I have read and enjoyed several series of novels set in the British navy during the Napoleonic wars, most recently one by Naomi Novik that departs a little further from history than its predecessors by providing the British and their enemies with dragons.
Interesting but it should be noted the military hasn't changed much on that at all, at least among commissioned officers, outside the specific success metric. Failed US captains and admirals still get assigned to desks in offices with no staff, get promoted on tenure and patronage, etc; the main difference is they lose prestige rather money as their paychecks don't change but honestly most of those guys don't care or else they would just resign. Your modern merchant to conquer is a PowerPoint slide deck on intersectionality and trying to tease out the ever shifting DEI order of preference of the day.
Hell I remember Ft. Bliss in El Paso used to have a special base just for them, McGregor Range. When I went there for training once the permanent staff for the entire "base" was an O6 full bird colonel commanding two junior enlisted and a single non commissioned officer. I was talking to the Spec4 who caught HIV but couldn't get discharged under Clinton hence his assignment there and he was telling me everyone out there was banished, the base has always been that way, Ft. Bliss rejects whom you couldn't figure out how to discharge but wouldn't retire or quit either on their own accord. The COL had gotten caught sleeping with his own command sergeant major's teen daughter but wouldn't resign. The other two I believe were alcoholics who had dozens of DUIs under their belt but otherwise no other bad marks and couldn't get discharged as they kept completing the rehab program successfully.
> Failed US captains and admirals still get assigned to desks in offices with no staff
Until they decide to retire, which most of them do pretty quickly once they find themselves in this position.
> get promoted on tenure and patronage
Tenure, no--promotions in the Navy (I can't speak about other services) were based on how good your performance evaluations looked, regardless of where you were on the seniority list, when I was in, and AFAIK still are.
"Patronage" I suppose could be used to describe the process by which performance evaluations are produced, or at least some aspects of it.
Yeah I can't speak to the navy side outside occasional interactions on joint operations I had with them as well some some time I spent working for NCTAMS-LANT and even then just scuttlebutt, I wasn't HR lol. But I def know from my COCOM days plenty of flags and O6's across ALL services got assigned desks in windowless offices with no staff or responsibility and many of them rode it out a couple years trying to game the retirement pay brackets. That or they were assigned as the token military "leader" to a civil service department which was ran actually by the "deputy" lifer GS-15 or SES one grade junior and told to just sit there and do nothing, i.e. "don't interfere with the existing well oiled operations there or annoy the GSs". My observation was generally shitbags know they are shitbags so they don't care about being "grounded", i.e. the E-5 who does twenty years with not an ounce of shame, the O-3 that does likewise. And it takes a lot to genuinely boot senior officers and non-coms short of a catastrophic failure which usually, to get that rank, they know how to avoid via plausible deniability and insolation. What they weren't though is hung or even chaptered out / forcibly removed from service for incompetent.
On the Army side tenure mattered, it wasn't the only factor but it definitely was considered as part of the overall promotions metrics as well as assignments, i.e. the more you were "passed over" the more likely you would get passed over again as far as promotions goes yet on the flipside seniority tended to give you better or choice of assignments especially for flags. On operational matters the senior equivalent rank had command unless it was explicitly stated otherwise and yeah I've seen that dick waving contest way to many times.
I was directly thinking of OER's on patronage as, at least in the Army, they were 100% subjective in practice, but even above that, there is good old fashion patronage where you tied yourself to your boss as a loyalist and he pulls you all the way up with him as part of his command staff. I seen in a lot especially at the COCOM where everyone was the former staff of someone currently in power and had been around them their entire career assignment to assignment as a pseudo permanent adjutant even in services that don't officially have those (I think the Navy actually official does IIRC).
I remember USAREUR had this 2 star chick as their A6 years ago and I remember meeting her back when she was a lowly O3. As she went up each rank, she pulled her down one directly up with her who did the same, i.e. when she became battalion commander, her former squad commander rolled into her company command. When she became brigade commander, they became battalion commander and they then likewise pulled up their company commander, etc all while never leaving the overall unit nor command structure. Repeat recursively. We called them the "good old girls" because it was entire gang of feminists working together to build a power base for themselves and it worked for their careers quite well. They even managed to replace all their male civil servants with women via attrition and new hires.
