Communities rule: intra-service politics in the United States Army (original) (raw)

Defense Organization and Civil-Military Relations

This study examines how defense institutions and personnel are formally organized in Latin America. In a region long plagued by praetorian armies, it is especially important that organizational designs ensure that civilians maintain institutional control over armed forces. For this to occur, it is argued that those designs must incorporate certain principles: (a) enhance the civilian presence in key defense institutions, (b) empower defense ministries, (c) lower the military’s vertical authority along the chain of command, and (d) unify civilian power while dividing military power. Based on an examination of legal documents and other data for sixteen Latin American democracies, findings show three general organizational patterns: an ideal–typical defense structure that achieves all four objectives, a second best defense structure that still leaves too much military power unified, and a dual command structure that is least desirable for weakening the defense ministry while coalescing military might high up the ladder of influence.

Beyond the Problematic of Legitimacy: Military Influences on Civilian Society

Boundary 2-an International Journal of Literature and Culture, 2005

The various relations between the military and technology are best discussed at a level intermediate between the micro-level of the individual and the macrolevel of society as a whole. The mesolevel, as this intermediate dimension may be called, contains a variety of entities, from rural communities to institutional organizations, and from neighborhoods to cities, in which technologies range from the personal wrist-watch to the urban transit system. But of all these intermediate entities, organizations are of particular importance. This is true not only because when one speaks of "the military" one is actually referring to a complex population of organizations, specialized to fight on land, air, or sea, but more importantly because the influence that these organizations may have on civilian technology is often effected through changes in civilian organizations leading to particular uses of technology. In this essay I will concentrate on these organizational influences, and not as much on the technologies themselves. We must therefore start with the theory of organizations.

Advancing the field of organizations through the study of military organizations

Industrial and Corporate Change, 2014

This article argues that the field of organization studies may learn from closer study of decision-making and behaviors in military organizations. It describes some of the intellectual roots of organizational studies within a strategic, military context; discusses some recent characteristics of strategic competition that organization scholars may find fruitful to study; and view some of the key contemporary challenges in military organizations through the lens of strategic organization design, a framework the builds on, and integrates, several streams of research in organizational behavior that have implications for, and influence, how organizations make strategic decisions.

The Role of Society in the Control of Armed Forces – Implications for Democracy

Contributing to the on-going debate on the second generation challenges of civilian control of armed forces, this article discusses the role societal actors play in keeping a vigilant eye on the military organisation of their country. It argues in favour of enlarging the framework of civilian control in order to better take account of the plurality of both civilian actors as controlling body and military actors as referent object of control. Referring to on-going problems of right-wing extremism in the German Bundeswehr and ethnic bonding in the Russian armed forces as illustrative cases, deficiencies of existing control mechanisms will be identified. Societal oversight, as will be outlined, plays an increasingly important role in terms of compensation mechanism, irrespective of the character of the political regime.

Organizing War and the Military in Society: A Systemic Perspective

Sotsiologicheskoe Obozrenie / Russian Sociological Review, 2016

Sociology can analyze war and warfare under different aspects, for example, as a problem of collective violence. It has rather neglected another important aspect of war, as in the fact that war is also always an organizational phenomenon. In the last few years, several studies on war have been focusing on this aspect by using or referring to Niklas Luhmann's system theory. This paper looks at some of these aspects by critically asking how these sociological studies use Luhmann's theory in their analysis of war or war-related social structures. Luhmann's theory, particularly the theory of society based on the principle of functional differentiation, has a powerful explicative potential, particularly for the analysis of war and warfare. However, only a few studies are actually using Luhmann's theory in an adequate way by situating the concepts at the correct analytical level. War and "military systems" should be analyzed as organizational structures in society which are managed, first of all, by the political system, a function system of society, and which by no means excludes a multiplicity of interdependencies with other systems. A systemic perspective should also take regional "expressions" of society such as "military systems" in specific states or groups of states into account.

The Bureaucracy in Military Sociology

Armed forces and international security: global …, 2003

This short chapter examines the literature on the bureaucracy in military sociology. This is a somewhat neglected topic and is treated in an interdisciplinary manner.