ARE POST-COLD WAR MILITARIES POSTMODERN?

The theoretical perspective of postmodernism has become commonplace in sociology. Not surprisingly, military sociologists have begun to apply the description to the forms of military organization emerging after the end of the Cold War in Europe, and to military personnel themselves.(1) However, while it is well documented that post-Cold War militaries in the West are experiencing substantial changes in missions, size, and organizational structure, it is less clear that these changes can be accurately described as "postmodern." There is, in fact, little agreement, even among those theorists who have introduced the term into the sociological vocabulary, as to whether a "condition of postmodernity" exists, let alone what might constitute a distinctively postmodern form of organization. Thus we argue in this article that the application of the concept to contemporary military forces should not be made too hastily.

We attempt to ground the discussion of the so-called "postmodern military" by considering recent organizational changes in military forces in terms of discrete strands of postmodern social theory. By so doing, it becomes clear that military sociology ought not to simply equate postmodern with post-Cold War.(2) The argument developed here is twofold. First, contemporary armed forces are increasingly confronted by a world exhibiting several distinctly postmodern characteristics. In the terms favored by social theorists, the military is increasingly asked to operate in a condition of postmodernity. Rather than inducing a postmodern military, however, these very transformations of the military environment have spurred or facilitated organizational changes in the armed forces of a distinctly modern nature. Ironically, therefore, we argue that postmodern conditions have precipitated a form of organizational military modernism crystallized since the end of the Cold War.

The point of departure for this argument lies in the proposition that while the organizational changes focused upon by military sociologists echo postmodern themes, they are in fact the cumulative products of historical processes not simply identifiable as postmodern. What is more, these trajectories of change are temporally clustered and largely consolidated by the end of the Cold War itself, a critical conjuncture whose very impact is explicitly discounted by postmodernists. Based on this foundation, the contemporary military defies characterization as "postmodern," displaying instead those qualities distinctive of modernism: rational, calculated structural adaptation to environmental change.

Second, in arguing that it is important to exercise caution in the application of the term postmodern to the military, it is useful to take one additional step. Not only must we consider military analysts' orientations to the postmodern, as we have done; we must also examine postmodernists' orientations to the military. Only in this way can we see what characteristics of the military capture the attention of postmodern thinkers. And only in this way can we appreciate the dimensions of change to which their work sensitizes us. As a step toward such a synthesis, we briefly incorporate some of observations of the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard,(3) widely considered a postmodern social theorist (though not by Baudrillard himself), written during the war in the Persian Gulf in 1990-91. Drawing on examples from this and other works in the postmodern tradition, we suggest some alternative criteria by which to judge whether the military has indeed become postmodern.

Post-Cold War versus Postmodern

The end of the Cold War in Europe has been conceived of as a "watershed" period, both in a historical sense and more specifically in the realm of military affairs.(4) Historically, the end of the Cold War in Europe has signaled the demise of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe and the apparent victory of industrialized democratic states with market economies over their ideological foes.(5) Militarily, the end of the Cold War in Europe has meant that the armed forces of both sides in the 45-year standoff between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations have undergone significant demobilizing efforts, resulting in substantial reorganization and restructuring in order to tailor forces to the new, post-Cold War tasks beginning to emerge.(6) These new missions include peacekeeping, humanitarian efforts, and collective military responses to various regional conflicts that are no longer held in check by either Soviet influence or bipolar tensions. The end of the Cold War and the subsequent effects on military organization, structure, and missions have led some sociologists to theorize that the armed forces of the early twenty-first century will be sufficiently different in form and function from their predecessors that they should be characterized as "postmodern."(7)

The postmodern perspective has been employed most recently and perhaps most sweepingly in The Postmodern Military, a cross-national set of case studies of contemporary armed forces.(8) This edited volume may be taken as an exemplar, not simply for the richness of its range of cases, but because of the volume's self-conscious attempt to frame its analyses explicitly in terms of postmodern forms of military organization. In this volume, it is argued that the postmodern military may be identified by five fundamental organizational characteristics: 1) The interpenetration of civilian and military spheres; 2) a decreasing emphasis on differences in service, rank, and combat versus support specialties; 3) a change in mission, from war fighting to lower-intensity humanitarian and/or constabulary missions; 4) the tendency for missions to be carried out in a multilateral rather than unilateral context, through a coalition of forces acting under international auspices, and 5) the internationalization of military forces themselves.(9)