Sunday Book Review: The Culture of Military Organizations

Over the past 2-3 decades, much of the most interesting work in security studies and military history has rested on the study of military organizations as institutions. Although there’s some commonality across time and space in how the state institutions we call “militaries” organize themselves internally, there’s also a great deal of variance. The Culture of Military Organizations, edited by Pete Mansoor and Williamson Murray, concentrates on the cultural aspects of this variance, examining a wide range of military organizations and studying the development and impact of different cultural practices and objects.

An introductory essay by Lennie Wong and Steve Gerras frames the rest of the book by defining and operationalizing organizational culture. Culture is, of course, an extremely slippery construct, but the notion that military organizations would differ culturally from one another in consequential ways is deeply intuitive to anyone who has worked with different militaries. This is true across time (military orgs change in response to interior and exterior pressure), across national cultures (armies from alternative cultural structures vary in how they can incorporate technology and doctrine), and across function. Gerras and Wong introduce nine metrics for studying military organizational culture, along with a structure for analyzing cultural practices and objects.

Of the chapters, my favorites were Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh’s on Grant and the Army of the Tennessee, Richard Hart Sinnreich’s piece on the culture of the Victorian British Army (a nice companion piece to Williamson Murray’ chapter on the British Army 1914-1945). Reina Pennington’s section on the Red Army was also awfully good. Toward the end there’s a shitty chapter about the U.S. Air Force that can be safely ignored.

The volume emerged out of conference at Ohio State’s Mershon Center that brought together a sizable group of historians and political scientists specializing in military organizational dynamics. Because the conference workshopped up each chapter, I was available to become familiar with most of them before they reached the printer. As an aside, it was an absolute delight to be able to participate, and especially to have the opportunity to meet both Williamson Murray and Allan Millett, two of the titans of modern military history.

This is a good, readable book, well worth a look if you need something for a class, are interested in the theory, or just want to know more about a few fascinating armies, navies, and air forces. My sole quibble is that the chapters vary to seem degree regarding how carefully they follow the framing of culture, but for most readers this will not be a serious problem.