This is the fourth part (I, IIa, IIb, III) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized. We’ve talked about how armies are recruited, equipped and paid for. In particular, as we’ve seen so far, the structure of recruitment, organization and payment (such as it was) is heavily dependent on the underlying civilian structures, often mirroring them quite closely. Armies cannot help but recreate their civilian social structures on the battlefield.
The same is absolutely true for leadership and cohesion, essential for getting an army to fight effectively. Now we need to clear up some definitions here at the start between the three ideas we’re going to focus on here: we’re breaking up a multifaceted idea (‘combat motivation’) into component parts because, as we’ll see, effective combat motivation is something of a ‘three-legged stool’ that needs all three legs to stand effectively. Those three legs are leadership, morale and cohesion; the first of which will be our focus this week and the last of which will be our focus next week.
Leadership refers to the to the command structures of an army, which as we’ll see certainly do have a motivation component. This is a top-down sort of combat motivation: good leaders might cultivate the respect or admiration of their troops, might find ways to motivate them in difficult times, might lead by example or otherwise ‘perform’ generalship and so on. What we’re going to focus on here is where leaders come from because, as it turns out, most societies have pretty strong ideas about where military leaders are supposed to come from, what backgrounds they’re supposed to have and (no surprise) they tend to mirror civilian leadership structures.
Meanwhile morale refers to the bottom-up motivation of the combatants. Specifically, I tend to use this to mean their attachment to the cause, both their loyalty to it and also their belief that it can be achieved. We aren’t going to deal too much with morale here because it is often very conflict-specific: different causes come with different morale implications. However, I do want to stress an important idea here: morale is what gets soldiers to a battlefield, not what keeps them on it (generally).
Finally cohesion is a side-together sort of motivation: the ability of a unit to cohere under pressure, to ‘hold together’ rather than breaking up when things get difficult. In the terror of combat, the high sounding reasons for service (the foundations of morale) are hard to keep in mind and combatants need something a bit more primal to keep them in the ranks: that is cohesion and it is generally based in some kind of strong attachment to the other fellows in the ranks next to them. As we’ll see, just like leadership systems tend to mirror civilian leadership structures, the options for fostering strong cohesion among soldiers are heavily dependent on what a civilian society looks like. We’ll treat cohesion principles next week.
By way of clarifying contrast: a force with low morale might melt away from desertion even when there’s not fighting going on, because no one is invested in the cause. A force with low cohesion (but high morale) might panic and disperse in a battle but reform later to fight again: they remain committed to the cause, but unable to handle the terror of battle collectively. A force with bad morale but high cohesion is very dangerous to a general, because that is the raw material for mutinies: the men will hold together against you as quickly as for you.
Naturally, most military systems that have existed for more than a single campaign have some effective system for arranging leadership and ensuring cohesion on a repeat basis. And that is what we’ll be looking at this week: how the structures of societies shape and constrain leadership and cohesion of the armies they form.
But first, as always, recruiting and maintaining large pre-modern armies is expensive! Much like many of those pre-modern armies, this project is supported by devolving the costs of my ruinous book-buying habit on to recruits readers. You can help by spreading the word to new readers and by supporting this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).
Where Leaders Come From
Polities have a bewildering array of ways that they chose military leaders – some are determined by hereditary positions, others by professional career tracks, other elected and so on – but the general rule to understanding all of them is this: the same sort of people who exercise positions of authority to organize civil society also lead the armies and navies of that society. The biggest distinction between leadership system is often just the question of if the civil leader are the exact same people as the military leadership, or different fellows drawn from the same class. Those who lead in peace, almost always lead in war.
So from the worldbuilding perspective, before you can think about your ‘officer class,’ you need to think about the ruling class of your society. This isn’t quite the place to get into every possible permutation of ruling class a pre-modern society can have, but we can make do with a few examples to give a sense of how these notions connect. One thing I will note: in pre-modern societies, professional leadership classes are extremely rare – even as they are very common in modern societies. So while your instinct may be that ‘to be a general, someone just goes to ‘general school’ and then works up the career ladder’ that is almost never the career path for pre-modern military leadership. To the degree these societies have professional classes, they are usually politically marginal and politically marginal groups do not get to lead a society’s army.
Instead, as a rule, the aristocrats who organize large institutions and groups in peacetime assume, as a matter of course, that they have the necessary skills to organize the same large groups in war time. Coming from a modern viewpoint, with our emphasis on ‘scientific’ leadership approaches and specialist knowledge, the idea that experience at large-scale farming or Confucian philosophy fully qualified one to lead armies seems strange, but those historical aristocrats are generally untroubled by the idea that their training might not prepare them to lead. After all, the skills of the aristocrat – whatever they might be – are the large-scale leadership skills of the society and it usually takes quite a sharp and humiliating experience of defeat to cause any aristocracy to reconsider that (and often not even then).
So let’s look at some connected civilian-and-military leadership structures to get a sense of how they can work, keeping in mind that we’re not being exhaustive.
The most common system by far is some form of military-aristocracy: a hereditary or nearly hereditary class that wields military leadership as its prerogative. In complex, agrarian societies, these are almost always leisured large-landholders who live off of the rents of their lands. There is thus often an inherent tension in how a leisured class justifies its role of power and privilege in society by pointing to its military leadership role. One of the classic summations of this was the medieval European division of society into “those who work (the commons), those who pray (the clergy), and those who fight (the nobility)” – it is the role as ‘those who fight’ (or who lead the fight) which justifies aristocratic privilege and wealth.
Crucially, I want to stress: the aristocrat earns their position of command by wealth and birth, they do not earn wealth and birth by martial excellence. These aristocracies are ‘rich mens’ clubs’ not ‘good fighters’ clubs,’ and they are buttressed with ideologies that assume people born from the lower classes make poor soldiers and generals by their very nature. Pre-modern societies are, by modern standards, extremely low in social mobility and so they create cultures and customs which justify and normalize those systems.
But – as I’ve been alluded to this whole series – not all military aristocracies are the same. In particular, there is a marked difference between warrior-aristocracies and what I am going to call (very roughly) officer-aristocracies – the core difference is the precise martial skill that justifies aristocratic power, but that has all sorts of ramifications with how these fellows behave.
In a warrior-aristocracy, a core part of being an aristocrat is mastery of a specific style of personal combat, most frequently cavalry combat (or chariot combat, before the advent of true cavalry). Part of this is simply the expense of it – you have to be rich to have access to horses from a young age to learn to ride well – but there is also a heavy skill component, in that it is very hard to learn to be a truly excellent horseman if you do not start early. The thing to keep in mind is that because warrior-aristocrats’ social position is contingent on performing a specific kind of warfare, they are going to want to be visible performing that sort of warfare. As a result, these fellows are often socially constrained to lead from the front and to fight personally even when it might be wiser not to.
Warrior-aristocracies cover, as best I can tell, the great majority of complex, agrarian non-state societies and it isn’t hard to see how all of the systems fit together: the warrior-aristocrats, their retinues of lesser warrior-aristocrats and common-soldier retainers, the fragmentation of violence in the society and the leadership role of those warrior aristocrats. Naturally, the most senior (by wealth, generally, because this is about power within a society) warrior-aristocrats will lead the army in battle, with more junior warrior-aristocrats leading common soldiers in a retinue-of-retinues army structure: the biggest Big Man leads the army, with the retinues of his subordinate Big Men beneath him and so on, down to the common soldiers at the bottom of each of these retinues.
As a society gets more complex and a state emerges, the state often comes with new kinds of non-military, non-aristocratic civilian leadership roles (note that religious leadership roles invariably pre-date the state – but priests and the state is a topic (voted on by the Senate) for another day). That opens up new forms of military-aristocracy but also new forms of civil leadership – the interactions between them are complex.
