Hey, folks. As much as I hate doing it, I have to pull a ‘gap week’ this week, as the second part of the Gracchi series (on the younger brother, Gaius Gracchus) isn’t done yet and I have some academic travel that I need to prepare for which is going to demand most of my time this week. That said, let me point you to a few things to read to hopefully make up the time. Before I get to that, I did want to note that I saw some speculation as to the current political valence of treating the Gracchi and I suppose I would note that, quite frankly, I do not think any contemporary political figure maps neatly on to either Tiberius or Gaius Gracchus. Their careers are ‘useful to think with,’ particularly on the dangers of escalation in politics, but I wouldn’t suggest either of them as a one-to-one match with current politics. This is usually the case with history: it is a valuable tool to think with, but as a guidebook of general principles, not a roadmap of specific routes.
On to some recommendations!
First off, with the notion of an American ‘warrior’ ethos, it seems relevant to put together a range of things written by me and others on the distinction between warriors and soldiers. The OG post on this topic is a classic by the Angry Staff Officer from 2016, “Stop Calling Us Warriors.” I’ve written in this same vein here on the blog in the opening part of our series on the myth of the “Universal Warrior” and in Foreign Policy with “The U.S. Military Needs Citizen-Soldiers, Not Warriors.” Most recently, the issue has been reignited with an Eliot A. Cohen piece in The Atlantic on the effort to bring back (it never really left) the pernicious idea of a ‘warrior culture’ in the US military.
As you may gather from all of this, I think the idea of having ‘warriors’ – combatants who stand decisively and permanently apart and above civilian society by virtue of their employment of violence – is a dangerous idea for a free society. Instead, the ideal is the soldier: the combatant that serves as part of a unit (rather than as an individual warrior) for the community (where the warrior serves for himself) for a temporary period. Where the warrior remains forever a warrior, the soldier must one day, at the end of the war, or the tour of duty, become a civilian again.
Indeed, soldiers can do everything warriors can – for the last five centuries or more, they’ve done most of it quite a lot better than warriors – but they can also do something that warriors are incapable of: becoming civilians. For a modern, free society, that means that warriors are not so much something special as they are simply just defective soldiers. The soldier’s calling is higher.
For those looking instead for something a bit more explicitly classical, there’s the latest Pasts Imperfect with a discussion of women and the Roman army, related to an exciting new volume on Women and the Army in the Roman Empire. Likewise via the newsletter, a discussion of the emergence of the so-called ‘Roman salute’ – which is, spoilers, not at all Roman – by Sarah Bond and Stephanie Wong at Hyperallergic.
Finally, it has been a while since we checked in with Peopling the Past, but back in October they had a neat blog series looking at bone studies, discussing for instance evidence for cultural finger amputation, the remains of an individual venerated as a hero in ancient Corinth and a discussion of the evidence for nutrition in the remains of Roman remains, particularly in differences in gender. All very neat examples of the kind of information that we can glean from archaeological studies well beyond what the literary evidence can provide.
And with that, we’ll be back next week to, hopefully, finish our discussion of the Gracchi.
So if I’m understanding the archaeology article correctly, the literary evidence told us that marriage was a 25 year old man buying a 16 year old girl but archaeology is now telling us that actually at 16 the “Males get to play outside.” As in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX4Xg9fW0Cw
(Yes, I’m confident this is a 100% accurate interpretation of the article on my part)
Also, the finger amputation thing obviously means she was inducted into the Assassins.
With regard to the term “warrior”, I think the main issue is the idea that they are above civilians. I can see a place for a warrior–in the same way that there is a place for an engineer or a plumber or a computer programmer, as a specialized role within and a part of normal society. (If you think you ever stop being a plumber you’ve never had a sibling with a backed-up toilet!) The military is a necessary thing for any country hoping to survive more than five minutes, and particularly important to the USA, which has an interest in maintaining not merely the status quo but also its particular status within the status quo; this warrants career military men, who could justifiably be termed warriors.
As I said, the problem comes when they are placed above civilian society. (It’s also a problem if they are placed lower than civilian society, but that hasn’t been an issue for nearly 200 years in the USA.) Ideally it should be a job–an honorable one, but no more so than accounting or surveying or farming, it’s part of the necessary fabric of our civilization. There’s always going to be social distinctions based on rank, even within private companies, and they’re not always bad, but the military should be on par with those distinctions. A general should be considered on par with a CEO, for example. A colonel should be on par with a project manager or regional manager. That sort of thing.
Part of this is cultural. In the USA we tend to associate ourselves with what we do for a living to an extreme degree. And as I mentioned with the plumber parenthetical, there are some jobs that you can never quite put down at the end of the day. If you’re a plumber, or computer programmer, or carpenter, or welder, or a massage therapist, or a bunch of other jobs–or if you ever were one–it’s not uncommon for your friends and family to expect you to provide those services to them (the whole horizontal social tie thing). There’s no realistic reason to assume that the profession of warrior would be different. You’d still have a lot of your identity tied up in your profession, and while the skillset isn’t as useful in civilian life it does come up (volunteer emergency response, for example).
This is, I will admit, purely speculative and better suited to world-building than addressing real-world problems. As the term is currently used–in a manner which obviously and absolutely DOES place “warriors” above civilians in the social hierarchy–it is, quite obviously, dangerous.
I think that there was a time in US history when soldiers were placed below civilians. I remember reading Grant’s autobiography. He had a very low opinion of professional enlisted soldiers, and thought far more highly of the enlisted volunteers of the early Civil War. I suppose his opinions were both honest and conventional, but IANAHistorian.
I think that there was a time in US history when soldiers were placed below civilians.
It seems like an unwise idea for any society to consider soldiers *low* status, since they’re the people who can literally overthrow the government if they choose to.
The only exceptions tends to be when you have a soldier caste and a high status warrior-caste.
Its been done many times; you often read it in explanations of why so many people backed the coup/rebellion
The low status of British soldiers is a theme of Kipling’s work. “Tommy” for example.
Soldiers have been low status in many societies – as drunken, rowdy and drawn from the lowest elements (much of 18th century Europe, for instance). The officers in these societies were high status, and there are many and various ways of keeping them from thinking of overthrowing the government.
Good point! I wasn’t thinking of the officer vs. soldier distinction.
The capacity of soldiers to overthrow the government can always be limited by atomizing their organizational structure and making a lot of their logistical support dependent on the government.
I don’t want miserable soldiers, but I think miserable soldiers are less of an existential threat if they’re broken up into groups of about a hundred that can’t effectively coordinate with each other independently, and would run out of supplies in less than a week.
I think miserable soldiers are less of an existential threat if they’re broken up into groups of about a hundred that can’t effectively coordinate with each other independently, and would run out of supplies in less than a week.
I can’t see any problems at all with having your country defended by a lot of small groups of miserable, undersupplied people who are unable to coordinate effectively with each other. Certainly no way that would be an existential threat.
“I can’t see any problem with”
I can. It made the Russian army singularly weak and incapable during most encounters with Napoleon, even during defence of their own homeland.
It’s not ‘smart’, but it is a thing a society can have means to think it can get away with for a while.
(That said, whether it invites external threats at an existential level is dependent on a lot of factors. Russia wasn’t always an exactly inviting target for invasion.)
That said, as far as coordination goes, the point is to not lack it entirely, it’s to make it fully dependent on the people you are supposed to try overthrowing. To make the army functional when serving the government and not when opposing it.
I’m pretty sure ajay’s comment was sarcastic. Poe’s Law really rules this comments section.
Yes, and I responded to that sarcasm and how it tried to cast aspersions on my point by both referring to how it being a counterproductive thing doesn’t prevent it from being done and that the sarcasm misconstrued some of my point anyway.
I didn’t read “I can’t see anything wrong with” literally, I read it as perceiving me to have not thought through all the implications, and responded to it as such.
I feel like you understand the words soldier and warrior slightly different than mine, so I am going to type up what my opinion is here. Note that I am looking in from the outside, living in the EU in a country whose population cares little about it’s military.
I think there is a qualitative difference between soldiers/warriors and a profession such as plumbers. A retired plumber can become say a grandparent, and part time plumber, and this adds to whatever community they retire to: Their neighbours and friends and family will occasionally ask the retired plumber to fix something, or ask for advice on a project where they plan to do plumbing themselves, etc.
But a fighting man (soldier/warrior) isn’t like this. The skills of a fighting man don’t translate well to 99% of real life, and a level of caution that makes sense when deployed overseas results in repeatedly creating dangerous situations. The skill of figuring out what is wrong with your house plumbing might serve you well in a peaceful environment, but skills like standing guard and keeping out “outsiders”, or (an extreme example) following orders to do violence coming from “the government”, are actively harmful to a peaceful society. Thus the ideal for a retired fighting man is to completely let go of the skills used in his previous life when he was employed, and become solely a “retired citizen” or grandparent or whatever. (or if leaving the military at age 30, he could become a plumber, and then a retired plumber)
As I understand it, the difference between a soldier and a warrior as used in these posts is that a soldier *understands this* and will let go of the skills he developed during his career (except perhaps in crazy circumstances. One imagines a lot of Ukrainian retired soldiers suddenly remembered skills a few years ago), while a warrior sees his career as a vital part of his identity, and refuses to let go and continues to identify as member of the military even if he is a decade retired. Under these definitions, during their period working there is no difference between them, but a retired soldier is likely to get a normal job, and then retire in peace, while a retired warrior will keep thinking of fighting and possibly cause problems doing so.
I think that your idea that is should be an honourable but otherwise normal job is absolutely correct, just that thinking of it as a *job* rather than as a *life* is what to me makes the difference between a soldier and a warrior.
this is a perfectly reasonable distinction, but it’s not one the pentagon uses. let’s remember, the things in the pentagon that drive the use of terms like warrior is (A) it sounds kind of cool and (B) The army has claimed soldier as their own. our host reads too much into it.
“The Pentagon” uses “warfighter” to mean (deep breath): Soldiers, Sailors, Aircrew, Marines, Guardians (sigh), and Sometimes Coasties.
