A Bazin

Winning Trust and Confidence A Bazin

The United States asks its military service members to do much more than fight the nation's wars; it asks them to build trust with numerous stakeholders in complex and dynamic environment. The literature indicates that parties in conflict situations can employ confidence-building measures to move incrementally closer toward conflict resolution. This study applied a qualitative grounded theory methodology to investigate confidence-building from the experiences of service members recently deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq and created a theoretical model that future service members could apply in similar circumstances. The findings indicate that through understanding context and applying physical, communication, and relationship confidence-building measures over time, service members can build trust with key stakeholders. The potential implications of this research are that service members can directly apply these to build relationships when deployed to other conflict environments in the future.