Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part IVa: Leadership – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

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Bret Devereaux

Collections, How To Civic Governance

July 18, 2026

23 Minutes

This is the fourth part (I, IIa, IIb, III) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized. We’ve talked about how armies are recruited, equipped and paid for. In particular, as we’ve seen so far, the structure of recruitment, organization and payment (such as it was) is heavily dependent on the underlying civilian structures, often mirroring them quite closely. Armies cannot help but recreate their civilian social structures on the battlefield .

The same is absolutely true for leadership and cohesion , essential for getting an army to fight effectively. Now we need to clear up some definitions here at the start between the three ideas we’re going to focus on here: we’re breaking up a multifaceted idea (‘combat motivation’) into component parts because, as we’ll see, effective combat motivation is something of a ‘three-legged stool’ that needs all three legs to stand effectively. Those three legs are leadership , morale and cohesion ; the first of which will be our focus this week and the last of which will be our focus next week.

Leadership refers to the to the command structures of an army, which as we’ll see certainly do have a motivation component. This is a top-down sort of combat motivation: good leaders might cultivate the respect or admiration of their troops, might find ways to motivate them in difficult times, might lead by example or otherwise ‘perform’ generalship and so on. What we’re going to focus on here is where leaders come from because, as it turns out, most societies have pretty strong ideas about where military leaders are supposed to come from, what backgrounds they’re supposed to have and (no surprise) they tend to mirror civilian leadership structures.

Meanwhile morale refers to the bottom-up motivation of the combatants. Specifically, I tend to use this to mean their attachment to the cause, both their loyalty to it and also their belief that it can be achieved. We aren’t going to deal too much with morale here because it is often very conflict-specific: different causes come with different morale implications. However, I do want to stress an important idea here: morale is what gets soldiers to a battlefield, not what keeps them on it (generally).

Finally cohesion is a side-together sort of motivation: the ability of a unit to cohere under pressure, to ‘hold together’ rather than breaking up when things get difficult. In the terror of combat, the high sounding reasons for service (the foundations of morale) are hard to keep in mind and combatants need something a bit more primal to keep them in the ranks: that is cohesion and it is generally based in some kind of strong attachment to the other fellows in the ranks next to them. As we’ll see, just like leadership systems tend to mirror civilian leadership structures, the options for fostering strong cohesion among soldiers are heavily dependent on what a civilian society looks like. We’ll treat cohesion principles next week.

By way of clarifying contrast: a force with low morale might melt away from desertion even when there’s not fighting going on, because no one is invested in the cause. A force with low cohesion (but high morale) might panic and disperse in a battle but reform later to fight again: they remain committed to the cause, but unable to handle the terror of battle collectively. A force with bad morale but high cohesion is very dangerous to a general, because that is the raw material for mutinies: the men will hold together against you as quickly as for you.

Naturally, most military systems that have existed for more than a single campaign have some effective system for arranging leadership and ensuring cohesion on a repeat basis. And that is what we’ll be looking at this week : how the structures of societies shape and constrain leadership and cohesion of the armies they form .

But first, as always, recruiting and maintaining large pre-modern armies is expensive! Much like many of those pre-modern armies, this project is supported by devolving the costs of my ruinous book-buying habit on to recruits readers. You can help by spreading the word to new readers and by supporting this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).

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Where Leaders Come From

Polities have a bewildering array of ways that they chose military leaders – some are determined by hereditary positions, others by professional career tracks, other elected and...