Interesting considerations. I think you’re spot on right about the difference between a soldier and a warrior is in the ability to ‘put down’ skills learnt in their role when they are no longer in the military.
I suppose I’d argue against the total non-applicability of skills learnt in the army to civilian life. If you need someone for a role that has to be 100% on time every single time, even if there’s a hurricane outside…employ someone who’s ex-military. There are many skills learnt in the armed forces that are valuable in civilian life.
I think the key difficulty for a ‘warrior’ mindset is in correctly identifying and setting aside which skills are appropriate and which skills are not, because those skills are part of your core identity. I suppose the equivalent of a ‘retired warrior-plumber’ would be someone who continues to help out with the odd plumbing job for their family…but charges them full rates to do so. Not because they need the money, but because ‘that’s what a plumber does, and if I don’t charge my hourly rate then I’m less of a person for doing it’.
The difference in my head is the willingness to discard parts of your employment that are inappropriate outside of that employment. Plus the issue of holding yourself as a different social class above everyone else.
If they learned them
and if those cold not learned in real life
I think the skills are more transferable than you think. Even putting aside law enforcement, national guard, reserves and private security, there is self-defense, hiking, gunsmithing, training, etc. A more specialized MOS also provides other marketable skills like piloting, cybersecurity, industrial logistics, project management, supply chain management, etc.
I think the real difference is between a conscript and a volunteer. Just like with any career, someone who loves doing what he does for a living will tend to perform better. It’s just that people who love turning enemy soldiers into meat tend to make the rest of us a bit squeamish in a way that plumbers do not. It isn’t so different from people who have never seen an animal killed being squeamish about butchers or hunters.
The difference between a conscript and a volunteer is that the conscript will likely not accept the nonsense and abuse as volunteer soldiers.
Between this and the earlier comment about how rebellious miserable soldiers are… like, we have histories of what it was like to be in the military of places like Imperial Russia and China. It was pretty involuntary, conditions were terrible, and they were not well regarded socially. They’re not exactly well known for overthrowing their governments, at least not without more widespread social instability.
I would argue that Imperial Russia and China circa 1948 are both /really bad/ examples of the idea that common soldiers will never rebel against their governments.
Both of those countries have histories a lot longer than those respective years.
If situations where soldiers consistently don’t overthrow the government and situations where they do have a common denominator of them being miserable and disempowered, I think the most relevant factor in the latter case is something other than how well they’re treated.
@Isator Levi
“They’re not exactly well known for overthrowing their governments”
Huh? What about Decembrist revolt? Emperor Taizu of Song?
Which military is well known for overthrowing their governments anyway?
The Decembrist Revolt was based on officers with liberal ideology attempting to make a less autocratic government, not the rank and file revolting against their miserable conditions.
And also, like, failed.
@Isator Levi,
In Imperial Russia the Cossacks would count as a distinct “warrior caste” separate from the ‘soldiers’, right? At least in terms of how they saw themselves and were seen by others?
I think Cossack fighters were more akin to militias within their own social context (i.e. men of regular social class taking up arms by necessity without that necessarily defining their lifelong position), and irregular soldiers in relation to the larger military; not “warriors”, just people with a lot of horseriding experience who can be pressed into service as skirmishers, in a way where they’re perceived to work best if they’re largely outside the military hierarchy.
but skills like standing guard and keeping out “outsiders”, or (an extreme example) following orders to do violence coming from “the government”, are actively harmful to a peaceful society
I think I’d disagree with that- even a society at peace is still going to have constant security threats, both internal and external, and is going to need people equipped to deal with them.
An honorable discharge from the military itself evidences plenty of skills valued on the job market. Soft skills count as skills. Most employers want employees who intelligently follow orders, and know how to push back when necessary.
And in a logistics-heavy military like the United States, there are plenty of hard skills that easily transfer into civilian applications.
I think we disagree on two points.
“The skills of a fighting man don’t translate well to 99% of real life…”
This is our first disagreement: What skills are involved?
The skills of a plumber don’t either. Nor do the skills of a paleontologist. The high degree of specialization in the modern economy means that most professions only teach a very narrow range of skills. (The exception is geology, which every high schooler should take–knowing where a flood plain is has saved me a lot of grief!)
And I’d question the validity of this statement. Most of the soldiers and former soldiers I’ve met have a tremendous variety of skills other than combat. For example, one is a mechanic–a skill with direct civilian applications. Another has experience with requisitions–something that’s not terribly different from what I do with subcontractors. Another is a communications specialist–which serves them well working for NASA. Another was good at navigation–which was really useful for field surveys for environmental compliance. A good chunk of my relatives that fought in WWII learned welding, heavy equipment operations, and the like, which they immediately put to use when they got home. The difference between piloting an Apache and piloting LifeFlight isn’t tremendous. The tremendously tail-heavy tooth-to-tail ratio of modern armed forces means that most of them are going to have skills that are readily applicable to civilian applications.
“I think that your idea that is should be an honourable but otherwise normal job is absolutely correct, just that thinking of it as a *job* rather than as a *life* is what to me makes the difference between a soldier and a warrior.”
This is the other disagreement: The idea that it’s common to differentiate between one’s job and one’s life. As I mentioned, Americans are particularly bad at this–we tend to define ourselves by what we do. And examples of this are easy to come by. I remember one emeritus paleontologist in my alma mater that had to walk to her office because she’d had her license taken away (due to bad eyesight and crashing into the building twice) and her bike taken away (due to running over a few people). She simply couldn’t differentiate between “job” and “life”. I know engineers that still keep their subscriptions to industry publications, because that’s who they are. The “job” is the specific task, or the specific company, but the career is your identity. We can debate whether it’s healthy or not, but the fact is there’s nothing unique about the military in this, it’s part of the general cultural view of employment, at least in the USA.
As the military is an honorable occupation, I don’t think it’s justifiable to require people treat it differently from other occupations. (This is in contrast to something like “thief” or “executioner” or “sin eater”, where the culture holds the work to be shameful and that shame doesn’t go away.) Basically, it seems like a case of special pleading. I get why you’d argue it isn’t–there are obvious and dangerous historic precedents involved, in ways that don’t exist for things like accounting or insurance adjusters. This is the area where I really think my speculation fails in the real world. I’m just not convinced in my own mind that this distinction is necessary, the way Bret implies. It strikes me as a situation where we don’t need to view things a certain way, but we as a culture have chosen to. (To be clear, that doesn’t make it bad! The concept of “family” is another case where cultures define the term in ways that aren’t necessitated by anything, and in which different cultures view things differently.)
I would say if there is no general conscription, the service to society and the dangers they put themselves in should grant soldiers a somewhat higher status, as long as they conduct themselves honorably. A similar level of respect as the one given to firefighters, perhaps.
only if the cause is just and honourable
The cause is not up to the soldiers, it is up to the politicians (and in a democracy, the voters). For soldiers it should be enough if they behave just and honorably on the ground level.
If the cause is repugnant it does not matter that much
I doubt you realize it but what you’ve just stated is the reason a society should only have general conscription.
Maybe decision making should be weighted towards those it concerns most. Soldiers should have a higher voice on whether a nation should go to a war abroad, a defensive war within the borders should give more weight for the non-combat citizens. The building and fire code regulation should be handled by firefighters.
There is a need for the military, and for people whose career is to be in the military. The problem lies in distinguishing them from civilian jobs (“plumber”), even without putting them above civilians. There are multiple reasons for this.
1) Creating a “military identity” tends naturally to “well, military men know best about military issues, therefore they should be in charge of making any military-related decisions, such as whether/when/where to go to war”. Which is the second strategic sin.
2) Focusing on the other side, where anyone who isn’t (…) is just categorically not a plumber is not a fruitful attitude in a society where home toilets sometimes clog. I believe the psychological term is “learned helplessness” — where people don’t do even things that they confidently know to be quick, easy, cheap, and risk-free, purely because they feel they “aren’t allowed to” because the action lies outside their social identity. On the level of not picking up the plunger. This issue has less relevance to the military as such (though I suppose it would be one heck of a problem if they tried to reintroduce the draft), but I think uniformed emergency responders are less than amused with the attitude of “I’m not one of them, therefore the thing(s) for me to do are some combination of:
– call 911 to the exclusion of trying to address the problem, when that would be fruitful;
– repeatedly call 911 to ask whether they have solved the problem affecting hundreds of people yet (what is a DDOS?);
– do as civilians do in films, actively hinder the emergency response by running around screaming in panic, getting in their cars and forming a traffic jam, bonus points for abandoning cars”.
My understanding is that this factor would come into play less in the cases where the job/identity is held to be of higher status (“is it arrogant of me to improvise law-fu? yes, but whatever”) and more in the cases where it is of a lower status and thus being seen doing it threatens with a permanent loss of status. Which is sort of the case here! Take e.g. an accountant. All of their friends, relatives, acquaintances have 9-5 clean indoors jobs. They are somewhere between having to be reminded that “odd”/irregular-hours/on-call jobs even exist, and feeling either pity (“exploitation?”) or disdain (“this is what you get for not studying in school”) or both. They also sometimes share posts about hunting and factory farming being immoral. Now tell them their new job will be to dig ditches and to occasionally try to kill other humans.
3) Quite simply it’s bad for one’s mental health to be “outside society”. The unavoidable terrible work-life balance of long deployments …tests social connections (shredding many of them). Explicitly distancing one from everyone else around them, “they could never understand what it is like to be a plumber”, is singularly unhelpful. By default, it adds more difficulty into recruiting. However, given the distinction, it is almost a natural idea (including “many people will come up with this justification on their own”) to put this class above the rest of society, and highly incentive-compatible for recruiting.
I don’t think that’s an appropriate use of Learned Helplessness.
Learned Helplessness is when a person or animal is in a situation that they are incapable of escaping or dealing with something that they come to believe they are powerless to affect their situation even when circumstances have changed and they could do something. e.g. putting a dog in a cage and sending electricity through the floor to shock them until they stop trying to escape, because they can’t. Then removing the top of the cage so they can easy jump out, but don’t because they had conditioned to believe it was pointless to try.