On the one hand, the form of military leadership might change, from warrior-aristocrats to what I am calling officer-aristocrats. In this second form, military leadership remains largely hereditary, limited to large landholders, but they understand their military role not as personally fighting in a given way, but as leading or organizing. The Roman aristocracy functions this way: Roman generals are invariably aristocratic senators, but their model of leadership is not based on the demonstration of personal combat ability or even necessarily personal physical bravery. They are thus free, as a matter of social expectation, to ‘command from the rear’ – a Roman general can get ‘stuck in,’ but they do not have to and it is rarely the wise thing to do so they don’t do it often. Instead of performing personal fighting, these fellows are often expected to be performing organizational and logistical leadership. I cannot see any specific reason why this form of leadership couldn’t emerge in a non-state society, but I struggle to think of an example – even Chinggis Khan and his heirs had to demonstrate their martial bona fides in riding and hunting to maintain legitimacy within their aristocracies, in a way that no Greek strategos, Roman general or Chinese general seems to have had to.
The other quirk for increasingly complex aristocracies is the relationship between budding civil administrations and older military aristocracies. Often, even as the civilian administration is taken over by an educated sub-aristocratic class (professionals, burghers, etc.) the command of armies remains in the hands of the old aristocracy. The classic example of this was the distinction in Ancien Régime France between the noblesse d’épée (‘Nobility of the Sword’) – the old nobility, which still exercised most military command – and the noblesse de robe (‘Nobility of the Robe’), a newer nobility that generally held administrative or judicial positions, but not generally military ones. Likewise, the old Prussian aristocracy, die Junker, maintained a clear presence in military posts in the German army through the Second World War.
In other cases, the rising civil administrative class and the military aristocracy remain the same. The Greek polis and the Roman Republic both provide paradigmatic examples, where the assumption clearly was that the same sort of skills that prepared a man to lead in peace also prepared him to lead in war. To greatly simplify, in both Greece and Rome, there was generally a hereditary landed aristocracy of elite families in any given community and often the function of voting systems was to choose which of those hereditary elites would exercise power (by holding this or that office) at a given time.
The other major option for states are to forgo a military aristocracy more or less altogether and professionalize their officers. Because this is how most modern militaries work, I think it is what people reach to first, but I have put it last because it is so incredibly rare. Vocational leadership classes – our military aristocracies where men are born into command – are very common; professional leadership classes, where men are selected and trained for the task, are very rare. This runs counter to most folks’ expectations, but it remains broadly true: the enlisted ranks (the ‘common soldiers,’ though by the time we’re talking about them as ‘enlisted ranks,’ we’re obviously talking about quite well established states) are professionalized long before the leadership class is. The Roman army by the first century AD is fully professional in its ‘enlisted’ ranks (through the centurions), but retains its senatorial military-aristocrat command class. Likewise, European armies in the sixteenth and seventeenth century increasingly consist of professional soldiers, supported by an increasingly professional civil bureaucracy, lead by the same old military-aristocracy as the Late Middle Ages. Professional soldiers often come before – and often simply without – professional officers.
That said, the Chinese state bureaucracy, particularly as it comes to be dominated by the civil service examination system during the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and subsequently does represent a kind of professionalization of military leadership, albeit professionalized not around military skills but rather around skills in writing, literature and philosophy. If that seems shocking, remember that Roman aristocrats got formal training in philosophy and rhetoric, not command, as boys too. We’ll cover in a moment how military leadership skills were communicated. Nevertheless, these scholar-officials show up pretty often in military leadership roles.
Leader Selection
Now briefly, we should also talk about how these leaders are selected. After all, a society has more potential generals than armies, so there must be some way to decide who gets command. In non-state societies, where the potential generals are also military-aristocrats with their own retinues, chieftains and kings often have very limited options on who to put in command: if the king is present, the expectation is that he leads the army (that’s what kings are for), but if he isn’t, then often there’s a strong impulse for the biggest of the magnates to do so. After all, if you snub Duke so-and-so for command despite his bringing the largest retinue, he might just leave and take his retinue with him.
Indeed, for many non-state polities where military power is highly fragmented and fluid, the answer to ‘who leads the army’ is often ‘whoever can.’ In pre-Roman Spain and Gaul, the pattern we see in our sources looks fairly fluid, with charismatic or capable warlords emerging – invariably out of the warrior-aristocracy, these men are not peasants – to knit together large coalitions and thus large armies through personal leadership and charisma.
By contrast, as the state grows stronger, it can exercise more choice on who gets command. For monarchies, that often means royal selection, which may be quite personal (if the aristocracy is small) or, in large bureaucratic states, institutionalized and impersonal. Often the lower ranks have an institutional system of advancement (as we’ll see below), but major commands need to be signed off on at the center of power, simply because generals and admirals represent substantial risks to central authority and must be vetted for loyalty even more than for ability.
Republics are comparatively rare, but they tend to elect their generals and often elect lower officers as well. For states which structure recruitment through contractors, those contractors generally become the officers who lead units, typically led by a general chosen by the king. But those colonels (the contractors) and the general are almost invariably drawn from the same military aristocracy that would have provided them in a vassalage-based system (though in some cases the captains beneath the colonels may come from lower social backgrounds, in which case their career path may be different and may reach its ceiling earlier).
Crucially, the ‘roster’ from which the state – be that a king personally or a bureaucracy generally – can select from tends to remain limited to the tradition, generally hereditary leadership class. After all, a king who tried to fill his posts with commoners would find all of his other key stakeholders – who are military aristocrats – swiftly moving against him. There are occasional exceptions, of course, but they remain occasional because the state, in whatever form it is, needs these magnates in order to function and so it cannot simply sideline them. Of course eventually the modern administrative state emerges which no longer needs these fellows and thus may dispense with them, but that is quite explicitly a modern creature and in any case it merely creates a new leadership class.
There is, after all, a reason that modern armies are led by college-educated officers, often with advanced degrees in the higher ranks, drawn from the same system of elite education that produces our presidents, prime ministers, senators and MPs. Because no army can help but recreate its civilian social structures on the battlefield, so a society where the divide is no longer aristocrat and peasant, but blue-collar and white-collar has blue-collar soldiers and white-collar officers.
How Leaders are Trained
Now generals, admirals and other officers are not, in fact, born ready to command, whatever the social mythology of a ruling class may think. Armies – even smaller units within armies – are complex creatures that require a fair bit of knowledge and skill to control properly. As important, leadership is a skill itself: it is a performance, the exact elements of which will vary from one culture to the next, but it has to be learned. So clearly there must be some way in each of these societies to teach the fellows who will lead.
Here is a spot where I see worldbuilders who aren’t necessarily familiar with historical systems err quite badly, because they import the assumptions of how individuals are prepared and selected for leadership from modern societies. Sometimes the assumption is that command preparation works more or less like an idealized becoming the manager of a small franchise: one starts as the cash register and works upwards. But that absolutely does not work: these societies have low social mobility and a military leadership class which is jealous of its privileges. Service ‘in the ranks’ may or may not be an expectation of command preparation for that military leadership class, but even for societies where it is, no one expects to simply ‘work their way up’ from the ranks. Instead, in pre-modern armies as in modern ones, there is generally a sharp and rarely bridged (in pre-modern armies, often flatly unbridgeable) divide between officers and senior enlisted personnel, because there is a class difference being expressed.
The alternative assumption is to assume that pre-modern command preparation must look rather a lot like modern command preparation or at least some version of modern education: there has to be a ‘generalship academy,’ with classes and competitive exams and so on. This tendency is, I think, heightened in a lot of fiction where the audience are young adults and so the core conceit is basically, “what if high school and college was all facets of life?” because high school and college is the social structure the reader knows and cares about. So you get the military academies of Fire Emblem: Three Houses or Trails of Cold Steel or Final Fantasy VIII (a trope that clearly started in Japan but feels like it has worked into English-language young adult fiction over time as well). Pre-modern societies functionally never have these formal institutions for officer training. The only major exception here is the aforementioned Chinese civil service system, but that didn’t train command or military skills, which were left to be acquired through experience and apprenticeships.
