The Military is a product of gender dynamics and their fears of its weakness only reinforce the patriarchy.

That combativeness must be deliberately induced or constructed is equally evident elsewhere. A variety of techniques-including persuasion, sexual and other incentives, taunting and accusations, humiliation, flattery and exaltations, and ideological equations of warriorhood with manhood-maybe used to exhort or pressure (mostly) young men to engage in a form of self-sacrifice to which they are not readily disposed. The same holds true for state societies where extreme, traumatizing practices of basic training are employed to trans-form young (male) civilians into soldiers. Nor is resistance to combat unusual. Throughout history, individual men have attempted various means of evasion that have included flight, prison, self-mutilation, feigning illness, insanity or sexual deviance, hiring surrogates, going AWOL or even committing suicide. Often when they have fought, they have done so under the influence of mood-altering substances- or under threat of lethal violence from their superiors. During the Great War Canadian troops were commonly provided extra rations of rum prior to an offensive in order to prepare them for death or killing. Officers also let their men know that they had appointed battle police to shoot laggards or those who hid. 33 Such evidence dispels essentialist myths of innate male aggressiveness. Rather, it demonstrates that dramatic transformations, along with social boundaries and liminality, are needed to construct and maintain a combative identity and solidarity. In those pre-state societies where warfare is strictly gender segregated and marked as masculine, these practices are often accompanied by discourses of male-female antagonism, ambivalence and fear, the projection of dissension among men onto women, and a displacement of the fear of the dangers of war onto dangers associated with female "pollution." Such gender-divisive devices are actively cultivated in gerontocracies by male elders who themselves display a more relaxed attitude toward women than do the younger men in whom they deliberately induce this exaggerated fear of female contamination. It Elsewhere, I describe a similar, though much less exaggerated, dynamic in the Canadian armed forces that fulfills its mandate to wage war against the enemy through an organizational structure and meaning system that together incorporate a number of mutually informing binary oppositions such as war/peace, death/life, strong/weak, military/civilian, defenders/defended, friend/enemy, and uniformity/diversity. It is onto these sets of op-positions that gender is mapped: Men/masculinity is associated with the former (i.e., war, strong, military, uniformity, defenders, friend, etc.) and women/femininity with the latter (i.e., peace, weak, civilian, diversity, defended, enemy, etc.), embodying, in part, impediments to operational effectiveness. What makes women's presence so contentious is not what they are-their purported essential physiology-but what they represent, their associated social attributes." It is the aspect of femininity that is associated with weakness and other oppositional characteristics cited above that conjures up the enemy. In the same vein, as we will soon see, the military's masculinity has less to do with men's essential characteristics than with what they represent in relation to the military's mandate. The military's need to segregate its members from civilian society and to develop and sustain in them a solidarity, combative attitude entails identifying and shunning all that is associated with the debilitating elements of the civilian sphere. And because the value and practices of the civilian sphere are the inverse of those of the military, the conflation of the military with masculinity and violence serves to normalize and legitimate the military's lethal goals and practices-"Thus far we have seen that pre-state and state societies have in common the need to construct and sustain the bellicose identities of their combatants. But there are other commonalities as well. As in pre-states, war in state societies is multifaceted, drawing on a wide range of participants; and it is ritually complex, bound up with sacred meaning and practice." This is as true of Ancient Assyria, with its cultic functionaries for interpreting omens and providing religious justification for military campaigns. " As it is of early-twentieth-century Canada, in which propaganda framed World War I as a Christian struggle against the forces of evil. Clerics of various Christian denominations worked hand in hand with the military to encourage young men to exhibit a Christian spirit of self-sacrifice; death in battle was equated with saintliness. In addition to the sacralization of war, the social organization of war in state societies also differentiates populations into defenders and defended, in varying ways and degrees. And as is often the case for pre-state societies, as we saw earlier, combatants in state-sponsored militaries act as proxies for those who cannot or would not fight. 40 Although pre-state and state societies have this latter point in common, it is also the point on which they diverge. That is, despite the susceptibility of warriors in pre-state societies to interpersonal pressure or to structural inducements to engage in combat, often as proxies, the absence of an enforceable draft, of a coercive superior authority, renders the process from recruitment to com-bat fundamentally democratic: The decision to engage in this form of collective lethal violence is ultimately voluntary, made by combatants themselves. No one is shot for refusing to fight. In state societies, in contrast, motivating soldiers to place themselves in harm's way-with little to gain and much to lose is a principal preoccupation. How does the military appropriate the soldier's autonomy and ensure obedience to orders, especially to those that en-tail risking one's life? The organizational answer to the military's motivational dilemma is elucidated by Mumford in his description of the origins of the army as an organizational form at the "dawn of civilization" in the fourth millennium B.C.E. in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, Yucatan, and Peru. The innovation of the army as one of several in a constellation of new institutions and cultural inventions lay not in new mechanical inventions but in a new form of social organization that harnessed a human multitude into what comprised the first gigantic machine, which Mumford terms the "megamachine." It is this human machine that produced the grand projects, both sacred and profane, many of which still stand today: temples, pyramids, ziggurats, and giant irrigation works. The basis of this new culture, with the army as its central paradigm, was its dedication "to the expansion of collective power ... by perfecting new instruments of coercion. The individual initiative of the hero was replaced by the strict obedience of disciplined troops governed by the technical rationality that mobilized them into integrated, mechanized groups acting on orders is-sued by a solitary individual at the top and transmitted through a series of intermediaries to the very lowest of units and individuals. For the machine to function effectively, orders had to be reproduced and followed precisely; rank was sacrosanct and disobedience intolerable. The army represented a new instrument of coercion, directed not merely at the enemies of a ruling elite but at its very own subjects. Wittfogel describes a similar dynamic for what he terms "hydraulic society"; its objective of harnessing water required the harnessing of the will of populations. He identifies the same shift to authoritarianism in the army, noting that soldiers in the hydraulic state lacked the protection of II democratic check or feudal contracts ... they came when they were summoned; they marched where they were told; they fought as long as the ruler wanted them to fight." 