Scholars and practitioners in the social and behavioral sciences have studied military systems for over a century. Archaeologists and anthropologists have offered insights into the war making of prehistoric humankind as well as modern primary group dynamics (the ways soldiers develop their own methods of making sense of and appraising what they do) and the ways modern societies celebrate and memorialize warriors (Keeley 1996; Divale 1973; Mosse 1990; Ben-Ari 1998). Historians have explored the relationships between the social, economic, and geographic contexts of ancient and modern states and the military institutions they generated as well as the relationship between technological changes in weaponry and changes or the absence of change in the ways states and their military leaders prepare for and wage war (Mumford 1961; Mann 1986; Vagts 1959; Lynn 1984). Political scientists have delved into the relationships between political and military elites and the presence or absence of military coup making. (Finer 1988; Huntington 1957; Stepan 1971; Peri 1983; Karsten 1997; Feaver and Kohn 2001). Sociologists and social psychologists have asked how soldiers are recruited, trained, and motivated; how racial and gender integration is achieved; how morale is sustained or lost; what combat does to those who experience it; and how military institutions and personnel interact with the rest of society (Andrzejewski 1954; Janowitz 1960; Moskos et al. 2000; Stouffer 1949; Kindsvatter 2003; Gal and Mangelsdorff 1991; Cronin 1998). Geographers and economists have attempted to measure the costs and benefits of military institutions and warfare on regions, with their attendant impacts on domestic economies (Nef 1950; Melman 1985; Knorr 1956; Russett 1970; Rockoff 2005; Kirby 1992). Cultural studies/literary history scholars have mined the memoirs, poems, and novels of veterans (Wilson 1962; Fussell 1975; Fussell 1989; Lewis 1985).
THE MILITARY-SOCIETY SYMBIOSIS
For millennia organization for warfare has been one of the central activities of humankind. Military institutions, however simple they were in prehistoric times, were among the first social institutions. Bands of hunter-gatherers employed simple weapons and tactics in fights with other hunter-gatherers. The kinship-centered, cooperative propensities of earlier humankind coupled with the effective use of verbal communication offer better explanations of the combat effectiveness of early human communities than do studies relying solely on theories of aggressiveness (Bigelow 1969; Dawson 1986).
Simple, subsistence-level societies did not all wage war in the same manner. Resource availability and cultural differences among those societies were important factors in war making. The decision of some communities to house new couples in the wife’s mother’s community (matrilocality) as opposed to the husband’s father’s community (patrilocality) has been found to be associated strongly with a low level of local conflict as a result of the constant breaking up of extremely localistic war bands and a higher degree of effectiveness in longer-range warfare as a result of the creation of more cosmopolitan intercommunity trust and affiliation (Divale 1973).
Simple settled agricultural communities defended their fields with every-man-a-warrior militias. The first city-states tended to emerge in fertile alluvial valleys, where warlords dominated and fortified central market towns that had a surplus large enough to enable them to retain a professional military retinue. Those warlords centralized the acquisition and distribution of weapons, attacked and held nearby towns and cities, and extended their power into the pastoral hinterland. Virtually the entire budget of the first known warlord, Sargon of Akkad, the conqueror of Sumer, went to his army, but his military "pacification" also produced secure trade routes, law courts, uniform weights and measures, and a common coinage. (In later periods up to 70 percent of the budget would go to the military, as in the cases of the Roman Empire, Charlemagne, Edward III, and Louis XIV.) In the process those warlords developed symbiotic relations with agrarian and mercantile elites. "Civilization" had arrived (O’Connell 1995; Mumford 1961).
In the Middle Ages the armies of city-states and monarchies served elites who in several areas ruled relatively decentralized feudal communities dominated by aristocratic lords with their own armed retinues. Eventually most of the nominal kingly leaders of those feudal states, utilizing new military technologies and "standing armies" paid for in innovative ways, defeated their aristocratic rivals and claimed a monopoly on military violence. Many of those monarchic rulers later yielded to revolutionary forces employing conscript armies. Most of those military forces reverted in time to the modern model of "all-volunteer" forces, and the more affluent of those states developed increasingly sophisticated weapons, strategic planners, and logistic systems (Redlich 1964-1965; Black 1998; Tilly 1992; McNeill 1982).