But of course leaders must be trained. These societies engage in quite a lot of warfare and they cannot afford to simply be bad at it, so leaders have to be prepared.
The most common answer by far is some form of apprenticeship system: young potential leaders (from the right social class) are trained with a mix of informal tutelage (at the hands of more senior leaders) and experience, often in a sequence of experiences and roles that is quite clearly and often rigidly defined. Not always so, mind you – the path by which became a general in ancient Greece was often a lot less predictable, for instance – but frequently so.
So, for instance, the Roman cursus honorum, the sequences of posts and offices a Roman aristocrat embarking on a political career might hold, has a pretty clear bent towards military preparation. A young man would first serve a few years ‘in the ranks’ (typically as a cavalryman, because he’s rich), before trying to obtain a post as a military tribune (essentially a staff officer), where the expectation was that the commanding general he served under (a consul or a praetor) would take his tribunes under his wing. Military tribunes also had some command duties, generally lower-stakes and usually accomplished in pairs. Then came the quaestorship, a financial and administrative office which often meant handling logistics for an army (or the finances of the whole state), again under the watchful eye of more senior magistrates. Then the praetorship represented the first independent opportunity for command, but generally with a small force in a largely pacified region. Only then might a Roman aristocrat, now approaching the eligibility age of 42, consider the consulship and real field command – which of course came with it an expectation of tutoring the next generation of military tribunes and quaestors and so the process repeated. In short, the career path is a series of ‘command apprenticeships.’
The education of a medieval western European knight started even earlier, but was also structured effectively as a series of apprenticeships, although in this case focused as much on personal combat skills (because this is a warrior-aristocracy, unlike the Roman one) as leadership.1 High-born boys would be effectively apprenticed to another noble house as a page at age seven to serve and also be trained in the necessary skills of his rank, including combat and leadership. At fourteen, that boy would graduate into being a squire, a knight’s on-the-field shield-and-armor bearer, learning the skills of the warrior-aristocracy first hand, ideally becoming a knight himself in his early 20s. Even then, he is probably not going to be handed a large unit, but rather be expected to lead his own small unit, while the more senior (by both age and wealth) members of the nobility lead larger retinues.
As an aside, popular depictions of knights miss a component of this because they tend – the recent Knight of the Seven Kingdoms does this, albeit with a plot excuse that the main character is a very poor knight – to have a knight on his own with just a squire or a page. But in practice even a relatively humble knight was expected to lead a small unit (a ‘lance fournie‘) of at least a half-dozen men. Of course the kind of boy who might, by dint of birth, expect to end up commanding much larger retinues would probably squire for a lord who also commanded much larger retinues.
Alternately, we might even jump well into the early modern period and look at the career path for an officer in the French army of the 17th century.2 Aspiring officers, drawn from France’s old knightly and noble classes, first served a couple of years as a regular soldier (either as a cadet or as a volunteer serving with a relative), before being pulled into service as one of the very junior officers (ensigns and sous-lieutenants). Service at that level qualified a young man to seek to purchase a commission as a captain to lead a company, where he served under a colonel. In each step, a young men relied substantially on patronage and support from his superiors and so young officers were encouraged to attach themselves to more senior ones both to try to learn and to try to impress. Captains who came from wealth could eventually purchase a commission as a colonel, while those who lacked it might instead advance to the dead-end administrative post of major. The king then chose the officers above the post of colonel, but generally from men who had processed through this system. Lynn openly describes the system as one of “military apprenticeship.” The period’s navies worked much the same, except that the highly technical nature of naval warfare meant the apprenticeship was longer and involved more formal learning.3
In literate societies, these apprenticeships might be supplemented with written guidebooks, military manuals of various kinds. There is an odd tendency in modern fantasy fiction to pooh-pooh this sort of thing – Game of Thrones (the show, in particular) goes out of its way a few times to cast aspersions on the usefulness of such works – but the fact that societies with literate military aristocracies produce and preserve these kinds of works with regularity suggests that the fellows who would know best – the one’s actually leading armies – found them useful.
In the pre-modern era, however, such military manuals are rarely strictly technical in nature – they are not very much like a modern field manual. Instead, they tend to be framed more like a work of philosophy, laying out general principles for command, compiling lists of strategems or famous examples of tactics and so on. Often they extend beyond what we might consider strictly military matters, to include general advice on rulership, blending into a genre we call ‘mirrors for princes,’ guidebooks on how to rule well. The key thing to keep in mind is these manuals were not intended as textbooks for classics, but often works for reflection, intended to be read (and re-read) alongside a man’s trip through his military apprenticeships. Purely technical ‘reference’ books existed as well (Vitruvius’ De architectura is a paradigmatic example), but seem to have been more rare; they get a lot more common after gunpowder, when a command of engineering and mathematics (for ballistics) suddenly become a lot more important.
However, for someone looking to come to grips with the leadership culture of a pre-modern society, I would encourage you to see military manuals and mirrors for princes operating within a continuum of other literary works: histories, epics, religious texts and so on, all of which are telling aristocrats how to be aristocrats. These men, after all, are not generally professionals trained in a school, they are members of a permanent, hereditary (or semi-hereditary) military-leadership class and so excellence at command for them often consists of the refinement of the manners and habits of their class. That might include careful logistics or sound tactical planning, but equally it might include poetry, courtly manners, the habits of a good patron and so on. The delineation we expect between the professional skills of ‘military science’ and the social skills of the professional managerial class (to which most modern officers belong) simply does not exist for pre-modern societies where military leadership is not professionalized.
Thinking About Leadership
For the worldbuilder then, thinking about fictional armies (or the student of history thinking about real ones), be sure to think about the entire military-leadership life-cycle. After all, when the important council of war gathers, it isn’t just going to be the top generals involved: those generals have their own subordinates (who are also their apprentices), who may have their own subordinates (who are their apprentices) and so on. One thing that is often missing in these sorts of stories are the host of junior officers we know would normally be present, observing the decision-making process – even if, because they’re more junior in age or rank, they aren’t expected to say anything.
So the first question should be “where does the ‘officer class’ as it were, of this society come from?” Some kinds of armies can get away with fairly minimal numbers of officers and relatively amateurish ones, but most more sophisticated kinds of warfare demand a fair bit of organization. Keep in mind, when thinking about this question, the sharp limits on both information gathering and on issuing commands, which is going to mean that leaders even relatively small distances away from the ‘center’ (whoever is in overall command) are going to be exercising a lot of independent leadership. As a result, there are probably a fair number more fellows involved in leadership and decision-making than you might expect for even a very modest army.
Next, think about what kinds of peacetime life habits the officer class might have. Since they’re unlikely to be professionals, chances are they are large landholders, or (in a pastoral society), large herd owners. The war leader is more often the fellow who wields the most influence within a society – on account of wealth, charisma, family connections and so on – than the best fellow at commanding, so think about what kinds of power matter within the aristocracy and what latitude the social system has for advancement based on merit. But also think about how these fellows interact with subordinates in their peacetime role, because that is likely how they will default to acting in a military role – it is the ‘leadership skillset’ they are learning even when they are not in the saddle. Roman command behavior, I’d argue, flows very directly out of Roman patron-client relations and their habits. Likewise, it is hard not to see medieval leadership language conditioned both by the war aristocrats related to fellow aristocrats in their household (the knights in the retinue of a lord, for instance) and also the far more domineering way they interacted with their peasants (who might be their common soldiers).
Above all: these men are attempting to perform generalship. They are not so much moving pieces on a chessboard as they are playing on a stage, attempting to look the part of being a general because that is actually what often mattered the most.
