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How ‘unique’ should the military be?: A review of representative literature & outline of a synthetic formulation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Bernard Boëne
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Extract

Central to the study of ‘armed forces and society’, whether the approach be that of sociology, political science or legal doctrine, is the question of how unique the military really is—and ought to be. Over the last four decades or so, a number of authors have evinced keen interest in, and written more or less extensively on such matters as the objective, normative and subjective dimensions of military life, functional, structural and cultural features of military organization, civil-military relations, and the patterns of long-term change affecting them.

Type
Research Article
Information
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , June 1990 , pp. 3 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1990

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References

(1) Moreigne, Jean-Paul, Officiers, pour quel «office»? Contribution psychosociologique à l'approche d'une nouvelle condition militaire, contemporaine du concept polémologique de dissuasion, Revue de Défense Nationale (05 1971), 718–727Google Scholar.

(2) Biderman, Albert D., What is Military?, in Tax, Sol (ed.), The Draft: a handbook of facts and alternatives (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 122–137Google Scholar.

(3) In a tell-tale analytical shift, sociologists of the military in the 1980's seem to have abandoned Erving Goffman's ‘total institution’ concept in favor of Lewis Coser's notion of ‘greedy institutions’. See, for instance, Segal, Mady W. on military families, in Moskos, Charles C., Wood, Frank R. (eds.), The Military: more than just a job? (Washington/New York, Pergamon-Brassey's, 1988), 79–97Google Scholar.

(4) Moskos, Charles, From institution to occupation: trends in military organization, Armed Forces & Society, IV, N. 1 (Fall 1977)Google Scholar, same title, paper prepared for presentation at the International Congress ‘Society and Armed Forces in the Nuclear Age’, The Hague, Netherlands, May 9–12, 1982; Institutional/occupational trends in Armed Forces: an update, Armed Forces & Society, XII, N. 2 (Spring 1986)Google Scholar; C. Moskos, F. Wood (eds.), The Military… op. cit.

(5) See the contributions of C. Downs, B. Fleckenstein, B. Boëne, N. Jans, J. S. Van der Meulen, D. Smokovitis, K. Haltiner and R. Gal in The Military…, op.cit.

(6) Segal, David R., Measuring the institutional/occupational change thesis, Armed Forces & Society, XII, N. 3 (Spring 1986)Google Scholar.

(7) Luttwak, Edward N., The Pentagon and the Art of War (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1984), pp. 266–267Google Scholar; Fallows, James, National Defense (New York, Random House, 1981)Google Scholar, chapter 2.

(8) Gen. A. Beaufre, Officiers, pour quel office ? La vocation militaire et la tradition, Le Figaro, 3 and 4 June 1971, reprinted in Le Casoar (review of the association of St. Cyr graduates), September 1971.

(9) Dabezies, Pierre, La spécificité militaire: esquisse d'une approche globale de l'armée, Arès (1980), 77–105Google Scholar; also, Dabezies', contribution to Boëne, Bernard (ed.), La Spécificité militaire (Paris, Armand Colin, 1990)Google Scholar.

(10) The Soldier and the State: the theory and politics of civil-military relations (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard U.P., 1957)Google Scholar.

(11) On the theoretical aspects of the ‘fusion’ of ‘profession’ and ‘organization’, Van Doorn, Jacques, The Soldier and Social Change (Beverly Hills, Sage Publications, 1975)Google Scholar, chapter 2.

(12) Feld, Maury D., A typology of military organization, Public Policy, VII (1958), 3–40Google Scholar.

(13) Huntington, , Power, expertise and the military profession, Daedalus (Fall 1963), 785–807Google Scholar.

(14) Huntington, , The Common Defense (New York, Columbia U.P., 1961)Google Scholar.

(15) Huntington, , The Soldier and the State in the 1970's, in Goodpaster, Andrew J. and Huntington, Samuel P., Civil-Military Relations (Washington, American Enterprise Institute, 1977), pp. 5–28Google Scholar.

(16) Weber, Max, Economy and Society, edited by Roth, Guenther and Wittich, Claus (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978), chapter VIII, p. 875Google Scholar.

(17) Also see Janowitz, Morris, Changing patterns of organizational authority, Administrative Science Quarterly, III (03 1959), 474–493Google Scholar.

(18) Harries-Jenkins, Gwyn, Dysfunctional consequences of military professionalization, in Janowitz, M. and Van Doorn, J. (eds.), On Military Ideology (Rotterdam, Rotterdam University Press, 1971), pp. 139–165Google Scholar.