44 Feudal armies, by contrast, were notorious for their lack of discipline, with officers as likely to disobey as were the rank and file to be careless and reckless. In sum, this review of the army's ancient origins highlights the internal repression unique to this form of social organization. It is the archaic army's form of authoritarian social organization that has come down to us through the millennia. Whereas warriors in pre-state societies must be induced, persuaded, or humiliated into fighting in the absence of overarching coercive structures, in state societies armies are coercive structures, and control the principal agents and executors of state violence against their own members. WHY MILITARY MASCULINITY? To recapitulate, the above anthropological and historical narratives on war and gender prompt us to question the masculine social organization of warfare in the form of the military and to investigate the military's organizational means for extracting obedience from its members: its authoritarianism. More-over, these comparative perspectives are mutually informing: examining the military's authoritarianism furthers our understanding of the means by which this organization commits its soldiers to its high-risk, potentially lethal practices, and of how these are gendered. Whereas the problem of getting soldiers to place themselves at risk was difficult under ancient authoritarian rule, motivation for hierarchically controlled lethal violence on the part of those who are structurally excluded from the decision-making processes and benefits of war is far more challenging in democracies, which guarantee the franchise and prom-ise individual rights and freedoms, and where most social practices are ostensibly based on consent. As an anomalous holdover from a distant and largely forgotten past, the military has in many ways remained true to the despotic social conditions in which it originated. Even as Western societies have inched their way toward expanded legal and political rights, the military's segregation from the larger civilian society has allowed it to retain many of the social and legal parameters of its historic roots." In democracies there is a particular tension between the larger society's political and legal institutions and the military's coercive mandate and conditions of service. This tension exacerbates the military's existing preoccupation with the internal coercion of its members, with maintaining discipline, ensuring obedience, and mitigating resistance to the performance of this hazardous work. Tasks such as peacekeeping or peace enforcement aside, militaries are instruments of lethal force with mandates to deliver collective lethal violence. Managers of violence are carefully distinguished from those responsible for engendering and sustaining the violence of still others who are charged with its execution. Rank marks the internal differentiation, or conflicts of interest, between more and less powerful men. But rather than being transparent, these differences must be camouflaged in order to construct the military's unity of purpose-which is its operational effectiveness. This is the benchmark against which all else is evaluated. How are these differences in interests contained? The most obvious method is through the construction of the ranking system as inviolable, sacrosanct. Challenging rank is in the order of heresy, since it would mean exposing the oppositions of interest inherent in the ranking system's dispersal of power, thereby disrupting the disciplinary system that enforces obedience. The second method of containment consists in the construction of gender along a male-female axis of opposition, evident above in the elaborate discourses of male-female differences in physiological and social characteristics that render women less able to serve. It is this emphasis on male-female difference that serves to deflect attention from the fault lines along which military masculinity fractures internally. Further, it allows for the perpetuation of the military's attachment to a uniform masculinity (uniformity, strength, ete.) and an opposition to femininity (diversity, weakness, etc.) which, as in some pre-state societies, is used to de-flect, mask, and contain these tensions between multiple and unequal military masculinities. Masculine unity, an ally of masculine military uniformity, is a third method of containing, as well as actually masking, differences in military masculinities, and it forms the basis for constructing and fostering troop solidarity in order to achieve the military's unity of purpose, which, again, is its operational effectiveness. CONCLUSION The objective of this chapter has been to set out some of the parameters for understanding why the military constructs itself as uniformly masculine and why it is disrupted by the entry of women. Comparative cross-cultural and historical perspectives of the gendered social organization of war demonstrate that military masculinity is neither universal nor inevitable. Instead, a uniform military masculinity is carefully constructed through deliberate social practice as a means of operationalizing a unique mandate-waging war-through an authoritarian organization that is preoccupied with ensuring the obedience of potentially resistant practitioners. The military is an organization that values, promotes, and engages in practices that are the inverse of those valued, promoted, and practiced in the civilian sphere. Militaries are mandated to perfect the techniques of lethal violence, of killing; to fulfill this mandate they must construct different kinds of lives and deaths, and they must assign them meaning. Military masculinity has less to do with men's essential characteristics than it does with the characteristics and assigned meanings of the different world-the military world-that soldiers inhabit. It is in describing something of the nature and requisites of this world, and in shifting our sights from the male-female axis of opposition to the oppositions between military men and to the fractures within military masculinity, that we have been able to delineate some of what masculinity and femininity-embodied in real men and women- represent. It remains to be seen what long-term effects the increasing presence of women will have on the military as a gendered organization and on its mandate, values, and practices.