Military Organization

Conceptual Overview

With its typical functional and cultural characteristics, particularly hierarchy and discipline (see below), the MO has historically represented an indirect model for many other public and private organizations—from the police corps to fire departments, and so forth—that also operate under conditions of emergency requiring uniqueness and authority of command, prompt and undisputed compliance, and esprit de corps. The military organizational model has been and is imitated by other organizations managing armed forces, including nonpublic ones. In the modern era—generally from the foundation of the large European nation-states in the 17th century until the end of the Cold War—the state was successfully assured of what Max Weber called the monopoly on legitimate violence. In the current, postmodern, phase, new private actors—both legal and illegal—compete with public powers for this monopoly.

Among the former are private military companies, working alongside regular armed forces offering services to the states, especially at the two extremes of political and technical evolution: in the hypercomplexity of the sole surviving world superpower, the United States, and in the rudimental and precarious context of failed states. Emerging forcefully among the latter, particularly following the attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001, are the terrorist organizations, true and proper multinationals of illegitimate violence lacking any precise territorial base that can be identified and neutralized. Using means made possible by globalization, from the Internet to interdependent financial markets, and utilizing methods of extreme struggle, such as suicide attacks, terrorist organizations with religious underpinnings, such as al-Qaeda, multiply the force of impact of the traditional political or nationalistic guerilla or terrorist groups. In analytical terms as well as in terms of prevention and conflict, it is certainly reductive to focus solely on the military aspects of the postmodern terrorist threat; however, it is undoubted that the tactics adopted, the internal structure, and the organizational culture of neoterrorism all maintain a precise military imprint.

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