The early modern state emerged in areas where mon-archs were able to overcome the medieval constitutional traditions of sharing their power with a parliament composed of the gentry and the aristocracy. As commerce, riches from the New World, and more efficient European farming techniques generated economic surpluses, those resources were taxed for military purposes. Intendants loyal to the French monarchy slowly bled power from the nobility to fuel royal ambitions throughout the seventeenth century. King Gustavus Adolphus successfully conscripted Swedes for the seven armies he threw against the Hapsburgs in the second quarter of that century, paying for the effort with the sale of war bonds and monopolies, the appropriation of farms, the rationing of food, and the debasement of the currency, all accomplished by a ruthless bureaucracy. As Charles Tilly put it, "War made the State, and the State made war" (Tilly 1992, p. 213).
In the Netherlands sixteenth-century Calvinist wool manufacturers and merchants organized the first modern professional army. The forces of their Spanish foe had been raised in the venture-capitalism fashion of most early modern forces: The crown paid a fixed sum to professional military entrepreneurs to raise regiments. However, the primary remuneration for those men in the course of the campaign was understood to be booty under the maxim bellum se ipsum alet ("war should feed itself"). The Dutch force was conceived differently. Its mission was defensive and of indefinite tenure. Its commanders tried to avoid the chaotic behavior characteristic of looting soldiers in order to maintain discipline. Hence its men were paid regular salaries and enjoyed the benefits of a fledgling commissariat. Its employers included some of the world’s first assembly-line (woolen clothing) manufacturers. Thus it is not surprising that Dutch infantrymen were trained to present the enemy with a continuous and lethal series of musket volleys through the use of training manuals that offered a recruit dozens of by-the-number engravings of the steps that all the ranks of musketeers were to take simultaneously in a load-and-fire countermarch (Feld 1975).
THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY
Some technological innovations transformed both military methods and social and political structures. Bronze weapons were expensive. Thus Bronze Age armies were aristocratic, and their states were oligarchies. The advent of cheaper iron weapons meant that men of more modest means could bear arms. In ancient Greece this eventually resulted in more democratic polities. The stirrup enabled armored men to fight more effectively from horseback, but armor and large horses were expensive. Only an oligarchy could afford to field that type of force in Europe, Asia, or Africa.
By 1350, however, pikemen and crossbowmen had dealt the armored cavalry of feudalism devastating blows, and although the landed nobles resisted, their role as cavalry in military systems began to decline. The introduction of firearms into western Africa and Maori New Zealand significantly transformed the social and political structures of those peoples. In Europe and the Middle East firearms grew in significance as the rate and rainproof reliability of fire increased tenfold between the early sixteenth century and the late seventeenth century. By 1600 the ratio of infantry to cavalry in Europe had risen to almost 8 to 1. Military demands continued to influence and be aided by developments in the clothing industry, the metals trades, nautical technology, land transportation, and high finance (Vasillopulos 1995; Nef 1950; Van Creveld 1983).
The evolution and growth of military institutions appears to some to have followed a steady linear path from the simple to the sophisticated, but there were many exceptions. Indeed the European feudal and nineteenth-century Chinese warlord military systems were retrogressions from the more complex and effective armies of the Roman and Chinese imperial states that preceded them. Technological advances in warfare were not adopted readily by many military elites (Goldman 2006). Eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Mameluke warriors in Egypt clung to swordsmanship, sixteenth-century Japanese shoguns embraced firearms with great success but then abandoned and suppressed their use out of respect for the ethos of the elite class of samurai swordsmen, and medieval European aristocrats disdained improvements in infantry weapons and tactics for similar reasons (Stone 2004).
Armies grew in size as well as complexity over the course of several centuries, but those increases were not driven by technological breakthroughs. They came about only when political leaderships decided that such increases were appropriate. Empire builders such as Louis XIV and Phillip II increased the size of their armies, whereas leaders in Poland, Britain, and the United States held back. The leadership of the fledgling state of Israel produced a military with a high participation ratio because of its sense that Israel was beleaguered. Revolutionaries such as those in the French Committee of Public Safety and the Chinese Kuomintang and the Chinese Communists opted for mass armies for political purposes. Political leaders decide to add weapons and manpower at times of opportunity or threat; they also decide to reduce their expenditures and forces when that seems to be the right course. Examples include the Swedish decision in the eighteenth century to reduce the national military and the decision by the Chinese Empire in the sixteenth century to withdraw its massive navy from the Indian Ocean (Lynn 1990; Stone 2004; Vagts 1959; Perrin 1979).
Conscription of Frenchmen in the 1790s for the revolutionary infantry advanced the role of the common soldier. The conscription act called on those with new rights to satisfy new obligations. However, that massive and recurring mobilization did not lead to greater democracy. The musket had not "made the democrat," in J. F. C. Fuller’s formulation (Fuller 1961, p. 33), in revolutionary France any more than it had in early modern Japan, Russia, or Prussia. Although it ended the battlefield supremacy of the samurai and the knight, they reemerged as the officer corps of the new standing armies.
