The Sociology of the Military

My hope is that this essay may provide the reader an interesting and critical outsider’s (non-sociologist’s) retrospection of selected books related to military sociology from the position of a military insider (a retired U.S. Army colonel). After considering 22 books on the subject published since the year 2000, I settled on four, two outside the margins of military sociology, that I thought best represented diversity in the study of the military. To buttress my sense of needed diversity, I adapted the 1979 work of Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan, Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis, to evaluate suitable representation across four sociological paradigms: interpretivism, radical humanism, radical structuralism, and structural functionalism. ¹ What may be interesting in and of itself is that I could not find books that military sociologists dedicated to radical humanism or radical structuralism paradigms, no matter how loosely I interpreted their makeup. Therefore, in searching for these representations, I extended my reach to two authors, Sandra Whitworth (2004) and Frans P. B. Osinga (2007), who write from what I would characterize as “international-relations sociology,” following the “patterns of interdisciplinary collaboration” (Merton 1973: 53). ² While none of the four books I selected fall neatly into one of the paradigms, I am confident that each is an exemplar that leans toward one of the four more than the others.

An Exemplar of Interpretivism—principal assumption: human reality is socially constructed. My most mind-changing find is the book The Sociology of War and Violence by Siniša Malešević, who is presently Professor and Chair of School of Sociology at University College, Dublin, Ireland. For those interested in incorporating the history of war and state-legitimated violence into their repertoire, this book offers the perfect start.

Malešević’s first two chapters set a meta-theoretical stage for his arguments in the chapters that follow. Self-characterized as a “macro-level sociologist” (p. 311), Malešević’s work takes the interpretivist path on a grand scale, using combinations of comparative politics and tracing an historic long view reminiscent of the classic and comprehensive European sociologists Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. In his introduction, he highlights the role that war and violence had in spurring these foundational sociologists to explore class struggles, devise bellicose social theories, and explain the rise of the modern bureaucratic state. Following the historic trace, Malešević begins his next chapter wagging his finger at the broader community of sociologists: “…contemporary mainstream sociology, unlike its classical predecessors, remains intractable in its near absolute ignoring of warfare” (p. 50). Although there are a few associations and journals that deal with the relationship between society and the subset, the military, ³ none deal with the macro sociology of war.

Malešević continues with his critical review of social-Darwinian theories of war, pointing to Azar Gat’s socio-biological analogical interpretations in his War in Human Civilization (2008). Malešević sees Gat’s approach as an overreach, ignoring that such large-scale organized violence cannot be reduced to a natural evolutionary selection process where the victor survives. After all, war “requires organized social action, collective intentionality, the systematic use of weapons, sophisticated linguistic coordination and ritualism” (p. 57). He is equally decisive about the correspondent economic-rational decision theories for casus belli where participants are “utility maximizers who choose the best action according to a stable set of, mostly universal, preferences” (p. 60). The author does compliment the more sophisticated framework of Stathis Kalyvas and his book The Logic of Violence in Civil War (2006), where conflict is vested within a decentralized, micro-decision making structure emerging from the motives and strategies of local political elites. Malešević credits another exception, again with no shortage of critical examination, to interpretive sociologist Philip Smith (e.g., his 2005 book, Why War? The Cultural Logic of Iraq, the Gulf War, and Suez), who examines reasons for war through culturally relational narratives; in short, a theory of storytelling as casus belli. All in all, he finds few contemporary grand theorists who comprehensively articulate the socio-cultural studies of war and undermines those writers who typify the importance of the Clausewitzian notions of a society which manifests a homogenized will-to-fight attributed to ethnocentricity and shared ideology.

