The Soldier and the State
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Does the officer have a professional motivation? Clearly he does not act primarily from economic incentives. In western society the vocation of officership is not well rewarded monetarily. Nor is his behavior within his profession governed by economic rewards and punishments. The officer is not a mercenary who transfers his services wherever they are best rewarded, nor is he the temporary citizen-soldier inspired by intense momentary patriotism and duty but with no steadying and permanent desire to perfect himself in the management of violence. The motivations of the officer are a technical love for his craft and the sense of social obligation to utilize this craft for the benefit of society. The combination of these drives constitutes professional motivation. Society, on the other hand, can only assure this motivation if it offers its officers continuing and sufficient pay both while on active duty and when retired.
The officer possesses intellectualized skill, mastery of which requires intense study. But like the lawyer and doctor he is not primarily a man of the closet; he deals continuously with people. The test of his professional ability is the application of technical knowledge in a human context. Since this application is not regulated by economic means, however, the officer requires positive guides spelling out his responsibilities to his fellow officers, his subordinates, his superiors, and the state which he serves. His behavior within the military structure is governed by a complex mass of regulations, customs, and traditions. His behavior in relation to society is guided by an awareness that his skill can only be utilized for purposes approved by society through its political agent, the state. While the primary responsibility of the physician is to his patient, and the lawyer to his client, the principal responsibility of the military officer is to the state. His responsibility to the state is the responsibility of the expert adviser. Like the lawyer and physician, he is concerned with only one segment of the activities of his client. Consequently, he cannot impose decisions upon his client which have implications beyond his field of special competence. He can only explain to his client his needs in this area, advise him as to how to meet these needs, and then, when the client has made his decisions, aid him in implementing them. To some extent the officer’s behavior towards the state is guided by an explicit code expressed in law and comparable to the canons of professional ethics of the physician and lawyer. To a larger extent, the officer’s code is expressed in custom, tradition, and the continuing spirit of the profession.
THE CORPORATE CHARACTER OF OFFICERSHIP. Officership is a public bureaucratized profession. The legal right to practice the profession is limited to members of a carefully defined body. His commission is to the officer what his license is to a doctor. Organically, however, the officer corps is much more than simply a creature of the state. The functional imperatives of security give rise to complex vocational institutions which mold the officer corps into an autonomous social unit. Entrance into this unit is restricted to those with the requisite education and training and is usually permitted only at the lowest level of professional competence. The corporate structure of the officer corps includes not just the official bureaucracy but also societies, associations, schools, journals, customs, and traditions. The professional world of the officer tends to encompass an unusually high proportion of his activities. He normally lives and works apart from the rest of society; physically and socially he probably has fewer nonprofessional contacts than most other professional men. The line between him and the layman or civilian is publicly symbolized by uniforms and insignia of rank.
The officer corps is both a bureaucratic profession and a bureaucratic organization. Within the profession, levels of competence are distinguished by a hierarchy of ranks; within the organization, duties are distinguished by a hierarchy of office. Rankinheres in the individual and reflects his professional achievement measured in terms of experience, seniority, education, and ability. Appointments to rank are normally made by the officer corps itself applying general principles established by the state. Assignments to office are normally somewhat more subject to outside influence. In all bureaucracies authority derives from office; in a professional bureaucracy eligibility for office derives from rank. An officer is permitted to perform certain types of duties and functions by virtue of his rank; he does not receive rank because he has been assigned to an office. Although in practice there are exceptions to this principle, the professional character of the officer corps rests upon the priority of the hierarchy of rank over the hierarchy of office.
The officer corps normally includes a number of nonprofessional “reservists.” This is due to the fluctuating need for officers and the impossibility of the state maintaining continuously an officer corps of the size required in emergencies. The reservists are a temporary supplement to the officer corps and qualify for military rank by education and training. While members of the corps, they normally possess all the prerogatives and responsibilities of the professional in the same rank. The legal distinction between them and the professional is preserved, however, and entrance into the permanent corps of officers is much more restricted than entrance into the reserve corps. The reservists seldom achieve the level of professional skill open to the career officers; consequently, the bulk of the reservists are in the lower ranks of the professional bureaucracy while the higher ranks are monopolized by the career professionals. The latter, as the continuing element in the military structure and because of their superior professional competence as a body, are normally charged with the education and indoctrination of the reservists in the skills and the traditions of the vocation. The reservist only temporarily assumes professional responsibility. His principal functions in society lie elsewhere. As a result, his motivations, values, and behavior frequently differ greatly from those of the career professional.
