This week I want to try something a little different. Rather than taking apart a particular fantasy military system, I thought I might try to lay out a more general sense of how military systems tend to map on to societies, both because such general historical frameworks are handy for thinking about the past, but also because they make useful rules of thumb for imagining fantastical societies. So essentially here we are asking: how do societies end up with the sort of armies they have?
This is going to take a few posts to get through because there are actually quite a few key components to cover: the why and how of recruitment (both ‘why do these people feel obligated to serve’ and ‘how do you get them into the army’), how a society pay for that (or doesn’t), who leads it and how, and how once formed any army coheres in the field. Finally, we’ll wrap up with some historical ‘archetypes’ to show how these different facets link together with the underlying civilian society and also how that shapes what they look like on the battlefield (including weapons and tactics).
This series is also going to be a bit unusual because in some ways its purpose is to link up and summarize a bunch of other posts. We’ve had a lot of posts and series over the years which examined this or that historical or fictional military and discussed the ways in which their militaries reflected civilian society and I wanted to pull a lot of that together in one place. As a result in this series – more than most – the links are going to be ‘load bearing.’ Likewise a lot of the heavy bibliography here is going to live in the links, although I think for someone looking to get a handle on how pre-modern societies and pre-modern militaries come together, the two key readings I would suggest are P. Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World (1989) and then J. Landers, The Field and the Forge: Population, Production and Power in the Pre-Industrial West (2003). Also well worth reading as an overview is Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (2006).
Now we’re going to restrict ourselves a bit here in that we are going to stick to pre-modern or more correctly pre-industrial armies. The rules change a lot for industrial and post-industrial armies, though by the same token we really don’t have nearly the same range of examples for industrial armies either: we really have a single dominant model for industrial armies that emerged in Europe from 1914 to 1945 and then a bunch of reactions to that model (along with what we might term an industrial ‘transitional’ period from ~1800 to 1914). It is thus hard to build a complete typology, because the industrial sample size is so small.
By contrast, the sample for pre-industrial agrarian armies is really big, so it becomes a bit easier to spot recurring patterns of organization and structure as different societies stumble on to the same solutions for generating force. So that’s what we’re going to do this week: look at some of the patterns, keeping in mind that these are general rules with many complications and exceptions. In the process, we’re going to pull together a lot of the individual discussions of specific systems – historical and fantastical – as examples.
Fans of fictional worlds will have often run into the most egregious examples of the failure to think in these terms. Professional or seemingly professional armies employed by societies that lack the administrative structure to manage them, armies that are too large or too small for their parent societies, ‘guards’ that seem to spring out of holes in the ground rather than organically fit into society anywhere and so on.
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).
Armies and Societies
I have written this maxim a few different ways, but it is worth writing again: no army can help but recreate its civilian social structures on the battlefield.
When analyzing a historical army or creating a fictional one, everything must begin with that idea, that military systems grow out of and reflect their ‘civilian’ societies or – for societies that lack civilians as such – reflect the civilian side of the lives of their members. That means that armies tend to recreate civilian hierarchies, with similar – often identical – lines of status between the two.
So to understand what kind of military our society might come up with, we first need to ask some key questions about the civilian society.
First: is this society agrarian? Which is to say, are they farmers? In most cases, the answer will be yes because with only a handful of exceptions, if they’re not farmers you’re not going to have cities or states and most settings have those. That said, if your society consists of nomads – either hunter-gatherers or pastoral nomads – they aren’t going to have a state (which is a creature of the agrarian world) and so you want to think about non-state forms of military organization, which is going to channel them towards some specific solutions to our problems below.
Next: is this a state? Is military force in this society collected into a single political entity or is it fragmented among many different centers of power? One odd choice I see in a lot of fantasy settings is to have huge, sprawling cities with non-state systems of organization (power informally divided among a bunch of different groups that all wield force), but that’s not a pattern we see often historically. Instead, the more urban a society is, the more likely it is that military power is concentrated into a single political entity – the state. At the same time, non-state polities may lack a single political entity with a monopoly on the use of force, but that doesn’t mean they lack a military system, it just means that power is fragmented in that system.
Third: what kind of aristocracy does this society have? Every society has a socio-economic elite, but there are different kinds. Does aristocratic wealth mostly flow upwards from large landholdings or flow downwards from employment in a royal bureaucracy (the former is much more common)? Likewise, to what degree does this society have a bureaucracy as such and how much power does it wield? It can be easy to assume modern bureaucratic administrative structures, but these are rare in pre-modern societies: power is often wielded by local grandees than by employed representatives of the state and if the power is wielded by those grandees, the military system is likely to run through them to some extent as well as well.
Your aristocrats are going to assume that – since they lead society in peace – they lead society in war, but how they do so depends on their self-conception. Here, I distinguish sometimes between military aristocrats – aristocracies who understand their primary purpose is warfare generally (often leadership), as distinct from religious or bureaucracy aristocracies that might be of a non-military character – and warrior aristocrats, who understand their primary purpose in society as personally fighting in a specific way (usually but not always mounted).
Note that while warrior aristocrats’ legitimacy in claiming aristocratic status comes from their personal practice of violence, the source of their power is almost invariably wealth from large landholdings: they’re not aristocrats because they’re good at fighting. Instead, they’re aristocrats because they’re rich and then to justify the wealth and power they wield, they practice a certain form of direct, personal kind of warfare. A guy who is really good at fighting but is poor and without title is not a knight; a guy who has wealth and title but is terrible at fighting is a bad knight, but a knight nonetheless. Warrior-elites are thus elites-who-are-warriors, not necessarily warriors-who-are-elite-at-war, though since their social class places a lot of emphasis at being good at fighting, they’re often very good at fighting (in a specific way, again, usually but not always mounted).
Fourth: how do the regular farmers (who are 90+% of the population) connect to the aristocracy? Are they mostly free-holders who own their own land, but are economically dependent on the Big Man? Or does the local Big Man – that is, the aristocrat who is nearest them – own their land itself? Or does the king (or state, in some other form; it might be a temple!) own their land, in which case the aristocrat they engage with is an administrator rather than a land-owner?
For the aristocracy to exist (and for the state to exist, if it does), it has to be siphoning agricultural production from these smaller farmers, so consider how that happens as well. Aristocrats collect rents on the lands they own or control. The state may collect taxes, but in many pre-modern states, royal revenues are dominated by the lands the king owns rather than taxes. Naturally, if taxes are being collected, that implies some kind of bureaucracy collecting them, which non-state societies may not have and which may be underdeveloped in weak-state societies.
What we’re trying to get with all of these questions is thinking about how the peasantry and the aristocracy relate to each other and how that relationship is understood and justified. Those questions are important because civil society comes first – armies are built out of existing subsistence systems and social structures, not usually the other way around – and because the structure of a society limits the possible military systems it can house.
Recruitment Principles
Once we have a sense of our civilian society, the next thing we need to think about is how do we get recruits?
Landers (op. cit.) breaks down recruitment systems based on the principle they function on, distinguishing between general compulsion (conscription by force, levies), the entitlement principle (service as the flip-side of the coin for some set of rights or status), the vocational principle (standing armies or military aristocracies that served because that was their role in society) or devolution (devolve the problem downward onto vassals, communities or households). That’s a useful framework, but I want to shift it around somewhat for our purposes, because I want to separate clearly why the recruits fight from how you get them (and because I think ‘general compulsion’ is actually not the most useful category here).
So we can start with what I am going to call the recruitment principle (as distinct from the recruitment method), which is the why of your recruitment: why do these fellows feel like they must or ought to serve. A lot of historical fiction or fantasy settings fail to address this particular question or else answer it with a very crude ‘because they have to’ (that is, compulsion) but that’s not usually how this works. After all, this society is about to give these fellows weapons, so without some broader social structure that encourages or constrains them to remind at the standard, there is very little preventing them from deserting or revolting. Compulsion can get me into the ranks, but it struggles to keep them there.
The first place most modern folks’ mind goes, of course, is to pattern this task off of their own jobs and so to assume that these fellows are under arms because they are paid to be, which I am going to term the employment principle (separate from the vocational principle). We may sum it up with, “recruits show up purely as an economic transaction: service for money” – it’s a job. These may be foreign troops (in which case they’re mercenaries) or domestic troops, but the key thing here is that the bond which holds them to the army is monetary: they get paid.
The problem is this is not actually the most common recruitment principle. Indeed, while many armies may employ mercenaries as auxiliary troops or maintain some small standing employment-based component (like non-noble professional retainers, for instance), it is fairly rare for pre-modern armies to function purely ‘as a job.’ The exceptions are professional armies, but professional armies are the exception, not the rule: the later Han dynasty, the Roman Empire (but not the Republic) and early modern Europe feature professional armies, but otherwise these are uncommon. Crucially – and we’ll come back to this as we move along – professional armies require a strong state with a capable bureaucracy and extensive revenues, because the state is taking on the whole administrative and financial burden of maintaining the army. Early modern European states famously struggled horribly under those burdens, while the Roman Army of the imperial period consumed well over half of the state’s budget.
Note that warriors and soldiers recruited by other principles might also get paid (although often not as much), the difference is that there is some other social connection that is underlying their recruitment.
Instead, it is more common that the core of military forces in pre-modern societies arise out of three basic sets of principles (two of which I am borrowing from Landers): the entitlement principle, the vocational principle and what I am going to call the clientage principle. All three share an element in that what ties an individual to recruitment is who they are which in pre-modern societies that are generally extremely low social-mobility societies, is almost invariably a product of what family they were born into.
In entitlement principle recruiting, liability for military service is an expectation that corresponds to a set of social rights and privileges, most often citizenship. Note that we’re not talking about citizenship as a reward for service, but rather service as a requirement of citizens. Naturally, for an entitlement system like this to really function, there needs to be some socially valuable position, with connected rights and privileges, available for common folk (we’ll talk about aristocrats in a second). That tends to make entitlement principle service a creature of smaller citizenship-based communities: A Greek polis recruiting hoplites, the Roman Republic recruiting its legions, or medieval town and commune governments establishing a service requirements amongst the townfolk (the burghers), whose citizenship in the town marks them apart from the regular peasantry.
The great advantage of entitlement principle systems is that, because social status and military service are tightly interconnected, getting soldiers to muster and keeping them in the ranks is relatively easier. Think about a Roman citizen soldier in the Middle Republic: if he deserts, where does he even desert to – his hometown where everyone knows he’s supposed to be with the army and where he and his family’s entire social identity is tied up with his liability for military service? The system creates really strong social pressures that make this easier.
The limitation of such systems is that they require that entitlement in the first place and that entitlement almost always comes with the expectation of a political voice through some kind of voting or communal consensus decision-making. That may not sound like a tradeoff to you, but it certainly is to the elites of this society: to recruit on this basis they have to cede power to the commons to some degree in order to create the political entitlement worth fighting for. In practice, it should be noted, the systems don’t generally seem to form that way: they are not grants from the aristocracy to the commons (‘fight for me and I’ll let you vote!’) but rather concessions wrested from the aristocracy by the commons through collective action (‘let us vote or we won’t fight!’), which then acquire the heavy reinforcement of becoming the traditional rights and privileges of the citizenry.
