The nature of 'Armed Force'

In work we have been doing at HCSS/TNO we have taken a closer look at the historical roots of many words we regularly use in the strategic community.
The stories behind many of these words are truly fascinating. They invariably start at some point in (forgotten) time with some wordsmiths who ‘invent’ words for the various concepts they see and experience around themselves, thereby often displaying remarkable ingenuity. [I personally find this to be uniformly the case across all languages I have been exposed to and also across time. Neither does this surprise me, given the centrality of language to us as human beings.] After being 'welded' by some creative individual, the new word is then thrown into a competitive societal market for 'words'. In this market, the new entrant has to fight for acceptance, fend off the competition of old or new alternatives from within the same language group but also from without, adjust to changing circumstances, etc. If societies feel that some other word better captures the thing or thought it expresses, the word may - and often does - die. But so those words that have stood the test of time for centuries must have captured something very fundamental. We do not often stand still to think about these ‘fundamental’, original meanings. And often we can only venture an approximate guess about what they had on their mind. But the very exercise – captured in the linguistic discipline of ‘etymology’ (the science of the origins and development of words) – remains a fascinating one. And the story behind the word 'arm' is an excellent example of this.

arm (2) 

"weapon," c.1300, from O.Fr. armes (pl.), 11c., from L. arma "weapons," lit. "tools, implements (of war)," from PIE base *ar- "fit, join" (see arm (1)). The notion seems to be "that which is fitted together." Meaning "heraldic insignia" (in coat of arms, etc.) is early 14c.; originally they were borne on shields of fully armed knights or barons. The verb meaning "to furnish with weapons" is from c.1200. 

The English word ‘arm’ was borrowed (around 1300) from the Old French word armes, from the Latin arma “weapons,” literally  “tools, implements (of war)”. So far, so unsurprising. The more interesting part of this story requires us to go back a few thousands of years more to the hypothetical reconstructed ancestral language of the Indo-European language family whose time scale is much debated, but though to be about 5,500 years ago. There we find that the original root of the words ‘arm’ is thought to derive from the Proto-Indo-European base ‘*ar-‘, meaning ‘to fit, to join’. The notion thus seems to be that the word ‘arms’ implied ‘that which is fitted together’. This also explains the other meaning of arm: a limb that essentially joins together the upper arm and the forearm. When applied to the military context, ‘armed force’ thus merely represents what we today would call ‘capability packages’ (that what can be fitted together) for the purpose of imposing one’s will on others (‘force’).

The concrete instantiation of these capability packages typically reflects the Age in which they are used. In pre-historical times, ‘what was fitted together’ was essentially wood, a few primitive ropes and some stones (for clubs, spears, bows, slings).  In the Bronze Age, bronze was added to the mix to yield edged metal weapons; the Iron Age added the much more commonly available iron to the mix – and so on until we reach the current industrial-age ‘armed force’ that we now take as the standard.


When most of us today think about the concept of ‘armed force’, we conjure up highly hierarchically organized mobile formations of uniformed soldiers equipped with a wide range of physical technologies based (mostly) on steel, engines and firepower that are employed by national political leaders to advance or defend their national goals. While this particular image is by now deeply ingrained in our consciousness, ‘armed forces’ have not always looked like this.  Before the nation-state became the primary actor in the international system (a point in history often traced back by political scientists to the Treaties of Westphalia of 1649), ‘armed force’ was exercised by a far more heterogeneous set of actors than just the nation-states (tribes, clans, religious or ethnic groupings, etc.). And prior to the industrial revolution, the physical incarnation of this force looked quite different from what we observe today – not only in terms of physical (weapons) technologies, but also in terms of the accompanying ‘social technologies’ – including organizational principles, doctrines, etc.   As with most other aspects of public and private life, the industrial age truly revolutionized the very essence of ‘armed force’.

We have to acknowledge that the two key defining features of our current image of armed forces – their state-centred (‘Westphalian’) and industrial quintessence – are under increasing pressure.  Both may very well stay with us for some time to come, but we can already detect the patchy outlines of a different era with (again) a much more heterogeneous cast of actors and with (and much of this is new) post-industrial socio-technical features (‘arms’, doctrines, organizational structures, etc.).  If we assume that humans will continue to avail themselves of whatever they find and can create around themselves to attempt to impose their will (in our opinion one of the very few fairly safe assumptions in defence planning), we have to accept that post-industrial defense capability packages may look as different from industrial ones, as paleo- or neolithic warriors did from Bronze-age ones; or as armies of medieval knights from the current industrial ones that we are so familiar with.