Fair bit different from some one who lacks expertise or doesn’t belong to a specific field not trying something because the feel unqualified.
There’s no place for someone in a free society whose only skill, self-purpose, or vocation is interpersonal direct violence. There are many places for people who have such violence as a part of their identity or skill-set, but those are described by other professional terms. A baker’s bread and a plumber’s pipes are like a warrior’s direct violence. These are words with consistent and longstanding meanings, even for descriptivists.
“It’s also a problem if they are placed lower than civilian society, but that hasn’t been an issue for nearly 200 years in the USA.”
For most of the history of the US, a military career (as other than an officer, and not always even then) was generally looked on as distinctly second rate. A refuge for those that had few prospects and were unable to survive in civil society. Congress in particular and society in general were suspicious of standing armies.
This didn’t change until the Cold War when (rightly or wrongly) it was seen as a necessity to have a large standing armed force. A force trained and ready to respond at short notice against any threat posed by the Red Horde. Then the idea of a professional soldier (sailor, airman, marine) began to emerge as an acceptable way to make a living. (And then Vietnam and we had to rebuild the whole damm thing from scratch afterwards.)
But all through that, we understood ourselves to be citizen soldiers. Ordinary Joes doing their part and taking their turn serving their country. And once our turn was done, we were going to go back to being Ordinary Joes.
“I can see a place for a warrior–in the same way that there is a place for an engineer or a plumber or a computer programmer, as a specialized role within and a part of normal society.”
“Warrior” isn’t a job title – it’s a class identifier.
“The military is a necessary thing for any country hoping to survive more than five minutes, and particularly important to the USA, which has an interest in maintaining not merely the status quo but also its particular status within the status quo; this warrants career military men, who could justifiably be termed warriors.”
Soldier, sailor, airman, marine – these are job titles, not class identifiers.
““Warrior” isn’t a job title – it’s a class identifier.”
Nice conclusion. What’s your actual argument? To simply ignore that and declare your views as the only valid ones is, frankly, rude. It’s assuming a position of superiority that is neither evidenced nor justified. (No, I do not consider the fact that you went into greater detail on a fairly irrelevant aside I made than I chose to to be sufficient to justify your presumption of superiority.) (If you’re curious where I’m coming from, it’s the books “Introduction to Critical Thinking” and “Asking the Right Questions”, though any critical thinking text provides the same framework.)
A conclusion issued without support is nothing but a mere opinion–without substance and, in any serious discussion, about as useful as a fart. More formally, it is epistemological null. I get that people disagree with me; that’s why I went to such lengths to lay out my reasoning. Re-stating the conclusion doesn’t add anything useful to the discussion. I know that people hold your conclusion, and I know what your conclusion is–it’s essentially the one Bret made, without the nuance. The same effect could be achieved by literally not saying anything.
And if you think this idea that being in a particular job sets you apart is unique to the military, your understanding of civilian life is extremely limited. Emergency responders, doctors/nurses, construction managers–I’ve heard all of them and more talk about how they have trouble relating to other people in various ways because their experiences give them a totally unique view of the world. Which is to say, these jobs become de facto class identifiers. Which, again, gets to the point I’m making: that “warrior” here is not an invalid term, it’s merely one with a lot of cultural baggage that we need not accept (which is in opposition to Bret’s argument that the baggage is inherently part of the term and insurmountable).
“Which is to say, these jobs become de facto class identifiers.”
No, they don’t. Asserting that indicates (again) that you don’t actually understand the difference between a job and a social class. (My original point, one which you force me to repeat.) Understanding this difference, rather than simply hand waving it away as you do, is the key to understanding the argument being laid out by our host.
“Which, again, gets to the point I’m making: that “warrior” here is not an invalid term, it’s merely one with a lot of cultural baggage that we need not accept”
When you observe the behavior of the demographic pushing the use of the term, it is abundantly clear that the widely accepted meaning of the word is exactly what they mean. You are completely free to redefine terms away from their accepted meaning, but when you do… you’re no longer participating in the same discussion as the rest of us.
“No, I do not consider the fact that you went into greater detail on a fairly irrelevant aside”
I went into detail because doing so was critical to supporting the argument I was making. That traditionally, the US has not seen it’s citizen soldiers as a class apart. (And that’s there’s a strong streak of “Tommy” (as in Kipling’s poem) that many fail to appreciate.) Being in the military is a job, a temporary one, not a way of life, not what one is. And that for most of this country’s history, that was widely understood by both service members and civilians outside the service.
And with that, I’m done here.
I don’t think a professional, long-service soldier needs to consider themselves a warrior, simply because most of them don’t do much violence. Putting aside the long periods of peace most countries have been at in the second half of the 20th Century and the first part of the 21st, there are lots of soldiers who don’t engage in violence directly. They perform maintenance, conduct R&D, or handle logistics, all things that let front-line soldiers do their violence and all things that have been key to the high performance of America’s military in recent history. I don’t think a warrior would find much purpose or honor in handling a logistics train.
One of the bravest men that I ever saw was a fellow on top of a telegraph pole in the midst of a furious fire fight in Tunisia. I stopped and asked what the hell he was doing up there at a time like that. He answered, ‘Fixing the wire, Sir.’ I asked, ‘Isn’t that a little unhealthy right about now?’ He answered, ‘Yes Sir, but the Goddamned wire has to be fixed.’ I asked, ‘Don’t those planes strafing the road bother you?’ And he answered, ‘No, Sir, but you sure as hell do!’ Now, there was a real man. A real soldier. There was a man who devoted all he had to his duty, no matter how seemingly insignificant his duty might appear at the time, no matter how great the odds.
And you should have seen those trucks on the rode to Tunisia. Those drivers were magnificent. All day and all night they rolled over those son-of-a-bitching roads, never stopping, never faltering from their course, with shells bursting all around them all of the time. We got through on good old American guts. Many of those men drove for over forty consecutive hours. These men weren’t combat men, but they were soldiers with a job to do. They did it, and in one hell of a way they did it. They were part of a team. Without team effort, without them, the fight would have been lost. All of the links in the chain pulled together and the chain became unbreakable.
–George S. Patton
I find Patton’s emphasis on qualities of bravery and team effort as the significant factors to be distinct from any references to a warrior ethos or mindset made here or elsewhere.
Isn’t bravery and team effort a big part of what Tyrtaeus valorizes: “oi men gar tolmosi par’ alleloisi menontes/es t’autoschedien kai promachous ienai”?
US military personnel are definitely placed apart from civilians, most notably by their restricted civil rights and special legal code (UCMJ) that civilians are immune to. Whether they’re viewed as ‘above’ or ‘below’ the civilian population really says more about the speaker’s perspective and beliefs than anything else.
Not much special about it special rules for soldiers are common
The reason for the special legal code probably has something to do with the matter, that when a US soldier kills an Afghanistan citizen it should obviously be the Afghanistan criminal system that investigates the judges the matter. The USA has traditionally been strongly against this even in allied nations like Japan and Italy.
Seems like the Warrior-Soldier thing could really be a three way split: Warrior aristocrat (the “warrior” of these posts, held above society and fighting is their main thing.), Everyone fights (Anciet Mediterranean citizen soldiers, national service today, tribal groups where everyone has fighting skills), and Soldier as a job (mercenaries, professional armies). There is some shading into each other as with any categories, band historical c=societies seem to use a mix of both, but they do seem to provide a clearer cluster in some ways.
Yet the “soldier as a job” have been often absolutely literal cancer to their socieities (roman legions, many mercenary companies) while all the military coups in the XIX and XX centuries were done by conscript based armies
Is that true? The countries that have had a lot of military coups historically don’t *seem* to be weighted towards ones that have conscription (today), necessarily. Although of course today is not the high era of the military coup, and I don’t know, without doing some in depth research, what the conscription policy of Pakistan or Burkina Faso or Bolivia was in, say, the 1960s- for all i know they might have had conscription then. Anyone know for sure?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription#/media/File:Conscription_map_of_the_world.svg
I am a bit more ambivalent about the value of soldiers vs warriors. Warrior-aristocrats were the first (or among the first) who really tried to implement rules of protecting non-combatants from warfare during the middle ages. After all, the clergy who promoted the Peace of God and the troubadours who sung about Chivalry often came from the warrior-aristocracy themselves. While the ideals often weren’t honored, it wasn’t completely futile and also had influence on later developments of the laws of war. It is plausible that these ideals only could develope BECAUSE warrior-aristocrats considered themselves apart and above the civilians: they needed to make their religion and their way of life compatible, so they started to value a condescending benevolence to those lower than them. And they also understood themselves and their enemies as being the same class of people, encouraging ransoming of captives and thus good treatment of noble prisoners.
A military that considers itself above and apart from the population might very well pride itself in strictly keeping to the Law of Armed Conflict, even if the general population is itching for them to “take the gloves off”. But those are not the connotations the word “warrior” had – that word is calling to mind primal and baddass, where being fearless and good at killing are the important values. So promoting a “warrior culture” in the military is still bad. But what if the United States military instead promoted a “knight culture”? The word knight in modern times has connotations that go even beyond the medieval ideals.
In the article in the Atlantic, Cohen writes about soldiers: “Their virtues are obedience, stoicism, perseverance, and competence. They serve a common good, and duty, not glory, is their prime motivation.” But I suspect that soldiers will only hold these values if either these values are held by the general population or if it is used as a distinguishing mark that places the soldiers above the common citizen.
Bret (and Angry Staff Officer) seem to have the WW2 armies as their ideal, composed as they were of draftees from all walks of life, serving for a relatively brief period, and then returning to civilian life. But the current global situation doesn’t need or even permit the US to have that sort of army. We need to police the whole world (bien-pensant liberals who complain about “warrior culture” despise isolationists or quasi-isolationists like Trump), we need to have trained men on hand to respond quickly to our enemies, and our soldiers need to fight with complicated machines which require a lot of training (and a fairly high level of native intelligence and general aptitude, somewhat above the civilian average). All of this demands a relatively small group of specialists, who train and serve for long periods, not a mass of short-term conscripts longing for the day they get out.