For more on these voluntary shooter’s guilds, see L. Crombie, Archery and Crossbow Guilds in Medieval Flanders, 1300-1500 (2016).
As an aside, this is one case where the fantasy-style ‘large city with fragmented internal power structures’ that one sees frequently in high fantasy RPGs (thinking places like Baldur’s Gate or Defiance Bay), though notably in the low countries, these guilds were subject to a higher political authority, be it a town government or a noble.
The next option is what we can call (following Landers) the vocational principle, which also connects service to who you are, but rather than connecting it to your place in a political order, it connects service to a place in the broader social order: the vocational principle is one in which a certain class of people fight because they are the warrior class, typically because you were born into the warrior class.
The vocational principle can come in two forms. First, in many non-agrarian, (hunter-gatherer or pastoral nomads (like Steppe nomads)), or relatively less complex ‘horticultural‘ societies, it is often the case that the entire free adult male population is part of the ‘warrior class.’ These are, after all, generally very small clan- or tribal-based societies with a lot less social stratification so ‘everybody’ (that is, all free adult males) fights. For men, participating in communal warfare is a core component to belonging to the tribe, camp, clan or village.
The mistake one sees in a lot of speculative fiction (and also certain reactionary political movements) is assuming that this sort of ‘everyone is a warrior’ social structure can be transplanted to more complex societies with greater degrees of specialization. The reductio ad absurdum of this are some portrayals of Star Trek’s Klingons: an entire post-industrial multi-planet empire that can design starships (and so must be hyper-specialized) but where also somehow everyone is a warrior trained in close-combat weapons. Real societies do not train their starship designers (or their blacksmiths) to also be master swordsmen because that isn’t worth anyone‘s time.1 But they pretty clearly can’t: the moment a society begins specializing its labor (required to achieve high population densities), ‘fighting’ becomes to one degree or another a specialized role too.
The thing is, as we’ve discussed, while non-specialized ‘all warrior’ societies can sometimes overwhelm highly specialized agrarian societies by and large since the advent of farming the most resource-rich parts of the world have been dominated by complex, stratified and specialized agrarian societies, because of their higher population densities – pre-modern agrarian societies can get into the 30-70 people per square mile range, compared to something like 0.5 person per square mile for hunter-gatherers outside of very resource rich zones and something like around 2-5 per square mile for nomadic pastoralists. It usually doesn’t matter if everyone in your tribe is trained to be a warrior if those farmers over there can triple your numbers by mobilizing just 10% of their peasants. There are exceptions, of course, but they’re rare.
Instead in more specialized societies we see the second form of the vocational principle: a warrior class in which a distinct specialized class in society are warriors (or military leaders), usually by birth (because, again, these are low social mobility societies). In essence, this is a case where in the more complex society, just as ‘farmer’ and ‘blacksmith’ and so on have become both specialized jobs and also basically hereditary classes (because who is picking ‘subsistence farmer’ if ‘pampered noble’ is an option?), ‘warrior’ becomes just one more specialist social class, defined largely by heredity.
That can take a number of forms, the most common of which is the military aristocracy. The aristocracy – or some part of it (there may be a parallel civic or religious aristocracy) – has as its justification for its existence that it is the part of society that fights or at least that specializes in warfare. These fellows are aristocrats, to be clear, because they’re rich, not because the fight well – but to be a member of the aristocratic class in good standing with the disproportionate access to prestige and resources that implies also requires being a military specialist and so they develop those skills and are available for privileged military positions (like cavalry or command). We’ll get into, in a later part of this series, the differences between warrior aristocracies and what I’m going to call officer aristocracies (does the noble primarily fight or lead?).
That said, this category also includes some other ways of structuring a military vocation for a society. One we’ve discussed only a little bit are military slaves (like the Mamluks)- a low status class of vocational warriors, though these fellows have a habit of not remaining low-status or slaves for very long, because – of course – they have weapons.
Alternately, conquering empires might seek to create a vocational military class by putting soldiers on plots of land (complete with laborers) in the expectation that they and their children will remain liable for an elite kind of military service. These we call military settlers and they are usually a feature of a regime moving in – societies usually do not impose military settlers on themselves. The ‘Macedonians’ in Hellenistic kingdoms make for a good example of this, as do Arab garrison cities in the Rashidun Caliphate. For ‘everyone is a warrior’ societies that do end up overrunning larger, more complex agrarian societies, this is often what happens: the tribal ethnic group becomes a military aristocracy settled as overlords over the resource rich land of the conquered.
Finally, we have clientage principle recruitment, where the recruiting principle is that the men being pulled into the ranks are – in their civilian society – dependents of the fellows recruiting them. In this case military service is part of the obligations of the dependent towards their superior. That may seem strange in some cases – as a condition of giving the local Big Man a chunk of your food, you also sometimes have to fight for him? – but its important to remember that these societies do not see the exchange that way. Instead, they’d frame it that, as a condition of having the Big Man’s protection and being able to farm his land, you give him a chunk of the produce and are also expected to fight for him. It’s important to remember that these principles for recruitment are not laws about the physical universe, but fundamentally questions of psychology and culture: if the entire culture agrees that the land belongs to the lord or the king or the temple and you are paying (in a way) for the privilege of farming it, then that is the reality for all concerned.
Dependents here can come in a few varieties. The highest status such dependents might be retainers, men maintained in an aristocrats household as full time ‘muscle.’ While these fellows might be paid mercenaries, in a lot of societies they’re not getting paid in cash but rather in status and a living: they get to live as part of the Big Man’s household, they get their food and other necessities and they’re a more important person than the peasantry. Crucially, retainers of this sort are not ‘free agents’ to the highest bidder, but often tightly bound by formal ties (clientage, hospitality, familial bonds, homage and so on) to a specific aristocrat.
Below that, a Big Man might expect that as part of the unequal reciprocal exchange of clientage, his clients – the poor farmers around him – might owe him support which would include following his lead in warfare. At the same time, as we’ll see, we can flip this sort of thinking around and say that for the community, the Big Man forms a natural leader around which the community, if it is under threat, can rally (and the flipside of that, the Big Man is probably a vocational warrior, as above). Finally, the dependents here might be some form of non-free persons – not usually slaves, but rather tenants or serfs. Often the package of obligations these folks owed their overlord included corvée labor of some sort, so military service as such an obligation makes some sense.
We can see these sorts of systems at work with the Carolingian general and select levies or the Anglo-Saxon fyrd. In both the Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon system, there was a ‘general levy’ of all free men called up as a local defense militia, but households were also brigaded together and required collectively to furnish a man for the select levy to provide a standing or expeditionary force. It is striking how these systems required the active participation of local magnates in order to act as focal points for organization and leadership. As a result, these systems tend to be fundamentally local: while the king has the authority to call up a whole bunch of regional select-levies or fyrds to make up a field army, in practice these are local units, not a ‘national’ conscription system. Notably, Charlemagne’s effort to impose a royal bureaucracy on the Carolingian levy using royal officials (the missi, ‘those having been sent [by the king]’) emerges as a kind of last-gasp effort to keep this system running as it comes apart and never quite works as a centralized system.
That said, this sort of system could be centralized and extended to form a ‘national’ conscription system, with the example that springs to mind being the early Han dynasty (202BC-220AD) military system in China, which emerged out of the mass conscription systems of the Warring States period, where very large armies were raised for specific campaigns against peer competitor states. Notably, as the Han dynasty’s primary security challenges lay with holding frontiers (the Qin dynasty having already removed all of the peer competitors before being replaced by the Han), the Han system steadily transformed into a professional standing army composed of a mix of paid professionals and military settlers. That said – and we’ll come right back to this next week – mass conscription requires record-keeping, bureaucracy and state centralization that relatively few pre-modern polities have. Still it certainly is possible to have a society with at least the notion that the common peasant is simply obligated to perform some amount of military service.
Putting Society and Principle Together
So to recap, we can list our recruitment principles with a very rough sense of how common they are and where:
- The Employment Principle (because they get paid): frequently used to supplement armies that have a core recruited another way but only rarely the main recruitment principle. Where it is used as such (professional armies), it requires a strong state with a lot of revenue and state capacity. Examples: Imperial Rome, the later Han Dynasty, some early modern European armies.
- The Entitlement Principle (because it is the converse of some set of rights these fellows have): common for city-states or other sorts of republics, but requires having a legal/political status like citizenship which is valuable enough to fight for. Troops recruited on this principle can be expected to basically recruit and arm themselves in many cases, but they’re ‘paid’ in political rights as much as cash. Examples: The Roman Republic, Greek polis-armies, medieval town militias.
- The Vocational Principle (because it is their social role/class):
- All-Warrior Society (every free adult male is a warrior): common in largely non-specialized societies – hunter-gatherers, nomadic pastoralists, very early agriculture. Troops recruited on this basis arm, organize and largely recruit themselves, but these societies tend to be small, low population density and comparatively poor. Examples: Plains Native Americans, Steppe nomads, hunter-gatherer societies.
- Warrior Class or Officer Class (specialized society with a dedicated fighting or military-leadership class): extremely common among complex agrarian societies, a military aristocracy of some sort is practically the default mode of leadership in such societies, but note that warrior-aristocrats and officer-aristocrats may have very different expectations of what that means. Often the fellows provide the leadership for otherwise employment-, entitlement- or clientage-based armies or alternately a core of specialist warriors around which such levies are grafted. Examples: Almost too numerous to provide – non-state Gallic aristocrats, medieval European knights and nobility, the Roman Senate (an ‘officer class’ example!), and so on.
- Military Settlers (an imposed military aristocracy of fighters given land in exchange for future service): a fairly common solution for consolidating conquest (especially for societies which simply lack the bureaucratic infrastructure for direct governance), creating a new upper-stratum of military-aristocrats that are often ethnically distinct from the ruled. Examples: Macedonian military-settlers after Alexander’s conquests; the garrison-cities of the Rashidun Caliphate.
- Military Slaves (a subordinate class of specialist warriors): a relatively uncommon and historically unstable system, but hardly an unknown one, heavily dependent on the availability of an ethnically distinct class of warriors available to be enslaved. Examples: Mamluks, Janissaries.
- We might also put Prisoner Armies (recruitment as punishment for a crime) in this category. These tend to be somewhat more stable, but their military performance is not always stellar. Example: the armies of the Song Dynasty.2
- The Clientage Principle (because it is an obligation they have towards social superiors)
- Retainers and Clientage (little men have specific ties of loyalty to Big Men who can call them to arms): as far as I can tell, the primary way complex non-state societies raise military force. Because it relies on personal ties, it tends to stay fragmented. Examples: non-state Gaul and Spain, but also vassalage-based medieval polities.
- Universal Military Service (little men owe military service to their lord, king or the state): common although rarely as universal or centralized as the name implies. Often takes the form of regional militias agglomerated into a larger army (examples: Carolingian select-levy, the Anglo-Saxon fyrd), but there are rare examples of truly mass conscription systems, particularly in China (examples: Warring States period, Qin Dynasty, early Han Dynasty).
