How ambiguity results in excellence: The role of hierarchy and reputation in U.S. Army Special Forces

Human Organization, Spring 1998 by Simons, Anna

This article explores how group reputations get made and unmade within the strictures of an elite military organization. For instance, within teams there are both formal and informal pecking orders. Above teams there exist layers of command and control. "Need to know" and information flows are critical to the construction of A-team identities both among teams and for commanders ' consumption. Yet, the view from within teams and of teams is never the same. From within, teams are thought never to be equal. From above they are expected to be interchangeable. As this article describes, hierarchy is actually bolstered by such different perspectives, and teams work better as a result.

Key words: military organization, U.S. Army Special Forces; US, North Carolina

Political anthropologists have long recognized the power that can be squeezed from ambiguity (Balandier 1970) and the significance of indeterminacy lurking in even the most rigidseeming social structures (Moore 1978). F. G. Bailey, for one, has devoted a lifetime to examining strategems, spoils, rulemaking, rule-breaking, and gamesmanship, while always taking into account the individual and the persistence of individualism (Bailey 1969, 1993).

Arguably, no institution brings together individualism and conformity or indeterminacy and rigid structure better than does the military. Yet, the United States armed forces have seldom been described, let alone analyzed by political anthropologists. Sociologists have studied numerous aspects of army organization and army life. But the benefits the army gains from soldiers taking advantage of the same structure the army uses to take advantage of them has not been well explored. Thus, in addition to describing the workings of a particular unit -U.S. Army Special Forces (popularly known as the Green Berets) - I argue that it is the ambiguities embedded in army structure, which help account for excellence.

The ethnographic information presented in this article was gathered during formal fieldwork conducted with the 3rd Special Forces Group at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina in 1991-92 (see Simons 1997).1 More than a year was spent in team rooms, out in the woods, on patrols, in training exercises, at firing ranges, and in various schools with soldiers. I was able to speak to individuals singly, but given the group nature of work (which it was not my goal to interrupt), I concentrated primarily on observing intra- and inter-team dynamics. Unlike SF soldiers themselves, I was able to shift my point of view from team to team, and could ask questions of commanders beyond the team level. Because I was an anthropologist, too, soldiers afforded me the opportunity to do whatever they were doing without holding me to their standards. Participation-observation at this micro level thus privileged me in numerous ways. Most studies of the armed forces, and even Special Operations, tend to be interview-driven analyses which plumb officers' perspectives (e.g., Collins 1994; Marquis 1997) or, when soldiers' viewpoints are elicited, it is generally by survey or questionnaire (e.g., Brooks and Zazanis 1997).

The potential, then, for different points of view not to be granted equal weight cannot be overstated, particularly since two formal hierarchies exist in the U.S. Army, each of which is uniform across units, on all posts, in peacetime as well as during war. Officers (captains, majors, lieutenant colonels, colonels, and generals) belong to one order and enlisted personnel (privates, corporals, and sergeants, or as in the case of Special Forces, non-commissioned officers [NCOs]) inhabit another.2 The relationship between officers and NCOs is, by definition, unequal. Officially, technically, and legally, all officers outrank any NCO. However, not even modern armies can control for inconsonance, and within units, off paper, and because officers and NCOs work together, these hierarchies intersect. In certain situations, senior sergeants are practically duty-bound to control junior officers, while informal pecking orders will time and again subvert the official order if the same men do not sit atop both.

On the one hand, the army seems to have perfected an ingeniously hierarchical system which demands perfectly interchangeable parts, interchangeability, along with redundancy and standardization, being military ideals. On the other hand, outdoing "the other guy" is also a military ideal. How - we should wonder-does an organization like Special Forces, which is designed to attract the best conventional soldiers the army produces, manage to standardize such competitive men? How do theory and practice work out their differences?

The short answer is: thanks to enduring structure and routinized mobility. The longer answer depends on the ambiguities we find as we travel up and down the chain of command, which, tellingly, no soldier does.3

SF and the Army

Since 1987 Special Forces (SF) has existed as its own branch of the U.S. Army, with a structural stature equivalent to that of armor or the infantry. Administered, financed, and supplied much like any other service arm, it is SF's soldiers, missions, and organization which set it apart.