The officer-enlisted divide that characterizes America’s rank system has historical roots in the most successful military forces of the eighteenth century: the British military under King George III, the French military of King Louis XVI, and the Prussian military of King Frederick II. Their dual-track, class-based rank systems were modeled after the societies from which they drew their manpower, with aristocrats and landed gentry commanding large numbers of conscripted peasants and urban laborers, employed in large formations on an open field of battle or the high seas. So distrusted was the general population from which the conscripted masses were drawn that
Sir Arthur Wellesley blatantly
expressed his sentiment in 1813: “We have in service the scum of the earth as common soldiers.” Officers were
gentlemen for whom a commission was a marker of prestige, while
conscripts were often impressed from the streets and were generally expected to flee at the first sign of battle if not under the harshest possible discipline enforced by members of a higher caste.
Enlisted conscripts with a university education were virtually unheard of, and the primary requirement to succeed in the enlisted ranks was the ability to march in step and the mechanical memorization and drill required to load and fire a musket. While the lessons of eighteenth-century conflict can be extraordinarily informative at the strategic level, the tactical realities of twenty-first-century warfare bear little resemblance to the line formations and marching in step of Saratoga or Waterloo. And yet, the United States is still employing a rank system inherited from the monarchies of the premodern Europe.
