Why do they serve? Changes and differences in motives of Danish soldiers deployed to peace-keeping and peace-enforcing missions

This paper investigates what motivates young people to volunteer for peace-keeping or peace-enforcing missions and how their motives change between pre- and post-deployment. Data include information about social and military background, and motives for more than 600 soldiers, 444 of whom answered the survey both before and after deployment. Soldiers are deployed to different missions under the same circumstances. To conceptualize motives among soldiers, we use factor analysis and find three factors: challenge, self-benefit, and fidelity. Challenge represents an occupational orientation; fidelity, an institutional orientation; and self-benefit, a desire for adventure. Exploiting the within-subject design of our data, we find that pre- and post-deployment motives vary significantly according to the type of mission and soldiers’ previous experiences (first-timers or experienced soldiers). Our results suggest that after the mission, peace-keepers are generally more disappointed than peace-enforcers. Our results also show that self-benefit motives are important for younger soldiers with only a high school education, and that this group usually serves as peace-enforcers during their gap year.     

Military Off the Shelf Procurements: A Norwegian Case Study

Buying off the shelf procurements (OTS) has become an important part of the national acquisition strategy in several countries, and this paper seeks to bring empirical evidence on OTS as the preferred acquisition strategy by use of data from 2015 to 2022 investment portfolio of the Norwegian Armed Forces. We develop definitions for three categories of procurement – OTS, modified OTS and development projects – as well as a method to classify projects into these categories. Our first finding is that the characteristics of OTS projects correspond to modified OTS and development projects. Our second finding indicates that OTS projects perform better when it comes to the completion of projects according to the initial schedule, compared to development projects.