Today, our troops are called on to be soldiers, and policemen, and aid workers. Will this dilution of mission mark the end of the warrior and a concomitant degradation in the United States' ability to wage war?
In the military, our role models have more of a connection with what we do, rather than with what we watch someone else do. So as an aggregate, we don't aspire to "be like" Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods; we want to "be like" Arleigh or Chesty or Omar. In short, what we want to be—in word if not always in deed—are warriors. Though it seems so much more than what most of us really are on a day-to-day basis, we in the military like, maybe even need, to think of ourselves this way.
There is, of course, disagreement as to what exactly a warrior is. It currently is in vogue to evoke this word in conjunction with all sorts of activities-info warrior, C3I warrior, weekend warrior—thus pushing it dangerously close to meaningless jargon. There also is disagreement as to whether it is a positive term. Those deep thinkers who cast it in a negative light believe that the warrior ideal is archaic and that those who embrace it are not needed or deserving of a place in our modern military. On the other side are those who warn that the U.S. military no longer has warriors in the numbers it needs, and that without them we will face a grim future against any foe who can begin to approach our technological firepower—or who can find a way to negate it.
One way to frame this debate is to ask whether the Mogadishu debacle and the recent barracks bombing in Saudi Arabia are natural misfortunes that will happen to any engaged military regardless of its superiority, or whether they point to a larger problem. Do our shiny systems and past successes obscure a shortfall in our capabilities that technological preeminence is not always enough to overcome? Is our military producing the warriors it will need to defend our country's interests in a still-dangerous, even anarchical, post-20th century world?
Do We Still Have—or Need—Warriors?
Webster's says that a warrior is a person engaged or experienced in warfare, a soldier; or a person who has shown great vigor, courage, or aggressiveness, as in politics.1 On its face, this certainly is something worth aspiring to. Others such as Ralph Peters see a more devolved meaning to the word and the individual ethic it attempts to embody. His description of warriors as "erratic primitives of shifting allegiance habituated to violence, with no stake in civil order" makes it clear that his ideal army would be made up of professional soldiers—not warriors.2
Even accepting the more benign description of a warrior, there are those who find it distasteful that we need a standing military, let alone one populated with individuals trained in the art of war—killing people and breaking things. Perhaps it is because we Americans like to think of ourselves as peace loving that we try to ignore our quite warlike history. However, ten major conflicts, numerous lesser ones, and millions of casualties cannot be explained away as solely the work of circumstance and chance. The corridors of the Pentagon are virtual shrines to those who have fought on the far-from-bloodless tapestry of our country's history.
Sometimes missed by those who contemplate the warriors of our past is the fact that the successes they were part of largely occurred after some notable failures early in the conflict. Only after calling on our superior resource base and oftentimes discarding our peacetime military leadership have we actually turned the tide toward ultimate victory.
These early failures generally are blamed on unpreparedness and largely laid at the feet of small forces, inadequate training, and antiquated and insufficient weaponry. These certainly were factors, but the interwar loss of some of our best warriors also has played a role. This is because those individuals who are the most successful in war, who develop a warrior mentality or who are what historian John Keegan has called "natural warriors,"3 often are ill-prepared for the different roles and personas they must take on in times of peace. Even modern professional soldiers with just a few hard and sharp edges will discover that in the absence of major conflict, many of their countrymen will find those edges discomfiting. As authors James Dunnigan and Raymond Macedonia note:
As soon as the shooting stopped, most serving officers were evaluated on how well behaved they would be for peacetime service. This put a lot of the natural warriors at a disadvantage. The warriors tended either to have bad manners or to be uninterested in peacetime politicking. Some warriors had good manners and a taste for politics, but this was not the norm. Commanders facing peacetime soldiering want troops who won't cause trouble. Another war may never come, but a commander's peacetime promotion prospects depend on avoiding the kind of bad press that rowdy warrior types are prone to produce.4
The easy success of the Gulf War seemed to indicate that perhaps we finally had learned how to prepare for war between wars and that we had either retained enough warriors or learned how to fight without them. In reality however, it can be argued that our success came only as a result of the application of troops and resources not yet returned home after their Cold War battles. With the Cold War receding further in the rearview mirror, it should not be surprising to find the United States making its standard trip toward unpreparedness, part of which involves the shedding of many of our Cold War and Gulf War warriors, and part of which involves a shift in priorities from building a force to fight to maintaining what we can, where we can, for those still in uniform, while trying to ensure that we will be ready to fight again if needed.