What I hope emerges from this quick comparison is how sensitive these principles are to the structure of the underlying society: for most societies, the options whittle down to just a handful almost immediately. A fragmented state with a weak central bureaucracy will almost inevitably need to reply on military aristocrats, their retainers and clients because it hasn’t the revenues or the political structure for anything else, for instance. A society with specialized economic roles isn’t going to be able to set up as an ‘all warrior’ society and a society without specialized economic roles isn’t going to be able to use any other system. A society without a tradition of universal military service is going to have a hard time conscripting its peasantry and a society without a citizenship-like legal/political status is going to have a hard time recruiting on an entitlement basis. Likewise, if a society lacks a large warrior-aristocrat class, then it lacks a large warrior-aristocrat class and cannot recruit on that basis.
Next week, we’ll look at putting these principles into action, thinking about how armies are raised and paid for.
- The Klingons actually make sense if you assume the Klingons we see are actually the other kind of vocational warriors – a military aristocracy – and that we simply never meet any ‘blue collar’ inhabitants of the Klingon empire. Of course, that would change the ‘noble warriors’ of the Klingon aristocracy into the cruel, brutish slave-masters of an empire in which they exist solely to oppress and exploit their highly productive, specialized victims; one of TNG-and-later Star Trek’s problems is that it is very hard to square the circle whereby coexisting in alliance with the Klingon Empire as we see it is the right and moral thing for the Federation to do.
- I am not really an expert on these systems, which is why I haven’t said much about them, but you can get a sense of the Song system reading E. Alyagon, Inked: Tattooed Soldiers and the Song Empire’s Penal Military Complex (2023).
We might also put Prisoner Armies (recruitment as punishment for a crime) in this category. These tend to be somewhat more stable, but their military performance is not always stellar. Example: the armies of the Song Dynasty.
I’m curious about this: did states (either premodern or industrial/modern) ever think about criminal recruits in terms of their special costs and benefits, beyond just their role as a cheap source of warm bodies? Like, presumably a regiment of criminals is going to be pre-selected for certain tendencies towards…..violence (which might have its benefits at least in certain kinds of warfare), but also pre-selected for a low inclination to obey authority (which would be very undesirable especially in warfare).
Inked by Elad Alyagon is a good source if you’re interested further. Basically they had a penal-military complex with varying ranks based on physical ability and other factors; they were paid and fed in return for becoming legible and controllable to the Song state. Going from criminal to soldier was one-way for the most part, with old or weak soldiers being used as indentured labour. Other influxes also existed, but mostly by compulsion for uncontrolled people- conscription of the poor, or conscripting masses of refugees after disasters, for example. They weren’t very loyal or effective, but internal political stability benefitted a lot from converting ‘chaotic low classes’ into ‘state-controlled low classes’, and so the Song dynasty tended to use diplomatic heft to avoid peer conflicts where possible (e.g tributes).
In fiction, I would imagine it highly depends on what are these folks in prison for. A system that is constructed to arbitrarily punish people with impressment is going to end up with different sort than one that periodically rounds up street gangs.
@pontifex,
Obviously this would be wholly immoral, but it seems to me that if you’re engaged, in, say, a war of quasi-extermination, where your target is the enemy people as a whole and not just their military, then you might “benefit” by having e.g. hardened violent criminals in your army. I do wonder if any, e.g., settler-colonial militaries (or for that matter some of the “first system warfare”, pre-agrarian peoples where conflicts were sometimes about displacing a people and taking their land as well) historically have seen things that way.
>but it seems to me that if you’re engaged, in, say, a war of quasi-extermination, where your target is the enemy people as a whole and not just their military, then you might “benefit” by having e.g. hardened violent criminals in your army
That’s not something regular armies have ever had difficulties with, tbh. Rules of engagement are more or less universally there to keep the army from being a wave of annihilation, not to make it one. Being a wave of annihilation is an army’s natural state.
IIRC the Russian army did (and to some extent still *does*) recruit extensively from prisons and as punishment.
The Wehrmacht in WW2 also had penal units, and volunteering for the SS was also sometimes used as a way to “rehabilitate” prisoners. The SS maintained at least one unit that was largely composed of felons, and they had a reputation as dangerous and cruel even by SS standards.
SS maintained at least one unit that was largely composed of felons, and they had a reputation as dangerous and cruel even by SS standards.
That’s exactly what I would expect, yea, and the Nazis are exactly the kind of state I would expect to see that as a good thing.
I do kind of wonder if it was used by other, less malign but still settler-colonial type societies.
I don’t want to downplay the fact that Russia/SU did pardon criminals in exchange for enlistment, but I think it is valuable to think of it as specifically “WWII recruitment” and “Ukraine war recruitment”. I do not think legal mechanism for that kind of thing exited at any point between 1945 and 2022.
I was actually thinking about earlier, in the 18th century, rather than the USSR.
Now that I think about it, there’s arguably a slight distinction between “sentenced to military service” and “offered military service *instead* of another sentence”.
Supposedly in the 1950s peacetime draft era, local judges overseeing the disposition of petty troublemakers would sometimes offer to waive their sentences if they agreed to join the military. The thinking being that minor offenders would benefit most by being placed under a system of discipline. I don’t think this ever had legal force but was essentially a handshake deal.
they can be used to pacify civilian revolts though. Not very good at anything else.
After reading the post, I’m not sure if my question is still really on topic here, but, well, I had planned to ask it in this thread ever since you announced this series a week ago. It’s a slight rephrase of something I posted on a partly worldbuilding-focused forum years ago, and something I’ve long wanted to ask people with some knowledge of military matters.
So…
I have a question about how to half-way plausibly run the military of one of my fictional cultures, and since I have no military experience myself, I have no idea how to answer the question.
In modern armed forces on Earth, it’s generally the norm to have two completely, or almost completely, separate career tracks for officers and enlisted ranks – you can join the military as an enlisted recruit, or you can apply for officers’ training and, if you get accepted and successfully complete officers’ training, become a second lieutenant or whatever the equivalent rank in your service is right after completing training.
Apparently, this dates back to the European wars of the middle ages and early modern ages, when men who had been born into the nobility usually served as officers and men who had been born as commoners usually served in the enlisted ranks.
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?
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?
The reason why this is an issue there at all is that the fictional culture in question has a strong taboo, both cultural and legal, against giving a young person any serious amount of power. So the idea of twentysomethings commanding platoons or companies would strike them as somehow wrong. The social background is that of a society built around an explicitly ageist hierarchy, where you’re supposed to put in your time doing unpleasant jobs and taking orders while you’re younger, and should ideally get rewarded with higher-status positions when you’re older.
Will the series touch on warfare at levels below the state? I’m curious about how it works when for example two aristocrats who have retainers and peasants obligated to service but who also owe service to a king fight each other. If they serve the same king is he likely to view this as a waste or an offense to his own rule? Are there rules and when can a king step in a settle things and when can’t he? What if the fueding aristocrats serve different kings but those kings are at peace? Does this threaten the peace. Do the kings war, or stamp out the brushfire, or grab a bucket of popcorn and watch?
It’s likely the sovereign would at least attempt to broker a peace unless he is preoccupied. Like for instance away on a war himself.
But if both parties are stubborn, compromise may not be possible
Or the sovereign might just be weak/ineffective, or sadistic.
A lot of the time the goal of these minor fights seems to be to present a fait accompli before the sovereign can react (and usually put his weight behind one or the other of the scufflers)
First argument against which springs to mind is that there are a lot of things an officer needs to know to be good at the job, and the later in life they get started on learning all that, the narrower the window is between attaining competency and succumbing to senescence.
If the sole recruitment pool for officers is those who’ve already survived a certain span of time as grunts, that also means that in the aftermath of serious losses – arguably when the society is in greatest need of officers young enough to be adaptable – the pool is empty.
Oversimplifying, the modern officer/enlisted divide solves for three big problems:
1) The sort of people who you want piloting fighter jets or commanding armies have better options than spending their early 20s doing hard manual labour under tight supervision.
2) Many “management” roles in the military are far more physically demanding than a civilian post with similar responsibility would be.
3) The military is an enormous structure that is orders of magnitude more complex than any civilian entity, and no one wants to try removing a load bearing pillar when it works well enough as if.
Your societal ageism could fix that first problem; you’re going to spend your 20s doing grunt work no matter what. The second one could be resolved if this is a sci-fi story with some sort of advanced medical care that keeps people healthy longer. The third one can be handwaved away by your society following a different historic path.
In reality there would still be a lot of details to fill in, but I’d say its plausible enough for fiction.
Given modern medicine, its certainly possible to do things differently than we do. A whole bunch of US military manpower policy can trace back to WWII. One of the takeaways from the opening years of that war, was that too much of the senior officer corps was literally too old to handle the stress demands of the job– so postwar we ended up with a 20-year military career track (cliff-vesting pension paying 50% of base pay after 20 years of service, then ramping up to 75% at 30) designed to “top out” almost everyone in their early 50s unless they make flag rank.
My first company commander- equivalent was a Mustang major. He ended up retiring, as a major, with 30 years of service, less than a year after I made captain (and I was still a bit short of 30 years of age). He was an extreme example, having been enlisted far longer than most before making the change, but that was the kind of age-rank combination that the system tries to avoid after seeing it go badly too often c.1942.
The 20-and-out pension system went away about 15 years ago; it’s likely that the military will eventually re-evaluate the way it presses “up-or-out” in light of how much more physically effective a 60 year old is today compared to one 85 years ago. There’ve been more-or-less constant rumbles for years about adjusting the rigidity of the system to better accomodate skillsets like cyber etc.
Once the military decides it can deal with 10 extra years of age on the high end, then maybe it can re-evaluate whether or not an all-mustang (or very mustang-heavy) officer corps is worth the other tradeoffs (and there are many– the first few that come to mind are “socialization” “throughput” and “wear and tear”).
Large organizations tend to have special class of “managers” with a different skill set from the people who are actually doing the job. The bureaucrats at the Wallmart HQ are different from the cashiers. Typically in the western world you enter the managerial class by education, but it’s still possible to rise through the ranks, especially if you build your own business.
So it would be a huge waste for a society to demand that young people spend decades working as cashiers before they can work at the Wallmart HQ, or decades being grunts before they become officers. Rich societies can afford to waste a lot (example: the US healthcare system). So it’s not impossible.
But a more plausible system to me is that young managers-to-be are given tasks that are manager-like but unpleasant and subservient. This is not too far from the current system: ask any second lieutenant or Wallmart HQ intern on a bad day, and they will tell you that they did grueling pointless coursework at university to get a position where they work too many hours for little pay and recognition, that they lack any real power, that their bosses takes the credit for all their achievements and that they spend most of their time navigating pointless rules and fixing their bosses mistakes. Tune this system up a little and it’s a plausible model for your world. You can adjust how much this system is driven by credentialism (young people have to study long and hard to get diplomas needed to advance), clientalism (young people need to find patrons to work under to advance) and bureaucracy.
> 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?