“A relatively small group of specialists, who train and serve for long periods” is what Angry Staff Officer says is the opposite of warrior culture. He complains that the notion of warrior ethos draws from unspecialized premodern military cultures like Sparta, using the line “warriors don’t have tasks.”
Army Staff Officer has a rather superficial understanding of both history and current events. Most people who valorize the warrior ethos are envisioning Smedley Butler, not Achilles or Lysander or El Cid. Butler didn’t fight alone, he didn’t own slaves, and he didn’t fight for money, but he also didn’t long to return to civilian life (or fit in very well once he did return).
He’s literally pointing out how the warrior ethos in the US Army is looking back to Sparta. In the Marines, Pressfield is required reading.
Butler, in contrast, is most likely to be cited by isolationists. There’s a culture of isolationism in the US that assumes veterans are part of it, but in truth, the US military and military households are consistently more hawkish than average (for example, this was visible in polling on Ukraine aid in 2022).
Hmm, which polling would that be? I tried searching, but the only poll I found which explicitly compared the opinions of veterans (and military families) with the general population was the one below.
https://cv4a.org/news-media/new-poll-majority-of-veterans-support-less-us-military-engagement-abroad-oppose-war-with-russia-over-ukraine-and-want-more-va-health-care-options/
Now, that poll was taken immediately BEFORE the Ukraine war AND it was conducted for an org best known nowadays for having once been led by the newly confirmed Secretary of Defense before dismissing him for misconduct. Nevertheless, if you click through to the document, the polling was done by the respected YouGov and the sample size is large (800 people for all three groups, with a total of 2,400 surveyed).
> Key findings of the poll include:
> Broad opposition against going to war with Russia exists amongst all groups – 49% of the general population, 60% of veterans, and 52% of military families. Of note is the number of “not sure” respondents in the general population sample.
> Pluralities of all groups surveyed would support a move by the president to withdrawal [sic] all troops from Iraq – 49% of the general population, 58% of the veterans, and 55% of the military families.
> A vast majority of Americans (82%) believe our military engagement around the world should be reduced or stay about the same. Only 6% believe we should be more engaged. Notably, the veterans (7%) and military family (4%) populations are less supportive of more military engagement than the general population (8%)
> There is strong agreement amongst all groups polled that European NATO nations need to spend more on their own defense – 52% of the general population, 80% of the veterans, and 63% of the military families. Conversely, only 4% of those polled think they should spend less.
> Majorities of the general public (55%), veterans (64%), and military households (59%), say military/defense spending should be decreased or kept the same. This level of support has remained about the same since 2019, yet we have not seen this feeling represented in federal budgetary or spending actions in Washington.
Now the last summary is a little misleading – in the full poll 38.5% of the veterans and 32.4% of support increasing military spending as opposed to 28.9% of the general population, while the percentage of those who want to decrease is 25.5% for the veterans, 26.9% for military family members and 26.1% for the general population. It’s simply that almost no veterans/family members are “not sure” and so more of them answer “the same” which leads to that result. It’s similar for the question (again, prewar) on whether the number of troops in Europe should be increased or decreased – about 5% more veterans support BOTH options and 10% more support changing nothing, because almost none of them are unsure while a quarter of the general population are.
(There are a few other questions in the full poll, which I am not quoting here as they are not directly related to “hawkishness”. I.e. opinion on veterans’ healthcare or responses to generalized questions about political leanings/2020 vote or “most/least important issue” ranking. Some of those responses may surprise you, particularly regarding the military family group.)
So, “most people who valorize the warrior ethos” envision the man whose experience of following said ethos led him to THE COMPLETE OPPOSITE of the beliefs you are espousing?
After all, searching that name on Wikipedia provides the following:
> After retiring from the Marine Corps, Butler became an outspoken critic of American foreign policy and military interventions, which he saw being driven primarily by U.S. business interests. In 1935, Butler wrote the book War Is a Racket, where he argued that imperialist motivations had been the cause behind several American interventions, many of which he personally participated in. Butler also became a advocate for populist politics, speaking at meetings organized by veterans, pacifists, and church groups until his death in 1940.
> ….In December 1933, Butler toured the country with James E. Van Zandt to recruit members for the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW). He described their effort as “trying to educate the soldiers out of the sucker class.” In his speeches he denounced the Economy Act of 1933, called on veterans to organize politically to win their benefits, and condemned the FDR administration for its ties to big business. The VFW reprinted one of his speeches with the title “You Got to Get Mad” in its magazine Foreign Service. He said: “I believe in…taking Wall St. by the throat and shaking it up.”[62] He believed the rival veterans’ group the American Legion was controlled by banking interests. On December 8, 1933, he said: “I have never known one leader of the American Legion who had never sold them out—and I mean it.”[63]
>His views on the subject are summarized in the following passage from the November 1935 issue of the socialist magazine Common Sense:[15]
> I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
All of this seems rather diametrically opposed to your own opinion that “the current global situation doesn’t need or even permit the US to have that sort of army. We need to police the whole world… All of this demands a relatively small group of specialists.” In fact, Butler’s War is a Racket very explicitly spoke out AGAINST even trying to “police the whole world”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
> The work is divided into five chapters: War is a racket, Who makes the profits?, Who pays the bills? How to smash this racket? To hell with war! It contains this summary:
> War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
> In the booklet’s penultimate chapter, Butler recommends three steps to disrupt the war racket:
> Making war unprofitable. Butler suggests that the means for war should be “conscripted” before those who would fight the war:
> It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war. The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labour before the nation’s manhood can be conscripted. […] Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our steel companies and our munitions makers and our ship-builders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted — to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.
> Acts of war to be decided by those who fight it. He also suggests a limited referendum to determine if the war is to be fought. Eligible to vote would be those who risk death on the front lines.
> Limitation of militaries to self-defense. For the United States, Butler recommends that the Navy be limited, by law, to operating within 200 miles of the coastline, and the Army restricted to the territorial limits of the country, ensuring that war, if fought, can never be one of aggression.
Yes, I’m a big fan of Smedley Butler and generally agree with his view of US foriegn policy, but he is an…..odd figure to cite if you’re actually an enthusiast of the “US as world policeman” worldview.
I didn’t cite him for his views after leaving the service–almost everyone, left and right, finds the rabid isolationists of the 1930s to be an embarrassment*–but for his actions while in the service.
*If, like Hector, you think our involvement in World War II was a grievous mistake, peace be with you.
@ey81 I’m sorry, but you don’t get to just backpedal like that. If you don’t want us to examine Butler’s post-war record, then you shouldn’t explicitly and specifically mention him fitting your model even post war. Also, framing “He became an activist for an at the time unpopular cause” as “He never fitted into civilian life” is a hell of a simplification.
And secondly, shut up about World War II. The argument being made is about the claim of “The US has a moral right to a huge army because it’s the world police” not “The US has a right to wage war”. And for your world police argument, you do not get to invoke the US’s conduct in World War II. They did not intervene when Germany attacked Poland. They did not intervene when the Nazis excluded Jews from normal life. They did not intervene when the Nazis allowed mobs to just slaughter Jews in the street. They did not intervene when Germany took over France and installed a puppet government. They tried to stay out of it until 1941 when Japan forced them to formally take a position, after all these events above. And even then, the US did not fight for the lives of the Jews in that war. They didn’t even fully believe the reports about the concentration camps designed for mass slaughter until literally stumbling over them in the last years of the war!
“They didn’t even fully believe the reports about the concentration camps designed for mass slaughter until literally stumbling over them in the last years of the war!”
Funny, I must have missed the part where we fully believed the claims of concentration camps existing.
Bitterness aside, the better reason to fully and utterly dismiss the opinions of basically every conservative saying that we need to be world police whilst also invoking WW2 is that the *one* policy that was created *specifically* to address the Holocaust was letting migrants apply for residency *inside the US*. We made that change we turned aside hundreds of Jews because their paperwork wasn’t in order; it’s written in blood. And the same people arguing we need to be world police also tend to support mass deportations and are actively destroying this system.
If we had been the world police then, instead of isolationist, there would have been no need for that policy, because we would have policed the situation up front.
Wow, irony is really lost on this crowd. I would have thought that “didn’t . . . fit in very well once he did return [to civilian life]” was a pretty clear instance of litotes, but for those who catch the rhetorical figure, I will say that upon return to civilian life Smedley Butler went off the deep end and became batshit crazy. He probably wasn’t very influential, but as one of a chorus of isolationists, he did his small bit to delay and impede the Roosevelt administration’s plan for rearmament. America’s lack of military preparedness in turn made World War II more destructive (including but not limited to destructive of American lives) than it might otherwise have been..
It’s unclear how you’re even trying to frame the litotes here, it’s obvious you meant he didn’t function well but it’s also irrelevant to the fact he disagreed with you about the role of the military. If I’m trying to understand your point it’s, what, that he served well as a “warrior” but the fact he disagreed with you as a “civilian” can be dismissed as madness, incidentally proving he should never have been a civilian? That’s easily the most obvious reading of your text, and our reaction is not that we’re missing some irony, it’s that we find it kinda despicable. Or at least I do, not to speak for anyone else.
But describe, if you will, *how* Butley went off the deep end. So far all you’ve presented is policy beliefs, so it’s possible I’m actually missing some point about what you’re actually trying to say.
I will say in regards to isolationism; yes, the US should have been more willing to interfere with the descent of Europe in fascism, but our *own* fascist movements were active at that period of time and Smedley was a part of opposing them. Imperfect foresight isn’t madness. Less military spending seems good unless you know Europe is going to descend into almost unheralded madness, and whilst we have no excuse for not understanding where right wing politics leads *he* did. Butley might not have been right, but policy alone isn’t enough to say he was crazy or even particularly maladjusted, so-what are you referring to?
I wanted to clarify here that REGARDLESS of whether one thinks Butler’s opinions in retirement were right or wrong, it seems PREPOSTEROUS to avoid acknowledging that they directly stem from his lived experience. Occam’s Razor suggests that the direct outcome of encouraging “warriors” in the modern world to live and fight like Butler would be to have more retired veterans who think the same way Butler did in retirement and advocate for the positions he did. (And in fact, that opinion poll of veterans and their family members I linked earlier certainly trends in that direction.)