(19) Larson, Arthur D., Military professionalism and civil control: a comparative analysis of two interpretations, Journal of Political and Military Sociology, II (1974), 57–72Google Scholar.

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(21) Janowitz, Morris, The Professional Soldier: a social and political portrait (New York, Free Press, 1974; 1st edition: 1960)Google Scholar; Military conflict (Beverly Hills, Sage Publications, 1975)Google Scholar.

(22) Op. cit.

(23) Marshall, S. L. A., Men Against Fire (New York, Morrow, 1947)Google Scholar.

(24) Segal, David R., Blair, John, Newport, Frank, Stephens, Susan, Convergence, isomorphism, and interdependence at the civilmilitary interface, Journal of Political and Military Sociology (Fall 1974), pp. 157 ffGoogle Scholar.

(25) Janowitz, Morris, U.S. Forces and the Zero Draft, Adelphi Paper No. 94 (London, International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1973)Google Scholar, reprinted in Military Conflict, op. cit. pp. 239 ff.

(26) Also see Jacques Van Doorn, The Soldier and Social Change, op. cit. pp. 51–64.

(27) Martin, Michel L., Warriors to Managers: the French military establishment since 1945 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

(28) Thomas, Hubert Jean-Pierre, Fonction militaire et système d'hommes, in du Montcel, H. Tezenas, Thomas, H. J.-P., Roquelo, J.-C., Cailleteau, F., Boëne, B., Les Hommes de la Défense (Paris, FEDN, 1981)Google Scholar; also, Boëne, Bernard, The Moskos and Thomas models contrasted, The Military and Society: the European experience (Munich, Sowi International Forum 41, 1984)Google Scholar; Caforio, Giuseppe, The military profession: theories of change, Armed Forces & Society, XV, No. 1 (Fall 1988)Google Scholar.

(29) The definition offered here is broad enough to comprise civil as well as foreign wars, but it does not, in principle, extend to internal security, even though the latter also comes under the triad violence, organization, legitimacy. The difficulty inherent in such a distinction is that there is no firm, clear-cut boundary between war and the maintenance of internal political order: it is based on the amount of sociopolitical legitimacy that can be claimed by those who violate the existing order, i.e. on the size (and degree of political alienation) of their social base. This, in itself, is very often a matter of diverging judgments of fact, therefore a bone of political contention, open to manipulation from both sides. Such may be the reason why so many countries do not discriminate clearly between military and ‘paramilitary’ forces (like the gendarmerie, civil or national guard, carabinieri, etc.), even if they differentiate between armed forces and local police forces. It may also account for the wider definition of the function of the profession of arms offered by Britain's Gen. Sir John Hackett, as ‘the ordered application of force in the resolution of social problems’ (italics mine). It remains that the distinction is important in that it produces significant effects as to the level of violence applicable in given circumstances: as long as a government retains the hope of bringing ‘rebels’ back within the bounds of legality by creating a novel consensus capable of founding a new pacific order (which amounts to depriving them of their social base), the degree of violence applied can only be limited, even though the other side may be tempted to play the card of uncompromising, exacerbated violence. One can thus better understand the malaise of military forces in equivocal situations of this sort. It also goes to suggest the probable superiority of professional internal security units—specialists in the limited use of legitimate violence—in such circumstances, especially when the armed forces are manned by conscripts or reservists.

(30) Speier, Hans, The social types of war, American Journal of Sociology, XLVI (1941), 445–454CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

(31) du Picq, Charles Ardant, Études sur le combat (Paris, Editions Champ Libre, 1978Google Scholar; 1st ed. 1876–77).

(32) La Logique du social (Paris, Hachette, 1979)Google Scholar.

(33) This does not always come naturally to combatants, especially in conscript forces: in World War II, a survey of some 400 U.S. Army infantry companies in Europe and the Pacific showed that between 15 and 25 percent at most of the men actually fired their weapons at enemy personnel. Marshall, Gen. S. L. A., Men Against Fire (New York, Morrow, 1947)Google Scholar.

