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Status System and Military Authority¹

When armies became mass organizations through the introduction of the rifle, the assumption developed that a rank distribution of a single broadly based pyramid was the appropriate hierarchical form. The greatest number of men were privates, all of whom performed a relatively standardized task—infantrymen directly engaging the enemy. The task of the infantryman required only limited specialization, but it was a specialization without transferable skill to civilian employment. The officer of the line with his specialized training likewise had limited employment opportunities in the larger society. The number of officers at the higher levels of command and coordination dropped off progressively and sharply, but the concentration of technical specialists increased. In such a hierarchy the number of ranks could be small and the lines of authority could extend directly from the top to the very bottom. Traditionally the Navy had a similar rank system.

However, the new skill structure of the military establishment is one in which specialization penetrates down the hierarchy into the formations assigned to combat. The concentration of persons engaged in purely military occupations is now a minority and even the combat occupations involve technical specialization. The transferability of skill to civilian occupations is extremely widespread. Top-ranking generals and admirals particularly have many nonmilitary functions to perform which involve general managerial skills. These long-term changes in the military establishment can be seen from an occupational analysis of enlisted personnel since the Civil War. Military type of occupations accounted for 93.2 per cent of the personnel in the Civil War, but after the Spanish-American War the civilian type of occupations began to predominate. By 1954 only 28.8 per cent of Army personnel were engaged in purely military occupations. The percentages are undoubtedly lower for both Navy and Air Force personnel.

As already indicated, to meet the organizational requirements of this proliferation of skills, the military hierarchy has had to be adjusted, so that the allocation of ranks is no longer a pyramid, but is closer to a diamond in shape. More accurately, two diamond-shaped hierarchies—one for the enlisted men and one for the officers corps have emerged.

Traditional hierarchical authority is the basis on which the military establishment maintains its organizational boundaries. Such authority comes to be shared with the authority of skill and achievement, despite formal channels of command and the official hierarchy of rank.

Sociological analysis has long recognized that status systems are required to regulate and control the tensions and conflicts generated by competition among differing systems of authority. Authority, ascribed or achieved, is not operative because of the ultimate sanctions that an officer can mobilize. Rather, in any organization, civilian or military, authority systems operate on a day-to-day basis or fail to operate because of the status—that is, the prestige and the respect—the officers have. If authority is traditional and ascribed, status systems are likely to be fixed and clear-cut. But with the extension of achievement and skill criteria for allocating authority, status systems become fluid and are not clear-cut. Skilled specialists or men with outstanding combat records, despite low rank, may be accorded higher prestige than officers with higher rank. When status and prestige are in sharp variation to the contributions a person renders to an organization, authority systems are certain to be subject to strain and tension.

OCCUPATIONAL SPECIALIZATION IN ARMY ENLISTED PERSONNEL, CIVIL WAR TO 1954

The effectiveness of military authority is deeply conditioned by the status and prestige which civilian society accords the military profession. It is generally recognized that, despite public acclaim of military heroes, officership is a low-status profession. The results of a national sampling of opinion placed the prestige of the officer in the armed services not only below the physician, scientist, college professor, and minister, but even below that of the public schoolteacher. In this study, the relative prestige of the Air Force and Navy was above that of the Army and the Marine Corps, as measured by adult opinion as to which service they preferred for their sons. Yet one adult civilian in two felt that he would be pleased if his son took up a career in the military services. Interestingly enough, the less educated civilian holds both the military officer and the public servant in higher esteem than does the better educated.

An adequate level of prestige, difficult though that may be to define, is required to maintain organizational effectiveness and to inhibit excessive personnel turnover. In addition, the relatively low prestige of the military in the eyes of civilians conditions the conception that the military profession holds of itself. The military takes over this civilian image, with the result that the military exhibits extreme status sensitivity. The concern with status of the military professional is to be traced not only to the hierarchical organization of the armed forces. The military behaves very much like any other minority or low-status group.

It is, therefore, not surprising that the military establishment has evolved an elaborate basis for according its limited supply of status and prestige to its own members. Most pervasive is the criterion which is applied universally through the services, the distinction between the officers and the enlisted men. The other universal distinctions are between regulars and reservists, line versus staff, combat versus noncombat, and the like. There are also more particular designations, such as veteran status of a particular campaign, membership in a high-status formation, or graduation from a service academy.

An effort was made by a University of North Carolina Air Force research group to study empirically status rivalries at selected Air Force bases. On the whole, these research studies were mainly descriptive and did not analyze in detail the consequences of status rivalries on organizational behavior. They overlooked the positive influences that status systems have on initiative and incentives. Two of the collaborators, James D. Thompson and Richard L. Simpson, summarized their orientation with the hypothesis that "when members of a minority status class are concentrated in certain parts of a unit, especially in positions of authority, organizational stress is likely to develop." Social scientists will be required to develop a more comprehensive view of the nature and consequences of status rivalries in military systems.

A published study from this project by Raymond Mack underlines the observation, well known to every alert military commander, that flying in the Air Force has more prestige than decision-making at the lower echelons; that is, operational units outrank command units in prestige. But this system of prestige does not extend throughout the entire hierarchy. Although a combat ideology pervades the highest echelons, the prestige of decision-making and planning increases, the higher the officer advances. Thus, in their career development Air Force officers and officers in the other services must readjust their perspectives, often with great difficulty, to new professional requirements.

¹ From Morris Janowitz, , pp. 31–32, 34–36. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1959. By permission.