That is definitely something I want to read, but I couldn't help noticing the absence of two characters: the After and the Before. The after I would say is revolutionary France, where social mobility was also high, though it too suffered from the single-point-of-failure issue, represented by Napoleon, in my opinion. The before would be the British private sector, or even the Dutch one. How many institutional innovations in the Royal Navy didn't actually come from traders of spices, or pirates? Also, surely there were phenomena of convergent evolution as well.
It is tempting to see patronage as the defining feature of the public sector. Today, where it seems to be most alive is in activities where promotion to leadership positions is not allowed to be ostensibly transactional: party politics, armed forces, universities. But if there are dividing lines between environments where one or the other system of governance prevails, they seem to be blurred. For example, I once watched a documentary about a British captain (James Cook?), and it explained the org chart of a Royal Navy ship. There was one individual in charge of actually commanding the ship, but the top figure, maybe it was the captain, did not get involved in such mundane affairs, his job was to set the course and define strategy. This was presented to make it seem that such a position was merely a reward for aristocrats, but to me it looked a lot like the position of a modern CEO - who not only sets strategy, but also acts as a tether to the principals of the company (the executive board). So patronage seems to flourish in certain environments, perhaps those that are less exposed to market competition, such as Napoleonic France's top brass, but patronage also makes sense within a firm. The lines are blurred, which I guess is part of the point of this post.
As I try to think of examples, I struggle to find clear stereotypes from which to discern any rules. We could look at tech today, where we have many non-aristocratic CEOs, people who came from bellow and built companies from the ground up. On the other hand, there is a whole ecosystem for funding tech ventures, and connections seem to matter, or at least the ability to convince a venture capitalist of one's capabilities and virtues.
Lots of rentier-aristocrats did own government bonds, specifically consols.
Aside from that, path-dependance may explain some of the imperfections of both the prize and aristocratic systems. Unless you have a sovereignty entrepreneur (eg. Peter the Great), the feudal system evolved into the patronage-bureaucracy system without much intentional transformation; initially just the king re-using his clients for something else, then gradually shifting to different clients. There was no overall destruction and reconstitution of groups, though, so the value system can only gradually shift from one form to the other. Thus feudal aristocrats' castles can become palaces, and their agricultural estates can become gardens, but because they can't gradually evolve into furnishing a warship that shift doesn't happen. Useful skills also aren't much use as a marker of in-group loyalty through group-dependance, as they can be used in general life if group affiliation ends.
I suspect it's similar for the naval prize laws; they evolved out of laws that did little more than legitimise pirates as privateers, so having to pay the value of the ship would be too sticky to change without upsetting naval officers. It may also have been a good advert for joining the navy in the first place; the captains who took the Santisima Trinidad both got the equivalent of £100,000,000 though little more than luck, and I expect that encouraged a lot of people to join the navy.
> One puzzle he does not consider is why the navy did not solve the problem of misaligned incentives by lowering the prize money awarded for merchant ships or raising it for warships, which should have been easy enough to do.
I believe the prize system was itself an improvement over the previous system where the sailors would get to keep whatever they looted. This lead to problems that since merchant ships were frequently loaded with more valuable goods than warships, and a emphasis on capturing rather than sinking enemy ships. The solution was to subsidize prize money for warships captured or sunk.
How close to reality is that book snippet about how to deal with an affair with the separated wife? I have become less trustworthy of such historical social details as I get older. Technical details are less likely to have errors because they are reasonably well documented in museums and contemporary books, although I have occasionally spotted anachronisms off by a decade or two.
I've heard the claim that before Nelson it was traditional to, after every fleet battle, find the one captain who performed worst of all and have him court-martialed, and that part of Nelson's popularity among his captains is that he abandoned this method.
With enough removal of incompetents (and ways to test for incompetence), strict seniority is less destructive than it may appear.