The signs of this shift are all around us. Only 20% of our 1.44 million active-duty military personnel are considered "tooth,"5 and they are finding themselves deployed for longer and longer periods. Tiered readiness—which means some units would see their level of readiness institutionally reduced—is being touted as a way to save money.6 And an estimated 10% of all defense dollars goes toward the support of dependents.7
Combined with the increasing prominence of military operations other than war—including more than 200 peacekeeping operations since 19908—this results in a steady degradation in the United States' ability to wage war on other than a limited scale. As Karen House has pointed out, "nonmilitary missions eventually destroy the fighting capability of a military force. Armies, in the end, are largely composed of young men and women in uniform, not diplomats and philosophers. Such young men and women can be trained as soldiers or as policemen or as aid workers, but not as all three."9
In becoming less a war machine and more an arm of the Red Cross, in taking responsibility for policing the world's bad neighborhoods, in refusing to examine physical strength and endurance differences honestly when making the decision to place women in combat and combat-related billets, we have lost touch with the realities involved in producing a modern warrior. We must sometimes override our well-meaning impulses to do things that are societally expedient, so that we might better prepare individuals for battle. The training needed to do this well is not and never has been a benign process—a fact sometimes buried by our more gentle impulses.
The need to train our military aggressively is compounded by the fact that our society probably produces fewer natural warriors than it used to. If so, then the warriors we discard in peacetime will be missed more than ever. Men such as now-retired Admiral Stan Arthur. Men such as Colonel James Hallums, who arrived at West Point to instill a "warrior spirit" in the leadership department but lost his post after only one year for "abusive leadership." Supporters say he didn't pass muster with the "weenie" element of the modern Army. "Too gruff, blunt, and demanding for the academics around him; too proud of his warrior past. He was, they charge, drummed out of the service for being politically incorrect. Critics say Colonel Hallums proved himself a macho, oafish officer out of step with the reality of a peacetime Army whose purpose is now more complicated than storming a machine-gun nest—and whose culture now includes technicians and managers as well as warriors like himself."10
These men cannot be replaced easily even in the best of times—and these most assuredly are not the best of times for the modern warrior. In today's environment, the distinctions between manager and leader, bureaucrat, technocrat, and soldier have never been more blurred. This is unfortunate, because as Eliot Cohen notes: "Military organizations still need, and will always need, specialists in direct combat. . . . The cultural challenge for military organizations will be to maintain a warrior spirit and the intuitive understanding of war that goes with it, even when their leaders are not, in large part, warriors themselves."11
A Future without Warriors?
Having won the "last" war we now are preparing for the "war after next." But can we afford to repeat our old pattern and lose the first battle of the war "in-between," and will the absence of warriors lead us to that unwelcome outcome?
Perhaps the question is moot. After all, the vision of war as an arcade game played from afar would seem to place a premium on a technologically proficient mind and a quick finger, not on someone who can lead grunts on the ground. Indeed, it has been predicted that as we move from "sledge hammers to tweezers,"12 information warriors will replace tank commanders and fighter pilots as the group from which the military establishment draws the bulk of its leaders.13
One is left to speculate on what would happen if a future opponent were able to deny the U.S. military its technological advantage. In addition, there are many unanswered questions concerning the general vulnerability of some of the new systems under development.
Even if we are able to counter the threat posed to our new technology by our more conventional foes, this is only part of the story. We cannot truly expect all of our future battles to occur in environments where our technological prowess is allowed to run unfettered. Lieutenant General Jay Garner, Assistant Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, has said that in the future U.S. troops most likely will be fighting in cities and facing nontraditional threats such as chemical and biological weapons. He notes, "The asymmetrical threats are a counter to technology. It is significant because once an enemy chooses to fight in cities, then all of the precision fires and precision munitions we have are no longer valid, unless you want to take down a whole city, which we won't do. . . . That puts a premium on infantry who can go in and separate the enemy from civilians, and that seems to be forgotten now."14 General Garner is seconded by Lieutenant General Peter Shoomaker, head of Army Special Operations Command, who says, "Standoff weapons will never substitute for the judgment of people on the ground."15
War is hell. It takes the siren call of adventure and the glorification of the profession of arms to entice individuals to overcome their natural reflex to flee what can hurt them. It explains why realistic and intensive training and hard-edged and experienced leadership is so important, no matter what technological advantages we may possess.
