Caveat: I'm not a military theorist, so this is just general knowledge combined with common sense...
Raphael wrote: ↑Sun Apr 21, 2019 7:57 am
So my question is: is this, strictly speaking, necessary? That is, is there something in the very nature of modern warfare, or of running large military organizations, that requires this in order for things to work? Or is it just a historical artifact of the way things were done in early modern Europe?
Neither.
It arose as an artifact of the way things are done almost everywhere, and has been preserved because it's a good idea. But it isn't necessary.
The three things, I think, that are likely to lead to this are (see below for third):
- societies are stratified - some rule, some are ruled. Rulers do not want to hand over all armed forces to the ruled (because then they would stop being rulers themselves - c.f the mamluks, etc). So the ruling class is always going to want to have its own people in charge of the armed forces - it's in their interest to make "commanding violence" and "coming from the ruling class" as much as possible synonymous. And, conversely, commanding a military company is fun, and prestigious, and the favoured sons of the ruling class will not want to have to fight on foot in the trenches for ten years as enlisted men before they get promoted! They want their fun miltiary holiday NOW, damnit!
- armies don't begin as state projects; they are commercial ventures at heart. As with any other company, they require both labour and capital: the subjects provide the labour, but they need to find a capitalist to provide their capital. [equipment; food; barracks; political legitimacy in the eyes of the sovereign; social capital to provide trust and information access with other military companies] That means that in most pre-modern armies, in some sort of way a rich, ruling-class guy is "hiring" the company and, naturally, they want to be in charge of it (see the first point).
These two points together mean that it's extremely likely that in most pre-modern armies, there will be a clear division between the company, on the one hand, and the captain, who funds the company and in return directs its activities. The details of this are different, depending on whether it's a feudal levy or a mercenary company or a man-o'-war or whatever, but in some way you're likely to get this sort of officer class.
Now, two exceptions spring to mind. First, there's what we might call the 'master and commander' loophole: while the officer class is going to want ultimate control of the company, they don't always demand daily micromanaging control. In the British navy at one time, following merchant navy practice, some ships had both a "commander", who decided where the ship was going to go, and a "master", who would give the appropriate orders to get it there. In a similar way, in some mediaeval armies, a great deal of power was held by sergeants and sergeants major - the professionals who knew what they were doing, and got everything sorted out while the lord-captains went off and caroused. This came to modern fruition with the Prussian system of the "general staff", a core of trained professional officers who "advised" the feudal commanders.
The other exception is that you can maybe partially get around class distinctions in a society with little sense of class, or a commitment to avoiding it. This is part of the reason why some city-states were disproportionately militarily powerful - because they were able to operate disciplined, professional militias in which promotion was by merit rather than by birth. This also contributed a core of professionalism to the Roman army even long after it ceased to be an urban militia. In this sort of system, the companies are not owned by their commanders, but by the State, and the State simply allocates commanders to the company. But of course, most pre-modern societies other than Rome (which developed its own problems!) were not able to so fully extend the dictatorial power of the State beyond the immediate confines of the capital, and therefore were reliant on various lords and magnates to in some way or other raise and maintain companies.
So, that's why an officer class develops, and how you maybe can avoid it. But then there's the third reason...
- different levels of command have very different skill requirements, which, particularly in the absence of modern professional training methods, rely on acquired experience. Being a good sergeant is a difficult skill-set that can take many years to acquire. So if every captain used to be a sergeant, which sergeants do you promote? The good sergeants? If you do, then your captains will all be quite old, and your generals will all be ancient. Or do you keep the good sergeants as sergeants? In which case, you're incentivising your sergeants to be bad at their job, to keep themselves free for promotion to lieutenant. At the very least, if you promote your promising sergeant candidates to be officers, you're going to run out of good sergeants. Structurally speaking, the army is a huge pyramid, and if you promote all your talent from bottom to top, you're going to a) have very old people at the top, and b) find all your talent being leached up to the top leaving not enough at the bottom. And because the skill sets you have to learn are different, you'll be investing a lot of time and resources to make people good sergeants, only to have them forget all about that and instead learn to be good captains.
So, one easy way to avoid these problems is to cut your pyramid in half, and make it so that you can start the top half without having done the bottom half; and, conversely, so that most of the knowledge and talent in the bottom half stays there. The natural social hierarchy and class structure tends to lead to this naturally; but even systems that try to avoid that may well find themselves replicating the enlisted/officer pyramid-cutting purely for practical reasons.
Now of course you might say: but this applies all over the pyramid! You're still training up good captains and having them throw that knowledge away to become good generals! Why isn't the pyramid cut in more places?
The answer is: it can be. Mediaeval armies often had, effectively, a 'general officer class', distinct from their 'field officer class' - the Prince of Gelderland did not first learn to command a small company before becoming a general, and while some really talented middle-class captains might end up promoted to general, it was a rare thing. And if we look at the bottom half of the pyramid, navies often distinguished a non-ruling sergeancy class - the sailing master, the master gunner, the boatswain, the navigator, the surgeon, etc, to varying degrees - who wouldn't usually be promoted to captain/commander, but who were also not necessarily promoted from the ordinary seamen. A concept in British history in this regard is the division not into two groups (officer/enlisted) but into three (commissioned officer/warrant officer/enlisted) - commissioned officers would (usually) be gentlemen, while warrant officers would be literate and numerate middle-class professionals (though experienced seamen could step up to be warrant officers eventually), and the rank and file would be lower class.
However, in general, modernisation has lead to the streamlining of the system. This is because there's tension between the above demands for specialisation and streaming, and on the other hand the tendency for baroque, segmented systems to be inefficient in allocating talent.
Wikipedia informs me that in the US armed forces, "mustang" is the general slang term for someone who first served in the enlisted ranks, then successfully applied for officers' training, and is now a commissioned officer. So, in terms of US military slang, my question is: would it be plausible to have a fictional military in which all the commissioned officers are mustangs?
Yes, I think it's plausible, but probably not likely.
It's probably likely in the case of a highly untrained, unorganised army - the idea of braves being promoted to raid leaders for a tribe, for example. It becomes less likely as you get more stratified societies (which push toward rank-specialisation for political-economic reasons) and as you get more complicated militaries (which pull toward rank-specialisation for reasons of efficiency).
One SF counterexample may be if you have much more effective talent-assessment, so that you can fast-track people directly to the rank they're best suited to. I don't think we can even really do that yet, but with more advanced psychological testing maybe we'll be able to.
And we should also distinguish two scenarios: the pyramid-promotion system (start at the bottom, get promoted rank by rank), and the talent-spotting system (start at the bottom, then zoom up to the 'appropriate' rank directly). Social stratification pushes toward the pyramid. However, the demands of rank-specialisation probably only really demand the latter, provided a sufficiently robust system of talent-spotting. I believe some militia-style forces have employed that system: everybody serves their term in the rank and file, and only then do the most talent (or richest, or best-connected, etc) soldiers get promoted to be officers.