The enlisted men subordinate to the officer corps are a part of the organizational bureaucracy but not of the professional bureaucracy. The enlisted personnel have neither the intellectual skills nor the professional responsibility of the officer. They are specialists in the application of violence not the management of violence. Their vocation is a trade not a profession. This fundamental difference between the officer corps and the enlisted corps is reflected in the sharp line which is universally drawn between the two in all the military forces of the world. If there were not this cleavage, there could be a single military hierarchy extending from the lowest enlisted man to the highest officer. But the differing character of the two vocations makes the organizational hierarchy discontinuous. The ranks which exist in the enlisted corps do not constitute a professional hierarchy. They reflect varying aptitudes, abilities, and offices within the trade of soldier, and movement up and down them is much more fluid than in the officer corps. The difference between the officer and enlisted vocations precludes any general progression from one to the other. Individual enlisted men do become officers but this is the exception rather than the rule. The education and training necessary for officership are normally incompatible with prolonged service as an enlisted man.
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The Rise of the Military Profession in Western Society
A NEW SOCIAL TYPE
The art of fighting is an old accomplishment of mankind. The military profession, however, is a recent creation of modern society. Historically, professionalism has been a distinguishing characteristic of western culture. The great civil professions originated in the late Middle Ages and existed in highly developed form by the beginning of the eighteenth century. The profession of officership, however, was essentially a product of the nineteenth century. It was, indeed, one of the most significant institutional creations of that century. Only in the Napoleonic Wars did officers begin to acquire a specialized technique to distinguish themselves from laymen and begin to develop the standards, values, and organization inherent in that technique. The professional officer as a social type is as uniquely characteristic of modern society as is the industrial entrepreneur. The emergence of the officer corps as an autonomous professional body cannot, of course, be g
iven any precise dates. It was gradual and faltering. Two facts, however, stand out. Prior to 1800 there was no such thing as a professional officer corps. In 1900 such bodies existed in virtually all major countries.
The emergence of a professional officer corps created the modern problem of civil-military relations in Europe and North America. It is possible to speak of the issues of civilian control, militarism, and the military mind as existing prior to 1800, but the fundamental transformation in the first part of the nineteenth century makes it relatively profitless to go back before that time in search of light on modern problems. Knowledge of the manners and outlook of that aristocratic, individualistic amateur, the medieval knight, is of little help in understanding the professional values and attitudes which constitute the contemporary military mind. The activities of the Praetorian Guard offer few useful lessons for civilian control: the problem in the modern state is not armed revolt but the relation of the expert to the politician. The cleavage between the military and civilian spheres and the resulting tension between the two are phenomena of distinctly recent origin.
This chapter deals with the gradual emergence of the officer corps as an autonomous social institution: its antecedents, its causes, and its early history. Prussia, France, and England, the three major powers which pioneered the way, will be used to illustrate the change from eighteenth-century preprofessionalism to nineteenth-century professionalism. The development of professional expertise, responsibility, and corporateness will be measured in terms of the evolution of five key institutions of the military vocation: (1) the requirements for entry into the officer corps; (2) the means of advancement within the officer corps; (3) the character of the military educational system; (4) the nature of the military staff system; and (5) the general esprit and competence of the officer corps. The changes in these factors were accompanied by the development of a professional ethic furnishing the intellectual rationale for the new military man and his new institutions.
MERCENARY AND ARISTOCRATIC OFFICERSHIP
Armies and navies led by officers existed before 1800. If these officers were not professionals, what were they? Generally they were either mercenaries or aristocrats. Neither viewed officership as a profession. For the mercenary it was a business; for the amateur aristocrat it was a hobby. In place of the professional goal of expert service, the former pursued profit, the latter honor and adventure.
The mercenary officer was the dominant type from the breakdown of feudalism to the latter part of the seventeenth century. His origins were in the free companies which flourished during the Hundred Years War (1337–1453). Under the mercenary system the officer was essentially an entrepreneur, raising a company of men whose services he offered for sale. The mercenary officer might possess a higher or lower level of vocational competence. Success, however, was judged not by professional standards but by pecuniary ones. An army was composed of separate units each the property of a different commander. The mercenaries were individualists, to some degree in competition with each other; they possessed neither common standards nor corporate spirit. Discipline and responsibility were absent. War was a predatory business and the ethics of predatory business prevailed. The end of the mercenary system came with the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) and the success of the disciplined armies of Gustavus Adolphus and Oliver Cromwell.* Remnants of the system, however, persisted almost down to the beginnings of professionalism.