Finally, think about how these men advance – not merely who decides who gets to be the general, but also who gets to decide who advances through more junior offices. Systems will, after all, select for the skills which ensure advancement and a system of elected generals is going to work quite differently from a system where advancement has more to do with patronage from senior officers to more junior ones, which in turn is also going to be very different from a system where state power is so weak that ‘advancement’ just means having the largest private army within a larger retinue-of-retinues force.
Next week, we’ll shift our focus from leadership back to the common soldiers to look at how to think about the cohesive principles of a given force, since different armies rely on different systems to generate that all important cohesion.
- On this next bit, see Rogers, Soldiers’ Lives Through History: The Middle Ages (2007) and Verbruggen, The Art of War in Western Europe during the Middle Ages (1997). Popular culture depictions of knights tend to be both quite common and also quite bad despite the fact that there is a lot of really good public scholarship available to help getting these things right.
- Working from Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army: 1610-1715 (1997).
- On this, see N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World (1986).
China did have a parallel military examination system starting in 702 during the reign of Wu Zetian, with the literary side focusing on their military classics, along with tests of mounted archery, halberd exercises, and raw strength. The Tang general Guo Ziyi (who recaptured Chang’an from An Lushan) was one of the graduates of that path who rose the highest, as military exam graduates tended to fill lower officer positions with civil examination graduates holding overall command. At the risk of overly simplifying things to fit into the paradigm of the article, the civil examination produced officer-aristocrats while the military examination produced graduates closer to warrior-aristocrats, with very rare movement from the latter group to the former.
Or the military examination produced a professional NCO/senior enlisted corps.
The vast difference between enlisted and officers in Anglo-Saxon militaries blinds us easily to the finer distinctions inside the officer corps. And those do exist. In particular, I would like to raise the Continental difference between general staff officers (Offiziere in Generalstabsdienst) and everyone else. Typically, the acceptance into the general staff officer corps takes place at the stage where you are a captain, as acceptance into the war college. You are never going to command a brigade without being a general staff officer. In larger armies, there is often even a further qualification of military academy, where you go as a colonel or major general, after even a couple of further rounds of culling.
In the Continental systems, especially where the military model is (or was historically) based on the mobilisation, there is no “up or out” but a career officer serves until orderly retirement. Thus, most officers will never be general staff officers but will grow old as majors or lieutenant colonels, doing staff work in various echelons that would have real troops (or at least real troops corresponding to the officer strength of that echelon) under their command only during mobilisation. (As far as I understand, this career group exists nowadays also in the US military: officers passed over for promotion but retained for the interests of the service. But they are not talked about much, because the very existence of the personnel group is an embarrasment.)
So, considering that the graduates of the Chinese military examinations were, in the actual fact, quite few, you don’t need to try to find parallels in senior NCOs but in these more career-limited types of officers who are going to serve for life, enjoy full privileges of an officer but are never going to make general.
Does this happen in all European countries? The fact that it’s called “Offiziere in Generalstabsdienst” seems to indicate it’s inherited from Prussia specifically.
Although perhaps most countries ended up imitating them; I’m hardly an expert.
The protection from “up or out” seems to be pretty slim in the US.
– 18-20 years service, just to get them to 20 which gives them a full pension,
– “critical specialists”, mostly medical until recently, probably because the civilian remuneration is so much better,
– flag officers, who started out as high nobility and have almost always been by seniority,
– warrant officers, who are specialists and are a sort of halfway officer, designed back when an officer wasn’t expected to be technically proficient.
I think the “up or out” rule was designed for several reasons:
1. Officers are supposed to be hungry to do well and lead. If you’re not hot to lead ever larger units, are you really fit to be an officer at all?
2. It also gives you a set of civilians who are supposed to have the skills. Which is useful when you go to war and you have a sudden need for more officers.
3. It might keep generals from gathering a huge flock of ensigns around them who are scions of families capable of patronage but are completely useless at being an officer. If you have “up or out”, eventually they have to be sent out to lead some unit and be promoted or be kicked out. Or die, I guess. Hard on the unit that they lead into a disaster though.
During the Vietnam War the US tried to drastically increase its number of officers. This only resulted in the American armed forces acquiring loads of incompetent ones. Oftentimes these incompetent officers got killed by their own soldiers. There is a TV trope for such occasions in fiction:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnfriendlyFire
See also “fragging”, named after the widespread practice of using hand grenades to kill or wound officers. And it was widespread, hundreds of cases are known. Also “Fodding”, where soldiers would damage their equipment, such as by throwing paint and screws into gears on a ship.
Though a more in depth discussion of that can likely wait till Bret talks about cohesion. It wasn’t really directly indicative of the officer bloat, but rather not were caused by the fact that the cohesive principal broke.
In (at least professional) militaries you achieve cohesion by mixing vertical bonds to superiors with horizontal bonds to peers. The horizontal bonds get units to cohere together, and the vertical bonds let you command them to do things they’d normally not want to do. The vertical bonds are like a leash you use to pull the army to where you want. It’s why leadership is so important, particularly in offensive operations; you can get weakly led men to guard a position, it’s nearly impossible to get them to advance on a guarded one.
If your horizontal bonds break the unit dissolves, but if the vertical ones break it mutinies. Adding more officers is or can be an attempt by the top brass to get a firmer grip on the unit, but if there’s a fundamental disconnect between what the brass wants and the population writ large wants no amount of added officers will help; leverage isn’t the issue, the actual strength of will is.
Vietnam was a complete social breakdown. Politically what the ruling class and the working class wanted diverged. So everything about the military started to break. All issues were downwind of that.
Now I’m thinking about how one can use this for exposition.
“Ah, but because the Exxys have Zees, we must Wi them.”
“We both know that, why are you saying it out loud?”
“Well my dumbass apprentice needs it spelled out for him, sorry about that.”
“Ah it’s fine, if he really needs it spelled out such, then let me say it for everyone to know…”
I suppose underlying this is the pragmatic problem that if the civilian leadership structure and the military leadership structure isn’t aligned, the military leadership will be inclined to take over the civilian. Like in 16th-19th century Britain the military didn’t carry out a coup because the military leaders were the sons/younger brothers/nephews of those they’d be couping.
Something I find interesting while being ignorant about is how the Soviet and Chinese Communist Parties kept control of their militaries despite their revolutionary nature.
That’s because “revolutionary” is not an actual ideology that people follow, despite what some “enlightened centrists” say about the ideology of the left. The communist armies were loyal to the state because they were convinced of the cause of communism. There is no need to overthrow a government if the government currently in place is doing what you want – and the military wanted communism just like the party leaders. First because they literally were the revolutionaries who had everyone removed from power who was against that vision. And then because these states of course selected new military leaders who were ideologically aligned with the state.
Such ideological alignment I’d suspect is present in every state (You don’t get to be a US general either if you want to overthrow the government), but of course both China and the Soviet Union were very totalitarian and went a lot further than that. If you were an avowed communist but displeased the Party Leader, you’d get purged from the military very quickly and replaced by someone who didn’t. As long as these purges don’t become too sweeping or too general, this can work for a surprisingly long time in buying the loyalty of an institution, because not only does every purged person serve as an example for the rest, but their job vacancy is an opportunity to advance for somebody else. So people are incentivised to go along with it.
As I recall much of the Soviet officer corps was shot on the eve of the Second World War, which does not look to me as though the political leadership was entirely convinced of their loyalty.
The question of “Does the party leadership trust the military” is not really part of the argument I’m making – my question is the reverse “Does the military trust the party leadership?” And if an attempt at a mass purge of military leadership gets you lots of people willing to shoot the officer for you, instead of trying to shoot you with those pistols (and rifles, and tanks and airplanes), then the answer has to be “broadly, Yes”.
Although I will not dispute the least that authoritarian regimes very quickly slide into paranoia in their search for disloyalty, and end up purging everyone who looks competent in their job, to their own eventual detriment and of course unnecessary human suffering.
