Before going to war again, our leaders must first decide on what we mean to accomplish and how far we are willing to go to win. Otherwise, we will again subject our troops to unnecessary
confusion, stress, and personal risk, as we did in Vietnam and are doing now in Iraq.
First, let's be clear on the meaning of war. It is deadly business, both for the troops who fight it and the civilians caught up in it. It is ugly and cruel, not exciting and glamorous as so often portrayed in Hollywood. Wars are fought primarily by young men barely out of high school who are still maturing and forming values. They don't have the luxury of weighing the morality of their actions from safe and comfortable homes and TV studios. Split-second decisions on whether or not to use lethal force are required in situations where their lives and those of their comrades hang in the balance.
Sure, police are often in the same position. But there is a substantial difference. Police are trained to keep the peace. Law enforcement remains largely reactive in spite of community policing. Working exclusively among civilians, police must always exercise restraint. Soldiers, on the other hand, are trained to defeat an enemy by whatever it takes. They are proactive. They take the fight to the enemy rather than wait for a crime to be committed. Political correctness may have caused the War Department to tone down its name to the Department of Defense, but the fact remains that Soldiers are primarily warriors, not peacekeepers. They are effective at winning wars; less so at winning hearts and minds.
So the results of a recent Defense Department survey of U.S. troops in combat in Iraq, while probably causing some handwringing among critics of the conflict, produced few surprises among those who really understand war and what's at stake in this one. Almost half of those surveyed supported the use of torture, especially if lives were at stake, and one in ten reported having personally abused Iraqi civilians. Only about a third of Marines and less than half of the Soldiers said that they would report a comrade who mistreated a non-combatant or who violated the rules of engagement. Substantially less than half believed that enemy non-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect.
Before expressing shock, consider that approximately two-thirds of the respondents said that they knew someone killed or seriously injured and that many of them were serving in their second or third combat tours. Before you judge them, try walking in their boots.
"War is hell," they say. Most civilians, though, have little concept of it, so they should avoid using the term metaphorically as in the war on drugs or other causes that have nothing remotely in common with real war. Doing so tends to trivialize the term and it becomes easier to apply civilian concepts of humaneness and ethics to what is in reality a very savage business. It has no civilian equivalent. In war, unlike sports or business, it matters less how you play the game than whether or not you win. Maintaining the moral high ground may be a popular theme for editorial writers, but it means very little if you lose. Winning is everything.
The last war we actually won was World War II, before political correctness had been invented and before Soldiers were subject to so much second-guessing. We killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in fire bombings and often took no prisoners in battle. Interrogation of prisoners could be rigorous indeed, and maintaining their dignity was not a high priority. No one would dream of referring to such actions as torture. There were few embedded media members, and they were kept rather busy reporting real news, mostly involving the heroic actions of our troops. There was a war on, and we did what we had to do to win.
Today, opponents of this war are attempting to infuse political correctness and civilian ethical standards into our troops who do the fighting for them. If they go too far, they may end up destroying the military warrior culture altogether. That should worry Americans greatly, because the jihadists are under no such moral constraints.
Captain Kelly is a regular contributor to Proceedings and was the U.S. Naval Institute's Author of the Year in 1979.