Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

Uniforms aren't purely a military thing. Sports teams wear them; so do students at certain kinds of schools. Some jobs mandate uniforms for their employees, including servants in the past wearing the "livery" of their masters. But we associate this idea so much with soldiers (and with the not entirely unrelated police) that being "in uniform" can be shorthand for military service, "uniforms" shorthand for the personnel of such groups.

Why, though? What purpose does the uniform serve?

The knee-jerk answer is "to tell friend from foe on the battlefield," and that's not entirely wrong. But if you're envisioning that thing you've seen in movies where two armies smash into each other and instantly dissolve into a confused melee with enemies on all sides, erase that from your mind. If your battlefield looks like that, something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. Uniforms are more likely to serve their purpose in letting you know that the unit you see approaching from the south is your reinforcements -- or, alternatively, the other side about to flank you. (Disguising yourself as the enemy has both its merits and its perils . . .)

Identification goes beyond knowing who to stab in the heat of battle, though. Uniforms can also tell you which part of your own army you're looking at: is that guy an infantryman? Gunner? Cavalry soldier? Which lord's retinue or modern squadron does he belong to? If you find some dead bodies in the woods, which unit got ambushed, and what does that mean for your subsequent situation?

Or you can read "identification" in a slightly different sense. Wearing a uniform signals not only to others but to you that you belong to a particular group, whether that's your specific unit or your army as a whole. And this isn't merely a nice side note; that sense of identity is key to battlefield performance, since the bond with your buddies and your unwillingness to let them down play a vital role in getting you to fight instead of running away. There's a reason soldiers often take pride in their uniforms; those represent membership in something bigger than just themselves.

The psychological angle also turns outward, having its own effect on the enemy. By now you won't be surprised to hear me say that not all armed forces achieve uniformity of appearance; that requires money, effort, and the organizational capacity to make it happen. Modern states take these things for granted, but historically, not everyone pulled it off. Those that did signaled to their opponents that they were well-funded, committed to the cause, and organized enough to handle the necessary logistics and discipline. Who would you rather fight: that guy, or the one with a ragtag assemblage of fellows in whatever clothes they happen to be wearing? Uniforms are a tool of intimidation as well as cohesion.

Of course, it's not an all-or-nothing proposition. Modern uniforms are incredibly codified, even down to mandating the exact chemical composition of the dyes used on the fabric. Everything from a soldier's boots to their haircut is governed by regulations (which may also prohibit the addition of personal touches on top of required bits). Before industrialization, though, that degree of standardization was much harder to achieve -- and very few armies tried.

Instead, you can go for more limited elements. Maybe everybody is supposed to wear a coat and trousers of more or less the same color and cut, but everything past that is up for grabs. Maybe you issue tabards, which don't have to be fitted and are easily thrown over whatever else your soldiers are wearing. Maybe it's headgear or, in an absolute minimal form, armbands to identify which force each guy belongs to. In Japan it was sashimono, small banners on poles attached to the soldiers' backs; you've probably seen this in films.

You also don't have to outfit your entire army with uniforms. Elite units tend to get these first, both because they have the money to do it, and because it makes them look special -- which I don't mean in a derogatory sense! They're elite for a reason, and dressing them in the same gear both gives them confidence and advertises their badassery to the enemy. Sometimes their "uniform" is just better and more complete armor, but that counts; if your infantry are in boiled leather and your elite cavalry are in mail, or the infantry have mail and the cavalry have plate, it doesn't matter as much whether the plate is all identical in style. Just seeing all that polished metal shining in the distance signals that a real threat is about the enter the field.

Officers are a special subset of this. Up until quite recently, we took it for granted that officers should be immediately identifiable by their appearance, without having to check for small markers like the stripes on a patch. This wasn't just to make them look important; it was because you needed to be able to find them as fast as possible so you could follow their orders. One of the best ways to do this was to give them taller hats, with crests or feathers or big ol' spikes or anything that made them stand out in a crowd. They might also look archaic; there's a distinct tendency for officer garb to lag a bit behind current fashion, probably because we associate tradition with authority. But the flamboyant visibility of officers declined very sharply around the time we got better at long-distance sniping: being immediately identifiable becomes a fatal liability when that helps a hidden enemy pick out the most valuable target to drill through the skull.

Flamboyance can become a problem for regular soldiers, too. For a while in the nineteenth century, French soldiers wore trousers in a particular shade of red called garance, which came to be seen as a proud symbol of French identity. Then we developed smokeless rifles, and battlefield visibility improved enormously. After they lost 27,000 men in a single day in early World War I, France decided their national identity would be better off without red trousers.

Finally, uniformity can be situational. Modern soldiers may have a service uniform and a full dress uniform, both of which are distinct from their combat uniform, i.e. the kit they're wearing in the field. That's multiplying the investment and effort by three! In less organized forces, soldiers might be permitted to wear whatever they like most of the time, and only don their uniforms for battle or for ceremonial occasions. Or alternatively, they're supposed to be in uniform at all times, and their officers simply fail to enforce that discipline: coats get hocked to pay gambling debts, torn up for rags, or left behind because the soldier just doesn't care.

Because remember, one option for uniforms is "nothing at all." Though I sometimes see writers forget this, it's entirely possible that an army deploys no uniformity whatsoever, because they just don't have the money or the organizational oomph to make it happen. Soldiers show up in whatever assortment of clothes and gear they can scrape together, or whatever the recruiting authority managed to scrape together and then hand out. They won't look very good, and they might not feel very good, either, but they'll just have to cope. It's the best their particular force can do.



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/2026/08/07/new-worlds-uniformity/)