Justifying the institutional usage of 'random number generators' in a strict hierarchal society

Explain absurdity with MORE absurdity

I think such an absurdity is best left unexplained or to be explained in an even absurder way. Terry Pratchett did so very often and to great effect.

For example:

General John the Random who intruduced randomness to most areas of the military, it started out with rolling dice to determine the perfect time for an attack, but later devolved into assigning positions and weapons at random without respect to experience and equipment.

Despite some drawbacks, his unusual tactics won many battles due to being absolutely unpredictable for his enemies, who heavily relied on reason and reconnaisance. Since even the General wouldn't know what he would command 5 minutes from now, spies became utterly useless against General Johns tactics. Even after placing multiple spies in the inner circle of General John their information was of little use.

General Paul later tried to abolish or at least reduce the applied randomness, but after losing a single battle with the new tactics, the military quickly resumed the "Doctrine of RNGesus".

History of bribery and favouritism

In an "easy" battle, the front ranks will get glory and first choice of loot. (Note that it has only been in very modern times that there has been even a pretence of restricting or stopping looting, throughout most of history soldiers' wages have been so low that loot was the only chance of truly gaining wealth.) Conversely, in a "hard" battle, the front rank/s will take significant casualties even if all goes well and have very little chance of survival in a rout. Historically, the chances of being in a "good" position (ie one that contributed to wealth and/or survival) in what I'll call the "squareheads" were almost entirely dependent on money or favours being provided to the person who determined which position each soldier would occupy in a square.

Eventually, the levels of bribery and institutionalised corruption exceeded what the military and society would tolerate. In order to avoid any possibility of such corruption occurring in future, positions within a square for the next day were determined by random allocation. (Devise your own gruesome penalty for anyone who attempts to make the allocation less random.)

The one (quite minor) advantage of this system is that regardless of what numbers are available or casualties have occurred, there is no need to worry about how to reallocate people between squads or platoons etc because there is no subgroup, just "the square".

The most massive disadvantage of this system is that people are not spherical cows and you cannot just plug people into a random spot in a square formation in between random strangers and expect them to fight effectively - even more so because this type of big formation absolutely depended on the file leaders to maintain coherence and now the people on each end of each file are completely random. The comradeship within a file/squad is absolutely crucial to military morale and effective performance.

The second-most massive disadvantage of this system is that there must be lower level groupings for administration and individual tasks (ie squads, platoons, companies etc) but their members will be scattered randomly all through the big square, making it impossible for any of the sub-commanders to even know who is still alive and functional, let alone redistribute ammunition, water and food to them or get them to undertake a task that needs less than one big square.

While you do not want an answer of "it works because their enemies are more moronic", unfortunately that is the only answer that will apply if they are fighting a force of their peers. However, they may not be fighting a force of their peers - their enemies may be vastly outnumbered, massively overwhelmed technologically and/or really bad at logistics. Possibly the squareheads rely on inflicting casualties from their (suboptimally shaped) square forts until they have an overwhelming numerical advantage and only then think about taking to the open field.

"The reason that the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis."

This is a quote supposedly attributed to either a German or Soviet officer.

And herein lies I think the answer - that is to say, that the Military believes that there since War itself is random there needs to be a little bit of randomness within the ranks to account for this.

Why would they think this? Well, if you want a silly and inexplicable things in your Military - make it a Tradition, usually with a link to either:

• A Famous victory
• A Famous Defeat
• Something to do with the Monarch (bonus points if it involves the Monarch being drunk)

In this case - a Famous victory whereby the Monarch was so sloshed they kept forgetting what order to put the Men in, resulted in a Square that was all gumbled up, however, when the Enemy tried to flank and do other shenanigens, because of the random, distributed nature of the weaponary - they were not so easily flanked and could repulse the attack.

Subsequent engagements using this tactic show that whilst there is a decrease in outright effectiveness, the flexibility that this semi-random setup gives makes up for it - which is why it has become standard military doctrine.