“It is not paranoia if they are really out to get you.”
Authoritarian regimes that face a significant risk of coups and revolutions — one indicator being that the current regime itself came to power after removing a previous regime in such a way — are perfectly justified in acting on that knowledge. (In Paradox games, you have a nice, numeric score for legitimacy and/or stability.)
when ‘just shoot them’ is perceived as an acceptable way to get rid of your officer corps, there’s generally a bit of a blurry line between disloyalty and incompetence. Often with an explanation of ‘they must have been plotting against me because no-one could actually be that stupid’, when clearly these very loyal men really were that stupid. Throw in a side of ‘we should be just as capable at this as any other given nation because us guys in charge are just as smart as their guys in charge, if not more so, completely ignoring structural, geographical and economic reasons why we are very much less capable’ and people get purged for disloyalty when they were loyal, because the failure has to be a conspiracy, not a result of bad luck and poor planning.
Of course some rulers will just openly state ‘yeah he was loyal, but he made a big mistake and now i’m telling him to literally fall on his own sword’, but the expectation of self-impalement generally seems to have needed to be quite well established to stop the guys just saying ‘nu-uh’ and taking off at a dead sprint.
Fanatics can’t imagine the possibility of their own methods not working. So when things don’t go as intended they take sabotage for granted. That in turn leads to people being killed for crimes which never took place. Hence the extreme cruelty of totalitarian regimes.
@ad9,
I think that had more to do with Stalin’s personal….issues though, and less to do with general sentiments in the party as a whole.
… Sort of. There’s been a general tendency lately in scholarship to point that while Stalin certainly starte the purges and was in overall control there was quite a bit of bottom-up and side-to-side stuff going on: People taking the chance to get rid of rivals, or even just genuinely people they thought were dangerous. The purges were, in a sense, a mass movement and not neccessarily *entirely* top-down directed.
This is, partly, true, but it is an oversimplification. The Red Army had a lot of tsarist officers, who joined it either for opportunistic reasons or because they honestly believed that bolsheviks offered the least evil choice for Russia. In addition, the Red Army started professionalising almost immediately after the Civil War, because a conscription-based mass army absolutely needs a cadre. And even the working-class, bolshevist officers who had risen during the war tended to become first and foremost military men instead of being bolsheviks, because service in armed forces tends to produce a different mindset than service as a political functionary or civil administrator. In addition, the working class officers were heavily, even desperately, schooled at all levels during the 1920’s to produce educated officer cadres – which, despite political indoctrination inherent in all Soviet military education, tends to perpetuate certain military-technical mindset.
The keys that the Soviet leadership used to control the army were
1) political officers (politruks) who most typically had a veto over commander’s decisions.
2) deep and wide infiltration of the Red Army by the Cheka-NKVD-OGB-MGB-KGB-FSB continuum.
3) massive purge of the officer corps, which meant that in 1939, about every non-purged Soviet officer was working two levels of command above their formal competence.
Later, during the Cold War, the Soviet Army was a very professional body that was very pliant with regard to political leadership, and the role of political officers was mainly comparable to chaplains, but this was mainly because the leadership was very much a mirror of the political one: the senior officers were people who had begun their careers under Stalin and who had performed well in the WWII, and were now enjoying all the perks of being part of the peace-time nomenclatura. And younger ones were products of the Soviet educational system, just like their civilian peers in the civilian nomeclatura.
That’s a fair point to make. As my first sentence might indicate, I had a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to what to me appeared to be the premise of the question. So I over-emphasized that these were not revolutions for the sake of having a revolution, but for the sake of implementing an ideology. Reality is of course always messier than that, and a state is made up of lots of people with different motivations.
It’s probably just as valid to answer the question of “Why did the military give up power by allowing the establishment of political officers and secret police oversight?” with “Because the decision makers at the time were ideologically aligned and thus trusted civilian leadership” and with “Because the decision makers did not want a military counter-revolution coup and that meant re-establishing strong civilian leadership control over the military.”
The Bolsheviks which founded the Soviet Union cam to power by kidnapping the Russian Revolution. Which in turn had broken out spontaneously as a reaction to Russia’s inability to defend itself during WWI. The Chinese Communists cam to power by winning the last round of Chinese civil wars.
“Such ideological alignment I’d suspect is present in every state (You don’t get to be a US general either if you want to overthrow the government)”
I don’t think this is strictly true everywhere; the Latin American militaries who performed coups d’état were often able to get promoted despite wanting to overthrow the government. But it is probably at least true enough that it makes the stereotypical coup plotter a colonel rather than a general (cf Nasser, Gaddafi)
I don’t think this is strictly true everywhere; the Latin American militaries who performed coups d’état were often able to get promoted despite wanting to overthrow the government.
I think that’s right. And then of course two other factors are:
1) in countries with pluralistic, election-based systems, the party that was in charge when a general was promoted may not be the party that’s in charge *now*, and if your loyalty is to the party rather than the system, then it might not transfer over to the new government, and
2) in times of ideological ferment (and Latin America during the mid 20th c was definitely in a state of ideological turmoil), a general’s opinions and ideological beliefs can change over time, and their loyalties might subsequently change too.
I think it’s definitely true that the classic, and most common, coup plotter is a colonel rather than a general. Though there are 20th c cases where even quite low ranking officers like Sergeants have overthrown governments.
I would take an exception to your statement about the British military not doing coups. In my opinion, there were two:
1) Lord Protector Cromwell quite explicitly rose to power as the commander of the New Model Army and dissolved the Long Parliament with a very open military support. His subsequent rule was probably the first modern military dictatorship.
2) The “Glorious Revolution” was a Dutch strategic strike where a foreign power bribed the leaders of the British military to stand aside while the capital was occupied with a fast invasion and then the coup finalised with the subversive elements of the parliament used to rubber-stamp the result of the military strike.
So, the British military was extremely subversive element during the 17th century, and only became a reliable tool of classes in power after the landed aristocracy (i.e. the Parliament) was able to cement its political pre-eminence.
I doubt Oliver Cromwell could think outside the box. He may not even have been aware there was a box to think outside. To me the ability to think outside the box is the difference between a military dictator and a traditional monarch.
Oliver Cromwell to the Scots Presbyterians: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, consider it possible ye may be mistaken”.
Sounds as if he was well aware that thinking outside a box might be possible. And did you know that when Archbishop Ussher died, Cromwell gave him a funeral in Westminster Abbey, according to the Anglican liturgy, at Government expense? Way outside any normal box, for one in his position.
In the case of the USSR, they actually experimented substantially in the 1920s and 30s with attempting to abolish rank and attendant hierarchy as such and replace it with one purely contingent on assignments and temporary positions. That this was largely ineffective and ended up solidifying after WW2 into a system where very little authority was devolved to NCOs and commissioned officers ended up taking many of the responsibilities NCOs have in modern Western-system militaries suggests strongly that this was a more accurate reflection of Soviet society, where even the modest social integration necessary to become a junior lieutenant was critical to being trusted with authority. (Or to put it in other words, the USSR did not produce a society without a social elite, they produced a society in which membership in the social elite was inflected by conscious expressions of ideological alignment as well as by family connections etc.)
And of course, this process also ended up killing a great many people who adopted that ideological alignment at the early stages while being members of the former social elite, right around the time the early experiments became clear failures…
Russia has virtually replaced its elite twice in less than a century. This pretty much killed off the idea of a hereditary elite being born to rule. Unfortunately the Soviet regime and its ultimate failure did not kill off other pre-modern myths on how people in general work. At least this is my best explanation for so many present-day Russians showing attitudes which seems to belong to a Feudal society.
I’m not sure mid-17th-century Britain (England) is your best example here!
Zampolits in every unit, lots of executions and much exile to worse conditions.
