The way of the warrior

Wednesday, 13th June 2007

The result is that in many Western militaries what anthropologists call the ‘honour group’, those people whose opinion really matters to you, has narrowed dramatically over the past 100 years. Read the letters of American Civil War soldiers, and you find that what counted was what the folks back home thought of them; read the letters of first world war soldiers, and you find that what they harped on about was their sense of duty towards their country. Now what soldiers are primarily concerned with is fitting in with their mates. This helps to explain the conclusion of the report above that a third of soldiers ‘believed torture was acceptable if it helped save the life of a fellow soldier’. Nonsoldiers lie outside the military honour group; as such they are felt to deserve no respect.

The inevitable conclusion is that military training needs to change its emphasis to incorporate a more cosmopolitan ethic. Armed forces might also consider revisiting the lists of official ‘values’ that they all like to produce. It is noticeable that, while these lists reflect great concern with the requirements of the traditional ‘warrior’ (generally including virtues such as courage, loyalty, discipline and obedience), they rarely show any concern for anyone outside the military circle. The Israel Defense Forces is unique in including in its list of values ‘respect for human life’ and ‘respect for human dignity’. Nothing even closely resembling these appears in the lists of any European or North American country. Can we be surprised if organisations that officially list loyalty but not respect for human dignity as primary institutional virtues discover that their members are willing to torture for the sake of their comrades?

It is soldiers that the Western world needs right now, not warriors. The warrior is a savage, anarchic and disordered; the soldier is a professional, disciplined and restrained. The warrior ethos is the path to defeat. It needs to be discarded before it is too late.

Paul Robinson is the author of Military Honour and the Conduct of War: from Ancient Greece to Iraq (Routledge, 2006).