(34) Ardent du Picq's intuitions were largely confirmed by subsequent empirical investigations, notably: Stouffer, Samuel A. et al. , The American Soldier: studies in social psychology in World War II, Vol. II : Combat and its Aftermath (Princeton, Princeton U.P., 1949)Google Scholar; S. L. A. Marshall, op. cit.; Shils, Edward, Janowitz, Morris, Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II, Public Opinion Quarterly, XII (Summer 1948)Google Scholar; see also George, Alexander L.in Little, Roger W. (ed.), Handbook of Military Institutions (Beverley Hills, Sage, 1971)Google Scholar; Sarkesian, Sam C. (ed.), Combat Effectiveness (Beverly Hills, Sage, 1980)Google Scholar; ColHenderson, W. Darryl, Cohesion: the human element in combat (Washington DC, NDU Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

(35) Jacques Van Doorn, The Soldier and Social Change, op. cit. pp. 145–49.

(36) Likewise, though in a less immediately obvious manner, the military drill introduced by the creators of the ‘Protestant discipline’, Maurice of Nassau, Gustavus Adolphus and Cromwell, signalled the advent of systematic instrumental rationalization in combat itself. This took place some three centuries ahead of F. W. Taylor's virtual robotization of factory floor workers. The parallel (derived from Weber) is indeed striking: in both cases, the gain in effectiveness/efficiency was appreciable; it resulted from the decomposition of individual action into simple, standardized gestures; it ruined elitist crafts based on exclusive, traditional skills (in the military case, those of English longbowmen, Swiss pikemen and Spanish men-at-arms). Cf. Jacques Van Doorn, op. cit., and Feld, Maury D., Military discipline as a social force, in The Structure of Violence: armed forces as social systems (Beverly Hills, Sage Publications, 1977)Google Scholar.

(37) Beyond a certain degree of technological sophistication, conventional weapons are themselves the source of another paradoxical effect known as ‘structural disarmament’: the financial and economic opportunity cost of military equipment rises faster than defense budgets, with the consequence that numbers are on the decline. Defense analysts can thus predict with some accuracy, based on the extrapolation of present trends, the year in which, for instance, the Air Force fleet of a major industrial power would limit itself to a single aircraft, by itself exhausting the procurement budget of that service. Such a situation dramatically increases the strategic and psychological cost of losing one of those weapons systems, and represents another compelling factor of inhibition of actual combat.

(38) Only police officers, public servants whose duties are of great importance to state security, professionals and specialists in life-and-death emergency situations (physicians, firemen, etc.) are apt to approximate the stringent role expectations that normally bear on military service members.

(39) Op. cit. The number of variables was increased from 6 to 12; two lines were added for good measure, one devoted to ‘approximate historical illustrations’, the other concerned with ‘possible pathologies’ and drawing on subsequent literature.

(40) They show, in particular, that political subordination of the military depends on certain conditions (not realized in the ‘feudal’ type, and vis-à-vis the colonial society, in the ‘imperial’ type), and does not therefore always come as naturally as some would have it, while military integration to the society can be so thorough as to practically annihilate the socio-political uniqueness of the armed forces (‘ideological’ type).

(41) As Janowitz remarked, virtually the only question Tocqueville raised when he focused on U.S. civil-military relations in the early 1830's was from what social strata officers and enlisted men were recruited. By the early decades of the twentieth century, such a question had lost a good deal of its former relevance: in slightly less than a century, professionalization had produced its effects.

(42) Cf. Weber's, Max classics, Politik als Beruf (1919)Google Scholar, and Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1921).

(43) Lasswell, Harold D., The garrison state, American Journal of Sociology, XLVI (1941)Google Scholar.

(44) Perlmutter, Amos, The Military and Politics in Modern Times (New Haven, Yale U.P., 1977)Google Scholar.

(45) Military professionalism and civil control, op. cit.

(46) The utilization of women, almost everywhere on the rise in the West since the 1970's, is a case in point: it can partly be accounted for as a necessary concession to the Zeitgeist. But women also represent a precious additional source of quality recruitment for all-volunteer military establishments faced with the possibility of manpower shortages. Female soldiers, however, are not without their drawbacks. They pose special problems (management, military self-image, etc.), while their minority status and still heavily restricted access to combat slots raise the thorny issues of gender segregation and unequal opportunity.

(47) This distinction is not unlike that made by Vagts, Alfredbetween military way and militarism in his monumental History of Militarism (New York, Norton, 1937), which can be analyzed as a study of the organic type's historical incarnations and pathologiesGoogle Scholar.

(48) This figure seeks to place the ideal incarnation—in the normative sense—of each of the five logics in terms of the form and degree of functional distinctiveness with which it is normally associated. That is why the bottom right cell, the locus of all pathological deviations, has been left empty.

* This article is a shortened version of a paper prepared for presentation at the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society international conference, Baltimore, 27–29 October, 1989.