ABSTRACT
Armies, Navies and Air Forces are organisations2 whose purpose has long since shifted from the relatively straight forward, practical function of fighting, to an enormously complex institutional matrix of processes and procedures, carried out by numerous inherent and out-sourced resources, human and material, to achieve certain ends. While Huntington was writing specifically of commissioned officers, another writer, Jacques van Doorn, wrote in 1975 of 'The officer corps: a fusion of profession and organisation.'3 The implication, in the mid years of the Cold War, was that the officer corps personified the contemporary standards of a professionalised and systematised leadership of national armed forces. The corporate body holding commissioned rank and full legal authority, organised the monopoly of violent means, reserved by the state for its defence.
