A Typology of Voluntary Associations

Abstract

Ideally speaking, military operations are painstakingly planned and then carried out with unquestioning resolution. The one operation requires conditions of orderliness and calm, the other creates an environment of disorderliness and confusion. Planners are therefore in the rear, while executors constitute in themselves the scene of battle. Differences in assignment result in differences as to the point from and the manner in which war is observed. As a result, two antithetical concepts dominate the exercise of military authority. The professional soldier operates within a bureaucratic framework. Assignments, therefore, tend to be evaluated according to the scope they provide for rational investigation and orderly procedure. Officers responsible for the drawing up of plans, then, have higher status than those responsible for their execution. This is so even when the latter are superior in rank. The superiority of planners is based on the assumption that their position serves to keep them informed about what is happening to the army as a whole, while that of the executor limits knowledge to personal experience. This assumption is supported by the hierarchical structure of military organization which establishes in specific detail the stages and the direction of the flow of information. In terms of this hierarchy, the man who receives information is superior to the man who transmits it. Since each superior invariably has several subordinates he enjoys the sum of their information which, by definition, is greater than any of its parts. By virtue of his position in the organizational structure, the superior is the best informed and, therefore, the best equipped to give orders. In terms of this same organizational structure, planning, exercise of reason, and rearward position result in high military authority. Execution, dependence upon direct personal experience, and frontal position, on the other hand, result in low military authority. The dictates of reason as exercised in the rear are, therefore, of greater weight than the facts of experience as suffered in the front. A plan of operations once decided must therefore be carried out even if reports from the scene of combat indicate that it is unrealistic. Determination of this kind is regarded as essential if the military structure of rank and authority is to be preserved. (1) a citizen rather than a regular army, (2) an equalitarian rather than a hierarchical military status structure, and (3) a military doctrine (and geographical reality) denying the existence of a strategic and logistical rear. How far these conditions are unique to contemporary Israel, how much dependent upon the nature of its Arab neighbors, and what possibility there is of applying them to the standing armies of the great powers are questions of the broadest military and sociological scope.