Karsten Peter (ed.). The Military-State-Society Symbiosis

Routledge, 1998. — 224 p.Organization for warfare has for millennia been one of humankind’s central activities. Indeed, our kinship-centered cooperative propensities, coupled with our effective use of verbal communication, offer better explanations of the military effectiveness of early human communities than those relying on theories of aggressiveness alone, or so Robert Bigelow and Robert McConnell have argued (persuasively). Simple, subsistence-level societies have not all waged war in the same manner. Cultural differences among such societies, such as the decision of some communities to house new couples in the wife’s mother’s community (matrilocality) as opposed to the husband’s father’s community (patrilocality), have been found to be strongly associated with a low level of local conflict (due to the constant breaking up of extremely localistic war bands) and a higher degree of effectiveness in longer range warfare (due to the creation of more cosmopolitan intercommunity trust and affiliation). When these war-band militaries of simple societies came into conflict with the more rationalized, state-run militaries of Spain, France, and Britain in the New World, the Amerindian and European military cultures often could not understand one another’s ways and mores. Military systems were also central to the emergence of ancient state-empires. These tended to emerge in fertile alluvial valleys as warlords came to dominate and fortify those central market towns with sufficient surplus to enable them to retain a professional military retinue, to centralize the acquisition and distribution of weapons, and to attack and hold other nearby towns and cities, while extending their power into the pastoral hinterland.