The alternative argument which seems to be advanced by ey81 – that you can neatly separate Butler the warrior and Butler the retired veteran, that he just randomly “went crazy” in retirement and most soldiers serving the way that “warrior” did would NOT end up the same way – appears to be based on mere wishful thinking. The burden of proof is high, yet I do not see any supporting evidence.
When it comes to U.S. and WWII – the basic moral argument that opposition to Hitler was right is hopefully incontestable by everyone here. However, there is the thorny argument that the ONLY reason any of us even know who Hitler was in the first place is because the U.S. chose to intervene in WWI, which tipped the scales in favour of the Entente while costing the lives of over 100,000 U.S. troops. All when the war would have otherwise ended with the kind of an armistice that would have weakened France, yet also given Germany no reason to morph into anything like the Third Reich. Here is a version of that argument advanced by “David T. Pyne, Esq., a former U.S. Army combat arms and H.Q. staff officer with an M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. He currently [as of 2022] serves as Deputy Director of National Operations for the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security”
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/what-if-united-states-had-stayed-out-world-war-i-201385/
You can easily find other historians arguing the same, but I’m limited to one link at a time.
I would caution against ascribing too much casual power to even an event as extreme as WW1 in terms of explaining fascism. The material forces that impel fascism persist regardless of circumstance in *any* capitalist country, something neatly shown by Butler nipping a home-grown fascist coup in the bud during his retirement.
As long as mass media is vulnerable to media capture by capital fascism is always going to be a risk, and as long as fascism can hide behind liberal naivety it’s always going to be able to exploit certain cognitive loopholes to gain power and support, if there is social unrest. If you simply lie and gaslight constantly the human mind *expects* the result to be violence levied against you by those you are implicitly trying to dehumanize and kill, and we are extraordinarily bad at realizing that the absence of that violent retaliation isn’t evidence the liar was right.
Germany already had all the social flaws that led to fascism before WW1, including a socially stratified society, rising capital class, democratic movement that threatened that classes interests, a poorly controlled media environment, and a corrupt legal system. WW1’s ending poured accelerant on that, which mattered, but it didn’t create the social flaws that led to fascism.
But what does follow is that if the US had not intervened in WW1 it is entirely possible that intervention in the fascist movements of the 1930’s could have been non-violent, or at least as non-violent as dealing with a group that wants to overthrow democracy and kill a majority of humanity to further their interests can or should be.
Methinks that for these questions the models of Franco or Pinochet are more relevant that the likes of Cleomenes or Agesilaus
Yes, “frontier maintenance” requires a standing army. However, unless you are willing to make an enormous bet on not-quite-yet-existing tech (or perhaps on nukes), facing a near-peer adversary requires the ability to draft up a conscript army, which in turn implies some preconditions both on the part of the military (“having somewhere to put” the arriving people), and on the part of society (understanding that the draft is a thing that can happen). The “warrior culture” idea interferes with that, in addition to any problems it may cause for civil-military relations.
We need to police the whole world (bien-pensant liberals who complain about “warrior culture” despise isolationists or quasi-isolationists like Trump),
No, we don’t need to police the whole world, that’s insane. As weird as this might seem to you, there are plenty of us who are neither 1) bien pensant liberals nor 2) Trump enthusiasts, we despise both sides, and believe in a *genuinely* modest, humble, and scaled back US global presence that doesn’t try to tell other countries how to run their affairs. I certainly don’t accept the assumption, or take it for granted, that it’s the role or right of the United States to ‘police the whole world’.
Trump is not an isolationist- if the first presidency wasn’t enough to tell us that, then certainly his musings about annexing Greenland and the Panama Canal should have taught us all that lesson a second time.
Well, you know, crime in Harlem doesn’t bother me, but if it gets out of hand, it ends up spreading to the Upper East Side. So like you, I don’t have any problem at all with Germany ruling a Jew-free Europe, or Putin subjugating Ukraine, or Afghans prohibiting girls from going to school past sixth grade. We’re both humble enough to consider that Europe, or Ukraine, or Afghan girls might actually be better off that way. But somehow it always ends up spreading to Hawaii or lower Manhattan.
That is a really bad-faith way of making a frankly not very good argument.
Firstly, your analogy is based on a moral panic argument that is both not true and clearly very classist and racist. Crime does not “spill” into rich neighbourhoods, and the solution is not to incarcerate every person out on the street in poor neighbourhoods.
Secondly, you also fall for the right-wing mindset that the only solution to crime is to do heavily punitive policing, where people are never helped, but only punished.
Both of those are not only complete nonsense for solving crime rates in New York, they’re also not true for “policing”, if you even can call it that, of the world stage.
Firstly, looking at the US military interventions of the last decades, it’s clear that the whole “world police” thing is just a talking point, and that geopolitical strategic and economic considerations are what determines whether the US actually intervenes or not, not whether human rights are violated.
Secondly, even if we take this “world police” thing in good faith (which we shouldn’t), it’s pretty clear that the current approach has, at best, a very mixed track record. A lot of those interventions did not actually make things better, and the cost in lives, money and human misery was extreme for the little improvements that it could manage.
Just like there are a lot of ways to reduce crime by being nice to people, with better returns of investment than just sending more and more of them to jail, we’re asking you to consider that maybe there are better ways to improve the living conditions of people living in other countries than drone-striking their weddings.
Crime spills. And when it spills, you get a sharp reaction.
@Mary Catelli
“crime spills”
I see no argument here, just a slogan.
Funny, you have no problem with the opposite assertion, it’s only this assertion you dismiss with “slogan.”
Anyway, I saw with my own eyes the reaction to the crime of the 1970s and it was exactly the spill that made the system crack.
What about Harlem do you think is at threat of getting out of hand?
The US depends a great deal on soft power – above all on its financial leverage, but also on cultural power and diplomatic ties. Ill-done, ‘policing the world’ undermines rather than reinforces this – and a US alone or despised is both much weaker and much poorer. But – sigh – some people are oblivious to the limits of force.
“It is always Munich in 1938” school of historiography, if it deserves to be called that, certainly makes for nice slogans, but falls apart under more than the most cursory examination of history.
* Truman opted not to interfere when the British withdrew from India and agreed to its partition over mere days, with no plan to avoid mass population displacement and violence, with the death toll in the hundreds of thousands (up to 2 million).
* Eisenhower didn’t do anything when the British threw some 300,000 Kenyans into literal concentration camps (where Obama’s grandfather was famously tortured with electric shocks) and turned villages into open-air prisons for a million more – out of a total population of some 7 million. Neither did he interfere when the French turned Algiers into another open-air prison, split apart by checkpoints and with up to half of its entire population getting detained and questioned (often with the use of torture) over just a couple of years.
* Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon all did very little about the initial secession attempt of what is now South Sudan, which lasted for 17 years and killed well over half a million people.
* Johnson’s support for Suharto dictatorship MAY be described as an example of serving as “world police” I suppose (after all, your invocation of Ukraine seems to suggest you believe support without direct military involvement counts as a “police action”) and a recent book The Jakarta Method makes the same case. Considering that said dictatorship again murdered over half a million people in just two years (higher estimates go up to three million), it’s probably not an example you would want to cite, however.
* Nixon didn’t do anything when Nigeria used literal starvation to subdue a rebel province of Biafra, with the LOWER bound on the number of those dead from hunger again at half a million people and the upper exceeding a million. His “police” role in what was then East Pakistan consisted of a failed indirect attempt to prevent its secession and the formation of modern Bangladesh and made no effort to prevent the murder of hundreds of thousands by the allied Pakistani military.
* Ford looked on as Ethiopian military started a coup, then adopted Communism a year later and began their own Red Terror with hundreds of thousands dead in two years. Carter and Reagan did very little about the subsequent civil war which lasted through all of their terms.
* Bush Sr. didn’t interfere when the Liberian-backed rebels attempted to seize power in Sierra Leone and the resultant civil war lasted for a decade.
* Clinton ignored both the ongoing war in Sierra Leone and the Rwandan Genocide. The latter soon led to what has been described as an African World War, centered on Congo, and with death toll in millions – again with effectively no direct involvement of the U.S.
* Bush Jr. pointedly ignored the war in Darfur, which broke out a month before he chose to invade Iraq. The same war led to what he himself described as a genocide a year later – yet did not even begin to impose sanctions until two years later, and allowed the UN and African Union to police it to the best of their limited capability.
* Obama did little as South Sudan, finally formed as a state with fanfare and U.S. support during his first term, descended into civil war between its President and Vice President early in his second, with any real police effort again ceded to the UN. The war infamously ended in 2020 with the two sides back at square one, and hundreds of thousands dying for nothing.
* Neither Trump nor Biden did anything meaningful about first the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya in Myanmar, and then the self-coup and the civil war.
So many times and places where “the world police”….just didn’t police. One can debate whether or not explicit U.S. intervention in those cases would have actually made things better, of course (though with hindsight, it is hard to imagine many of those could have gone much worse.) Yet the point is that regardless of whether or not strong intervention would have been the right thing to do, it never happened in all of those cases – yet none of those come to mind for you.
In fact, one might suggest these events elided your memory because for an American, there WASN’T a spillover worthy of remembering following any of them. In fact, the most notable spillovers have likely occurred exactly where there WAS an intervention – i.e. bin Laden being molded in the fires of U.S. support for explicitly Islamist rebels in Afghanistan, down to the level of printing textbooks explicitly intended to glorify jihad.
https://sites.williams.edu/wurj/social-sciences/islamist-education-american-funded-textbooks-in-afghanistan/
> Across Taliban controlled areas of Afghanistan, thousands of children are indoctrinated in an Islamist ideology through jihadist textbooks that incorporate violence and militarism through lessons to teach children basic reading and mathematics skills.1 Learning the alphabet, these children are taught “Jim [is for] Jihad. Jihad is an obligation. My [uncle] went to the jihad. Our brother gave water to the Mujahidin . . .” Textbooks designed to teach math and language arts are filled with depictions of Kalashnikov rifles, grenades, and military ammunition. However, the great irony is that these textbooks were produced, funded, and distributed by the US government using taxpayer dollars. The Taliban regime which President Bush deplored as an enemy which “aids terrorists” and “barbaric criminals who profane a great religion by commiting murder in its name” is using and reprinting American-funded materials to propagate its radical ideology among the Afghan youth. Why would the United States fund textbooks that promote a dangerous message antithetical to American values?