The initial Soviet takeover was interesting because e.g. Lenin was not in the military. Mao was a military leader (guerilla). Both took over where the state had failed. Russia fell apart while fighting WW1, China was torn apart by fighting the Japanese, which spiraled into the whole country ending up in the hands of warlords.
the Chinese military is under the direct command of the Party, through the Central Military Commission – which is a Party office – led by the General Secretary, instead of any High Command/General Staff/War Ministry. Basically a Party’s own military, not a national one.
This reminds me of something I’ve been wondering about for awhile: what was the deal with Maximinus Thrax? I am not so much puzzled by the idea that he could jump from commanding a legion to being emperor, and more puzzled by the idea that he supposedly rose from being a common soldier of low birth to commanding a legion. Did the army of Imperial Rome transition to being exceptionally meritocratic by pre-modern standards at some point? Had the cursus honorum broken down? Or should we dismiss the idea of him being a common soldier of low birth as a slander invented by his enemies?
(I think there are similar questions about some of the other 3rd century emperors, though some of the so-called “barracks emperors” seem to have had more normal Roman aristocratic careers.)
I would really take the descriptions of “low birth” with a pinch of salt. Even in the Late Republic, many political new-comers were domi nobiles, local big men. Considering that you needed to have a certain basic education to function effectively at the higher military offices, it is quite likely that these “low-birth” emperors were actually from quite privileged backgrounds, simply becaue they were able to get a basic schooling. Maximinus Thrax, if he started out really as a “shephered and bandit leader”, was probably a local big man, because that is how you become a leader of a bandit (i.e. rebel) group. However, they would have been considered “low-birth” by our historians who were from the old Roman aristocracy.
A bit like Obama or Vance: men who are often considered examples of how one rises from nothing to the political summit of the USA, but whose family backgrounds are, if you look more carefully, quite wealthy and allowed them very good educational opportunities.
there’s also a tendency of aristocracy to be rather snobbish about people they regard as ‘new money’, no matter the exact circumstances they ended up being ‘new money’, which in some cases is literally just ‘they were from a rural area distant from the capital, and the last couple of generations of their family were, despite prodigious wealth, a bit antisocial so now we’ve forgotten where they’re actually from.’ One funny example is the dukes of devonshire in england, given the cavendishes were already spectacularly wealthy when the duchy was created, but someone in attendance wasn’t too familiar on where derbyshire was, or whether it existed, so put the wrong region (devon, in the south west, rather than derbyshire, in the east midlands) in the title of the peerage.
I guess I’m more interested in the “common soldier” part than the “low birth” part. Like sure any Roman citizen could in theory become a quaestor and proceed up the cursus honorum. But… did he? Was he most likely a quaestor at some point, making him eligible to become a senator (even if the other senators looked down on him), or did he somehow make the jump straight from centurion to legate?
@Bret, this series is labeled as ‘for Worldbuilders’ but there’s no link to it on your Resources for Worldbuilders page, seems like an oversight.
One thing I feel the article could be clearer about is the spectrum between a Hereditary Leadership Class and a Professional Leadership within a larger Propertied Class in places where there is a certain amount of split between “Military” and “Civilian” careers.
To illustrate what I mean, look at Carthage – both their war leaders (rab mahanet) and their civilian leaders (shofetim) came of course from wealthy members of their citizen class, but not only did advancing in one career lock you out from another, but at least for the Barcids, it seems that being the child of a war leader makes you considerably more likely to also choose a war leader career. So somewhat like having a hereditary Military Aristrocract sub-class within the larger class of Propertied Notables.
Compare that to the example he gives about the modern state. Yes, both generals and politicians are drawn from the (not closed but still likely to self-replicate) academic class. And there’s also not often an overlap – successful generals don’t generally quit to run for Congress of vice versa. But the children of generals don’t automatically also become military leaders. They chose their own academic path and might become politicians or even tenured professors.
Or somewhat in the middle of the spectrum sits the two-track Imperial Examinations @Steve K mentions above – to be able to afford to prepare and sit through the examination you had to be a member of the propertied class of scholar-officials. While there was no requirement to choose the same exam track as your father (in theory, the examinations were open to all), of course your family background would prepare you better for one track than the other – a child of a general has more opportunities to learn horse-riding and archery than that of a magistrate.
” successful generals don’t generally quit to run for Congress of vice versa. ”
They sometimes do run for President though. Of the 47 US presidents, ten have achieved general rank.
Who, of course, were really only 45 distinct individuals.
Oh damn we had a whole half-century period from 1840-1888 where half our presidents had achieved the rank of general? Different time.
It’s also worth noting that lots of officers leave the military and go into politics. Fun bit of trivial that every single Cold War era US President was a former military officer, every single one of them part of the military chain of command in WWII (in Truman’s case, of course, this was by virtue of being Commander in Chief, though he’d previously attained the rank of Colonel).
Nowadays military officers are less dominant in US politics, though George W. Bush was an officer (even if he was attacked for having had a cushy Air National Guard spot rather than something likely to get him deployed to a combat zone), and there are still at least a few officers serving in Congress (Google says 100 veterans, I suspect heavily skewed towards officers though I’d be surprised if there weren’t a few enlisted and I can’t find an exact breakdown).
Another interesting fact I remember hearing during the 2024 election (in the context of Tim Walz’s service record) is that we’ve had NCOs become Vice President, but never President.
“Naturally, the most senior (by wealth, generally, because this is about power within a society) warrior-aristocrats will lead the army in battle, with more junior warrior-aristocrats leading common soldiers”
That ties to the ambiguity about the word “senior”.
Because it also has the common meaning of “older”.
There are other words available. Like “higher/superior”, or “better”, which sometimes got used. And yet a lot of societies insisted on conflation between social position and age, despite their obvious conflict. That includes the screaming oxymoron of “Senorita”.
If the wealth and position was normally held for life, any warrior aristocracy had to deal with fathers who were for a prolonged time distinctly less physically fit to fight than their adult sons or their rank and file followers, and yet continued to hold the wealth and status above the sons and followers.
What were the fathers doing in war? As Memnon said, killing an old man brings little honour.
Remember that the aristocrat earns their position of command by wealth and birth, they do not earn wealth and birth by martial excellence. If the father can’t fight, he still retains his wealth and status. And while warrior aristocrats are expected to lead their followers in battle, if you have a good reason for not fighting, a son is usually an acceptable substitute.
Or, the old fathers fight anyway. John of Bohemia died at the battle of Crécy, fighting for the French at age 50 and having been blind for many years. He wanted to die in battle. Jean de Vienne and Enguerrand de Coucy fought (for the French) at the battle of Nicopolis both aged 55, one dying in battle, one captured.
I would consider those examples middle-aged. When you use the word “old” I think of people over 60.
Those people would definitely be considered old in the middle ages. Not neccessarily *extremely* so but still old.
While high infant mortality does tend to skew the results a lot more than you might think, people still generally died a whole lot earlier: So in a sense people just didn’t have time to grow old the way we do.
You are right in that even those reaching adulthood did live a bit shorter than we do today. Living to more than 80 – which is common nowadays – would have meant you were very lucky in pre-industrial times.
Case in point, no King of England made it to 70. Unless you count Phillip of Spain.
The generally poor medical care available in this era and the lack of, for example, modern scientific physical therapy grounded in scientific studies of anatomy to help you recover fully from injuries meant that the typical person who lived to fifty was in considerably poorer health than the typical fifty-year-old today. If they had a chronic illness it was vanishingly unlikely to be receiving effective treatment; even if they did not it was overwhelmingly likely that various brushes with injury and disease would have, as it were, undermined their constitution.