Although the intensity of warfare and the military participation rates of male citizens both increased throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the share of both the gross national product and the resources of the state devoted to military expenditures began to decline in the late twentieth century. Social welfare and other nonmilitary lobbies grew more effective at the expense of the military-industrial complex. Civilian experts and technicians provided an increasing number of services to military institutions as the "tooth to tail" ratio of support personnel to combatants grew. Those in technical military specialties became increasingly vital to the maintenance and functioning of increasingly sophisticated military equipment (Wool 1968). Private contractors began to replace some military personnel. The ratio of American contract personnel to military personnel in the Gulf War was 1 to 60; by late 2006 in the war in Iraq it was virtually 1 to 1 (Hemingway 2006).
THE RECRUITMENT PROCESS
Military personnel have been recruited as volunteers or conscripted by the state. At different times and in different places volunteers have had a variety of reasons for offering themselves for service, and nations have employed a number of philosophical and technical approaches to the recruitment process, ranging from a total reliance on volunteerism to the most brutal sort of compulsion, with a host of intermediate formulas (Levi 1996).
In the absence of conscription, individuals have chosen to serve for monetary rewards or economic security, adventure or glory, and religious or political idealism. The soldiers of ancient Greece and Rome, those of medieval and early modern magnates, and those of more modern armies of empire were motivated largely by economic considerations; in fact some were foreign mercenaries. However, those economic motives could be intermingled with more culture-driven ones. Many Irish, Sikhs, and Gurkhas in the service of the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century British armed forces, for example, conceived of themselves as people with a warrior tradition, a self-image that was not lost on British recruiters (Karsten 1983; Enloe 1980). Similarly the Crow, Pawnee, and Shoshoni braves who volunteered to serve as scouts for the U.S. Army in the 1870s felt both the push of tribal need and the pull of a warrior tradition (Dunlay 1982). Some members of the untouchable caste (harijan) were recruited for British military service in India after the mutiny of elite Indian troops in the Bombay army in 1857. Untouchables saw military service as a vehicle for social mobility, and the thought of being used against Brahmins might have been appealing to some (Cohen 1990). Black Americans first volunteered largely for ideological reasons during the Civil War. Later many found military service to be a clear avenue for economic and social mobility, though they faced disappointment at the hands of racist recruiters and commanders until the second half of the twentieth century.
Within socioethnic communities that do not see themselves as warlike and in subcultures and families that are not impoverished, the individual act of volunteering in peacetime cannot be explained as easily. The first surge of wartime patriotic fervor in modern nation-states has led millions to enlist, but patriotic behavior also has been inspired by other motives. Many colonial New England recruits during the French and Indian War were younger sons who had not inherited land. Their response to offers of enlistment bounties consequently was informed by their desire to acquire a nest egg and personal independence from parental control. Most of those who served in the Continental army were more interested in the size of the bounty offered than in "the Cause" (Anderson 1984; Lender 1986). Conversely, many Confederate volunteers who rode with the guerrilla commander William Quantrill in western Missouri and Kansas during the Civil War were the eldest sons of substantial slave owners, defending their world against what they perceived to be a serious threat to its survival (Bowen 1977).
In any event patriotism alone does not explain why many have selected the military calling in peacetime in a host of historical periods. The spirit of adventure and the martial spirit notwithstanding, economic security clearly has been the primary motive for peacetime enlistments in voluntary military institutions (with the exception of officer candidate academies) (Karsten 1982).
When the question of recruitment is approached from the perspective of the recruiter, there are clear correlations between policy and sociopolitical structure. Mercantilist reasoning led several early modern European states to seek foreign paid volunteers (mercenaries) to keep their subjects employed productively on their farms and at their trades. Machiavelli argued for a militia drawn from both the propertied classes and the masses to defend the liberty of a city-state, but that reasoning did not impress most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rulers and their bureaucracies. Thus in 1776 Adam Smith maintained in his Wealth of Nations that militias were inefficient. Such a system drew people from their fields and trades to train and failed to bring them up to the standards of professional soldiers (Smith 1937, pp. 653-668). The solution was the creation of a professional military.