So both as an answer to this and as a muddying factor, the soviets (and other revolutionaries) *tried* to abandon this system, and reverted back.
The justifications for switching was obvious; personal ranks were a Russian nobility thing. If you needed leaders, you assigned them a positional rank again. They weren’t “General Alexi, to whom army group center was assigned” they were “Comrade Alexi, commander army group center”. The position derived all authority. Getting into position, or other business that didn’t necessitate authority, was a democratic process. Sortuve. It was a mess.
This…almost works. It kinda works for revolutionaries, sometimes. However the problems are obvious, particularly when you have to motivate men to do things they’d really rather not do, like invade others, or die on fortified positions until the enemy runs out of shells. Plus, if you can get men to do such things they will often find motivation-such as the looting and brutalization of civilians.
The issue is that the other aspect, that states want an army they can order to shoot protestors, results in the same push for ranks. You need hierarchy to get the military to massacre your own people. Not always, the early red army was in an idealogical fervor and a fully democratic process would have resulted in soldiers firing on tzarist protestors (we know, because to an extent it did) but as the machinery of state institutes social hierarchy those on top want to oppress others, no matter what you call your state.
Which is precisely why the early soviets abandoned ranks.
And also why Stalin reestablished them.
Sure, the practical concerns were used as justification and probably *did* justify the switch, but it’s fucking Stalin. The real reason for abandoning a system where horizontal cohesion bonds were paramount for one where vertical ones were paramount was that he could sit on top of the web of vertical loyalty bonds and move the military where he wanted, like a spider.
So we have an example, and it seems to prove both sides point. You seem to need vertical hierarchy to be effective and also it’s so very obviously a tool of oppression and the people who want it are evil.
There are other examples that tried to split the difference, but they were rarer. The most obvious one to me is pirate captains and other outlaws, who, as far as we can state a general rule, were internally egalitarian. Caribbean pirates in particular had a semi formal system where the captain was elected for battle decisions and the quartermaster was elected for quartering decisions, and the captain was master during combat and no further. However this was A. Not actually standardized, who would do the standardizing, just a social expectation, and B. Only possible because of a very unique set of conditions and not scalable. Rome also elected consuls, but that’s it’s own can of worms.
So as a final word; this is one of the big philosophical questions. There’s good reason to want an alternative system and no one has really managed to implement one. No one actually knows why.
My understanding is that the Russian military to this day has a different relationship with its commission/non commission officers as a legacy of this history and its relationship with conscription. Privates and NCOs are drawn from short-term conscripts, while officers are professionals who intend to stay in for their career. So you end up with a different dynamic where the platoon NCO is a conscript who’s probably only got a few months left in his service while the officer is a long term professional. (I don’t know whether Russian officers enter as privates or lieutenants, though that seems like a detail that a fictional society could change.) This results on a system where your officers tend to be a little better motivated but often end up having to do the job of the short-term NCO as well, though there were some reforms attempting to mitigate this with a semi-professional NCO class. In general the American stereotype is that this is an inefficient system that discouraged low level initiative while the Soviets preferred higher echelon planning. In the wake of the Ukraine war I’m not going to go to the mats for the effectiveness of the Russian military, though it definitely seems like the best case for this system overlaps with the Red Army’s performance in late WW2 where you’ve got a pool of highly motivated and battle hardened veterans for your NCOs, rather than inexperienced short timers promised an illusionary victory. (Also very much not an expert so open to people correcting or expanding on anything here!)
Just to point out an error, without contending with the primary point: Officer ranks were re-introduced by Trotskiy during the Russian Civil War, Stalin may have benefitted from it be he did not (re-)introduce that system.
In a small enough anarchist syndicate, task-specific leadership by acclamation is possible; and, in theory, this is the best form of leadership for human endeavors. Scaling up to larger systems requires the hierarchy we see in statist societies.
@Terry,
This is really interesting, thanks!
Do you know how things worked in other Communist-ruled states, either the Warsaw Pact states in Eastern/Central Europe, or those in Yugoslavia, Indochina, Cuba etc. where they came to power through independent armed struggle?
See Wikipedia’s article on “The Iron Law of Oligarchy” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy for the theory proposed by Robert Michels that even organizations that champion egalitarianism end up drifting towards a specialized managerial class.
My understanding (and I could be misremembering) is that in the nineteenth century French army, most officers commenced their basic officer training after their period of national service in the ranks, and in most cases after a short stint of volunteer service as a NCO as well. There was a military academy at Saint-Cyr which took teenage cadets but it wasn’t the standard route to a commission. This of course had cultural roots in the Revolutionary period, and the French considered it superior to the alternative system of separate promotion paths because it gave the officers more experience of military life right from the outset of their first posting as subalterns.
@raphael, a fictional military in which all the commissioned officers are “mustangs” is that of Starship Troopers. (The book, not the movie.)
In European history, yes officers were often a very separate career track from enlisted. Wouldn’t want the commoners thinking they can match their social superiors! The British army particularly suffered from this, and IIRC a USA military historian described the US West Point academy system for officers as a successful British sabotage effort 🙂
The French revolutionary army was an early success in breaking down the division, “a field marshal’s baton in every knapsack”. The post WW2 Israeli military supposedly insists on officers rising through the ranks, ditto the West German now German army as a way to distinguish themselves from the Prussian tradition.
So I’d say you can choose whichever you want for your fiction, and it’s historically justified.
“In European history, yes officers were often a very separate career track from enlisted. Wouldn’t want the commoners thinking they can match their social superiors! The British army particularly suffered from this”
Did they? I seem to recall the pre-1789 French army required all officers to be third-generation aristocrats. What exactly leads to the conclusion that it was Britain that “particularly suffered from this”?
The nobility had legal monopoly on becoming officers before the French Revolution.
“a field marshal’s baton in every knapsack”
I have read something similar as a quote from Jean Bernadotte. Don’t know how different this expression would sound when translated from French to English or Swedish. (I am a native Swedish-speaker and a non-native English one.) Certainly Jean Bernadotte came from a middle-class background and had been born a commoner. He only got a chance to become a commander because noble privileges were abolished in his lifetime. If I understand it correctly several of his colleagues had a comparable background. One was even a former slave who had been freed as a child and given an education by his slave-owning father.
That would be probably be (General) Alexandre Dumas, father of the writer and grandfather of the playwright. He signed up as a private since he couldn’t get a commission as an officer on account of his race. His father made him use a nom de guerre to avoid tarnishing the family name by having served as a private, hence the Dumas name.
Notably, all the examples you list have (or in the case of Germany, had) universal male conscription so officers-to-be serving in the ranks as normal conscripts would be a given for most of them.
It’s notable that some Star Trek episode writers think Starfleet works one way and other writers think it works the other way.
How deep is the recruitment pool for officers in this system? I am not intuitively familiar with what counts as an officer, but Brett highlighted that one difference between the Roman and other armies was the density of NCOs and such. If you want one leader and one assistant commander per 10 men, you’re forced to open these positions up to the youth. It’s less of a problem in a more tactically rigid system, or I guess if you have an inverted population pyramid.
Quick “mostly-mustang” counterexample – the Israeli military gets most of its officers its officer training course after regular enlisted training, not as a parallel track. Everyone takes their vocational aptitude tests up and goes off to basic, then takes their branches’ common training, then from there gets sorted into assorted technical specialties. In this, officer training is just another technical specialty (though one of the more time-intensive ones, hence requiring signing on to a non-conscript professional term of service), and transitioning from an enlisted-rank specialty to an officer-rank specialty after a year or two of service is AFAIU the common case.
(From my vague understanding of early IDF/PalMa”Kh history, the all-mustang system was a conscious divergence from PalMa”Kh’s British trainers’ military system, motivated in part by a socialist view of the two-track model as a feudal relic. That ideology has faded, though, while the career advancement structure remains – it’s proven stable and compatible with good military performance, though with officer-from-the-start being necessary for a few technical specialties.)
Tying it into your fictional world’s age-based hierarchy: while this does usually result in junior officers up to two years older than the enlisted soldiers they command, there are BIG exceptions. Notably, long service enlisted professional soldiers, or reservists called up years or decades after their initial service (lots of that now), can still end up serving under twenty-something officers. The army tries to avoid the latter by keeping reservist formations from the same age cohort together, with aging reservists serving under the same aging reserve officers for decades, but there’s always a “seam” in the hierarchy where the reservist formation slots into the active duty army, and some younger active duty officer ends up commanding an older but junior-in-rank reservist officer. That age/rank inversion is absolutely considered awkward, and the system is built to insulate the rank and file soldiery from it.
While Israeli society is no longer socialist, it’s still far more “classless” than even America, and due to how recruitment works it’s very likely that officers come from a poorer background than some of their men – a soldier that expects to be released and learn to be a doctor might serve under an officer that will learn to be a plumber (or in reserve service, a doctor-serving-as-soldier might be under a plumber-serving-as-officer).
Also, an Israeli officer, especially junior officer, is supposed to lead from the front, and it’s hard to lead from the front if you don’t have at least some experience as a grunt.
Israel has higher inequality than nearly any rich democracy these days (the US has even higher inequality). I’m unaware of good enough research on income mobility in Israel, and most likely any such research would just capture Jewish-Arab and mainline Jewish-Haredi inequalities, neither of which is relevant to the IDF.
Modern Switzerland would be an exception – every man (T&C apply) starts off with basic training as a recruit, there’s no direct entry to officer school, nor is there in civil society an “upper class” in the British sense.
The UK still has noble privileges. I don’t know if any other country has this today.
@Lena,
A few postcolonial African and Pacific Island countries do have a kind of House-of-Lords equivalent, I think, though less powerful than the House of Lords is.
But are the seats in these juridically hereditary? If I understand it correctly the British ones are.
@Lena,
They’re for hereditary chiefs and “nobles”, i.e. the remnanents of the precolonial aristocracies, so i think yes. Again, I think their powers are much more limited than those that the British House of Lords had historically, though.
@Lena
I know for quite some time the vast majority of the House of Lords was appointed. Wiki says since 1999 only 92 out of more than 700 Lords are hereditary.
Also in 2026 hereditary posts were abolished entirely.
It is still a lifetime appointment and it still has 26 bishops in it but by now it does not seem vastly different from senates of quite a few other European countries
The swiss army (a militia army based on universal conscription) draws all officers from its soldiers. Since compulsory service is only about a year, the downsides other people have mentioned are less impactful
The social background is that of a society built around an explicitly ageist hierarchy, where you’re supposed to put in your time doing unpleasant jobs and taking orders while you’re younger, and should ideally get rewarded with higher-status positions when you’re older.
This sounds really interesting (and I think there are historical societies that have worked that way).
It’s often seemed to me that if you’re going to have a hierarchy (and I think every society has, and probably always will), there’s a lot to be said, on paper, for making it fairly closely linked to age. Partly because it intuitively seems more egalitarian and ‘fairer’ than a system where status is based on, say, ownership of land or ownership of capital or family ancestry. Most of us have at least a fair shot of getting old someday (even if, yes, even that isn’t wholly egalitarian, since longevity does have a genetic component). Certainly better than the chance we have of acquiring lots of land and capital. And also, partly because it would push the culture strongly in the direction of deferred gratification, which would be a pro-social thing (at least to a large extent).