> After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the United States in coordination with regional partners such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan launched a covert campaign, Operation Cyclone, to support the Afghan mujahideen resistance to the Soviet occupation. While American funding for weapons and military equipment for the mujahideen is well known, many are unaware of the significant expenditures by the American government through USAID to provide educational materials and textbooks to mujahideen parties and Afghan children. Published and distributed by the University of Nebraska-Omaha (UNO), this program attempted to encourage a violent resistance to Soviet forces in Afghanistan by shaping the educational program of Afghan youth.
“Well, you know, crime in Harlem doesn’t bother me…”
Yes, we know.
A base and slanderous claim. One is allowed to draw analogies.
Poe’s Law.
Poe’s Law is about people in hyperbolic arguments using Nazis as a generic term for others disagreeing with them. It’s not calling it a fallacy for people to be critical of others making comments with undertones of race panic.
Nothing so specific about it. To call an obvious analogy ” comments with undertones of race panic” is Poe’s Law — mistaking sarcasm for straight-forward support.
All the more in that the race panic is yours. Why are you concluding that it was about race when it mentioned an neighborhood?
Wait, no, got my internet laws mixed up. Mea culpa.
In that case, my question would be “what about Poe’s Law”? Is that a statement of “my bad, I didn’t include the indicator that I was being satirical” or “get a load of this rube who can’t detect satire without being clearly marked”?
Either way, I’m not really seeing the satire of the original comment.
Well, it’s a bit hard to figure out what you are having an issue with. Given that the analogy of “trouble over there doesn’t bother me” seems pretty clear.
Yeah I don’t think I had satire in mind, although it was a hasty statement that I probably should have kept to myself. But ey81 is a consistent commenter with a consistent voice that communicates tendencies and perspectives; as am I…as is Mary for that matter.
We all curate our exposure to news sources and are also subject to having other people enforce a layer of curation there as well, and so without ascribing moral failure to anyone I genuinely was not surprised to see a comment from ey81 that was indicative of a news diet where concerns about Harlem crime are a staple.
” indicative of a news diet where concerns about Harlem crime are a staple.”
If that was what you saw in the analogy, that’s a you problem.
Lest you think you have anything to apologize for, you can obviously see the riveting quality of trolling that it’s incited as an attempt to chide you. You got them square on, and they hate being understood more than anything else. Makes them self conscious about how awful they are, I think.
The government is currently *actually run by Nazis* doing sieg heils at government functions. The oligarchs are saying they’re just joking and building concentration camps simultaneously; poes law is dead. I suspect it was actually dead over a decade ago and we were just far, far too tolerant of the people disingenuously invoking it then, too.
As opposed to all the Democrats doing sieg heils, which doesn’t bother you?
Anyone who bothered to look knows that gesture is frequently made by all sorts of people, and the claim you are advancing here is simply bigotry.
> Anyone who bothered to look knows that gesture is frequently made by all sorts of people, and the claim you are advancing here is simply bigotry.
You mean, the sorts of people who do things like this?
https://atlantablackstar.com/2024/12/26/elon-musk-exposed-subscribing-racist-account-calls-white-minority-retake-power-south-africa/
> With that in mind, what to make of Musk’s subscription to a pro-apartheid account on X, the social media platform he owns?
> Musk pays $5 a month for “bonus content and extra perks” on the account, “Boer” (@twatterbaas), which regularly disparages South Africa’s Black population while calling for power to be returned to whites.
> This recent tweet provides a good barometer of the account’s politics:
> “Atrica (sic) has 54 countries, 1.487 billion people. On the Southern tip lays South Africa, with the largest Economy and best infrastructure. Guess what makes South Africa different from the rest of Africa? 4.6 million white people.”
> In one post, Boer told “racist Blacks” of South Africa to “stop being selfish and transfer the strategical jobs and planning to us whites of this country.”
> “Why do blacks like to destroy and break what white man made?” he asked in another.
> The revelation about Musk’s membership comes days after he touted German’s AfD party, which has been accused of resurrecting Nazi-era ideology and slogans.
> “Only the AfD can save Germany,” Musk wrote Friday after re-posting a video from a far-right political activist.
You have probably heard that he had more recently said Germans need to get over “past guilt” while calling in to an AfD rally. Now, why would “past guilt” be an obstacle to supporting AfD in the first place? Doesn’t it suggest even he realizes AfD parallels the exact people who invented the sieg heil?
“Why are you concluding that it was about race when it mentioned an neighborhood?”
Because Harlem is not only a neighbourhood that has for most of the past one hundred years been predominantly black and Hispanic, but was the focal point for a major outpouring of artistic and cultural outpouring from African Americans in the middle of that. These things in combination make Harlem almost synonymous with African American people and culture.
Like, I cannot fathom how a person could think they could trick somebody into believing that a reference to crime in Harlem (or anything in Harlem) wasn’t about black people.
Then you should work on yourself and your racism.
I guess if we’re still going to play the game of “associating Harlem with African Americans just because of how heavily African Americans feature in its demographic and cultural history is racist actually”, we need to find some way to reconcile that to the extent to which contemporary African American people will also find that neighbourhood to be a byword for their subculture as a whole on account of its cultural and demographic history.
Like, you know, one of the most famous festivals of black American art and music in history, one that took place under the shadow of the death of Martin Luther King (and featured very direct and powerful tributes to his legacy) took place within and was named for that neighbourhood for very specific reasons, but by all means.
Or you can induct more people for a shorter time into the military as highly trained specialists, and rely on civilian-military skill crossover to help build cross-skills so you aren’t training them over duly. A lot of this is foundational to the modern military, as the military does not struggle meaningfully with literacy or arithmetic as a skill deficiency. While map reading and survival skills vary, it’s not uncommon for them to be high in recruits. Technological proficiency is likewise high, and skills like using GPS and GIS has infiltrated far into the population. And while firearm training is arguably a relatively minor skill, it’s still a ubiquitous one in a military and is widespread in the populace.
Point being that one path would be to offload more skill training onto the civilian sector if the military believed it would be necessary, then call up small groups of those trained professionals for short service stints. This goes hand in hand with building up either the reserve or actually establishing a system of modern militia, two similar ideas whose distinction speaks to ideology and isn’t relevant to this thesis.
Short service soldiers dragged from the civilian jobs they enjoy and earn a lot of money doing will never develop the morale or cohesion necessary to make an effective military force.
They’ve done so for centuries in the past. You need an “engaged” military, and social failures will tell here, but it’s the *expected* source of cohesive military recruits for most of history. Convincing civilians to join for a short service is going to require having a cause worth fighting for, though. This is part of why I want to change our society to that model-we want to make it harder for bad causes to have effective military backing, among many other reasons. If you don’t think you can convince Americans to go for a stint in the middle east, *ask yourself why*, don’t just treat it like a problem to solve.
The IDF force that entered Gaza by ground in October-December of 2023 was exactly short service soldiers dragged from civilian jobs, and had very high morale and cohesion. There was more than 100% compliance with the draft in the first week or so of the war – some people who weren’t being sent draft notices showed up anyway, and reservists who were abroad did what they could to get back to Israel to do reserve duty.
tell that Boney, Blücher, Moltke, Joffre, Mannerheim
Boney’s soldiers were not short service. Joffre’s soldiers were not highly-skilled–for that, you need the British Old Contemptibles, who were very much alienated from the society they served. Joffre and the younger Moltke fielded mass armies of low-skilled conscripts who took appalling casualties, exactly what the US doesn’t have or want. Mannerheim’s soldiers, like the IDF forces mentioned above, were fighting for national survival: the US is happily not in that position so we will not in the foreseeable future have that source of morale enhancement.
“Or you can induct more people for a shorter time into the military as highly trained specialists, and rely on civilian-military skill crossover to help build cross-skills so you aren’t training them over duly.”
The problem is that “inducted for a shorter time” and “being a highly trained specialist” are mutually exclusive. The latter takes an extended period butt-in-chair in a schoolhouse, and extensive experience in the field (on the flightline/ underway/ whatever). It takes years (and a lot of taxpayer dollars) to produce a highly trained specialist – and those skills atrophy fast when not used.
And crossover skills? Yeah, no. Those things are barely entry level skills, akin to being able to ride a tricycle on your way to being able to operate a motorcycle at highway speeds. They aren’t something you can depend on to significantly shorten the training and experience pipeline.
“And crossover skills? Yeah, no. Those things are barely entry level skills, akin to being able to ride a tricycle on your way to being able to operate a motorcycle at highway speeds. ”
I strongly suspect that’s military fetishism masquerading as insight. To most people the military is a black box where people go in and superhumans come out, backed by a massive military industrial complex with the largest propaganda budget in the history of earth.
If it was true that crossover skills were not useful to military readiness then we’d expect A. Territorial defense units to be useless in modern militaries and B. Military training to be population agnostic-that is, you could train a group from basically any population in the same way and end up with a similar output.
There’s significant evidence that neither assertion is true. Territorial defense units, I.E. Militias, Insurgents, Guerillas-are limited (as they ever are) but when given sufficient kit and appropriate battlefield roles they can pull surprisingly skilled maneuvers. In many ways they’re *more* effective now than a decade ago, due to drones lessening the information gap between soldiers and civilians.
And second, there are repeated instances of groups from different societies being trained by-the-books in a western style and being either sub-par or utterly ineffectual, or in groups from Ukraine or especially Russia pulling groups from marginalized groups and having extremely poor battlefield performance.
Hence I think that while American military training is certainly good, there’s a lot of nuance being overridden by propaganda. We’d use Bret’s rejoinder about how militaries are a reflection of their societies with other cultures, but we emphasize instead how our military has some super-special sauce it adds to civilians to make soldiers in ours. It reeks of cognitive bias.