The modern nation-state rediscovered the power of local and regional loyalties in recruiting volunteers. Great Britain reorganized its regiments in 1873 by basing one of its two battalions permanently in locales with which they thereafter would be identified. The usefulness of that step for both recruitment and morale was proved quickly, and in the first two years of World War I the massive British volunteer army was raised largely through the private actions of committees and individuals drawing on "local pride," the "taproot of English nationality" (Simkins 1988, pp. 82, 97, 186). The National Guard Association of the United States, created in the 1870s, lobbied for volunteer units of the various states seeking resources from Congress. The regular U.S. Army, recognizing the recruiting and political power of the guard’s local roots, drew on the same source in the local basing of its army reserve units in the twentieth century. Early twentieth-century Japanese military planners used the strong social bonds of village life to reinforce motivation in organizing army reserve units (Smethurst 1974).
Volunteerism was not always sufficient for raising military forces. Consequently Britain was subjected to a conscription of sorts during the Seven Years’ War and the wars of the French Revolution and Empire. However, the English Militia Act of 1757 and its later English and Irish counterparts of the 1790s, like the American Union army drafts of 1863 and 1864, were designed essentially to spur enlistment by coaxing either service or the purchase of insurance to provide the required "commutation fee" or pay for a substitute. The conscription policies of other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nations offered fewer options. The peasants of Russia, Hesse-Damstadt, Prussia, and some Latin American dictatorships were subjected to long terms of service.
Black Americans conscripted for segregated service in World Wars I and II faced both the fear and anger of southern whites and the distrust of white officers who regarded blacks as irresponsible and panicky. However, on the basis of their reading of massive surveys of the opinions of World War II soldiers, social psychologists advising the American military in the 1940s recommended the integration of black and white units to boost morale and improve performance levels. They were supported by white officer combat veterans who had developed respect for their men and had become confident in their ability, a phenomenon reminiscent of the experience of many white officers and their black troops in the Civil War. The integration of the services during the Korean War proved successful (Dalfiume 1969; Mandelbaum 1952). In the early 1960s the John F. Kennedy administration took the next step, requiring the desegregation of housing for military families near bases throughout the South.
WOMEN COMBATANTS
On rare occasions women have been used as combatants, as in nineteenth-century Benin and early modern Japan, and as guerrillas by the Soviet Union in World War II. More often they have served as auxiliaries in support, clerical, and nursing roles. In the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first century the armed services in the United States have recruited women more aggressively for a wider range of tasks, including combat support. Simultaneously women have been admitted to the nation’s federal and state service academies. There was considerable resistance to this change, but academy leadership later began to crack down on sexual harassment and selective hazing (Alpern 1998; Sherrow 1996; Gelfand 2006).
TRAINING AND SOCIALIZATION
The process of socializing military inductees into the service’s norms and mores while preparing them to perform their new duties always has had two dimensions: the goals and practices of the military and the impact of the process on the inductees. Certain features of the first dimension have been persistent and unmistakable. Discipline, collective action, the transmission of unit traditions, physical conditioning, and the acquisition of specific military skills always have been objectives of those responsible for the integration of recruits into military forces.
Modern boot camps are assumed by some social psychologists to be sophisticated versions of this process of reorienting individuals into the regimen and mores of the warrior culture with its male bonding. However, a study of U.S. Marine Corps basic training at Parris Island, South Carolina, in the 1940s and 1950s established the fact that marine officers for generations had felt it best to leave the process entirely in the hands of drill instructor sergeants (DIs), who trained the next generation of DIs without formal manuals or officer-led instruction. As one officer put it: "Probably it’s a good thing we don’t know how it’s done. If we knew, we might fiddlebitch and tinker with the process until we ruined it" (Fleming 1990, pp. 24-25; see also pp. 140-155).
The military always has reinforced training with disciplinary codes and leadership methods to ensure that missions are accomplished. Those codes and methods sometimes change, reflecting changes in the value system of the larger society or new demands within the military. The patterns of organizational authority in the modern military have changed since World War II. As the military became more technologically sophisticated, employing more specialists, the need to reenlist those specialists grew, but the specialists were often averse to arbitrary authority. Many former specialists indicated in the 1950s and 1960s that they had left the military because of its coercive ways (Wool 1968). Simultaneously soldier resistance movements, some developing into military unions, grew in the technologically advanced Western states in the 1960s and 1970s (Cortright and Watts 1991). Hence out of need, military elites slowly devised and provided less coercive forms of leadership than had prevailed before. The movement from coercion to persuasion accelerated in the United States when the draft was abolished in 1973 and the services had to rely entirely on volunteers.
