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Implications for The Warrior State
Everett Carl Dolman
School of Advanced Air and Space Studies
ISA Annual Meeting Paper, Honolulu, HI
05 March 2005
Just over a decade ago, I began a study of the influence of military organization on political
development in the Western experiment. This effort culminated in my recent book, The Warrior State.
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In
it, I present a deterministic model of politico-military development that challenges the general assumption
that political and social forms decide military structure. To the contrary, I insist that political forms
consistently follow military influences, and in the modern era, political change follows military
reorganization within five to ten years.
For the current panel, it is my intent to provide a theoretical framework for understanding the data
compiled and analyzed by its eminent members. It is further the intent of the panel members from Air
University’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, including Dr. Schaub, Dr. Jim Forsyth, and
myself, to expand the already impressive dataset by adding a complementary survey drawn from the one
largely missing American service group, the US Air Force. What we are studying is an increasing
separation between military and social attitudes and values on, among many other issues, gender and
sexual equity, proper military roles, and the potential for conflict between citizen and religious obligation.
If the distinctions noted so far continue to expand, the model herein projects potentially serious anti-
liberal ramifications for US politics.
Theory and Assumptions:
For all its destruction, war is a most rational activity. The study of it must be impartial and
coherent, and it must be guided by theory. Here, contract and coercion models of state development are
accessed to provide the rationale for military formation and organizational design. Both the economic
exploitation models of Douglass North and the coercion model of Charles Tilly are emphasized. In his
masterful discourse, North provides the logic for individuals to move from the relative variety and leisure
of hunting-gathering society to the more labor-intensive and limited caloric variation of settled
agriculture. Whereas North then ascribes all variations of government and politics to the search for
perfected rights of property, I adapt the model to argue for a rational-choice model of contractual military
formation.
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