While a fifty year old under such conditions would not generally be decrepit in the sense of, say, “would physically struggle to climb a flight of stairs,” they are very likely to be ‘old’ in the sense that the aging process has affected them to the point where strenuous prolonged physical activity such as “work all day in the fields” is quite noticeably more difficult for them than would be normal for men in their twenties or thirties. Similarly they may struggle with prolonged rough conditions such as sleeping under canvas or under the open sky in an army camp, or in fighting a pitched battle which tends to exhaust people very quickly.
Everything at work here is in purely statistical terms, but it is by no means unreasonable that medievals considered a fifty year old man to be “getting old.” Dying in your early sixties was then a “ripe old age” whereas we would now consider it “dying young.”
John of Bohemia died at the battle of Crécy, fighting for the French at age 50 and having been blind for many years
I recently learned about him on Eleanor Janega’s history podcast (she calls him “John of Luxembourg”): if the stories are accurate (and the sources mostly seem to agree), that is one amazing story, about him charging into battle tied to other knights.
Our host’s thesis–military structures mirror civilian structures–is spectacularly supported by the examples of Switzerland and Israel. In these countries, the mirroring exists at the individual level. Both countries rely on large and well-trained reserve forces. The reserve officers have civilian day jobs. There is a very strong correlation between the SES of the civilian day job and the military rank of the reserve officer. If you’re talking to an Israeli colonel, you’re probably also talking to a senior corporate executive.
The match is not precise – there are many people from a high SES that are grunts in the reserves. But, since the Army is professional, you need to be a good manager in order to get promoted to a Colonel, which means that you can likely find a good-paying job in the civilian world.
From my (second hand but close up) experience, the Israeli system in practice is not a replication of civilian social structures in the way our host means: the people being commanded are not that executive’s employees, they’re random other blue collar stiffs. And the correlation between peacetime and military status is not strong at the small unit level.
Rather, it’s a halfway house to the fully deracinated professional military. (This is also my understanding from reading about the Wilhelmine German mass mobilization system.)
Young men are pulled out of their civilian lives at a young age and thrown together with a random assortment of their age cohort. For 2-3 years, they undergo the full deracination experience of a professional military, breaking down social bonds and replacing them with a new parallel social hierarchy.
After their full time service, they are released into broader society… but are still brought back to the army in peacetime for reserve duty for a week or three every year. The point of this reserve duty is in part to keep them refreshed on skills and trained on new equipment, but as important is its function in maintaining a parallel social structure: peacetime reserve duty so that units do their reserve duty together, not separately as individuals. When war comes, the soldiers in a unit are not just the equivalent of the Western educated classes’ college acquaintances, but “comet” friends: dealt with infrequently but very intensely and at regular intervals.
People who participate in these systems very frequently describe them as rather different parallel societies from civilian life, and their peacetime participation in them as a removal (welcome or not) from civilian society rather than a replication of it.
Israel has mandatory conscription for women too. But I think it is shorter for woman than for men.
Possible typos:
“one starts as the cash register and works upwards.”
Did you mean “at the cash register”?
“manuals were not intended as textbooks for classics,”
Did you mean “textbooks for classes”?
You never had a retail job where you stood around and held money, shouting DING before handing it to the cashier?
I think it’s probably a mistake to class the use of tropes like “officer academies” is a statement of a belief of how it was. Fire Emblem, Tales, and Final Fantasy are not attempting to convince you of the historical truthiness of their setting; they’re doing it for instant emotional resonance with the audience who are familiar with being at school and feeling like an outcast, feeling like your life is leading up to some painfully high stakes tests. I doubt anyone was consciously thinking of the function of premodern routes of aristocratic education when they were designing the plots of these games, except perhaps as aesthetic influence.
And in any event the setting of Final Fantasy VIII is a pseudo-modern one, where we do actually have military schools (albiet with fewer gunswords, 19 year old teachers and giant monsters living in caves used for midterms).
I know you’ve got a lot of sunk value in this IP address, but I can’t help but think how much easier it would be to discover ACOUP, purchase memberships, and log in to comment if it were on Substack instead of WordPress. Please give it some consideration; WordPress just isn’t the go-to platform anymore.
“Armies cannot help but recreate their civilian social structures on the battlefield”
“the same sort of people who exercise positions of authority to organize civil society also lead the armies and navies of that society”
“Pre-modern societies are, by modern standards, extremely low in social mobility and so they create cultures and customs which justify and normalize those systems.”
I don´t notice you commenting on a major exception. The slave armies.
Which were not the only type of forces present in their societies…
Mid-16th century Turkey had the largest branch of forces as sipahi cavalry. These were somewhat “normal” warrior aristocracy – freeborn Turks who held lands and who could bequeath their position (but not specific lands!) to their sons. Sipahi numbers approached 100 000…
but then there were the infidel slaves.
The slave armies included Janissaries (about 12 000 foot) but also Household Six Divisions cavalry who were also slaves (about 5000 horse) and a number of officers.
Looking at the top, I seemed to count 26 men who served as Grand Vizier between 1500 and 1600 (distinct persons – some served multiple terms). Of these 26, 4 were of sipahi background – freeborn Turks.
The rest, 22 out of 26, were infidel slaves.
How did an infidel slave boy get picked to become Grand Vizier rather than live his life as a rank and file Janissary? There were something like 20 000 slave soldiers at any time, and fewer than 10 were the ones who would some time in his later life be the Grand Vizier.
Some of the Turkish commanders made a career because they had been noble in the infidel society before getting enslaved. So the Hercegovices. But my impression is that they were a minority, and most Grand Viziers had been of humble birth.
Note that there WERE different sorts of leadership in civil life compared to the slave Viziers and Pashas. A substantial part of sipahi officers were themself sipahis, and the civil life also had a role for qadis and mullas who were freeborn Turks.
And then there´s the Kingdom of Soldan. In Turkey, most of the upper class were slaves, except the Sultan (but his mother was a slave, too). In the Kingdom of Soldan, everybody in upper class was a Mameluke slave, and there including the Sultan.
How “modern” do you call the slave armies?
The Ottomans (I am less familiar with the mamlukes and others) is a very early modern state. (arguably one of the first)
My understanding is that Janissaries were sorted through a kind of meritocracy (though as usual there was a lot of patronage, “catching the eye” of a superior etc. going on) they were first sorted as recruits and sent to basically live among turkish families, forced to learn turkish, convert to islam, etc. Then they were sent to the Enderun Schools (I think they were all in Istanbul?) where they got the actual soldier training. Some of these were sorted to become officers or administrators depending on if they cuaght the eye of a superior, etc.
The name “Herzegovina” means “Duchy” in the local language. I have not found any “Kingdom of Soldan” on English-language Wikipedia. Is it more known under another name?
Mameluke state. Note that it included both Egypt and Levant. (“Kingdom of Soldan” is the name used in “Prince”).
For a world-building post about leadership, the societies with slave armies aren’t really any different from those around them.
The original Arabic-ish states in the early medieval period employed slave soldiers, ghulams, and this spread throughout the middle east and central Asian states. They also had viziers and other humble born officials who gained high rank – as favourites of the hereditary warrior aristocrat Caliphs. European medieval kings and emperors also sometimes raised favourites into positions of power.
But note how many viziers and royal favourites get executed by the ruler when they do something wrong, or are assassinated by jealous aristocrats, or executed by the next ruler when he inherits. This is a very low percentage way to enter the ruling class, and the existence of viziers and whatnot does not change the way the society operates and selects the vast majority of its military commanders.
The exceptions are where the slave soldiers become strong enough to seize power themselves, such as the Ghaznavids and the most famous Mamluks of Egpyt. And then they promptly turn themselves into a hereditary warrior aristocracy. For the vast majority of the population, and the soldiers, who lived through the Mamluk seizure of power in 13th C Egypt, the only difference was that the new Sultans spoke with a different accent.
This guide (and the others) are good for worldbuilding – if you’re doing historical fiction. If you’re doing fantasy, any sort of magic that’s at all common would an effect on all of these guides.