MORALE AND MOTIVATION
From the time when the first group of hunters drew on their supportive habits to collaborate in a successful war-band raid on their neighbors or in the defense of their village, the small-group camaraderie in military units has influenced the effectiveness of skirmishes, naval engagements, and pitched battles. Anything that disrupted that camaraderie was suspected of damaging military effectiveness. French revolutionary leaders in the Committee of Public Safety knew how to organize small squads of about fifteen men. When those men received their portions of stew in the evening, they often were provided with revolutionary broadsides or songs that they were expected to learn by the evening campfire. French revolutionaries understood the importance of patriotic fervor as well as what modern sociologists call the primary group (Lynn 1990). That induced bonding generally was successful. "A new comradeship and unity blossomed in our young lives," Emlyn Davies recalled of his early days in the Seventeenth Royal Welsh Fusiliers in 1914 (Simkins 1988, p. 302). The Canadian major George Pearkes wrote home in 1917 that "it always seems to me that I’m not fighting for King and Country but just for [my] company, which seems to be everything to me these days" (Pearkes).
In the 1950s U.S. Army researchers concluded that in battles between German and American units in World War II the German units generally appeared to have bested comparable American groups. In 1983 Martin van Creveld argued that this was the case in part because American policies with regard to unit formation and casualty replacement practices resulted in a fighting force with lower small group cohesion and trust than German units, in which cohesion was the conscious objective of commanders. Other research offers an additional explanation for German morale: the strength and depth of Nazi ideology and indoctrination (Van Creveld 1983; Bartov 1991).
Many Americans entered Vietnam with confidence in the rightness of their cause and the effectiveness of their weapons and leaders. That confidence often was reduced after months of heavy combat in steaming-hot terrain to what one veteran called "a war waged for survival in which each soldier fought for his own life and the lives of the men beside him, not caring who we killed … or how many or in what manner" (Lewis 1985, p. 118). Their plight was made more perilous by the high command’s practice of cycling career officers through brief combat command tours of duty.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF MILITARY SERVICE
As the rate, range, and lethality of fire and the duration of exposure to it rose over five centuries, combatants experienced increasing stress (Keegan 1976). After prolonged periods of combat, the din of battle and the sight of dying friends produced "the shakes" and other symptoms of mental distress in many soldiers. In World War I their reaction was called shell shock; in World War II, battle fatigue. This phenomenon appears to have affected men in the American Civil War as well (Dean 1997).
The increasing lethality of combat might have been expected to lead to greater unwillingness to respond to orders under fire. However, although there is clear evidence of this among French forces in World War I (Smith 1994) and some evidence in other armies in the twentieth century, most troops have obeyed orders that placed them in "the killing zone." Most mutinies involve matters of pay or living and working conditions (Bushnell 1985; Rose 1982). Many combat veterans who suffered post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) long after their years of service owed their distress to the trauma of combat, but not every veteran of heavy combat became a victim of PTSD (Card 1985).
Military service has both temporary and long-term effects. Some who appear to have been transformed by the experience are better understood to have possessed those propensities before entering the service or to have entered the service with traits or personalities that made them especially prone to experience the change. West German recruits who were given an "authoritarianism" questionnaire before entering basic training, again after completing eighteen months of service, and again two years after the completion of their service were found to have undergone a decline in their level of authoritarianism while experiencing it firsthand in the Bundeswehr. However, they then drifted back to the original higher level after they had put that experience behind them (Roghmann and Sodeur 1972). The process of self-selection into American airborne training and Green Beret service as a result of already possessed values proved to be more important than the training or duty assignments afterward in explaining post-training or post-service attitudes and values (Cockerham 1973; Mantell 1975). Thus the impact of training and efforts on transforming attitudes can be overstated. Militarization, if and when it occurs, often has been confused with the reinforcement of established values.
In some modern cases mobility opportunities in subsequent occupations improved as a result of military service, as was the case for minorities in the U.S. military in the 1950s and afterward (Browning, Lopreato, and Poston 1973). One’s perspective on the world could be altered as well. Certain American Revolutionary War soldiers seem to have experienced a change in political perspective. Officers who served outside their own states tended to adopt more cosmopolitan political positions after the Revolution, as did some enlisted men. Others who had not left their state but were similar in age, nativity, religion, social class, and county affiliation (the sum total of these characteristics constitutes "background") to those who had left their state exhibited no such change. One group had seen more of the Confederation and its plight and had seen the need for stronger bonds in the form of a new Constitution (Benton 1964; Burrows 1974). Similarly French soldiers who had served in America during the war were more actively involved than others in attacks on the homes and records of French nobility during the early stages of their revolution (McDonald 1951). Service in the Prussian/German armies and navies appears to have made militarists of many veterans (Ward and Diehl 1975). In analyzing the interactions of the military and society, future scholars will continue to ask how military service may have affected those who served as well as how some military institutions have affected the societies they belonged to whereas others simply have reflected those societies.
