Covenant backers, knowledge of or exposure to the Covenant had little impact on people’s desire to grant greater social or material benefits to veterans, whether or not they had risked their lives in combat. We do not know if exposure to the Covenant produced feelings of debt to the nation’s serving or discharged soldiers – the survey did not explicitly ask the question – but exposure to the Covenant did not yield the policy preferences expected by liberal contradictions theory.
Accordingly, while the Covenant provides material benefits, public acclaim, and legal protections that service personnel and veterans often value – and that many citizens are keen for them to receive – the observational and experimental results reported here suggest that the Covenant’s benefits may not be as thorough or consistent as its supporters think. More generally, the Covenant is a double-edged sword: it primes the public to welcome sending volunteer professional troops into harm’s way, and it desensitises people to the costs of using force, without correspondingly inclining citizens to support additional benefits or preferential treatment for soldiers and veterans. The ‘transmission belt’ linking the Covenant to public opinion is thus less reliable than its architects appear to have assumed.
Our study’s findings have significant implications for larger debates in international security and civil–military relations. First, the cultural construal of soldiering and service through appeals such as ‘support the troops’ or the UK Armed Forces Covenant set public expectations about military service, affecting how people think about the use of force and the concomitant benefits of military service. This study’s findings provide yet more evidence that rationalist accounts, while powerful, do not tell the full story and that cultural considerations matter in the formation of public opinion about the use of force. Second, these findings have implications for how societies – especially those that recruit volunteer, professional soldiers through the labour market – relate to their militaries. The Covenant, like much rhetoric employed by politicians across the West, blurs the lines between the citizen-soldier tradition and the reality of professional military service. It romanticises the professional armed forces as deeply patriotic and self-sacrificing, and thus worthy of citizens’ gratitude. When soldiers and officers are depicted in idealised fashion, public adherence to norms of democratic civil–military relations may falter. At the same time, this study’s findings suggest that placing professional soldiers on a pedestal has a significant downside for their own well-being. Various developments – the abandonment of conscription; greater reliance on airpower, missiles, drones, and other offshore technologies of warfare; the capacity to finance warfare through debt; improvements in military medicine – have sheltered citizens in wealthy democracies from the costs of using force.Footnote 106 Militaristic rhetoric, ceremonies, and rituals that emphasise professional soldiers’ free consent to the terms of the military contract, including its ‘unlimited liability’ clause, further soften public opposition to the deployment of armed force.
Future research could extend this study cross-nationally. While the Armed Forces Covenant represents a nearly singular real-world example, the notion that there exists a compact between state and society, on the one hand, and those who bear danger and discomfort in their defence, on the other, is not unique to the United Kingdom. However, there are several ways in which the UK may be different than other countries, and it is worth exploring whether these differences might be affecting the results. First, whenever politicians and pundits suggest that society ‘owes’ its soldiers and veterans, they are alluding to and invoking a tacit compact. Discourses associating battlefield sacrifice with superior citizenship, and thus claims on the polity, are more closely associated with republican citizenship models, epitomised by France. Perhaps the logic of social debt has greater purchase in liberal democracies like France that are less informed by Anglo-liberal traditions. In that case, a French Armed Forces Covenant might have effects more in line with the expectations of the Covenant’s backers – that is, liberal contradictions theory.
Second, the nature of a country’s social safety net may shape how people respond to Covenant-like appeals. For example, perhaps the fact that the United Kingdom has a rather expansive social safety net disinclines British citizens to grant additional prerogatives to certain classes of citizens, as the Covenant envisions. Maybe such appeals would find a more sympathetic audience in liberal countries with less robust social safety nets, like the United States. Indeed, for all the widely reported flaws of the Veterans Health Administration in the United States, it is the sector of US society that comes closest to a British-style welfare state – albeit boot-camp-to-grave, not cradle-to-grave. If this logic has merit, a US Armed Forces Covenant might then produce effects on public opinion consistent with the logic of obligation.
Conversely, it is possible that Americans would be even less receptive to Covenant-like appeals than are Britons, because US rights discourse is already suffused with the ideology of contract and the free market. While the British welfare state is extensive by American standards, since the 1980s it has shrunk substantially. It is today no longer on a par with its continental European neighbours. Perhaps countries with healthier social safety nets than Britain – like the Nordic countries – would respond to the Covenant in the ways predicted by liberal contradictions theory.
Third, at the start of this article, we suggested that the Covenant is roughly analogous to rhetoric calling on people to ‘support the troops’. We argued that the Covenant is an ‘easy case’ because, unlike ‘support the troops’ rhetoric, it has meaningful material corollaries and greater legal force: if the Covenant does not have the desired effects, certainly ‘support the troops’ rhetoric and its accompanying rituals do not. But it is worth studying more directly, in an experimental setting, whether other nations’ vague calls to ‘support the troops’ might have different effects than Britain’s explicit Armed Forces Covenant. Whereas the Covenant makes unlimited, amorphous demands of servicepeople while asking much less of society, more general ‘support the troops’ rhetoric imposes unlimited, amorphous obligations on society while asking much less of servicepeople. Moreover, because calls to ‘support the troops’ do not evoke the notion of contract, perhaps such rhetoric induces in listeners responses more consistent with liberal contradictions theory and the logic of social debt.
The Armed Forces Covenant thus has some troubling normative implications. Its framing promotes the myth that all British soldiers have, since the early 1960s, freely consented to service, and it underplays the less consensual origins of much enlistment. Although British soldiers today are volunteers, their choices are often constrained in significant ways, particularly by the socio-economic forces that concentrate military recruitment within less-privileged demographics.Footnote 107 Furthermore, even though enlistment is based on recruits’ relatively free consent, the energetic discretionary use of volunteer troops – while the vast majority of citizens are insulated from soldiering’s downsides – carries costs for both society and service personnel. The Covenant may have delivered some concrete benefits to soldiers and veterans. Yet as the dominant model for conceptualising military service, it also bears significant responsibility for a perverse implication of the voluntarist myth – that society owes soldiers what their contract stipulates, but nothing more.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1017/eis.2025.10027.
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to the University of Minnesota for its support of this research through a Grant-in-Aid of Research, Artistry and Scholarship.
Replication data and appendixes
Replication data for this article, as well as the online appendixes referenced in the notes, can be found at the Harvard Dataverse, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/COWSCG.
David Blagden is Associate Professor of International Security and Strategy at the University of Exeter (UK). He is also Senior Associate Fellow of the NATO Defense College, Visiting Fellow of the Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre, and Co-Editor of the University of Exeter Press ‘Exeter Strategic and Security Studies’ book series. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of relative power shifts, deterrence and coercion, and UK security policy. He has published in outlets including International Security, the European Journal of International Relations, International Studies Quarterly, Security Studies, and International Affairs.
Ronald R. Krebs is Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota (USA). He is the author of Narrative and the Making of U.S. National Security (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2021). Krebs is currently writing a book with the working title, The Age of Global Militarism: The Spread of Military Worship – and Why It Matters.
Robert Ralston is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK). His research focuses on the politics of decline in major powers and civil–military relations. He has published in outlets including Security Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Perspectives on Politics, and Armed Forces & Society.
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