The replacement of the mercenary officer by the aristocratic amateur was fundamentally the result of the consolidation of power by national monarchs who felt the need for permanent military forces to protect their dominions and to support their rule. Prior to this time armies and navies had been raised by kings and others as they were required. But the need of the monarchs was a continuing one, and consequently the standing army and the standing navy came into being. The rank and file of these forces normally consisted of long-term volunteers secured for eight- to twelve-year terms from the worst orders of society by a mixture of bribery and coercion. For officers the monarchs turned to the feudal nobility whom they were still reducing to their will. The nobles were either compelled (as in Prussia) or bribed (as in France) to enter the king’s service. The recruiting function was taken away from the officers and assigned to special agents of the king. The military forces became the property of the Crown rather than the property of its agents. The officers themselves became the permanent servants of the Crown rather than entrepreneurs operating on a contract basis. In brief, the military function was socialized: national control replaced private control. By 1789, except in artillery and engineering, the aristocracy had a virtual monopoly of officers’ positions in the European armies.1 Aristocratic officership was the last form of preprofessional officership to achieve unchallenged dominance in western society.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ARISTOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS
ENTRY: BIRTH AND WEALTH. During the seventeenth century many commoners served as officers in the Prussian and French armies. The following century, however, saw the gradual exclusion of these elements as aristocratic birth became a requirement for entry into all branches of the military service except the technical arms of the artillery and engineers. Eventually in France even the “bourgeois” arms were closed to nonaristocrats. In Prussia, Frederick William I (1713–1740) compelled the nobility to serve in the army, and Frederick the Great (1740–1786), convinced that only aristocrats possessed honor, loyalty, and courage, systematically expelled bourgeois elements from the officer corps.
Admission to the schools of preliminary military education, founded in both France and Prussia in the middle of the eighteenth century, was limited to aristocrats. As a result, the French Army in 1789 had 6,333 nobles, 1,845 commoners, and 1,100 soldiers of fortune in an officer corps of 9,578. In Prussia in 1806 there were only 700 non-nobles in a corps of 7,100, and virtually all of these were in the technical branches. In France the needs of the aristocracy determined the size of the officer corps. A military commission was a way of pensioning off an impoverished noble. As a result, in 1775 there were 60,000 officers in an army whose total strength was only three times that number. The overstaffing prevailed throughout the century, in war as well as in peace, until just prior to the Revolution.
In mercantile and plutocratic post-Restoration England also, aristocracy prevailed over militarism. But it was an aristocracy of wealth rather than of birth or status. In the army, the purchase of office was the means of both entry and advancement in all branches except the technical services. The purchase system established a property qualification for military rank consciously designed to insure an identity of interest between army and government and to make another military dictatorship impossible in the British Isles. The high price of office, the low pay which made it virtually impossible to live on an officer’s salary, and the lack of any system for pension or retirement caused commissions in peacetime to be monopolized by the younger sons of country gentry who possessed some private income. In war the officer corps was expanded by raising new regiments in which commissions might be purchased by virtually anyone who had the necessary funds.
During the last half of the seventeenth century the British Navy also began to have a group of permanent officers. Prior to 1794, however, no regularized system of entry existed for the vast bulk of officer candidates. Most officers began their careers working as servants to ships’ captains who personally selected them as future officers. In 1729 the government established a “Naval Academy” to train the sons of gentlemen, from thirteen to sixteen years of age, as naval officers. But this school was never very successful. The more ambitious youths preferred to enter the navy through the “captain’s servant” path. Entry into the navy was thus attained more by personal influence and patronage than by the aristocratic requirements of birth and wealth.2
ADVANCEMENT: PURCHASE, BIRTH, AND POLITICS. Wealth, birth, and political influence controlled advancement within as well as entry into the pre-1800 officer corps. The operation of the purchase sys
tem in the British Army has been discussed above. In the French Army, down to the last quarter of the eighteenth century, promotion was also normally by purchase. The highest military offices were monopolized by the court nobility, while the poorer country nobles remained in the lower ranks. The standard of wealth, however, clashed with that of birth, and in 1776 the country nobility prevailed upon the monarchy to begin the elimination of purchase. The shift from wealth to birth as a requisite for advancement did not, however, disturb the monopoly which the great nobles had on the top positions. Frequently, boys of twelve or fifteen would be made commanders of regiments. It was not until 1788 that the phenomenon of colonels “à la bavette” was restricted and semiprofessional methods of advancement introduced. But by then it was too late to alter the system of the old regime. In Prussia the higher nobility also monopolized the higher offices, although the fiction was maintained of promotion by merit. In actuality personal considerations and the whim of the sovereign were decisive factors. The low pay, further reduced by Frederick the Great, and the absence of any regularized pension system also tended to introduce a property requirement.3
Political influence generally determined appointments to the highest command positions in all the military forces. In France court intrigue selected the commanding general of the army; during the Seven Years War the fickle influence of Madame de Pompadour resulted in no less than six commanders in as many years. In Britain influence with Crown, Parliament, or both was essential to securing and retaining high command. Frequently large numbers of officers held seats in Parliament and made use of their legislative position to advance themselves in the army. Their dual role, however, also made them vulnerable to royal pressure, which George III at least did not hesitate to apply. High-ranking officers were frequently removed from their commands for opposing the wishes of the Crown. On occasion, the military hierarchy was prostituted to the purpose of soliciting the votes of officers. In the navy, too, as far as appointments at the higher level were concerned: “Sometimes it was by merit, but more commonly by favour and influence of family, relatives, and friends, in one word by ‘interest.’ ”4