Back in January, I took a couple of vacation days to head down to Washington to see Kirsten Gillibrand and the Democrats officially take over the House of Representatives (diary here).
We stayed at the Marriott in Crystal City, and when I went to find cheaper-than-Marriott breakfast in the underground stores around the Metro station there, I saw several Pentagon Army staffers wearing the full desert camouflage uniform.
WTF, I thought, why are these desk jockeys wearing camo and combat boots in the Dunkin Donuts line, half a world away from where such dress would be appropriate, the combat in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Now I know, thanks to James Wolcott, who commented and linked to a remarkable article by Paul Robertson in The Spectator.
Why Pentagon paper-pushers dress like they're in Baghdad, below.
First, let me say that this is something Steve Gilliard would have been all over, and far more articulate about than I, or even Wolcott. I miss him every day.
Robertson argues, convincingly, that one of the major problems in the Bushite wars is the "obsession in US military circles with the 'warrior ethos.'"
Which is why general officers on TV, as well as the majors at Metro stations, wear combat uniforms:
Warrior status goes beyond mere words; it is a matter of appearance, too. The smarter forms of military dress are now rarely to be seen. Instead, combat uniforms are de rigueur, no matter the place or event. Top generals visit universities and public institutions dressed for digging trenches; soldiers, and even cadets at some university Officer Training Corps, graduate from basic training not in parade best but in baggy camouflage gear; and when the head of the Army, General Pace, visited West Point, the entire corps of cadets turned out to meet him in combat uniforms.
snip
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.
Robetson notes that the "warrior ethos" is based on long-discredited work by one of the Army's once-respected historians, Brig. Gen. S.L.A. Marshall:
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.
(I have read, and own a copy of, Marshall's Men Against Fire, and always thought the idea that a majority of riflemen did not use their rifles when most needed was counter-intuitive.)
It was not always like this, though soldiers have always been concerned about the well-being of their comrades in combat:
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.
Robertson concludes:
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.
As Wolcott comments:
As military units bond as "honor groups," their primary loyality is not to civilian society but to their fellow warriors -- a regressive development that's destructive to the polity and counterproductive in the field.
So, for a variety of reasons, including how our military can be most effective when we send them into places like Iraq and Afghanistan, support the troops, or the soldiers and Marines, but not the warriors.