I don’t mean to target you specifically here btw, you’re just being very blunt and it’s useful as a counterpoint.
> If it was true that crossover skills were not useful to military readiness then we’d expect…military training to be population agnostic-that is, you could train a group from basically any population in the same way and end up with a similar output.
This doesn’t follow. The US military has a standardized test, the ASVAB, that measures the range of skills a prospective enlistee could be trained for. Different populations will have different distributions of ASVAB scores; not every population has the same number of 17 year olds who have what it takes to operate a nuclear reactor or maintain an Apache helicopter or operate an AEGIS integrated air defense system. However, it is also true that none of those skills exist in the civilian workforce to the extent necessary to fill the military’s needs; in fact, most civilian reactor operators in the US are naval veterans.
“However, it is also true that none of those skills exist in the civilian workforce to the extent necessary to fill the military’s needs; in fact, most civilian reactor operators in the US are naval veterans.”
Except I don’t think that’s true at all. That’s the key and unproven assertion in this conversation; what you just described is perfectly in line with the ASVAB catching differing skill levels among the civilian population and funneling people with those skills into different jobs. It could also be some sort of genetic aptitude or something otherwise esoteric, but there’s not reason to expect that this would follow arbitrary internal population divides, and I’m almost positive it does. Regional and economic differences should not influence ASVAB if it’s pure aptitude, yet they do.
There are also social explanations for why certain high tech jobs are limited to military veterans that aren’t related to proficiency-the two obvious are security clearances and hiring quotas-but more basically there is going to be a distribution of aptitude throughout any population. Perils of standardized testing aside it should just be a matter of moving your discernment criteria, and you’d expect to see any and all social influences dwarfed by population size in a pinch. But we don’t see that, we see outsized demographic influences.
There is, to my knowledge, no real quantitative way to figure out how much of these effects are due to inherent aptitude and culturally assumed skills, but it’s also not in the interest of the military to tell us as an institution, and our society is basically contorted to give the military what it wants.
“I strongly suspect that’s military fetishism masquerading as insight.”
No, it’s the response of someone with experience in military training and a working knowledge of the skills one acquires in training. Even being a poor bloody infantryman take far more training and skills than the average person understands, there’s a reason why the pipeline is months long. And the basics of using a GPS or handling a firearm (that is, your civilian skills) only takes up a small fraction of that.
Have you ever even examined any of the various US military training and field manuals? (They’re widely available online.)
“If it was true that crossover skills were not useful to military readiness”
I’m still awaiting your evidence they are. I mean, you make a number of assertions and support those with further assertions but you failed to establish the presence or absence of crossover skills.
There’s a ton of obvious evidence I’m right to some degree, including the simple fact that education correlates with scores on the various military exams or tests nations use. There’s also regional and cultural variations there that support the hypothesis. It’s a question of degrees and thresholds, and we’re never going to reach a consensus on that here
There’s reasons to support the assertion and hence reason to believe there’s a path forward to reorganize military training. It’s not like long service traditions are universal in history or across modern nations. There’s room to study the specifics elsewhere.
I can assure my civilian skills in my profession outclassed easily the competence of my instructors in the military in the same field
I would tend to disagree. When you have an effective training system, the skills necessary for most military jobs can be instructed in a surprisingly short time. For example, the Finnish Defence Forces trains raw recruits into functioning battalion-level units in half a year, and based on the experiences of international cooperation, there has been very little for us to be ashamed of in comparison with professional NATO armies.
To be honest, many military tasks are not that complex.
There is perhaps a middle ground between isolationism (rooted as it often is in extreme nationalism and a more contemptuous view of the world at large) and the idea that policing the world is a good or necessary thing.
Like, maybe there were people in Afghanistan who were better off during US military occupation (and a lot who were killed, whether they were much of a threat or not), but it’s apparent that wasn’t a particularly sustainable way to do that. And it’s not as if US world policing was motivated by proposed moral safeguards it might provide enough to want to go back and do it once such repression started happening again (let alone when it happens in places that don’t get cast as sources of major terrorism events).
Whatever enemies the US has don’t exactly seem to be moving quickly enough to require rapid response.
In all major military misadventures the sustainable way to integrate and stabilize the invaded area would have been to rapidly integrate the new population into the old. If we’d issued everyone in Afghanistan a green card and set up a scholarship program for all the kids to attend public Universities in the US (even with very restrictive assessment standards to jump through) there wouldn’t be a Taliban today at all. There would also be a lot of families living in Afghanistan with American family members who would value an enduring alliance in a way that the real current population does not.
What failing empires tend to do instead is set up temporary colonies in the occupied territory that are mostly responsible for keeping invaded people from moving around at all, and rotate these enforcement individuals out of the territory before they can make enduring social bonds with the locals.
Whilst this is the way to integrate captured territories, it’s an open question of if that would have been a good idea or served the goal of the invasion. Which brings to mind questions of if the invasion has good *and achievable* goals, which is really the problem, isn’t it?
If the US wanted to add territory to its nation there are plenty of South American nations that are both more practical and just as lucrative to invade, annex, and integrate. Plus the population shares a much more similar culture, religion, language group and intellectual tradition.
I personally think it’d be horrifying to do that due to the casualties inflicted by war, but there’s a kind of brute honesty to being a jingoistic conquerer that is at least internally consistent, and if your goal isn’t imperialism but integration there are justifications you can use that aren’t pure hypocrisy. There are certainly countries in South America that have been under a military dictatorship, it’s trivially easy to create a narrative about how conquering them so the people there can have proper representation in a real democracy is actually totally benevolent, even if that narrative is a rationalization.
And economically oil from South America works just as well as oil from Iraq. Apply the same argument to the various metals and minerals within Afghanistan, like lithium and copper, to stay on topic.
But invading the middle east serves purposes other than the economic or imperial-its valuable because trade and conflict there enriches the right people politically, while also serving a religious narrative of apocalyptic fervor that easily manipulates fools, and antisemitic (Arabs are a semetic people) and anti Iranian (Afghan people are mostly Iranian in descent) sentiment are broadly socially acceptable and hence act as useful propaganda tools.
In essence US military adventurism would not be served by integrating territories conquered in the middle east because integrating those territories is at cross purposes with the political motives for invading them.
This is such a bizarre (but very common) liberal fantasy: that once those benighted heathens see our way of life, they will abandon their folly and become just like us. Did bringing Sayyid Qutb to America make him a friend to Western liberal democracy? Has bringing immigrants to Malmo made them into good peaceful, liberal, tolerant Swedes?
“Has bringing immigrants to Malmo made them into good peaceful, liberal, tolerant Swedes?”
Yes, it has. For instance crime rates are down and the city is growing economically and demographically faster than the rest of Sweden, meaning it’s well on its way to all the upside of immigration without any downside. Culture shocks don’t invalidate the idea that tolerance is objectively correct.
Also you might want to avoid talking about semetic people you bigoted jackass. The Italian and Irish immigrants of the late 1800’s are just as valid of an example, and were disparaged in identical ways. If you can’t make your point with them your point is wrong. Maybe you didn’t use them as an example because it’s inconvenient to your thesis, but more likely you just think semetic people are less human than whites.
You’re also creating a strawman. The point isn’t that you can just bring people to America to make them allies. It’s that you need to treat them as equals and give them power in your system for them to be allies.
Am I seriously seeing an invocation of the long debunked idea of northern European “no-go zones” in the year of our Lord 2025?
And whatever Sayid Qutb’s did not reside in the United States with the intention of making that his lifelong residence in the first place, so whatever valid criticisms there are of his conservative reactionary outlook on its culture, they weren’t coming from a place of so much as a premise of integration.
Like Will Rogers, all I know is what I read in the papers. Nyheter Pa Latt Svenska doesn’t think Malmo is safe, and neither does my Swedish professor or her friends who live in Sweden.
“Like Will Rogers”
Am I wrong in gathering that he was a clown who modelled himself off of the image of an unsophisticated rube?
“All I know is what I read in the papers”
Makes sense from the number of French or other non-English idioms that are invoked.
“Nyheter Pa Latt Svenska doesn’t think Malmo is safe”
I’ll admit, finding any English language sources evaluating this as a source of news at all is difficult, but if there is scant information suggesting it is the local equivalent of something like Fox, I would be hard pressed to accept its credibility from a second-hand source that seems to think that murder rates in the US are…
Well, they are distressingly high (that’s what a constitutional right to firearms access gets you), but high in a way that suggests some deeply ingrained and widely experienced subculture of violence, rather than “still only a percentage of a percentage of the entire population”.
Also, whatever one’s conception of “long periods is”, there’s still significance to the point that there’s still a civilian life that comes after it.
Notwithstanding the fact that a great deal of US service members are only there for something like up to five years, and even the longest terms, with regards to the likely starting age, mean they’ll be out before the end of their thirties.
It’s not necessary for them to be conscripts for military service to not be the be-all end-all of their lives.
We do not need to police the whole world.
> Bret (and Angry Staff Officer) seem to have the WW2 armies as their ideal, composed as they were of draftees from all walks of life, serving for a relatively brief period, and then returning to civilian life.
I assume he hasn’t looked up much contemporany history aside a handful of western countries if he thinks conscript armies are somehow coup proof
A major part of the issue here is language. For various reasons, “warrior” has come be be the term of choice by many who mean “determined fighting spirit.” You can argue that they’re mistaken to use the term warrior this way (and for what it’s worth I would not disagree with that), but as we know, linguists tell us that words mean what people use them to mean.
Of course, you can make a more nuanced argument that even if “fighting spirit” is all those using the term warrior really mean to connote, because of all the (good) reasons why warrior is an (at best) muddled term for such a thing, it can lead to confusion. But at the end of the day, this isn’t the hill I’d choose to die on. Don’t worry so much about what terms people use to emphasize fighting spirit, but do keep up emphasizing the importance of civil-military relations in a liberal democracy.
Full disclosure: I am a life-long career military officer, but Canadian not American, which has given me an interesting perspective on this.
