Unveiling military strategic narratives on social media: a civil–military relations perspective

Although the armed forces’ social media narratives on operations can significantly influence public support, the rationale behind their decision-making process remains unclear. Drawing on civil–military relations theory, we explain the logic behind military decision-making in crafting these narratives. We argue that the strategic narratives of the armed forces are deeply influenced by their relationship with society. The nature of this relationship determines how the military balances two essential imperatives: promoting the armed forces’ representation within the parent society and highlighting the distinct characteristics of the armed forces. This balance influences the extent to which operations are narrated (circulation or non-circulation) within the overall narration and how they are presented. We test our argument by analysing the Italian Army’s Twitter communication. Tweets are analysed using an unsupervised LDA topic model on the entire corpus, manual coding of a subset on international missions and a mixed-method analysis. Our article contributes to the scholarship on public opinion and war, using an original methodology to analyse the strategic narratives of an overlooked actor. It also contributes to civil–military relations, suggesting an innovative method for studying the relationship between the armed forces and society.