Malešević moves on to explore the social- “…historical transformation from the disorganised forms of coercion prevalent at the dawn of human history to the early forms of warfare in antiquity, more complex modes of organised violence in medieval times and transition towards rationalised types of warfare that provided an impetus for the arrival of early modernity” (p. 89). Logically, he calls upon anthropological and archeological literature tracing evidence associated with humankind’s basic social requirement for efficiency-in-numbers linked with tribal hunting and gathering; postulating that, over the millennia, organized warfare is a relatively recent phenomenon, tightly coupled with advances in technology, the rise of city- and nation-state territorial wars, and in the Weberian tradition, the implications of organized religion (e.g., the ensuing conflicts of the Crusades and Protestant Reformation). Chapter Four is an extension of this argument, but Malešević views the issue through sociological lenses he refers to as “ontological dissonance” associated with the paradox of the epistemic progressives who exclaim the betterment of mankind resulting from the Enlightenment. This proposition conflicts with data, worth repeating here, that seem to show the more the scientific progress toward the expected pacific truth, the more the casualties of war: eleventh and twelfth centuries, about 60,000; twelfth and thirteenth, estimated to be 539,000; fourteenth and fifteenth, around 1.4 million; sixteenth and seventeenth, 7.8 million; and, jumping to an extraordinary 111 million in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The last century was, Malešević argues again in the Weberian sense, an era of “systematic, organized and prolific,” industrialized, and bureaucratized mass extermination (pp. 119–120). One cannot help but be reminded of the theory of societal militarization, a.k.a. “The Garrison State,” expressed in 1941 by one of the founders of military sociology, Harold Lasswell.

Malešević then peels back the arguments of the socio-geographic writers who claim war and organized violence is associated with physical locations of societies on the globe with European traditions serving as the focal point for sensemaking. He effectively dispels this theory, demonstrating that these writers typically frame causes of war from a Eurocentric view with units of analysis (e.g., “civilizations” or what social evolutionist Spengler 1939: 238, called “historical pseudomorphosis”) that are grossly crude and ambiguous. These writers, according to Malešević, ignore the unique roles of war in shaping sub-Saharan African-, Latin American-, North American-, Middle- and Far-Eastern societies. His bottom line is there should be little faith in studies that find causality with geo-exceptionalism and the homogenization fallacy of the “Western Way of War.” Rather, Malešević takes heterogeneous positions when describing the unique social consequences of war which he purposely removes from the Western-European frame of reference.

He rolls out his next four chapters intent on bashing the usual internally-oriented sociological frames of reference about war, to include “nationalism, propaganda, stratification, solidarity, and gender” in the context of “cumulative bureaucratization of coercion” (by central governments) and “centrifugal ideologization” (i.e., reminiscent of Karl Mannheim’s sociology of ideology) (p. 175). He effectively debunks the realist scholars who overly-homogenize agents of war, exposing, for example, the underlying fallacy of “nationalism” as defining cleanly differentiated warring groups who are presumably driven to bifurcation by “coercive state apparatuses” (p. 185). He cites examples of external wars that connect to internal wars (such as the Russian Revolution that paralleled World War I)—debunking extant wars theories that depend on the sociological concept of nationalism. Similarly Malešević attacks the oversimplification of the effects of the ambiguous concept of propaganda on solidarity of populations and soldiers engaged in war, whether promulgated by totalitarian or liberal democratic forms of government. He reviews critical studies that debunk the effects of propaganda, especially with intent to dehumanize the enemy, revealing that these factors were not as efficacious as espoused in the mainstream literature. Malešević highlights that in recent wars there are few face-to-face encounters with the enemy—most killing is performed bureaucratically and from a distance with modern, high-tech weapons—which make the study of propaganda less important.

Malešević’s Chapter Eight reminds me of an anonymous quote, “The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks.” ⁴ Here the author explores “the relationships between organized violence and social hierarchies” (p. 237)—what he claims is largely ignored by sociology writ large. Again, history demonstrates that as social groups grow larger, the specialization and stratification of labor grow, to include those of security forces designed to fight external threats. As hierarchies are formed so are the privileges of rank and position. Of sociological importance there seems to be a positive relationship between the smaller proportional level of group participation in the military (the warrior caste), and the larger degree of stratification in the society (p. 243). Furthermore, whereas sociologists tend to see industrialization as a principal agent behind social inequality, there may be better evidence that geopolitical warfare is more the culprit for justifying the inequities of social hierarchies.

