Restructured Armed Forces

The chapter describes the restructuring process of the armed forces of Western advanced industrial societies from a comparative perspective, using examples when appropriate. It shows how recent developments in their environment have influenced, and will continue to influence, their organizational structure. In order to survive and remain pertinent and efficient, military organizations, like their civilian counterparts, had to develop new, more decentralized structural forms, with more open boundaries and flatter hierarchies. The old big, centrally coordinated and routinized bureaucratic structures, well adapted to their stable milieu, have been gradually replaced by new, smaller and flexible organizations, better adapted to the new, uncertain and fluid environment of the 21st century. More specifically the end of the Cold War, technological change, economic and social-cultural evolution led the end of the mass armies. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and as a result of 9/11, the Western armies’ missions have changed. They are no longer to deter a known enemy, as during the Cold War, and even less to fight conventional wars on the European heartland, as during the mass armed forces era, but rather, with other actors, to respond to very diverse and complex crises all over the world. In the context of these new engagement scenarios, political and military logic calls for quick reaction capability of what Janowitz (1971) called “constabulary forces”. These kinds of forces are smaller and more professional.