The more junior ranks of officer are expected to lead soldiers in battle, which is an enormously physically demanding task. There’s a reason why junior commissioned officers are generally young: because their job requires physical strength, stamina and energy, at levels few can achieve much past 30.
If your fictional culture has technology (or is a different species) that doesn’t have physical deterioration in middle age, then there’s no reason you couldn’t have lieutenants at 40. Note that this would change a lot of things about society: if people in their 50s were routinely expected to be in better physical condition than those in their 20s (e.g. most Olympians would be 50+) then all sorts of expectations of the nature of age would change.
Plenty of modern militaries don’t directly recruit officers (e.g. Germany, Switzerland, Israel), but they do promote into officer careers straight out of basic training, ie within a year or two of initial recruitment. Trying to operate a military with a single hierarchy, where you have to reach senior NCO rank before becoming a junior officer is not going to work with the roles that are currently expected of junior officers – you won’t get people to platoon commander (lieutenant) fast enough or in enough numbers.
That’s not to say you couldn’t have a single hierarchy, but you’d have to put the lower officer ranks below the more senior NCOs. Would make company and regimental staffs (which are usually filled with both senior NCOs and junior officers) very interesting – promoting from platoon command to a master sergeant’s berth in the company or regimental HQ would change the dynamics. Not necessarily in bad ways, but it would be a very different military culture.
Do it this way, and you put platoon command and the like (ie junior officer rank) as jobs achieved in the soldier’s late 20s/early 30s, ie the last age when they are still physically capable of keeping up with 19-22 year old recruits.
This would result in behind-the-lines headquarters and the like being filled with older men, rather than the present situation where they have a substantial leavening of younger junior officers gaining experience in “staff” roles before being rotated back out to the front.
Finland does the same as Israel and Switzerland: everyone enters the military as conscript, and does the same basic training. You get selected to the NCO training after 12 weeks based on your performance, aptitude and peer reviews. The best students of the NCO school go forward to the reserve officer training after six weeks of NCO training.
If you wish to go career, both reserve officers and NCOs are allowed to apply both to career officer and to career NCO path, though if you are a reserve officer and a career NCO, your NCO rank will always be an acting rank, and you will keep your officer rank for mobilisation, and will revert to officer when you resign – and reserve NCOs who are selected to National Defence University for career officer education will need to first pass a course that supplements their training to the level of reserve officers.
We actually have a rather finely tuned system of reserves that also takes care of the age issue: as reservists age, the unit to which they are assigned gets a lower priority, and lower-priority units have more reservists in officer positions. So, when you are a young reservist and have a career officer company commander almost straight out of university (a lieutenant in their mid-twenties), and top-of-the-line equipment, and a platoon leader (reserve officer) of you own age. (In fact, the same guy was probably commanding your platoon even during your conscription, then as an “officer cadet”, under professional supervision.) In your mid-thirties, your unit has Cold War equipment (perhaps even some WWII stuff), and the company commander and battalion staff will be reserve captains of senior lieutenants in their early fourties.
A big part of it is that non-junior officers are to a large extent middle-managers – they are supposed to keep politics under control. NCOs are supposed to be technical experts, not political experts. There’s little gain from moving people between technical and political roles.
I’ll point out that in the modern USA military there’s a very wide grey zone occupied by two classes: non-commissioned officers, usually sergeants, who are technically enlisted but have some (or even substantial) practical command authority; and warrant officers, primarily specialists whose jobs require some autonomy of decision making. (In the Navy those would be “petty officers” such as boatswains). The jump to commissioned officer is still significant enough that non-coms and W.O.s sometimes actively choose not to pursue the opportunity to do so.
In TNG era Trek, it’s pretty clear that the Klingons we see are almost all military aristocrats. General Martok in DS9 explicitly struggles with legitimacy because he got his position through competence and not by birthright (and iirc he’s still a noble, just from a minor house).
And it is questionable how moral it is to be allied with them, though the morality of warring against them to liberate the commons from an aristocracy they believe in as an important part of their culture is even more fraught.
I think they are a combination of a military aristocracy and a sort of military caste. They all seem to be members of such and such a house. But I also get the sense that we’re also looking at like third son of a third son kind of people. They still count as warriors by vocation, but they’re not really all elites. There’s certain attitudes involved in being of that caste like the “good day to die” ethos and the all important honor. But there are also a lot of non warrior Klingons. They don’t as frequently have roles that interface with starfleet and so don’t show up on screen as much. I remember one episode where a young an naive federation citizen is talking to some sort of Klingon scientist and comments about how he thought all Klingons were warriors, and the scientist has this eye rolling attitude about the warriors behavior and says something about that not being possible in a huge multi system empire. I think it also goes to explain how a multi species empire has an all Klingon military. No non Klingons are in the right caste – though some half Klingons actually are!
I am fairly certain that Martok married into the nobility (the House of Linkasa becoming the House of Martok when Sirella’s father died), not that he was a member of even a minor House. Martok has always struck me as a very Sharpe-like figure; a lowborn commoner that translated his military excellence into rank and privilege.
We do also see Klingon scientists, doctors, and lawyers in the shows. Worf’s grandfather famously defended Kirk and McCoy during their trial in ST6. It’s just that we more-commonly see our Starfleet crews interacting with soldiers and politicians, so we don’t see as much of Klingon society beyond that.
>And it is questionable how moral it is to be allied with them, though the morality of warring against them to liberate the commons from an aristocracy they believe in as an important part of their culture is even more fraught.
The Federation has, at least nominally, an answer for this; the prime directive. Basically, err on the side of letting an alien culture figure their own shit out. No liberation wars. Act as an external example of a better world and win culturally.
In practice no Starfleet officer seems to adhere to it, in part because the entire point of a rule like that in television is to explore its limits, but it does make sense that Starfleet would be in conflict with this directive given it’s own mission statement.
Still, there’s good reason for the federation to be like this. It’s obvious that interstellar war in Star Trek can very easily become genocidal, with a single capital ship being capable of wiping out multiple planetary populations in the right circumstances; Deep Space Nine explores biological warfare being used to commit genocide a half dozen times or so, and several planets are rendered uninhabitable over the course of that show.
The Klingons actually don’t go for this kind of genocidal warfare by preference, instead trying to dominate and control populations as part of an imperial system, which means they’re actually *the good neighbors* compared to what the federation finds elsewhere. In fact they actually have internal systems in place to punish war criminals, which we actually see working, which is highly unusual for the alpha quadrant. If the Klingons conquer the federation the population of the federation largely exists afterwards-we see several indications this is to be expected. For one instance, there’s a episode where time displaced Klingons are convinced they *utterly won* the federation Klingon war, by Worf, a half Klingon, who is in charge of a human crew. They are suspicious but buy that this is what victory looks like.
As an aside-it seems that typically, non-Klingons don’t serve military roles. However by the end of the Klingon-Federation war, the Klingons had developed a healthy respect for Humans as warriors, and might integrate them as a subordinate military race in victory.
Hell, the federation had probably done the math and determined that if the Klingon empire did defeat them they’d culturally conquer the Klingons in a few generations anyway. The Klingons were not that bad to lose a war to, compared to any other Alpha quadrant power.
Note this includes the federation itself-the Klingon empires preference for taking populations and planets intact is unusual *in comparison to the federation*. The few times the federation feels the need to fight a total war, they prefer their enemies to *not exist anymore at the end*. They just don’t choose to go to war often, but it’s clear that there are effectively no internal brakes on what the federation high command is willing and able to authorize if they do. It takes the protagonists going rogue-multiple times!-to contradict the genocidal tendencies Starfleet exhibits when pressed.
Which its worth noting humans are the military class of the Federation. They seem to make an outright majority of Starfleet. Also an awful large share of colonists too. Humans are clearly the driving force of the Federation and went all-in on it while everyone else is sort of bolted on. They often have their smaller private fleets while outsourcing much of their foreign policy and and presumably paying dues to support Starfleet. Not necessarily so different from the Athenian Empire, but hopefully the Federation is less prone toward genociding and enslaving member communities who aren’t paying their dues…
I think you’re correct on how much less bad the Klingons are compared to things like the Borg. That means it’s perfectly reasonable to have an ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ style alliance. I mean, historically, you only have to look at WW2 where neither ‘side’ made much sense based on the principles of the individual countries. Japan had very little actually in common with the rest of the Axis, but a good reason to enter into military alliance against common foes, whilst Spain had a lot in common with Italy and Germany in principle, but no reason to commit militarily. The USSR got on with the western allies even less.
And it’s clear that even the Klingons think that the Federation poses a cultural threat to their culture via peaceful coexistence, to the point that they treat the federation as something akin to the Borg at times. It’s also probably notable that whilst it’s command structure is heirarchical, Starfleet members do not consider starfleet to even be a military and are also unpaid volunteers. So for the purposes of the above divisions, Starfleet members may believe that being part of starfleet it part of their vocational duty and tied to their role in society, but waging wars of liberation is explicitly not part of that duty, no matter how many civilisation-ending warheads are technically on their ship (they’re actually for adapting to use against weird space anomalies). .
Well Japan was actually pretty much idealogically aligned with the Axis. Its brand of fascism wasn’t naturally antisemitic, nor was it part of the same racial hierarchy, but then again there was a gradient among the European fascists too where the shared characteristics were actually quite varied.
But we don’t really need to debate that.
The interesting thing about the Klingon empire idealogically is that it’s actually suggested most client races are okay with the situation in the commentary and lore. They were conquered centuries ago and are now technically a serf race, but their overlords are basically uninterested in interfering except to produce war materials. Given how stressful warfare is to most species letting a bunch of crazy aliens do it isn’t a bad deal. It’s unclear how much actual slave labor is used in the Klingon empire, with this possibly changing over time, but the less compulsory depiction of the Klingon empire is probably a more realistic system.
Of course there are still klingons who were particularly bad aristocrats, and the system was obviously unstable in the long run, but that doesn’t contradict any depiction of Klingons.
Hence by the time of the Klingon federation alliance you can make a case that the Klingon military would basically be unchanged if they had starfleets social system; the primary forcing effect on “oops all Klingons” was cultural, not compulsory. Every traditionalist Klingon would volunteer for starfleet as the closest analog for military service, the ex clients would stay at home, and you’d accidentally end up with more than half your crew being Klingon warriors.
Amd as for starfleet itself and why it’s not aggressive; we see precisely your explanation textually. I was a bit trite here, but we see rebellions by basically every protagonist against Star fleets nominal authority at some point, brought on by star fleet being too aggressive or violent for them. We see *lower ranked* officers engaging in varying degrees of loud or soft rebellion too; Riker comes very close to torpedoing his career over his involvement in a secret cloaking project. Somehow high command seems to be infested with nutjobs (actually this makes perfect sense) but the average captain and under does not feel like their duty involves war not do they feel compelled to honor the rules to any real degree.