The penultimate chapter includes Malešević’s confirmation of many socio-historical accounts that women, throughout various ages and societies, have largely been excluded from the warrior caste. His investigation is about why this seems to be temporally- and globally-universal, and includes critically reviewing both biological- and sociological-masculinist research, that he concludes are quite flawed in their findings. He then examines the proposition that “warfare is dependent on the cultural construction of gender roles” (p. 285) and concludes, “…if one focuses on culture [usually described as something specific, relative, unique] to determine this phenomenon” it does not explain well the “regular, absolute, uniform and nearly universal” exclusion of women (p. 287). Malešević also attempts to debunk the post-essentialist feminist argument that the concept of “gender” itself is an arbitrary and discriminatory alienating social myth, and furthermore, patriarchalism is to blame. Again the author criticizes this conclusion as over-simplification and returns to his overarching descriptive concepts of cumulative bureaucratization and centrifugal ideologization. He proposes these sociological processes combined to meet the perceived societal need for women to procreate future warriors to sustain the warrior caste.

Finally, his last chapter is the most intriguing to me as I am presently engaged in insider debates about whether we are in a “novel era” of warfare (what proponents of the “new-wars paradigm” suggest). Malešević completes his myth-busting book, employing the method of “blocking presentism” (p. 311), in this case, avoiding the tendency for each generation of military scholars to proclaim the present includes the most complex dangers in the history of warfare. His counterarguments are, as in the other chapters, worth reading. In conclusion, Malešević’s work is worthy of sociologists’ heedfulness. Malešević exercises the hermeneutic methods of the interpretivist, using recorded history as his grammatological tool for a critical examination of the dominant narratives of the military intellectual community.

An Exemplar of Radical Humanism—principal assumption: our created world is amassed with social alienation. Sandra Whitworth, author of Men, Militarism, and UN Peacekeeping: A Gendered Analysis, is Professor and self-proclaimed feminist analyst at the Department of Political Science at York University in Toronto, Canada. From the contradictory backdrop of “peacekeeping” operations, she argues succinctly that: “Soldiers are not born, they are made; and part of what goes into the making of a soldier is a celebration and reinforcement of some of the most aggressive, and most insecure, elements of masculinity: those that promote violence, misogyny, homophobia, and racism…. Lying at the very core of peacekeeping is a contradiction: on the one hand, it depends on the individuals (mostly men) who have been constructed as soldiers, and on the other hand, it demands that they deny many of the traits they have come to understand being a soldier entails” (p. 3). This ethnography stems from her studies of UN peacekeeping operations in Cambodia and in examining the reports of Canadian Forces elite airborne regiment’s alleged atrocities while UN peacekeeping in Somalia in the early 1990s, also while serving as an observer-participant in the Canadian government’s “Somalia Inquiry,” 1995–97. Insofar as the latter, at the time she also detected the “predominantly masculinized” nature of the Canadian official investigatory body that, from her feminist perspective, overtly (and likely covertly) alienated the participation of any women’s points of view in the process (p. 6).

Indeed, rather than a relationalist approach taken by an interpretivist recognizing the presence of paradox as “normal” in social reality, the radical humanist seeks to expose hypocrisy and contradictions as sources of social alienation. How can one be a peacekeeper who is an instrument of war and organized violence? Whitworth’s message is these polarities are incommensurate; hence, the side effects of practicing with this social contradiction ultimately include “prostitution, sexual exploitation, and physical violence directed at local citizens by peacekeeping forces” (p. 17) notwithstanding higher incidents of HIV/AIDS. She employs feminist theory as a derivative of postcolonial and critical theory, noting “…that the ideas that constitute nations and institutions are also inevitably gendered” (p. 27). Hence, her purpose is to expose the dominant power structure of militant men (the usual assailants) over women (the usual alienated victims) and dig deeper into the epistemology of colonialism where “…the political production of knowledge about radicalized ‘others’ both forms one of the bases of imperialistic practices and produces the very idea of the ‘Orient’ as that which is intellectually and morally backward and in need of salvation” (p. 27).

