Description
Strategic studies has long assumed that actors in war broadly align with collective objectives, treating deviations from strategic coherence as noise rather than systematic phenomena. Yet historical and contemporary conflicts - from Afghanistan and Iraq to Ukraine and Israel - reveal persistent patterns of self-interested behaviour: leaders prioritising political survival, commanders pursuing personal glory, bureaucratic actors manoeuvring to protect turf. These dynamics are widely acknowledged but remain theoretically marginal within mainstream security studies. This paper develops a conceptual framework to bring such behaviour into the core of strategic analysis. Drawing on the moral economy tradition and interpretive approaches, it conceptualises strategy as socially embedded practice structured by expectations of legitimacy, reciprocity, duty, and shared sacrifice. It constructs two Weberian ideal types - serious strategy oriented towards collective ends, and cynical strategy oriented towards private interests - and theorises the complex middle ground where mixed motives, moral ambiguity, and narrative contestation shape wartime conduct. The argument shows how strategic cohesion depends not only on material capabilities or rational calculation, but on the maintenance of a functioning moral economy and persuasive narrative that binds actors to a collective purpose. In advancing this framework, the paper bridges strategic studies, interpretive IR, and political sociology, offering new analytical tools to explain strategic failure and the erosion of purpose in modern liberal democracies.