Its worth nothing if less extreme the Federation also has a warrior race. Humans seem to make an outright majority of Starfleet (lore pushback about other ships we don’t focus on being mostly alien etc don’t seem to really work given even those above captain in rank highly skew human) and a lot of the remaining are mixed race. Also seem to disproportionately make up colonies.
Basically Humans were the driving force to create and maintain the Federation and others got bolted on. Not quite the Romans, maybe more like Athens empire? Many systems still seem to maintain private fleets. The Federation takes over foreign policy, you presumably pay dues to support Starfleet, in return you get security against far stronger powers.
Starfleet goes for a less aggressive vibes than the Klingons but Humans are probably maintaining a level of peacetime mobilization that would not economically viable if they weren’t acting as the primary military arm of a large confederation…
Perhaps part of it is because if Starfleet was more overtly militaristic in its tone members might start to wonder if outsourcing their military capability to the Humans would end poorly. After all Athens wasn’t above using that collectively funded military to do a bit of genociding and enslaving if you got behind on your dues…
Heck, a changeling manages to build a supernova bomb from what appears to be reasonably common industrial components, and this isn’t some kind of super-science thing but a known hazard in a “Wait, we’re missing Tekasite and Protomatter… Oh shit.” kind of way.
Nothing to add but I loved this comment.
The Prime Directive only applies to pre-warp societies. It doesn’t apply to warp-capable civilizations, let alone peer competitors.
The Federation may have somewhat similar reasons for not trying to wage liberation wars against “undesirable” warp-capable cultures, but the Prime Directive has nothing to do with it.
Really looking forward to this series! It’s one of those subjects that has been buzzing around in the back of my mind for a long time, so it’s great to see our host breaking it down.
One minor quibble, I’d personally classify slave-armies as a subset of the employment principle rather than the vocational one. While its true that they become soldiers because they’re slaves, crucially they stay soldiers because they’re being paid.
More broadly, I find that emphasizing their enslavement tends to pack a bunch of unhelpful assumptions with modern audiences, and its actually better (albeit still an oversimplification) if people envision of them as “professional armies with an unusually cruel recruitment system”.
The Baldur’s Gate we see in BG3 seems to have centralised power – Gortash is able to fit himself onto the top of it without any rearrangement. He doesn’t seem able to arrest random adventurers without good cause, but I think that’s a matter of legitimacy. Most of the other centres of force have to operate covertly.
I have a feeling that the model for fantasy cities with multiple centres of force is something like Shakespeare’s Verona: the Montagues and Capulets have enough power to wage a feud with each other; the Prince can halt a fight but can’t arrest anyone who hasn’t actually killed someone.
But neither Montagues nor Capulets could put an army in the field.
Baldur’s Gate’s constitution varies a bit on exactly when in time you’re talking about but Gortash manages to basically parley the Absolute emergency (that he caused) into being granted well, emergency powers. Generally speaking its a fairly conventional city-state with a series of elected dukes (the Council of Four) ruling collectively (the Grand Duke is normally a first-among-equals who gets to break deadlocks)
The origin story is that the first dukes were pirate captains who refused to pay the tolls for entering the city and instead took it over and made themselves the leaders.
This feels like a throw back to the ACOUP of old, where world building was a common theme. It’s nice to have a positivist “how to do things” once in a awhile rather than “how they do it wrong”.
I wonder if one of the later parts will delve into equipment type, and if the trop that:
Urban recruits tend to become heavy infantry
Rural peasants light infantry
Rural elites heavy cavalry
Pastoralists heavy cavalry
is as true as it superficially looks to me
You have mentioned here and previously about the issues of not having a bureaucracy, but I’ve never been entirely clear, what is actually needed to create one? What do you need to be able to administer a larger area? Is it literacy? Legitimacy that you have the right to involve yourself in those decisions far away? Wealth enough to pay for it? Or is there more that I’m missing?
Also, I adapted the Select Levy for a fantasy RPG I run, where instead of one armed soldier per a certain number of households, it’s one literate member who can then be trained in magic (literacy being required to be a wizard in this world), magic makes it easier to get hold of writing than it was in our world at the time, but not as easy as the printing press made it, so this seemed a reasonable level of imposition.
Not just literacy, a high level of education would be necessary. There is also political resistance by local Big Men when the central government is trying to impose its will with bureaucrats. And simply the societal knowledge to create a permanent bureaucracy is non-obvious. Should you use tax form 3B/A-R or 66F?
Literacy is a must, many medieval schools and universities were created by rulers for this reason (e.g., the university of Naples was founded by Frederick II to train bureaucrats needed for his emprie).
Also, any bureaucracy has an agency problem and if your bureaucrats *only* want to enrich themselves, the whole thing will collapse very fast. So you also need an ideology that puts the state/common good above the bureaucrat’s family/clan.
Technically it’s not a must, though it certainly helps: The Incas clearly had a bureaucracy but not writing. (though quipu could be used for recordkeeping it’s not really a written language) and that’s the crucial bit.
Quipu is a form of proto-writing. You can make a table out of strings if there is a common agreement on what the different materials, knots and possibly colours are for.
Would it make sense to generalize to “bureaucracy requires some form of record-keeping outside of the human mind”?
Well, it’s not black and white – having a record keeping system helps even if it’s still full-fledged writing. I imagine that being able to write down and transmit stories – rather than just quantities of goods – makes for a more effective ideology and hence bureacracy
So, I’m curious if that ideology idea basically links to Bret’s previous talks about legitimacy. Essentially, if you think it is legitimate that you do that work for the common good, that’s the same as having an ideology that promotes you working for the common good. Very curious how Bret would see it in terms of modern thinking vs ancient thinking.
This is what things like Confucianism are for. Originally, it was a political ideology rather than a religion.
>You have mentioned here and previously about the issues of not having a bureaucracy, but I’ve never been entirely clear, what is actually needed to create one?
Well, the pressure to create one was enough to lead to the invention of writing at least twice (Mesopotamia and Egypt), possibly four times (add China and Mesoamerica). Maybe five, jury is out on the Indus Valley script-or-not. Plus a number of societies that reached the immediate pre/proto-writing stage (West Africa, Andes).
So the need for a bureaucracy in sufficiently complex societies is great enough that they’ll literally invent complex sets of abstract symbols to run it. Repeatedly.
So the first thing we can say is that there is an immense pressure to create a bureaucracy. It’s not so much that it has to be forced to exist, it will make itself exist.
The form the bureaucracy takes is of course a different matter. You get temples running their own businesses but also having to answer to the state (Mesopotamia/Egypt), which can however devolve and spread into the common population if the state loses interest in centralisation (Amorite/Kassite periods). Medieval Europe had a very unusual case where the church took up a great deal of the bureaucracy that the fragmented worldly authorities couldn’t handle (Food for thought: How much institutional damage/loss would occur if you removed the church from the early and high medieval era?). This may or may not have resulted in a stronger bureaucratic presence than is normal in such fragmented societies.
Tokugawa Japan was relatively centralised (well, the Daimyo stopped fighting each other for a while, at least), yet it somewhat unusually outsourced a lot of its bureaucracy down to individual villages (which caused Japan to have a ~50% literacy rate in 1800, three times higher than China’s; just the consequence of forcing the peasants to do their own accounting/taxes).
A bureaucracy is so fundamentally necessary, it basically creates itself ex nihilo. To the point of people inventing abstract communications systems out of nowhere just to have it.
The form this bureaucracy takes otoh, can be immensely variable, and at a glance, has surprisingly much to do with human decisions – very similar socio-economic environments can still lead to very different outcomes.
Fully developed writing systems have been independently invented three times. Once in the Middle East, once in China and once in Mesoamerica.
I personally lean towards Egyptian writing being independently developed, but regardless of one’s stance on that particular matter, the point here is not the development of writing as such, but /why/ the development of writing. Specifically, instances where writing was developed specifically to deal with bureaucratic challenges.
We can see this very clearly with cuneiform, which was developed entirely to deal with bureaucratic/accounting challenges. Egyptian (specifically hieratic) isn’t meaningfully different, although we don’t see intermediate steps as clearly as we do with cuneiform.
For Chinese, the evidence for a bureaucratic origin is AFAIK less clear cut, and it’s entirely invisible for us for the Mayan script (paper and rainforest, not ideal for preservation).
The area of the Ancient Mayan civilisation is actually quite seasonal. We are talking about distinct wet and dry seasons here. However, you are right in that something similar to paper would not last that long in the hot, moist climate. Our scarce contemporary sources to the Ancient Mayans are inscriptions in stone or written or ceramic.
Incidentally on the Japan note, I think people vastly overestimate how easy pulling a Meiji was. Japan’s literacy rate was 3 times that of China or Korea, themselves rather higher than pretty much anywhere else outside the West. It was the third-most populous non-European country for good measure. Really it had such a huge advantage in becoming an industrialized non-European descent great power than anyone else. And even Japan was only slightly more industrialized in absolute (less in per-capita) than Italy, weakest of the Great Powers, by WWII…
Now we certainly could have more Thailands or Ethiopias, that is much easier then becoming a post-Industrial Revolution country.
I’m going old school here, but according to Max Weber, you need a large, stable empire to endure for a decently long time for a bureaucracy to develop. He sees bureaucracies as an alternative to personalistic power. Bureaucracy, you create set of positions based on division of labor and a chain of command. Bureaucrats are slotted into the positions and they are loyal to the bureaucracy, rather than to the specific people above them. It’s a much more efficient system than born based on personalistic ties, since the latter is constantly affected by personal relational drama. (And, you know, your patron dying.)
However, in an unstable, potentially violent society, it makes much more sense for people to build personal connections to powerful people with resources. As long as that’s the case For most people, it’s difficult for a political leader to establish a bureaucracy. With increased ability and decreased risk of violence, however, it starts making sense for elites to replace personalistic systems with bureaucratic systems because they are more efficient and meritocratic.
Or automation has reduced labor hours so much that the average Klingon has time to imitate the warrior aristocrat’s habits, in particular Bat’leth fighting, which was already not truly warfare related anymore and primarily a status symbol. A SciFi society that expands surplus into allowing everyone to be a warrior would not be the most natural development, but it wouldn’t be entirely implausible either. Interestingly, the Klingon’s at a time of relative peace (TNG) seem more insistent on their warrior status than during a time when wars were more common (TOS). Though of course that wasn’t intended by the creators of the show to imply the warrior culture of the Klingons is partly an expression of cultural and status anxiety.
Automation doesn’t reduce labor hours; it increases them. The more your society can automate, the larger the productivity gap between directing machines and doing things by hand. You are then incentivized (through wages or other money-equivalents) to spend more time directing machines and less time playing with bat’leths.
It’s similar to the “lump of labor” fallacy. The higher wages from automation get you away from subsistence-poverty faster, and the temptation is to conclude that the wages then get you to “enough money” levels faster. But in practice there is no “enough money” point. There’s always something more you could be buying.
But part of what you’re buying is social status by doing stuff like Bat’leth practice.