Interesting but it should be noted the military hasn't changed much on that at all, at least among commissioned officers, outside the specific success metric. Failed US captains and admirals still get assigned to desks in offices with no staff, get promoted on tenure and patronage, etc; the main difference is they lose prestige rather money as their paychecks don't change but honestly most of those guys don't care or else they would just resign. Your modern merchant to conquer is a PowerPoint slide deck on intersectionality and trying to tease out the ever shifting DEI order of preference of the day.
Hell I remember Ft. Bliss in El Paso used to have a special base just for them, McGregor Range. When I went there for training once the permanent staff for the entire "base" was an O6 full bird colonel commanding two junior enlisted and a single non commissioned officer. I was talking to the Spec4 who caught HIV but couldn't get discharged under Clinton hence his assignment there and he was telling me everyone out there was banished, the base has always been that way, Ft. Bliss rejects whom you couldn't figure out how to discharge but wouldn't retire or quit either on their own accord. The COL had gotten caught sleeping with his own command sergeant major's teen daughter but wouldn't resign. The other two I believe were alcoholics who had dozens of DUIs under their belt but otherwise no other bad marks and couldn't get discharged as they kept completing the rehab program successfully.
Not much has changed.
> Failed US captains and admirals still get assigned to desks in offices with no staff
Until they decide to retire, which most of them do pretty quickly once they find themselves in this position.
> get promoted on tenure and patronage
Tenure, no--promotions in the Navy (I can't speak about other services) were based on how good your performance evaluations looked, regardless of where you were on the seniority list, when I was in, and AFAIK still are.
"Patronage" I suppose could be used to describe the process by which performance evaluations are produced, or at least some aspects of it.
Yeah I can't speak to the navy side outside occasional interactions on joint operations I had with them as well some some time I spent working for NCTAMS-LANT and even then just scuttlebutt, I wasn't HR lol. But I def know from my COCOM days plenty of flags and O6's across ALL services got assigned desks in windowless offices with no staff or responsibility and many of them rode it out a couple years trying to game the retirement pay brackets. That or they were assigned as the token military "leader" to a civil service department which was ran actually by the "deputy" lifer GS-15 or SES one grade junior and told to just sit there and do nothing, i.e. "don't interfere with the existing well oiled operations there or annoy the GSs". My observation was generally shitbags know they are shitbags so they don't care about being "grounded", i.e. the E-5 who does twenty years with not an ounce of shame, the O-3 that does likewise. And it takes a lot to genuinely boot senior officers and non-coms short of a catastrophic failure which usually, to get that rank, they know how to avoid via plausible deniability and insolation. What they weren't though is hung or even chaptered out / forcibly removed from service for incompetent.
On the Army side tenure mattered, it wasn't the only factor but it definitely was considered as part of the overall promotions metrics as well as assignments, i.e. the more you were "passed over" the more likely you would get passed over again as far as promotions goes yet on the flipside seniority tended to give you better or choice of assignments especially for flags. On operational matters the senior equivalent rank had command unless it was explicitly stated otherwise and yeah I've seen that dick waving contest way to many times.
I was directly thinking of OER's on patronage as, at least in the Army, they were 100% subjective in practice, but even above that, there is good old fashion patronage where you tied yourself to your boss as a loyalist and he pulls you all the way up with him as part of his command staff. I seen in a lot especially at the COCOM where everyone was the former staff of someone currently in power and had been around them their entire career assignment to assignment as a pseudo permanent adjutant even in services that don't officially have those (I think the Navy actually official does IIRC).
I remember USAREUR had this 2 star chick as their A6 years ago and I remember meeting her back when she was a lowly O3. As she went up each rank, she pulled her down one directly up with her who did the same, i.e. when she became battalion commander, her former squad commander rolled into her company command. When she became brigade commander, they became battalion commander and they then likewise pulled up their company commander, etc all while never leaving the overall unit nor command structure. Repeat recursively. We called them the "good old girls" because it was entire gang of feminists working together to build a power base for themselves and it worked for their careers quite well. They even managed to replace all their male civil servants with women via attrition and new hires.