Without this training and leadership, we will face imminent danger whenever we encounter an opponent with technology close to or equal to ours, or when we fight—as we undoubtedly will—in an environment where our technology is rendered useless or is not allowed full reign.
In today's more "enlightened" times we often become embarrassed by our less-enlightened traditions, by the immaturity of youth, by the very things we might be called on to do, and by the training that will enable us to do them. We are "disturbed and disgusted"16 by Marine paratrooper hazing. We "modify" chief's initiation. We question whether we should continue crossing-the-equator initiations. We wonder why it takes so long to get these 18- to 20-year-old men and women (and the older ones, for that matter) to the point where they are willing to fight and die, while at the same time possessing a maturity that ensures that they will never misbehave between battles.
Perhaps the warrior ideal is just a myth. Perhaps we will not be sorely tested again. Perhaps a world without war is on the horizon. But if a darker world is coming, it is doubtful we are ready for it. American skill and optimism seemingly always have prevailed, and as a nation we seem unwilling to believe that it ever could be otherwise. In the military, however, we have no choice but to contemplate all possible futures. To paraphrase Ralph Peters, we cannot afford to prepare only for the wars we want to fight, while ignoring those we will be unable to avoid.17 Warriors are needed for these unavoidable conflicts. They also are needed to ensure that in preparing for tomorrow or for the day after tomorrow, we are not left unprepared for tonight.
Lieutenant Commander Lanman is stationed at the Naval Inventory Control Point, Philadelphia.
1. Random House Webster's College Dictionary, 9th ed., s.v. "warrior." back to article
2. Ralph Peters, "The New Warrior Class," Parameters, Summer 1994, p. 16. back to article
3. John Keegan, "Natural Warriors," The Wall Street Journal, 27 March 1997, p. A20. Keegan describes natural warriors as men, present in all societies, who are good at war and cannot be anything but soldiers. back to article
4. James Dunnigan and Raymond Macedonia, Getting it Right (New York: W. Morrow, 1993), pp. 39-40. back to article
5. Richard Newman, "Operation-Fix-My Bifocals," U.S. News & World Report, 17 March 1997, p. 32. "Tooth" forces are those that train primarily for combat. Jack Weible, "Readiness is Taking its Toll," The Navy Times, 6 March 1997, p. 6. back to article
6. Rick Maze, "Joint Chiefs say a Tiered Approach May Save Money," The Navy Times, 17 March 1997, p. 6. back to article
7. David Evans, "Clear and Present Diapers," The Washington Post, 12 March 1995, p. C3. back to article
8. Zalmay Khalilzad & David Ochmanek, "An Affordable Two-War Strategy," The Wall Street Journal, 13 March 1997, p. A14. back to article
9. Karen House, "The Wrong Mission," The Wall Street Journal, 8 September 1994. back to article
10. Thomas Ricks, "Army at Odds, West Point Posting Becomes a Minefield for a 'Warrior Officer,'" The Wall Street Journal, 13 March 1997 p. A1. Colonel Hallums also is believed to have "irked faculty members by judging them, in part, by their fitness for combat, viewing this as relevant to their role of training future military leaders." p. A9. back to article
11. Eliot Cohen, "A Revolution in Warfare," Foreign Affairs, March/April 1996, p. 49. back to article
12. John Petersen, "Info War—The Next Generation," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 1997, p. 62. back to article
13. Eliot Cohen, "A Revolution in Warfare," Foreign Affairs, March/April 1996, p. 37. back to article
14. Robert Holzer, "QDR's High-Tech Focus Worries Ground Forces," Defense News, 24-30 March 1997, p. 19. back to article
15. Patrick Pexton, "High-Tech Military will come at High Cost," Navy Times, 10 February 1997. back to article
16. Dana Priest, "Cohen Disgusted by Hazing," Washington Post, February 1997. back to article
17. Ralph Peters, "After the Revolution," Parameters, Summer 1995, p. 9. back to article