But in practice there is no “enough money” point. There’s always something more you could be buying
While this is true in a sense, that people will always value money irrespective of what their standard of living is already, it’s also true that, on the whole, they value it less. This is borne out in people’s political choices, for example (which we can see from history and political science, and also from current events): the more that people’s material needs are met, the more they start valuing nonmaterial goods like, say, environmental protection, or nationalism, or religious values*, or sexual and gender self-expression, or any number of other things. But it’s also pretty clear from anthropology and from personal observation, and plays out in nonpolitical contexts as well. There’s a reason that, say, the Human Development Index linkes “development” to a log-scaled version of income (and also uses a cutoff of, apparently, $75k).
Once you have enough economic resources not to worry about survival even more does not make you much happier.
This sounds plausible. IIRC Mark Twain described the antebellum South as “Sir Walter Scottland”. Everyone was pretending to be an extra in Ivanhoe. Perhaps the Klingons are similar. A society of accountants and lawyers and vending machine repairmen all pretending to be the reincarnation of Kahless.
Sound like Twain’s own war time experience: LARPing as an officer.
This post talks about when a society has a specific shape. But how would transitions between societies look like and how this affects armies? E.g. an empire has a centralized bureacracy and uses the collected taxes to fund a standing army. When such empires start to collapse, raising taxes becomes difficult yet armies still need to be paid. This forces the generals to find “irregular” methods of revenue collection. The Late Han Dynasty comes to mind. The generals who suppressed the Yellow Turban peasant rebellion became the warlords of the Three Kingdoms era.
Usually a general sets himself up as a regional governor, combining civilian and military authority. Since the circumstances are chaotic he probably doesn’t have an effective bureaucracy to collect taxes. This puts a limit on the Employment principle. The Entitlement principle is a non-starter because the general is an autocrat. There are no voting rights to give. Are there counter examples? Obviously the general won’t turn his whole province into a republic but maybe he could grant privileges to local communities or guilds?
Which leaves the Vocational Principle. Give direct land grants to his soldier, creating a caste of soldier farmers. If the soldiers get enough land to be gentleman farmers and don’t have to work the land themselves, depends on available resources. This ties into the Clientage principle. The soldiers are clients of the general and his family.
From which segment of society do soldiers in such armies come from? I think such armies are usually completely new creations, not the former professional imperial armies which are often ineffective when the empire is collapsing. And who are the officers? The obvious first choice are local aristocrats. But surely there are also more colorful historical examples?
A lot of the cases at least the nucleus is the former government forces, but the general in question is forced to find new ways to pay for them (and potentially raise more of them)
Sometimes (like with Liu Bei) he starts without much in the way of government support and is raising forces himself basically in the hope of distinguishing himself and getting a job.
> The reductio ad absurdum of this are some portrayals of Star Trek’s Klingons: an entire post-industrial multi-planet empire that can design starships (and so must be hyper-specialized) but where also somehow everyone is a warrior trained in close-combat weapons. Real societies do not train their starship designers (or their blacksmiths) to also be master swordsmen because that isn’t worth anyone‘s time.
With increases in lifespan, labor productivity, and educational capacity, society gains greater ability to educate people in whatever it feels like. Society can afford to indulge in cultural quirks.
Consider how many people in our modern society get taught to play a musical instrument in school, or a sport, or something else that isn’t particularly economically useful.
Given Star Trek technology levels, there is no way that swordfighting makes sense as an actual combat strategy. They are doing it as a sport. For fun. (And perhaps to keep fit if they don’t have fitness pills).
With holodeck technology, it should be possible to make a really good VR fight training sim. If every schoolchild gets an hour a day of VR fighting as their equivalent of PE, and it’s also used widely as their main form of recreation, then most of the population could end up pretty good at close combat.
If the klingons were genetically a bit more predisposed to fighting than humans, then this might help explain why the VR fight sims were so popular compared to other potential forms of recreation. It might also explain a society that encourages everyone to get their aggression out in VR, under the belief that a klingon deprived of VR fights will start real fights.
Minor pedantic note: being able to play a musical instrument was very common, at least in pre-industrial Europe. Any village could provide a decent band, and often a good chorus. In Wales and Ireland a good singing voice or a deft hand on a fiddle was essential to impressing the ladies.
One thing that you kinda have to remember is that there were no recording media: if you wanted music you had to either do it yourself or find someone who did. Read 19th/early 20th century novels and you find quite a few instances of people just getting together and playing music for fun.
Oh, the part saying farming population density might be 30-70 per square mile vs 2-5 for pastoralism reminded me of something I’ve been wondering. I see a lot of different figures quoted for population density of various regions, and one thing that is not clear to me is if they are always talking about the whole thing (say, all of France, or all of Burgundy) vs the population density of the farmland (which would be very different). It seems important to note because obviously an area with more mountains and desert and marsh and whatever else would have less population density overall, but the actual experience of people farming there might be at the same density in the suitable farmlands (or higher as they all pack in to the workable land more). Which would be two very different experiences of “Sparsely populated” between actually spread out and simply densely clustered in specific hotspots.
2 points
a) do these points apply to navies as well?
b) you distinguish two systems – where money comes from holding land and one where money comes from serving in the bureaucracy. What about systems where money comes from commerce, a plutocracy like Venice?
b-I would guess money from commerce is still an upwards movement of money, as it still comes from holding something, in that case, trade goods, owning ships, dockyards, etc.
British naval impressment was backed by a legal framework that made it a form of conscription, but to the impressed men it probably seemed more like a slave/prisoner system.
The employment principle definitely holds — professional armies are ruinously expensive. The US is the extreme case right now: all-volunteer, ~$900B/year. Imperial Rome consumed over half its state budget on the military; the US isn’t at that ratio yet but in absolute terms it’s the most expensive military force in history. The question isn’t whether you can — it’s how long the fiscal basis holds. When Rome’s tax base atrophied, the professional army degraded right back into a semi-clientage model.
On the “everyone’s a warrior” point — I think the author’s “labor specialization” explanation misses the harder constraint. It’s not that you *can’t*, it’s that you can’t afford the gear. After the Iron Age, equipment costs jumped massively. A set of bronze armor plus weapons was several years of an ordinary person’s income. By the high medieval period, a full suit of plate armor cost what a luxury car does today; a warhorse with barding ran to what an entire village produced in a year. Once metallurgy advanced, equipment mattered too much, and not everyone could pay the entry ticket.
Equipment cost itself is the physical driver of military power concentration — from iron to starships, the more expensive the gear, the fewer people can fight, and the more power concentrates. No conspiracy theory needed to explain every instance of military aristocratization.
I disagree on the Klingon example. Klingons were never worldbuilding — they’re a Cold War metaphor. 1960s American writers needed a Soviet projection, so they produced this all-warrior honor-culture species. It works fine at the level of narrative function — the problem is when you treat it as a worldbuilding textbook, it falls apart. Which actually proves the author’s own point: a fictional military projection and real structural constraints aren’t the same thing. Using the former’s standards to critique the latter’s failure is a bit of a straw man.
>1960s American writers needed a Soviet projection, so they produced this all-warrior honor-culture species.
I mean, 1960s writers didn’t. They produced a Russia/USSR analogue – an expansionist and militarist empire, intent on spreading its ideology (their first appearance being a literal cold war, spreading your ideology to unsuspecting third parties metaphor).
TOS Klingons use subterfuge and cheat wherever they can. They demonstrate cultural sophistication and have a clear division of roles. They’re not obsessed with honour nor while close quarter combat.
Modern viking-style Klingons could be argued to evolve over the course of the films in the 70s and 80s, but this is debatable. Klingons receive a wilder, more barbaric appearance, but they still show a stratified society.
Then TNG happens and Klingons become a caricature.
Point being, 60s writers created a perfectly believable Klingon society and archetype.
80s writers tossed this into the bin and replaced it with a meme.
It looks like the thema system of the Byzantine empire doesn’t fit neatly in your classification. These fellows were military settlers but weren’t ethnically distinct from the rest of the population. They got land in exchange for their service but no political representation.
Military settlers don’t have to be ethnically distinct, but there’s no certainty that the early mercenary-settled thema were fully Greek, nor that the first Armenian thema weren’t settled with Armenians, nor that the later reinforcements to the de-Hellenized frontiers weren’t Greek.
Here’s the quote
“Military Settlers (an imposed military aristocracy of fighters given land in exchange for future service): a fairly common solution for consolidating conquest (especially for societies which simply lack the bureaucratic infrastructure for direct governance), creating a new upper-stratum of military-aristocrats that are often ethnically distinct from the ruled. Examples: Macedonian military-settlers after Alexander’s conquests; the garrison-cities of the Rashidun Caliphate.”
In the Byzantine case it was not to consolidate conquest but to stabilize the frontier. The bureaucratic infrastructure for direct governance existed but was found inadequate. The thematic soldiers were hardly aristocrats – I’ve never seen them described as such. We don’t know their ethnic makeup but there is no evidence it was too different.
I think the key to understanding the Klingons comes from from the Undiscovered Country homage episode of the prequel series Enterprise. The Klingon lawyer complains that these days, all the kids want to be warriors. This guy is old enough to remember a time when this wasn’t the case.
My hypothesis is that the Klingon Empire started as a personalistic regime around Kahless, with an honor-society warrior-aristocracy at its core. After Kahless dies, the warrior-aristocrats aren’t able to hold the whole thing together by personal connections alone, so they have to build an institutional state. It is built, deliberately or accidentally, to be highly permeable to corruption so that the existing aristocrats can extract resources from it and place their families and clients in key postings. The result of which being that the Empire is completely for sale by the TNG/DS9 timeframe, but can allow a commoner like Martok to rise through the ranks with the right aristocratic connections.
I think we should generally understand that most Klingons with speaking parts are aristocratic officers, and when they complain about there being no more honor in the Empire they’re complaining about upjumped peasants in positions of power or other aristocrats expanding their own influence by exploiting state institutions rather than cultivating personal bonds.
As an aside, I think the Federation deliberately turns a blind eye to Klingon occupations. The official death tool on Bajor from the Cardassian occupation was five million, which is a lot of dead individuals but is a remarkably small proportion of a society of billions to have been killed after 60 years of war and famine and purges. I think that the Federation deliberately counts only a narrow set of unjustified but deliberate killings by the Cardassian state in their tally because if you measure the death toll in occupations that way, the “honorable” Klingons get off relatively light. Of course in their very first appearance on the show, the Klingons go straight to mass reprisal killings, so who knows what sorts of fantastic lies the Federation tells to maintain the alliance (apart from the underlying truth that Starfleet can’t beat the Klingons in a war).
I suspect the alliance is part ‘this is mostly a military alliance of mutual defence’, which is no way requires anyone involved to actually like each other (The Allies in WW2 were made up of an empire, a nation founded in armed revolt again said empire, and a nation that had recently executed the emperor’s close relatives, and that’s before you need to mention political philosophy). That and both sides know full well that peaceful co-existence with the Federation is a threat to the Klingon Empire’s culture, to the point that the Klingons had repeatedly listed ‘peacefully co-existing with you is destroying our warrior culture’ as their reason to declare war on the Federation. I mean, why fight a war when offering an alliance is both easier and still lets you achieve everything declaring war might (and only provided you win) – I suppose the moral conundrum is really only Star Fleet having to acknowledge that they can’t force the Klingons to change next week, but can change them in a few centuries.
