ABSTRACT
One of the central difficulties in studying military administration is determining the nature of the thing being studied. That is, in terms of its basic character, what kind of organization is the military most like? And what kind of work does military service most resemble? Approaches in the literature have generally provided different answers. For one view, the military is a profession. The complexity of military work in the modern era has resulted in the necessary specialization and professionalization of military activity, where the development of and proficiency in a body of “military” expert, abstract knowledge is the sine quo non of success on the contemporary battlefield (Huntington, 1957, 1963; Snider, Nagl and Pfaff, 1999; Snider and Watkins, 2000). Others focus on the military’s formal organization as a large public bureaucracy, with Weberian ideal-typical structures of authority, uniform regulations and defined paths for promotion (Feaver, 1998, 2005). Finally, still other approaches emphasize the military’s status as a national public
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institution, highlighting the military’s relationship to the social and political character of American society (Bachman, Blair, and Segal, 1977; Moskos, 2001). This chapter critically reviews these three approaches to the study of military organizations: their differing conceptions of military work, their origins in distinct episodes of political development and their response to the changing military requirements of the post-Cold War security environment. In so doing, the following central arguments are made.
