Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part IVb: Cohesion

This is the second half of the fourth part ( I, IIa, IIb, III, IVa ) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized. Last week we took a look at how the leadership of these armies was drawn from the existing elite classes of their societies. As with other factors, armies cannot help but recreate their civilian social structures on the battlefield, with the result that the military leadership class often mirrored, where it wasn’t simply identical with, the civilian ruling class.

Now it will not surprise you that pre-modern military literature, written almost entirely by elites in the leadership class for other elites in the leadership class, is very interested in leadership and tends to attribute all military success or failure to the fellows in charge. Modern military science, however, has increasingly recognized the importance of combat motivation in individual rank-and-file soldiers. 1

As noted last time, we can break this broader concept of combat motivation into two parts: morale and cohesion, where morale is the soldier’s attachment to the cause and belief in its possible achievement and cohesion is a soldier’s attachment to his fellows. What combat motivation studies have tended to show is that morale will get a soldier to the battlefield, but will not keep him on it; it is cohesion instead, the ability of a unit to stay together under pressure that is essential for enduring the terror of combat.

That said, different armies and different societies generate cohesion in different ways, as we’ll see. Now this is one component of this series that is a bit of an exception: so far I’ve been hammering that most societies are going to be pushed very strongly towards specific kinds of recruitment, organization and leadership as a result of their civilian organization. Meanwhile, as we’ll see, certain kinds of cohesion depend to a greater or lesser degree on specific social structures or assu…