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This section deals with asymmetric warfare and its nature as well as the issues that it creates. The reason for devoting such a large part of the Seoul conference and of these proceedings to this type of warfare derives from the fact that it has changed many rules of the game of conflict.

This change has imposed a profound transformation on the military, not only tactical but also structural, preparatory and mental.

The commitment to adaptation, to change, to the broadening of mentalities and horizons that asymmetric warfare requires of the military today thus motivates the plurality – and also the heterogeneity – of the studies presented in the chapters of this section.

Since the suicide terrorist attacks of September Eleven, security issues have become more prominent again. There is also an increased interest in the military since the military was and still is seen as a major instrument in the so-called ‘war on terror’. The current international situation has thus increased the importance, significance and urgency of a correct, broad-based research effort on the part of the social sciences to study the emergence and development of conflicts with an eye on the means of conflict resolution. In this context, it is also appropriate and necessary to analyse one, albeit ambivalent, instrument of conflict resolution, the armed forces. Today, the military is said to face new and broader tasks than in the past.

This first part of the book is devoted to the forms of conflict that are characteristic of the start of the twenty-first century. As I document in the first essay, the newest and most significant form of struggle of our times is asymmetric warfare, which has had an enormous development as shown also by the great number of studies dedicated to it (see the bibliographies of the chapters focussed on this form of conflict).

The study of armed forces and conflict resolution has undergone important developments at the turn of the millennium and this has occurred not only due to the far-reaching work of scholars in the field, but, as often occurs in the social sciences, has been driven by events and new situations. It is well to recall in this regard that it was precisely the need for knowledge and intervention on the military institution that brought about the groundbreaking work done in the United States by Samuel Stouffer (see Stouffer et al., 1949) and his team after the country had entered into war, a work that gave rise to the contemporary history of sociology applied to armed forces.

The state of the relations between the armed forces and society in Italy displays some general features that should be described before going on to the analysis of the research data. The first is the presence of a very broad-based pacifism that has two different origins which, although quite different from each other, often end up by uniting or allying. These two traditions are a Marxist-anarchic, or a more generically leftist one, and a Catholic one that is still very strong in our country. Since the end of the Second World War, the extent of this pacifism, often with a good dose of antimilitarism, has always made relations between the country and its armed forces difficult. This situation has shown some rather significant changes in the last decade, however. Italy's ever-increasing participation in peace support operations (PSOs), which is very extensive in proportion to the commitments of other comparable countries, has given new popularity to the armed forces, both because of their use in functions more easily reconciled with pacifist ideals and because, finally put to the test,¹ they have demonstrated capabilities and skills that for many have been a revelation. The transition from conscription to voluntary service, although certainly heralding other problems in the relationship with public opinion, has also allowed the armed forces to shed the unpopularity due to the sacrifices required of male citizens. Added to these aspects is the rapid change of the international situation which, with the materialising of a significant threat from Islamic fundamentalism, has brought the problem of security² to the attention of everyone. All of the surveys conducted in the last decade, therefore, have recorded an increased level of social acceptance of the armed forces in Italy.

The Research Committee (RC) 01 of the International Sociological Association is carrying out a broad cross-national research on civil–military relations in democratic countries and, particularly, on the cultural dimensions of this relationship. In this chapter several country papers on that theme are presented, but before giving the floor to the reports of the findings from the national researches, let me introduce the research itself. The issue of a cultural gap between the armed forces and the parent society is an old one and on this theme we can say that two main positions are present in the literature; one is that there is a necessary cultural gap between the military and the civilian, and that a particular gap is not negative. Another side also accepts the idea that the military has a culture different from civilian society, but argues that traditional military culture now serves a less essential purpose: according to them the military has no functional imperative to retain a culture contrary to the prevailing civilian values. On this subject, we can cite what John Hillen (1999, pp. 43, 58), for instance, writes for the US:“To many observers, the values and social mores of 1990s America – narcissistic, morally relativist, self-indulgent, hedonistic, consumerist, individualistic, victim-centered, nihilistic, and soft – seem hopelessly at odds with those of traditional military culture.” Despite that, “Whether politically motivated by the agenda pushers or not, there is now [in the US] an inexorable momentum to ‘close the gap’ between the military and society without clearly identifying the nature of the gap, the extent to which it might in fact be healthy and desirable.”