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The way of the warrior

Paul Robinson

Wednesday, 13th June 2007

The ‘warrior ethos’ is a manifestation of the determination among US officers in recent years that they would have no more to do with that namby-pamby counter-insurgency stuff, let alone any of those even wimpier ‘Operations Other Than War’ (OOTW), such as peacekeeping. As one former chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff is quoted as saying, ‘Real men don’t do OOTW.’ US soldiers were to be pure war-fighters. Achilles was resurrected as the model.

The problem is that the US armed forces are now thoroughly mired in OOTW, which to some extent require a different set of qualities than conventional war does. Take, for instance, the warrior ethos’s language of close combat with the enemy: fine for conventional war; really not at all suitable for OOTW, which depend on the use of minimum force.

In addition, the warrior ethos is built on the idea, popularised by Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall, that soldiers will not fight for abstract theories, such as freedom or democracy, or for larger social corporations, such as the nation, but only for their immediate group of comrades. Hence the importance of never leaving a comrade behind. Marshall claimed to have based his conclusions on interviews with soldiers immediately after battle. The problem is that we have known at least since 1988 that Marshall was, as one historian puts it, ‘a fraud’, his research ‘sloppy, fabricated or simply guesswork’. His famous ‘discovery’ that only a quarter of soldiers fired their weapons in combat was a complete invention. Yet Marshall’s fraudulent concepts have had a remarkably powerful influence on armies throughout the Western world. Following his logic, the focus of much military training after the second world war became building ‘small group cohesion’ and increasing individuals’ rate of fire.

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