Whitworth highlights the discrepancies between the Canadian national rhetoric about the use of its forces, value-oriented on peace not war, and the consequences of values-in-use by these forces in action, ultimately resulting in the disbandment of an entire elite airborne regiment. She explores the practical inadequacies of contributing nations’ militaries in their preparation for such operations and the inappropriateness of choosing commandos, special operators, or paratroopers to wear the UN “blue beret” of a peacekeeper. When Somalia transformed from peacekeeping to firefights with locals (at times spurred by men who perceived the peacekeepers as taking away their access to local women), for example, these troops easily transformed themselves into killers rather than pacifists—a preference for their institutionalized mindsets. She devotes an entire chapter to a deeper investigation into the “militarized masculinities” of the men who wear blue berets. Whitworth defines militaries as: “…a hegemonic representation of idealized norms of masculinity that privilege the tough, stoic, emotionless warrior, capable and willing to employ violence to achieve whatever ends he may be ordered into. Militaries work hard to fix the identities of young men in these terms and have worked equally hard to deny the fragility of this construction” (p. 172).

Aside from the benefits of her critical approach to examining social alienation derived from deconstructing national and institutional dominant narratives, her text also provides excellent summaries of what transpired in Cambodia and Somalia peace missions, to include the historiography of why the UN missions were necessary and a deeper look into the organizational nature of the United Nations Departments of Peacekeeping Operations and Disarmament Affairs as they also relate to the historiography of war and organized violence in Afghanistan. From her critical viewpoint, she provides very practical advice to the UN as an institution, including: “Once women are understood primarily through their vulnerabilities, and once those vulnerabilities are understood as identifiable, the UN practices of early warning, conflict resolution, peacekeeping, and peace-building become the instruments through which women may be protected or spared from the atrocities they face” (p. 136).

All in all, Whitworth’s scholarship is impeccable, her writing style enjoyable, and her careful application of critical feminist theory quite impressive. Any serious sociologist would benefit from reading this book, as her ideas will spawn other hypotheses relating to social constructions of alienation coupled with violence whether in American urban ghetto gangs or in the streets of Mogadishu.

An Exemplar of Structural Functionalism—principal assumption: our world is reducible to systematic understandings. My choice here is the four-volume set (1,500-plus pages) edited by David Segal and James Burk, simply entitled Military Sociology. Segal and Burk selected previously published articles and book extracts to comprise this collection. The wide variety of journals articles ranged among the American Journal of Sociology, Armed Forces and Society, British Journal of Sociology, Daedalus, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Military Psychology, Military Review, Social Psychology Quarterly, to name a few. The book extracts were from those considered foundational: Morris Janowitz’s The New Military and The Professional Soldier; Samuel P. Huntington’s The Soldier and the State; Martin Shaw’s The New Western Way of War; Charles Tilly’s Capital, Coercion, and European States; and C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite.

Archetypal military sociologists subscribe to functionalism, the prevailing paradigm, and seem prone to divide their studies into a wide-range of sub-specialities including the causal or at least correlational characteristics of modern transformations to postmodern ⁵ military structures; the military perceived as an occupation versus an institution; how racial and multi-gender integration is working; issues with military families; factors of civil-military relations; elements of small group (squad/team) cohesion; leadership-as-a-variable; changing roles of the military in modern society; social-psychological or existential costs to veterans; military professional ethics; the macro-economics of war; the effects of unionization of militaries, and so forth. Much of this work is supported by quantitative analyses of human research survey results or available governmental statistics. Of the 71 articles, I would characterize that 49 are written from the functionalist viewpoint, whereas 18 are vested in interpretive sociology. Only four represent the radical humanist paradigm and none seem vested in radical structuralism.

