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JoshuaFox comments on Why officers vs. enlisted? - Less Wrong
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Yes. But war is a Darwinian process, and if one army figured out a better way to do things, they would win. That's not to say that a one-ladder system would make the difference, however.
Well... it is generally agreed, I think, that the Wehrmacht was, man for man and gun for gun, a better fighting force than any of the Allied armies that defeated it.
OK ... but they had the same two-ladder system, so that is not an example of an alternative to the two-ladder system.
The point is that most wars are won or lost on non-military grounds: economics, politics, technology, strategy, and even just the size of the army. For the one component of military organization to be naturally-selected, you would need many more wars and generations than have in fact existed.
Yes, but my point is that the organisation of even victorious armies is not necessarily optimal, or better than that of the army that it defeated. There hasn't been enough selection (and arguably, armies are insufficiently accurate replicators anyway) to make Darwinian arguments have the power you ascribe to them.
Er, all else being equal, maybe. There have been only a handful of total wars fought between states. There is zero reason to think armed forces have been optimized to that extent.
"But war is a Darwinian process"
No, it's not. If "Darwinian" means "pertaining to or resembling biological evolution", which it generally is understood as, then there are certain characteristics of biological evolution that one can reasonably expect to be present for the term to be proper: a genotype governing the development of organisms and consisting of genes (units of heritability), a phenotype physically expressing a particular genotype, a copying process that is largely faithful in transmitting genes but occasionally mutates them, a method of combining genes from two individuals, and a selection process based on phenotype. What is the "organism" in the case of war? The genotype? The phenotype? The genes? The copying process? Etc. Ask Billy Beane whether the mere existence of competition means perfect efficiency. Warfare involves signaling, brinkmanship, collusion, negotiation, bluffing, path dependence, local equilibriums, information asymmetry, superstition, stochastic processes with samples sizes completely inadequate to estimate underlying parameters, and more. There's no reason to think it's efficient.
Chance plays a huge role in natural selection.