Modern America has warriors, not soldiers
Paul Robinson says the US military needs to broaden its skills, but instead it is imposing a punitive warrior code, in which the 'military honour group' trumps all other virtues he moral elements,' said Clausewitz, 'are among the most important in war.' This was never more true than it is today. In the decisive battle for hearts and minds, the moral image an army projects is as powerful as, if not more powerful than, the physical force it wields. From this perspective, a new report issued by the US Army mental health advisory team makes for gloomy reading. According to the BBC, the report, based on a survey of 1,700 American soldiers in Iraq, found that 'less than half the troops in Iraq thought Iraqi civilians should be treated with dignity and respect. More than a third believed that torture was acceptable if it helped save the life of a fellow soldier or if it helped get information about the insurgents'. If this is true, the moral battle is close to being lost.
Much of the problem, I believe, lies in the obsession in US military circles with the 'warrior ethos'. The US military does not have 'soldiers' any more; it has 'warriors'. Air Force recruits, for instance, finish their basic training with a 'warrior week', and cadets at the Naval Academy in Annapolis take a course on `the code of the warrior'. The army's Platoon Leader Development Course is now the 'Warrior Leader Course', while the military's Walter Reed Hospital provides 'warrior care', not, of course, to its 'patients', but to its 'wounded warriors'. And the army has issued a 'Warrior Ethos', which everyone is expected to memorise: I am an American Soldier. I am a Warrior and a member of a team. I serve the people of the United States and live the Army Values. I will always place the mission first. I will never accept defeat. I will never quit. I will never leave a fallen comrade. I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills. I always maintain my arms, my equipment and myself. I am an expert and I am a professional. I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat. I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life. I am an American Soldier.
Not to be outdone, the US Air Force has recently brought out a similar ethos of its own. 'I am an American Airman,' it begins, 'I am a warrior . . . guardian of freedom and justice, my nation's sword and shield, its sentry and avenger.
Warrior status goes beyond mere words; it is a matter of appearance, too. The smarter forms of military dress are now rarely to be seen. Instead, combat uniforms are de rigueur, no matter the place or event. Top generals visit universities and public institutions dressed for digging trenches; soldiers, and even cadets at some university Officer Training Corps, graduate from basic training not in parade best but in baggy camouflage gear; and when the head of the army, General Pace, visited West Point, the entire corps of cadets turned out to meet him in combat uniforms.
The trend has even crept north of the border to mild-mannered Canada. The Canadian Chief of Defence Staff, General Rick Hillier, previously did an exchange tour as Deputy Commander of Fort Hood in the USA, and has adopted the 'warrior culture' in tutu. On occasion, I've stood at the bus stop outside National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa, and observed all the office-bound 'warriors' in their snappy new camouflage-pattern uniforms. Everyone, whatever desk they are sailing, driving or flying, needs to be ready for combat at any moment.
The 'warrior ethos' is a manifestation of the determination among US officers in recent years that they would have no more to do with that namby-pamby counterinsurgency stuff, let alone any of those even wimpier 'Operations Other Than War' (00TW), such as peacekeeping. As one former chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff is quoted as saying, 'Real men don't do OOTW.' US soldiers were to be pure war-fighters. Achilles was resurrected as the model.
The problem is that the US armed forces are now thoroughly mired in OOTW, which to some extent require a different set of qualities than conventional war does. Take, for instance, the warrior ethos's language of close combat with the enemy: fine for conventional war; really not at all suitable for OOTW, which depend on the use of minimum force.
In addition, the warrior ethos is built on the idea, popularised by Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall, that soldiers will not fight for abstract theories, such as freedom or democracy, or for larger social corporations, such as the nation, but only for their immediate group of comrades. Hence the importance of never leaving a comrade behind. Marshall claimed to have based his conclusions on interviews with soldiers immediately after battle. The problem is that we have known at least since 1988 that Marshall was, as one historian puts it, 'a fraud', his research 'sloppy, fabricated or simply guesswork'. His famous 'discovery' that only a quarter of soldiers fired their weapons in combat was a complete invention. Yet Marshall's fraudulent concepts have had a remarkably powerful influence on armies throughout the Western world. Following his logic, the focus of much military training after the second world war became building 'small group cohesion' and increasing individuals' rate of fire.
The result is that in many Western militaries what anthropologists call the 'honour group', those people whose opinion really matters to you, has narrowed dramatically over the past 100 years. Read the letters of American Civil War soldiers, and you find that what counted was what the folks back home thought of them; read the letters of first world war soldiers, and you find that what they harped on about was their sense of duty towards their country. Now what soldiers are primarily concerned with is fitting in with their mates. This helps to explain the conclusion of the report above that a third of soldiers 'believed torture was acceptable if it helped save the life of a fellow soldier'. Nonsoldiers lie outside the military honour group; as such they are felt to deserve no respect.
The inevitable conclusion is that military training needs to change its emphasis to incorporate a more cosmopolitan ethic. Armed forces might also consider revisiting the lists of official 'values' that they all like to produce. It is noticeable that, while these lists reflect great concern with the requirements of the traditional 'warrior' (generally including virtues such as courage, loyalty, discipline and obedience), they rarely show any concern for anyone outside the military circle. The Israel Defense Forces is unique in including in its list of values 'respect for human life' and 'respect for human dignity'. Nothing even closely resembling these appears in the lists of any European or North American country. Can we be surprised if organisations that officially list loyalty but not respect for human dignity as primary institutional virtues discover that their members are willing to torture for the sake of their comrades?
It is soldiers that the Western world needs right now, not warriors. The warrior is a savage, anarchic and disordered; the soldier is a professional, disciplined and restrained. The warrior ethos is the path to defeat. It needs to be discarded before it is too late.
Paul Robinson is the author of Military Honour and the Conduct of War: from Ancient Greece to Iraq (Routledge, 2006).
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