The editors artfully compiled these essays thematically (not chronologically), authored by both the “founding fathers” (not “mothers,” as Professor Whitworth would likely point out) of American military sociology book-writers and contemporary standard bearers of “specialized” military sociology (e.g., in the military sociology community, well-known names would include Giuseppe Caforio, Bernard Boëne, James Burk, the late Charles Moskos, and David Segal) who usually publish journal articles. Although not recognizing explicitly the inherent bias—that most of these studies lean toward utilitarianism—the editors do admit in their introduction that funding for much of the sociological research conducted on the military was largely from the War Department (during the World War II heyday of military sociological research) and later the Department of Defense: “Social scientific studies of the military grew in number, growth supported by extra-mural funded research at universities and research corporations and by the military’s in-house research organizations, like the U.S. Army Research Institute” (Segal and Burk 2012: xxx).

Despite my personal bias and bones to pick with the functionalist “chunking” of military sociology, and questionable policy motives behind this sort of government-sponsored text, the fact is that this and other edited works make up the preponderance of books published on the subject since the year 2000. Despite these criticisms, I commend that this reference set, above all the contemporary edited works published since 2000, is a must for the libraries of schools, colleges, and universities that have sociology departments. The articles are indeed interesting and the project itself is worthy of reflexive-sociological study (a la Bourdieu and Wacquant: 1992).

An Exemplar of Radical Structuralism—principal assumption: societies must cope with discontinuous structural changes in a conflicted world of perpetual crises. Colonel Frans P. B. Osinga of the Royal Netherlands Air Force published Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd as a follow of his PhD dissertation. ⁶ There are important military sociological implications in his portrayal of U.S. Air Force Colonel and Korean War fighter pilot John Boyd. Boyd’s theory of rapid, adaptive learning, signified by his “OODA Loop” (a recursive, observe-orient-decide-act repertoire) describes the necessity for individuals and organizations to sense-make quickly when facing highly complex and chaotic circumstances. Boyd never formally published his unconventional, action-oriented, fast-learning theories; hence, Osinga’s research relied on interviews with those familiar with his lectures and on Boyd’s artifacts, such as his personal notes and briefing chart, left after his death in 1997.

It may be a stretch to characterize Osinga’s portrayal of Boyd’s theories as having spawned from radical structuralism, however there are expressed analogies made to Marxian dialectical materialism and resultant “revolutions” in military affairs that caught my attention: “…at the heart of Boyd’s view on war and strategy resides the fundamental issue of epistemology and the view of knowledge as unfolding, evolving, as a dialectical process and uncertain…. Assigning meaning to events, phenomena or objects is not just an individual process. The OODA loop is itself indeed an epistemological statement….The postmodern school of thought in military studies points at new [revolutionary] modes of economic production…associated new sources of power…new modes of representation, and new forms of organization” (pp. 242–243).

Osinga compares this sort of thinking to Braudillard’s “simulacra,” a sure sign of radical structuralism at work. Boyd recognized that there is an objective reality for which the language of war stands in for the reality of war. So, the victorious opponent is one who changes the constructed, subjective reality of their foe which will translate to objective success; that is, we fight best to disrupt metaphysical meaning, not necessarily to destroy physical targets (I note the recent creation of U.S. Cyber Command and its Braudillardian “cyberwar,” ongoing 24/7 with the average American unaware, reminiscent of the 1999 movie, The Matrix: “USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries” (US CYBERCOM 2013).

Osinga’s representation of the ontologically-objective and epistemologically-radical ideations of Boyd is quite interesting. The book opened me to new frames of mind about how modern military institutions may have options that lead away from their sedimented functional mindsets about war and organized violence.