Military Professionalism, Power, and the Division of Labor: The Case of the Reintroduction of NCOs in the Swedish Armed Forces

Abstract

While noncommissioned officers (NCOs) are hailed as the “backbone” of the world’s armed forces, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to them compared with the officer corps. NCOs have been at the margins of social scientific literature, largely because of Huntington’s officer-centric concept of the military profession, which was based on a sharp division of roles and which excluded NCOs as well as reservists and soldiers. This article holds that the officer–NCO relationship is not a functional, timeless universal in military organizations and thus merits scholarly attention. The (re)introduction of NCO-style “Specialist Officers” in the Swedish Armed Forces is used to highlight how organizational and technological factors affect the division of labor between officers and NCOs and the text ends with a call for comparative research efforts on the category of NCOs.