Ding. This. OGH really needs to get out more, because the academic definition of “warrior” that he’s using, and (rightfully) arguing against being ingrained into the guardians of our society, is not the one being used when the people who are talking about having a “warrior mentality” are talking about it.
When I hear law enforcement/soldiers talking about a “warrior mentality” I do roll my eyes a little, but while there might be a slight superiority complex, it’s not based on “we have skills and they don’t,” but rather “we go out and risk our lives to protect others,” and when you look at how they define the “warrior mentality” it’s much less about being a separate class and much more about having a mindset that if things go pear-shaped you’re going to do what’s necessary to do your duty and come out victorious. Now, if you want to argue that law enforcement and soldiers fail to live up to that, or that we should call that mentality something else, fine, but a lot of the hand-wringing over this is based on a complete misconception of how terms are being used.
It would seem from the attitude often displayed by soldiers and especially by police that they often take their so-called mentality of risking their lives to the level of assuming the privileges alluded to here and in previous posts. I think the breakdown here is a cogent argument as to why, and the underlying issues of it.
whatever the virtues of the ‘warrior ethos’ are I think Uvalde proves that cops don’t have it
As opposed to, say, the school shooting in Tennessee where the cop went in and nailed the shooter in jig time.
Uvalde was a catastrophic failure, but it’s not how things normally go.
I always find the emphasis on risking lives to be amusing. My father and grandfather were both volunteer fire-fighters, and I clean up hazardous waste for a living; we’ve been in far more life-threatening situations than most of the military people we’ve met. The old joke is “War is unmitigated boredom punctuated by periods of pure insanity”, whereas there’s nothing BUT risk when fighting fires. Yet while fire fighters get a certain amount of status (remediation experts don’t, it’s a job where being in the spotlight means you’ve screwed up), it’s nothing like the privilege claimed by–or, rather, mostly FOR–military personnel. Dad got to be involved in local politics and be in a few parades; hardly compensation for being in multiple explosions! No one gives fire-fighter discounts, or allows them to board plains first, or the like, much less gives them special status in politics once their term as chief ends.
I forget who said it, but a combat vet made a blog post once arguing that the reason behind the status isn’t, by this logic, the fact that they risk their lives; a lot of jobs involve that. The status comes from killing, either actual or potential. He went so far as to say that “Thank you for your service” should be considered offensive, because most of the time it means “Thank you for killing people”, which puts them on the same level as any murderer (the guy was very jaded).
That distinction seems meaningful to this discussion. Someone who views military personnel as superior to civilians because of their willingness to kill–like Heinlen in “Starship Troopers”–is likely to fall into the traps Bret indicates in his post. Someone who genuinely believes that risking one’s life for one’s fellow countrymen is a virtue, in contrast, is more likely to praise a variety of difficult, dangerous, and necessary jobs–think Mike Rowe on “Dirty Jobs”. In which case the word “warrior” is really beside the point; the issue isn’t one of linguistics, but of philosophy, and I personally haven’t seen the linguistics map onto the philosophical issues.
Do combat medics not get the same respect?
In the days when we had soldiers and professional executioners, the executioners were of a lower status.
I’ve seen parts of Hacksaw Ridge and Desmond Doss seemed to receive a lot of abuse for refusing to carry a rifle. It would seem that someone who is willing to go to the front lines without a gun they could use for self protection would be much braver than most.
“The Conscientious Objector is a 2004 documentary film directed by Terry Benedict about the life of Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector who received the Medal of Honor for his service in World War II. Due to his religious convictions as a Seventh-day Adventist, Doss refused to carry a weapon. He initially faced opposition, persecution, and ridicule from his fellow soldiers, but ultimately won their admiration by demonstrating courage and saving many lives as a combat medic.”
I usually read about a “warrior mindset” among policemen in articles that allege they are too aggressive, shooting first and asking questions later. The unwillingness of most civilians to use force has both upsides and downsides.
Unfortunately, American homicide rates suggest that many, many civilians are willing to use force. You must be leading a sheltered life.
There were about 19,000 homicides in the US in 2023.
Out of a population of 334 million.
So assuming that every homicide was committed by a single person (which is probably not the case considering spree killings), that amounts to about one-two hundredth of a percent of the population that would engage in that kind of force.
I think a person can avoid those kinds of odds pretty incidentally.
Especially given the notorious tendency of those deaths to be regionally concentrated.
I am from a communist country and our military often use “warriors”/”fighters” to refer to our troops, while “soldiers” to refer to other country’s troops. The idea is that “soldier” sounds like someone just does a job for a paycheck and “warrior” sounds like some one sacrifice themselves for a greater idea. It helps that my country historically did not really have a “warrior class”.
Bret is discussing a specific case, caused by a handful of conservative and defense-thinktank writers, that really only concerns Standard American English. Even other (lower status) American English dialects don’t necessarily treat the words in the way that he is concerned about, but a big part of the intellectual movement he is reacting to is an attempt to export this hard/strict “warrior == career professional specialist in interpersonal direct violence == natural superior by virtue of interpersonal violence” definition out of thinktank speech and into everyday dialects.
I remember reading somewhere that if there was ever a “Roman salute,” it was more likely to be a gesture where the index finger was pointed up into the air, since this gesture is much more common in Roman art.
The interesting part of this argument was a comparison to the Tawhid gesture that Muslims sometimes make.
Somewhat unrelated, but I would like to know to what extent the “hand-in-waistcoat” gesture (of Napoleonic fame) was used in antiquity. I just don’t see it in Roman statures, the posture is wrong. Perhaps more common with the chiton rather than the toga?
In the famously militarized society I grew up in, “warrior” and “fighter” are the same word, and in modern military usage mean “soldier who served in a combat role” – that’s it. A tanker, a pilot, an infantry fighter, and a combat engineer are warriors; a soldier serving in a support role is not. As you may expect, soldiers in combat roles have more social prestige, not just in the military, but also after they are released into civilian life. Employers are not supposed to discriminate based on what one did in the military, which is often a proxy for racial discrimination against Arabs and gender discrimination (women barely serve in combat roles), but in practice they do so all the time, treating combat roles as more leadership material.
I think our host really undersells how much what he’s talking about is an effort by a small group of intellectuals to change common language, not a universal feature of language, or even of English.
more the skill threshold is incredibly lower and you dont get the same bang for your buck. in the right circumstances a fucking 13 year old with a machine gun could kill dozens casually, imagine what limited training could do. who would need decades long training for that type of outcome.
limited gains for not much use, if being Generous.
I would like to see some evidence that it has any effect on anyone to call him a soldier rather than a warrior.
The opening line of The World at War is: “Down this road on a summer day in 1944, the soldiers came.”
Did it really make a difference whether the Waffen-SS were called soldiers or warriors?
Well, Nazi doctrine stressed the warrior role of the SS in particular – they were always urged to have a ‘healthy warrior-hunter instinct’ and a ‘warrior’s hardness’. By contrast, Eisenhower always reminded his generals that they commanded a soldier-civilian army, just there to get the job done. In the Commonwealth armies teaching emphasised the goals after the war (peace, freedom, security ..), and the need to again get the job done to reach them.
And if the SS had been told to have a “soldiers hardness” instead, that would have made all the difference to the villagers of Oradour-sur-Glane?
I think this is really more about the motive and mindset behind choices of words and argument that there are connotations that make them more than mere homonyms, and any awareness the people they’re applied to have of that context and respond based on such, more than it is a word by itself affecting behaviour.
So it’s less about “calling soldier instead of warrior, all other things being equal, would or would not have an effect” so much as “what are the differences in scenario behind why either given term gets promoted”.
Also might be something a bit focused on the English speaking world, since German soldiers aren’t being called either term in their own society anyway, and I’m not certain if the blog writer is aware of any similar connotations or background attached to similar words in the context of spoken German anyway.
That said… looking at the apparent German word for warrior as “krieger”, I would be unsurprised if there are particular connotations attached to calling somebody that as distinct from “soldat”.
“warrior” here is just a propaganda wording. US soldiers were told they fight to protect their freedom, not just doing a job for a paycheck, while SS “warriors” still lived by paychecks and not having lands and serfs like medieval knights.
Well, in many modern countries, retired veterans are still eligible to be recalled to service when needed. So a soldier in those cases never truly stops being a fighter.
Honestly I think the whole soldier/warrior disctintion fully arbitrary, historically speaking
And you have, I gather, no intention of engaging meaningfully with the significant body of evidence that you are wrong, such as the recurrence of this distinction in a range of different languages and its clear pattern of non-arbitrary use (that is, it is a load-bearing definition which can be used to distinguish things that are really different)?
The words are entirely synonymous to the majority of the population. I agree that there is a distinction, but outside of academic circles it’s a distinction without a difference. It’s mostly cultural flavor, with ‘warrior’ being quaint and old-timey, like ‘champion’
I don’t think that they’re entirely synonymous to the majority of the population. I see ‘warrior’ used repeatedly when describing the concept of a ‘fight that makes up a significant proportion of one’s identity’ for a range of subjects. Cancer warrior, autism warrior, fitness warrior etc. etc.
In all of the searching I’ve just done, I haven’t once found anyone describing themselves as a ‘cancer soldier’ or a ‘fitness soldier’. I’d expect a skewed proportion just from it being a fashionable term, but if they were entirely synonymous I’d expect to find _at least one_ instance of the synonymous term being used.
I’d posit that people know full-well that there’s a distinction between the two, and intuitively grok that ‘warrior’ implies something more personal and consuming than ‘soldier’, even if they can’t trot out s dictionary definition when asked.
If you’re speaking in English it’s especially not arbitrary. There may be languages where there aren’t enough words to show the distinction easily in conversation, or societies that have deliberately emphasized one so much that the other idea falls out of common thought and speech.
But the post mentions the distinction as part of a very American situation, where there is a strain of intellectuals, commentators, and politicians who want to adjust American thinking by hacking a specific linguistic tick into common American dialects. It is about the use of “warrior” in a variation of Othering that is designed/intended to elevate rather than diminish the group that is labeled. Both the othering and the elevation require that there be preexisting ways in which the word “warrior” is distinct from terms like “soldier.”