Was the later Han fine with the employment?
Two or maybe three typos, all in one paragraph, in “Recruitment Principles.”
After all, this society is about to give these fellows weapons, so without some broader social structure that encourages or constrains them to remind at the standard, there is very little preventing them from deserting or revolting.
remind -> remain
Also, if by standard you mean something like “flag,” shouldn’t it be “under the standard”?
Compulsion can get me into the ranks, but it struggles to keep them there.
either me -> them or them -> me.
I wonder if this line of thinking will lead some to reconsider som modern questions. Such as, how did Russia get people of Donbass, Ukrainian citizens, to bear arms and fight against their Ukraine?
Your media will arrive with “compulsion” every time, which this article has just knocked out.
Some of them politically sympathises with the Russian regime. These are numerous enough to cause the outbreak civil war in 2014. For eight years a low intensity civil war waged on in eastern Ukraine. This was possible because the two splinter groups got military support from Russia. Then the Putin regime decided to do a full-scale invasion out of a combination of irredentism and paranoia.
Bret clearly states that this article is about per-industrial societies and this is not applicable to modern wars.
On the one hand compulsion is rarely 100% of the solution, but it often is not insignificant either. Not sure how you are saying this article has just knocked it out. One of the categories listed is literally slaves!
Much of the Russian-controlled Donbass has a significant pro-Russia element, but it is also true Russia does a lot of dubiously consensual recruiting. Most modern states in its situation would rely more on broad-based conscription but Putin clearly considers that politically complicated.
I think that this sort of thing is valuable because not only does it let world builders make societies that make sense, it also lets you actively choose when to contrast the more alien variations ‘the armies of evil’ or ‘these are not actually humans at all’ against a human society with a plausible seeming military recruited plausibly. After all, sometimes you do want a non-human society to look not like a metaphor for some human societal ill, but be genuinely different, and so having their military look actively insane to a human observer (Warhammer orks have the most obvious and comedic example, in that the basic principles that apply to humans, either in agricultural or hunter-gathering societies do not apply to a species of photosynthesising fungi, no matter how much they ape many other human attributes, like having limbs)
There’s a DS9 episode (can’t remember the name) where Worf is up for war crimes, and the klingon prosecutor and him have an argument about battle and honor, that could go some way towards explaining what’s on screen. Worf disparages him, and the prosecutor asserts that the courtroom is his battlefield, and he fights with words as his weapons. This could suggest that battle and war are a pseudo religious / intellectual concept in Klingon culture that the military caste (who the federation characters largley get their ideas of klingon culture from) take literally, and everyone else takes metaphorically. So an engineer might ‘do battle’ with a technical problem and doing so ‘honorably’ is not slapping together a quick solution or using AI.
One of the first TNG episodes dealing with the Klingons (s2ep8 ‘Heart of Glory’) kinds of hints at this itnerpretation: three klingons are taking the warrior cult literally and trying to start a war with the federation so they can live as ‘true klingons’. And worf berates them for taking battle so litrally as a concept. To quote from the memory alpha entry: ‘Worf tells him he is looking for battles in the wrong place, that the true test of a warrior lies within. He hasn’t mentioned duty, honor, or loyalty, the things a true warrior must have.’
This idea is dropped pretty quickly after this though, and Worf reverts to a much more literal interpretation of battle and honor. A lot of our understanding of klingon culture, especially in TNG is filtered through Worf, who is very much a second generation immigrant whose understanding of his culture isn’t lived in, caliciphied at a really young age, and is reversed engineered from legends.
(this is all of course headcannon; the series very clearly understand the klingons to be viking samurai who all take battle very seriously.)
The federation’s alliance with the Klingons can mostly be understood as not so much ‘they’re our buddies’ as ‘we’re keeping them in the alliance of the status quo because it makes them conquer less.”After the destruction of Praxis (the Empire’s main energy source) in The Undiscovered Country, the empire is left in a crippled state, and seems like it can’t maintain itself as a peer equal with the Federation for at least a generation. The Federation jumps at the chance to define and shackle Klingon territorial ambitions with treaties while they have the high ground, and they more importantly bring the klingons into the Alliance of the Status Quo trade network. This has the effect of making new klingon wars more costly and less likely. Which actually seems to have worked; the klingon empire we see in TNG mostly hasn’t conquered anywhere new in awhile (I think?)
The military caste, not having anywhere to blow off steam and felling insecure in what is now no longer a primary role in the Empire, start obssessing about honor and battle in a way TOS klingons never did (a bit like the samurai did in their later periods of peace). They still exert a lot of politicall power though, and under Gowron are able to breach a generation longs peace treaty with the Federation over some vague changeling casus belli. Gowron himself has always struck me as a kind of return to warrior ideals; the klingon emperor we first meet in TNG, the one that transferred blame to Worf’s family for the Kitimer disaster, was very aware of how fragile the empire was, and specifically the warrior idealogy. He was quite old, and so it seems plausible he was able to keep the klingon warrior caste of his generation from starting wars, but in so doing frustrated them so they pivoted hard to Gowron after his death.
I always thought TNG and DS9 did reasonably good jobs of highlighting the tensions of the (never fully outlined) Khitomer Accords. Even a basic non-aggression pact was fundamentally unstable, due to the instability of the highly personalist Klingon political system. And we only saw Klingon and Federation forces fighting as actual military allies when basic realpolitik *clearly* demanded it. The Dominion was an unambiguous existential threat to the Federation *and* to Klingon elites. (One might quibble over the question of whether Klingon *subject* peoples might greet the Dominion as a Cyrus, but that seems unlikely – the Cardassian experience demonstrates that the Dominion did not feel constrained by treaty obligations to vassal states, or by any particular standard of treatment for civilians).
>(One might quibble over the question of whether Klingon *subject* peoples might greet the Dominion as a Cyrus, but that seems unlikely – the Cardassian experience demonstrates that the Dominion did not feel constrained by treaty obligations to vassal states, or by any particular standard of treatment for civilians).
To be fair to the Dominion here, the Cardassians were in a queue for extermination for having tried to exterminate the Founders (the female changeling telling Garak as much when she visits DS9). Just because the Dominion decided to advance the timetable doesn’t mean they’d treat every subject species like that.
And even then, the Cardassians were initially given a lot of leeway. It’s only with Dukat out of the picture and Damar proving himself inadequate for everything ever that the reins are slowly, and after a multitude of chances, tightened. Indeed, I’d argue that if it wasn’t for Damar’s ego driving him towards rebellion, the Dominion would’ve seen little reason to tighten its grip on Cardassia for the duration of the war.
Sure, after the war, the Cardassians would’ve become tragic victims of a genetically engineered plague wiping out every last one of them or something, but hey.
But as long as you’re not trying to exterminate the Founders, or put up inconvenient levels of resistance (e.g. the Teplan), you should be fine.
Hell. The Dominion allowed the Betazed to keep existing after occupying their world, and to be blunt – if I was the Vorta in charge of conquering and occupying the homeworld of a telepathic species, that species could only be found in history books after I’m done.
“sprawling cities with non-state systems of organization (power informally divided among a bunch of different groups that all wield force), but that’s not a pattern we see often historically. ”
We actually sorta do see this here and there. Italy in particular during the middle ages. (though thats’ partially because of the entire complicated set of theoretically overlapping obligations and stuff) eventually it kinda solidifies into “proper” city-states, but there’s quite a bit of points where you have eg. nobles, some kind of representative assembly and church/imperial authorities all sorta wielding power to *some* degree but not one realyl being “in charge”. (and with various guilds/merchant families/nobles all being able to raise force when needed)
Those societies were in the process of developing from Feudalism to something more like a Polis. I don’t think each of the steps in the process would be stable in the long run.
It has to be remembered that throughout the Middle Ages Italy was caught in the tug of war between the Papacy and the self-styled “emperors” of the Holy Roman Empire. This left Italy too fragmented even for an Italian monarchy to arise.
I dispute your understanding of the Klingons. It is proven possible to create a human society where all able-bodied software engineers are able to play table-tennis, and sometimes do so as part of establishing prestige-relationships in workplaces. It follows then that humanlike aliens who practice less-obscured interpersonal violence as part of the cultural expectations in their intellectual workplaces are plausible.
The Papuans have developed an intermediate form in modern times. Instead of actually fighting they run around on a field with spears in their hands shooting swearwords and insults at each other.
I’ve always found the swedish medieval military system to be interesting, in that it kinda isn’t *quite* like any of those but has elements of them?
Like, the swedish peasantry had some degree of political rights (at least in a judicial sense, while the local assemblies were clearly dominated by Big Men all free landowners could attend) and were also expected to serve in the military (either directly in case of local defence or by furnishing a man, or in coastal areas, several vilalges pooling togehter resources to furnish a ship for expeditionary warfare) a lot of these obligations over time gets converted into taxes, and then a feudal “tax-exemption in exchange for service as a mounted warrior” (and the latter actually does seem to be somewhat permeable: We see people move in and out of the tax exemption depending on if they could afford to pass muster that year) gets grafted on top of that…
Sweden (and Finland) never developed much of a Feudal system. We tried to adapt too late and did not get that far before it became outdated.
Sort of. What never really developed was the actual infeudation (IE: Where nobles were granted land in exchange for military service) instead it was handled via tax-exemptions. (there were land grants for nobles but they tended to be more in the form of appointments to positions like castellans and generally weren’t heridatery)
>The official death tool on Bajor from the Cardassian occupation was five million, which is a lot of dead individuals but is a remarkably small proportion of a society of billions to have been killed after 60 years of war and famine and purges.
I can’t believe Scifi writers have problems with scale.
It is a recurrent problem in the genre:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale
Or “let us vote or we’ll fight against you!”. One example of which was the Dorr Rebellion in 1840s Rhode Island. Originally only the propertied– land owners– could vote; and the state government represented such land owners and therefore had no institutional interest in extending the franchise. So the rebels held an unsanctioned convention that declared itself the new government of Rhode Island, armed themselves, and the matter nearly came to a state civil war. Although technically a failure in the military sense, the rebellion convinced the status quo government to unbend enough to extend voting rights to anyone who would pay a poll tax.
“Those questions are important because civil society comes first – armies are built out of existing subsistence systems and social structures, not usually the other way around”
“Military Settlers (an imposed military aristocracy of fighters given land in exchange for future service): a fairly common solution for consolidating conquest (especially for societies which simply lack the bureaucratic infrastructure for direct governance), creating a new upper-stratum of military-aristocrats that are often ethnically distinct from the ruled.”
And that´s a qualification to the previous statement.
Subsistence systems and social structures of military settlers are built out of army.
The army is drawn from the subsistence systems and social structures of the conquering society, sure – but military settlers do not simply reproduce the society of the motherland.
Note how different societies the Englishmen built in Ulster, Virginia, New England and West Indies.
None of these was heavily based on a conquered society (like India was). Ulster, Virginia and West Indies had ethnically distinct ruled – England and New England did not.