The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Although humans have voluntarily joined militaries throughout history, research on the motivation to enlist has increased dramatically since the adoption of the All-Volunteer Force in the United States. Moskos categorized the motivations to enlist as institutional (the value alignment of the individual with the military) or occupational (the seeking of monetary rewards for competencies at market rates). This study explores the prevalence of these two traditional motivations in addition to two less commonly studied motivations—group mobilization and revenge-seeking—in an important context: the Kurds of northern Iraq. A survey of 2301 Kurdish soldiers (Peshmerga) during their war against the Islamic State (IS) indicates that institutional motivations are the most prevalent, although all four motivations are present. The importance of group mobilization and revenge-seeking represent important variations from the better-studied Western contexts that complicate our understanding of the motivation to enlist.

We show a statistically significant and quantitatively meaningful decline in the aptitude of commissioned officers in the marine corp from 1980 to 2014 as measured by their scores on the General Classification Test. This result contrasts with the widely studied increase in the quality of enlisted personnel since 1973 when conscription ended. As a possible cause for this decline, we focus on the fact that, during this period, marine officers had to have a 4-year college degree and there has been an expansion of the pool of young Americans in college. To corroborate this hypothesis, we show that there has been a similar decline in scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test for responders to the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth among college graduates but not for the overall set of respondents.

What drives soldiers to risk death on the battlefield? Scholars have suggested that battlefield participation is driven by ideology, coercion, and cohesion while overlooking the importance of confidence in tactical success. On contemporary battlefields, training in effective, modern-system tactics will increase initial confidence and create a positive feedback loop of battlefield participation and combat effectiveness. I test this theory through the as-if random assignment of Peshmerga (Kurdish soldiers) to modern-system training by Western countries. One third of the Peshmerga had no formal training, one third had non–modern-system training from other Peshmerga, and one third had been trained in the modern-system. While non–modern-system training slightly increased unit confidence, it did not impact battlefield participation; coalition training in modern-system tactics dramatically increased confidence and, more importantly, led to higher levels of self-reported battlefield participation

No abstract