That is definitely something I want to read, but I couldn't help noticing the absence of two characters: the After and the Before. The after I would say is revolutionary France, where social mobility was also high, though it too suffered from the single-point-of-failure issue, represented by Napoleon, in my opinion. The before would be the British private sector, or even the Dutch one. How many institutional innovations in the Royal Navy didn't actually come from traders of spices, or pirates? Also, surely there were phenomena of convergent evolution as well.
It is tempting to see patronage as the defining feature of the public sector. Today, where it seems to be most alive is in activities where promotion to leadership positions is not allowed to be ostensibly transactional: party politics, armed forces, universities. But if there are dividing lines between environments where one or the other system of governance prevails, they seem to be blurred. For example, I once watched a documentary about a British captain (James Cook?), and it explained the org chart of a Royal Navy ship. There was one individual in charge of actually commanding the ship, but the top figure, maybe it was the captain, did not get involved in such mundane affairs, his job was to set the course and define strategy. This was presented to make it seem that such a position was merely a reward for aristocrats, but to me it looked a lot like the position of a modern CEO - who not only sets strategy, but also acts as a tether to the principals of the company (the executive board). So patronage seems to flourish in certain environments, perhaps those that are less exposed to market competition, such as Napoleonic France's top brass, but patronage also makes sense within a firm. The lines are blurred, which I guess is part of the point of this post.
As I try to think of examples, I struggle to find clear stereotypes from which to discern any rules. We could look at tech today, where we have many non-aristocratic CEOs, people who came from bellow and built companies from the ground up. On the other hand, there is a whole ecosystem for funding tech ventures, and connections seem to matter, or at least the ability to convince a venture capitalist of one's capabilities and virtues.
Lots of rentier-aristocrats did own government bonds, specifically consols.
Aside from that, path-dependance may explain some of the imperfections of both the prize and aristocratic systems. Unless you have a sovereignty entrepreneur (eg. Peter the Great), the feudal system evolved into the patronage-bureaucracy system without much intentional transformation; initially just the king re-using his clients for something else, then gradually shifting to different clients. There was no overall destruction and reconstitution of groups, though, so the value system can only gradually shift from one form to the other. Thus feudal aristocrats' castles can become palaces, and their agricultural estates can become gardens, but because they can't gradually evolve into furnishing a warship that shift doesn't happen. Useful skills also aren't much use as a marker of in-group loyalty through group-dependance, as they can be used in general life if group affiliation ends.
I suspect it's similar for the naval prize laws; they evolved out of laws that did little more than legitimise pirates as privateers, so having to pay the value of the ship would be too sticky to change without upsetting naval officers. It may also have been a good advert for joining the navy in the first place; the captains who took the Santisima Trinidad both got the equivalent of £100,000,000 though little more than luck, and I expect that encouraged a lot of people to join the navy.
> One puzzle he does not consider is why the navy did not solve the problem of misaligned incentives by lowering the prize money awarded for merchant ships or raising it for warships, which should have been easy enough to do.
I believe the prize system was itself an improvement over the previous system where the sailors would get to keep whatever they looted. This lead to problems that since merchant ships were frequently loaded with more valuable goods than warships, and a emphasis on capturing rather than sinking enemy ships. The solution was to subsidize prize money for warships captured or sunk.
How close to reality is that book snippet about how to deal with an affair with the separated wife? I have become less trustworthy of such historical social details as I get older. Technical details are less likely to have errors because they are reasonably well documented in museums and contemporary books, although I have occasionally spotted anachronisms off by a decade or two.
I've heard the claim that before Nelson it was traditional to, after every fleet battle, find the one captain who performed worst of all and have him court-martialed, and that part of Nelson's popularity among his captains is that he abandoned this method.
With enough removal of incompetents (and ways to test for incompetence), strict seniority is less destructive than it may appear.
Second the (implicit) recommendation of this book: the discussion of duelling as a commitment device has stuck with me over the years.