The Scholarly Soldier: Distinguishing Features of Online Military Academic Journals

In the past, military scholars were constrained by the rules of military security and government policy review (Ginsburgh 1964). However, like Academia (Fleming 2010), the military scientific and discourse community must come to terms with evolving practices and procedures whose findings and feedback are of vital importance and must be ‘translated’ into theoretical frameworks and proposals that are disseminated throughout a geographically dislocated community. Therefore, military academic journals have embraced online channels of diffusion and intercommunication (Swales 2016), especially given the military’s close and historical connection with the Internet (Kaltenbach 2000; Moreno 2006). The study outlines the differences between American military and civilian cultures starting from Hofstede’s cultural dimensions to the military (Hoppa/Gray-Briggs 1999; Febbraro 2008; McKee/Febbraro/Riedel 2008; Wilbur 2013; Hardy 2016). Then, by means of a combination of multimodal and qualitative discourse analyses it focuses on three levels of a selection of online military academic journals: their overall textual and multimedia content; subgenres concerning legal accountability; and self-presentations and prescriptive regulatory stylistic guidelines. It thus verifies whether the peculiarities of military communication and culture contribute to enhancing knowledge dissemination within an evolving professional community and an innovative channel of information transmission.