# Non-Civil Personnel Systems The counterpart to [[Civil Service Reform]] — concerned with how states structure, manage, and transform personnel systems that operate _outside_ the civilian bureaucratic framework. Encompasses armed forces, intelligence and security services, and hybrid agencies where civilian and non-civilian logics overlap. Where civil service reform governs civilian bureaucracies through merit, transparency, and (increasingly) performance, non-civil personnel systems are organized around command authority, security clearances, operational secrecy, and sovereign functions that resist standard administrative logic. --- ## Entries ### Three core subsystems - **Uniformed military**: - Rank-based hierarchy, up-or-out promotion, defined by chain of command and subordination to civilian authority. The classical subject of civil-military relations literature. - **Intelligence community**: - Operates under security classification regimes that create parallel HR rules — separate pay scales, vetting requirements, limited external mobility, and accountability structures that bypass normal oversight. Cuts across civilian and military personnel streams, making it the hardest subsystem to classify comparatively. - **Security services / militarized police**: - Hybrid category: gendarmeries (France), border forces, and paramilitary agencies that borrow from both civil service and military logic. Often the site of the sharpest reform tensions. ### Key concepts - **Military professionalism** - **Civil-military relations** — the boundary problem between uniformed and civilian personnel systems - **Civilianization** — transfer of functions from uniformed to civilian personnel; a reform lever in many countries - **Militarization of the civil service** — the reverse movement: adoption of military logic, culture, or personnel practices within civilian agencies.