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Pfft comments on Why officers vs. enlisted? - Less Wrong
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When you mentioned different cultures I was imagining cannibals in the jungles of Borneo, or something. The JSDF is a completely ordinary western-style military, patterned after other modern armies. I don't think it counts as evidence that this is a human universal.
From what I have read in the recent book by Jared Diamond, fighting in New Guinea, is of a completely different type -- quite non-hierarchical. Can there be hierarchical armies without the two-ladder hierarchy?
Is the fighting in New Guinea on a large enough scale to require a hierarchy of any kind?
A group of just a few hundred men, without strongly segregated roles that need coordination (they all fight together in the same way), is just a warband. It doesn't need a complex command structure to coordinate; it might help, but doesn't have the training and regulations to enforce it. It's easier to be egalitarian than to have to worry about political infighting during actual fighting.
That's part of Diamond's point: These societies are organized on a small scale. Other similar societies scaled up and moved to a chieftain system.
But in any case, even small, elite, independent army units have the usual officer/enlisted dichotomy, even if in the elite units this is a less clear distinction.
Possibly, if the line of this post is correct and I am not taking it too far, this is because the SEALS, Sayeret, etc are implicitly expected to be agenty in a way that most soldiers are not.