The effect varies from “almost none” to “throw it out and think your system through” though, so I guess advice is going to be much less useful.
One of the reasons LOTR battles work, in the sense that you can reason from our world to that and say “Yes, this seems like it would work” is that magic is pretty rare and confined to certain events.
On the battlefield, you have the explosion of the wall, and the morale effect of Sauron’s will (and later the effect of losing it). I suppose the flying mounts for the Nazgul could count as magic, since they couldn’t exist in our world as well.
But the magic doesn’t help recruit troops, there’s no wizard corps. It’s even a bit vague as to whether Anduril is actually magical, as opposed to just being well-made.
If your magic manifests more than this rarely, then you have to think pretty deeply on how it actually effects things in your world.
To give one example that’s cited reasonably often, if flight is relatively common (3rd level spell in the latest D&D, and levitation is 2nd – how many casters like that are there?), then do castles actually work? Even if they do, the walls are likely to be rather different than in our world (probably much higher, and so much rarer).
Is there a spell to feed the troops? Even tasteless food will extend their range a lot.
Is magic common enough to be used in battle? If so, why is there a non-spellcasting nobility? Land and riches, but why do they have that land if there are e.g. spells to increase the fertility of land?
What keeps the spellcasters from taking over if they’re better at fighting than the non-spellcasters? Which in many fantasy worlds, they are.
>What keeps the spellcasters from taking over if they’re better at fighting than the non-spellcasters?
In a lot of cases that is because spellcasting has other problems. It might require so much work and study that you effectively *can’t* do other stuff. It might come with its own share of handicaps. (demonic possession, random chance to explode, etc.) that makes keeping a “civilian” leadership position basically impossible, etc.
(and for all that we talk about linear warriors and quadratic wizards in D&D a wizard is not so dangerous that a fighter isn’t a threat: Or at least not a couple of fighters)
(there’s also the quip from, I believe Feist’s Shadow of a Dark of Queen where Nakor describes the role of wizards in war as “First wizard casts spell, second wizard casts counterspell, third wizard tries to strengthen first wizard, fourth wizard trie sto help the counterspell, then army comesalong and chops up all those wizards standing around”) The basic point being that wizards are terrifying when unopposed, but tend to cancel each other out.
Magic in Tolkien is really different from other fantasy magic systems. He was not much of a fiction reader, and didn’t tend to get ideas from the living world. Tolkien magic is mostly like inanimate objects having extra morale, as nonsensical as that sounds; sometimes something, especially living somethings, imbued with that extra quality can have that quality perverted and shaped and controlled. Even that doesn’t get into conversation with other fictional magic systems although it does occasionally inform them.
“[Tolkien] was not much of a fiction reader” seems to only be true if you only treat “fiction” as being solely contemporary fiction, given that he was literally a professor who studied ancient epics. Unless you’re arguing that _Beowulf_ described historical events…
It was recorded by people who believed it, and that is not fiction in the modern sense.
There wasn’t much fantasy fiction to read at the time, so it’s hardly surprising that Tolkien didn’t tend to get ideas from the living world. But Tolkien had read Andrew Lang, and he was good friends with CS Lewis and they talked about their work, and he wrote non-fiction articles about both past and present fantasy… This is not someone ignoring what’s going on in the literature of his time.
One important reason to read material like this for your worldbuilding is that it gives a you benchmark from which you can more accurately understand what departures from reality should look like. Many, many fiction-writers fell down, not because they failed to understand how fantastic elements in their setting would alter the social fabric of the societies they portrayed, but because they failed to understand what the social fabric even looked like before the alterations.
“Roman generals are invariably aristocratic senators, but their model of leadership is not based on the demonstration of personal combat ability or even necessarily personal physical bravery.”
They do *love* it though. Nothing get the romans all hot and bothered like a senator tearing his toga off to show off his scars (all in the front, so they can see he didn’t run away)
“a trope that clearly started in Japan but feels like it has worked into English-language young adult fiction over time as well”
Most of contemporary American YA works with tropes that have prominence in Japan, because Anglophone fan-fiction is a single conversation that includes everything big enough to get an English-language localization. The classic Utena Plot, where a transfer student of obscured (potentially secretly elite) background arrives and becomes both an agent of and catalyst of the destruction of the Absurdly Powerful Student Council (and does not supplant it) continues to echo through Japanese mass-market entertainment; but this is, obviously, Yojimbo, and the school is setting, the elite characters are elite regardless of coursework. Fall-Into-the-Cockpit Gundam Plots are arguably older, but these feature children born with some luck who are subsequently conscripted into warfare as schoolchlidren (usually an intentional exploration of Axis Powers’ real-world child enlistment practices and the fallout thereof). That ‘not technically a child military academy’ screen is only collapsed in late ’95 in Evangelion, which wrapped as Utena was first being written; Battle Royale was also written at that time, but couldn’t find a publisher for years.
Almost a decade prior, Lackey’s Arrows of the Queen places its heroine in a fantasy college-high-school, which is fully a training academy for a feudal-fantasy country’s elite. This college trains a select group of magical scholarship kids who are destined to fill all the cursus honorum government roles (traveling judges in peacetime, officers at war, councilor roles in the capital, and special book plot assignments) but is also socially compelling as a place for other elite children to gather for study ahead of taking over from their parents. The books hint that this institution is a reform of an earlier full-apprenticeship model for the magic scholarship kids, and that both systems ultimately originate with the population of extraplanar telepathic aliens that lives in the capital city. A decade before that, you have Ender’s Game with it’s Battle School.
I really think that the development of the militarized social elite school as a fiction trope requires some emotional distance from the experience of having your high school bombed that was hard to find outside of the USA in the 20th century.
“I really think that the development of the militarized social elite school as a fiction trope requires some emotional distance from the experience of having your high school bombed that was hard to find outside of the USA in the 20th century.”
And yet a lot of 19th and early 20th century social elite had studied in military social elite schools. Napoleon who studied in Brienne Military School. De Gaulle who was a student of Saint Cyr…
Mexicans actually had the experience of having their high school bombed AND taken by storm. Chapultepec Castle.
How much of the European or Mexican classical fictional literature is set in real militarized elite schools?
I confess I can’t say, but certainly Battle Royale (et al.) has had a global reach with horizons we still can’t see. I’m sadly not really conversant in most Latin American lit, even Mexican; similar failures with European stuff too, especially Continental stuff, although more old things from Europe leak through into general American consciousness. Sometimes naval history fiction takes its depiction of an apprenticeship model and stuffs the cast with so many juvenile midshipmen that you get a bit of a floating classroom.
My understanding is that navies tended to professionalize and become more meritocratic earlier than armies due to the technical knowledge to required to sail or fight a ship.
The part about Junior officers being present but expected to shut up kind of reminds me of the scene in Avatar the last airbender where Zuko open his mouth at such a council and basically gets disinherited over it.
I wonder how well ATLA actually picture its military. (And if applicable the reasons for its success or failure)
I am not an expert on Avatar: The Last Airbender, but my understanding is that this had less to with the fact that Zuko* spoke up during a council, and more to do with what Zuko said at that council, with the result that he severely alienated his tyrannical, intolerant, and increasingly villainously-insane father by triggering his father’s villain complex.
__________
*(who was basically the crown prince of the Fire Nation, as eldest child and only son of the reigning monarch)
The Roman case is interesting because promotion came from being elected by the people. Sure, there was enormous aristocratic influence over elections, but the people chose between different aristocrats. The one exception is maybe the most critical — the Senate assigned pro-magistracies, so could (and did) avoid placing aristocrats into roles they would be poorly suited for.
Loved the Final Fantasy VIII reference. Though I should point out that in that game, the academies aren’t training officers, they’re basically training elite mercenaries who use divine blessings to be a match for armies. They fight on the frontlines instead of commanding.