What is the history of organizing militaries primarily through semi-permanent units as opposed to individual positions?

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All large enough armies have to be organized on this hierarchic principle. Otherwise one will have not an army but a disorganized crowd which is impossible to control. All that we know about ancient armies shows that they were organized like this, another matter is that we do not know many details about some of them. The best known example is the Roman army which consisted of legions, centuriae and manipulae. Mongol army in the Middle age was organized by strictly decimal principle, at least in theory, into tens, hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands. In much smaller European feudal armies, each lord has his unit which obeyed him, and the lords of the units obeyed (in principle) the chief commander. So there were at least two steps of the hierarchic structure.

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