Everyone must be ready for anything.

War is chaos. They don't like that. They want to cope. They choose to cope by having soldiers ready for anything.

Perhaps for the more specialized units, the soldiers cope by exchanging names. If John must do this duty, the guy who does this duty is John until lots are drawn again. (This of course depends on how comic the story is, how dark, and exactly in what ways it is darkly comic.)

Political reasons

So, going with the dark comedy theme.

In its wars, your empire usually enjoys two advantages. First, large population and fairly advanced beureacracy, resulting in always having overall numerical superiority over its enemies. Second, its cavalry is generally far superior to its enemies. The cuirassiers, mostly drafted from lesser nobility, are eager for glory, have excellent horses and the best (and shiniest) armour.

In battle, your empire/nation uses a sort of hammer and anvil tactics. The numerous infantry in rigid pike squares is the anvil, its job is mostly to tie down the enemy and not lose too many men in the process. Meanwhile the cavalry routs the opposing cavalry, then together with mobile artillery wheels round the back and attacks the enemy from behind, which usually wins the battle.

The military commanders are of course always drafted from nobility. Getting a cavalry of artillery command is far more prestigious, so infantry commanders tend to be, let's say, a lot less capable.

The problem is, the peasants and burghers drafted in the infantry don't like the idea of getting killed because of moronic orders given by their noble commanders. So some of them start to self-organise and pick sort of informal commanders from their own ranks. This is of course completely scandalous and totally undermines the established hierarchy. Only those of noble birth must have any sort of military command.

So the empire fights this practice and way they can. Anyone found to engage in this practice is subject to immediate court-martial, but since the chance of dying is pretty high anyway it's not very effective. So one of the things they try is to randomly rotate the soldiers in formations, to reduce the chance of them getting to know their formation mates too well and starting to organise themselves.

Unique order of command and battle position depends on ranking

This nation is very very hierarchal

I recommend to use this detail and take it to the extreme. They don't just have the common military rankings, e.g. general, colonel etc. but in battle they are also required to have a unique ranking among soldiers of the same military rank. To fit this into your setting this should not be needed outside of battle but only during battle for whatever comedic reason (e.g. the monarch wants to be able to ask any group of remaining soldiers who their leader is).

So how to efficiently distribute the minor ranking among equal ranked solders?
Yes, random distribution.

The next important detail on this is to have the formations based on the ranking - the more important soldiers need to be on more secure positions than the less important soldiers.
For example the lowest ranks are on the corners, the highest ranks are in the middle in an exactly predefined manner.

For comedic reasons, the importance is based purely on the ranking and not on the profession or skill (e.g. the one who made up that idea wasn't aware that specializations are important, the most important thing is that the leaders are secure).

The only drawback on this idea (except for the poor soldiers) is that soldiers with a higher military rank might stay on the same position when there is only one per group.

Standardized combined arms warfare is was less common than you think

While video games tell us that the ancient armies were these highly structured and uniform armies, this was not actually the case. Before the Macedonian Empire pioneered the idea of combined arms warfare, most armies were just a bunch of guys who showed up with their own weapons and fought like a vaguely organized mob with a mix of weapons. In some cases a culture would develop semi-homogeneous armaments like a spear of some general length, one of many styles of short sword, a shield of an approximate size, and maybe armor, maybe not... but even in this, there was not as standardized as we often imagine. It was not until the rise of professional armies that this really stopped being true.

In your army, there is no such thing as a pikeman, a legionary, or shock troopers. There are people who own some combination of spears, swords, shields, etc. As long as you avoid overly specialized weapons like 20ft pikes, there is absolutely nothing historically inaccurate about such unstructured mix of arms. Even a musketeer being in the back could make since if you think of it like a republic era legion where the idea is still that everyone is just "infantry" and if someone shows up with a fance side-arm like a musket, that's their choice.

When you understand this, the idea of rank and file by lottery makes a lot more since.