America’s Military Profession: Creating Hectors, not Achilles

By Aaron MacLean

October 1, 2014

Key points:

 The US military contributes to the American civic character by fostering and exemplifying the virtues of discipline and courage.  The US military is a reminder to Americans that the liberal order they enjoy exists in and needs defending against a world of illiberal forces.  Upon reentering civil society, veterans typically bring with them a more pragmatic world view and the virtues inculcated from service, allowing them to contribute resilience to the national civic character.  As American society grows increasingly uncomfortable with what the military has to believe and do to be successful on the battlefield, both the national defense and national character are likely to suffer.

This essay is the 10th in a series exploring the role of the professions in a modern, liberal democratic society and their effect on the civic culture of the nation. For more information about AEI’s Program on American Citizenship, visit www.citizenship-aei.org.

The military provides a clear benefit to the American polity: it is the country’s federal mechanism for the common defense. But what is its relationship to America’s civic culture? Do the professionals the military molds and employs in the nation’s wars affect the civic culture positively, as models of necessary virtues and keepers of specialized professional knowledge necessary to a healthy civic life? Or do they affect the culture negatively, as damaged and occasionally dangerous men perverted by violence?

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My search for the answer to these questions may as well begin in the village of Ganjgal in Konar Province, Afghanistan, on September 8, 2009. The Battle of Ganjgal was smaller in scale than, say, the Battle of Normandy or even the Battle of Fallujah. On the friendly side were a few dozen American advisers from the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps fighting alongside about 100 Afghan government troops and policemen. The Taliban brought about 60 men to the fight.

But despite the comparatively smaller scale, in its own modest way the day-long fight at Ganjgal carried all the universal traits of men at war: questionable leadership, intense physical and mental hardship, lives ended, lives saved, reputations broken, reputations made, terrible suffering, conflicting accounts in the aftermath, and extraordinary valor.

The US military’s purpose in visiting Ganjgal had been to secure the allegiance of the villagers to the Kabul government by getting them to accept a police station in return for refurbishments for their mosque. The village was nestled in the high ground, and the Afghans and their American advisers could only approach it by one poor-quality road.

The road and village were surrounded on three sides by elevated terrain such that to approach it, as the advisers and government troops did at dawn, was to be caught in a U-shaped sac. The three-sided ambush was a specialty of the Taliban: usually faced with superior American firepower, they preferred to bend fluidly around allied troops rather than attempt to hold terrain, surrounding Americans and attriting them as they advanced, falling back and melting away as necessary for survival.

Those Americans and government troops who had advanced the farthest into the village were in the worst position, under the most intense fire and cut off from their comrades farther back. The battle became a fight to save them and, ultimately, to recover some of their bodies. Five Americans died: three Marines, one Navy corpsman, and one soldier who, shot that day, later died of his wounds. According to the Afghan soldiers they fought alongside, the Americans had been killed while covering the withdrawal of their Afghan comrades, eight of whom died.

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One of the reasons for the number of casualties was that each American was effectively fighting with a hand tied behind his back. Despite repeated calls for indirect fire and air support from men on the scene, the senior leadership responsible for the operation declined for hours to provide help.

Working under the restrictive environment created by General Stanley McChrystal’s rules of engagement, which were designed to safeguard the lives of Afghan civilians, midlevel commanders overenforced the rules, preferring to risk American casualties rather than explain civilian deaths to a general. When late in the day-long fight the commanders allowed helicopter gunships to fire in support of the troops in combat, the effects were decisive but could not bring men back from the dead.

Two men who fought at Ganjgal were awarded the Medal of Honor: Army Captain Will Swenson and Marine Corporal Dakota Meyer. An unofficial if widely understood standard for the Medal of Honor is that the actions of the recipient must have been of such a character that, should the recipient not have performed those actions, no one would question or think less of him as a result.

Both Swenson and Meyer participated in the cruel task of pushing into the enemy’s planned killing fields to rescue the trapped, wounded, and fallen. For the Americans involved in this effort, the thought of not rescuing the men trapped in the village was anathema. They were determined to rescue those men or recover their bodies, even at the cost of their own lives.

The anger and confusion of the battlefield gave way to more anger and confusion in the aftermath. Investigations were conducted and leaders were disciplined. In response to pressure from Congress on the US Department of Defense to award Medals of Honor to living recipients, the Marine Corps was quick to offer up Dakota Meyer while the Army appeared to suppress Will Swenson’s nomination, perhaps stung by his criticism of the chain of command.1

Jonathan Landay, a McClatchy reporter who had been on the scene, wrote a series of stories describing how the details of the Marine Corps’ account of Meyer’s actions did not correspond

3 with what he or Swenson remembered. But in some respects Landay’s articles went too far, seeming to imply that because different men remember the chaos of a battlefield differently, then a calculated inflation must be at work. These things were suggested despite the fact that Meyer had consistently said that Will Swenson deserved the Medal of Honor and that he, Meyer, did not.

Moreover, to those with battlefield experience or knowledge of the complicated workings of human memory, the fact that two men remembered the particulars of a battle differently should hardly be tabloid fare. Moreover, it seems something less than a scandal that the Marine Corps would seek to promote with public honors and to make a role model out of a young man who, all agree, repeatedly risked his life to save the lives of his comrades.

What can be said, having reviewed the events and aftermath of Ganjgal, of the military’s contributions to civil society? For many, the events and aftermath would suggest that even considering the confusion and conflicting accounts, these events suggest that the military promotes courage as a virtue and that military men serve as reminders and role models of that essential virtue.

But others might use these events as evidence that the military has a perverting effect on American culture. In their view, the country promotes glamorizing narratives about patriotic, masculinist values to sanitize the reality of what was, in truth, only a grim and nasty affair. Sold on this false narrative, young men continue to volunteer to go to war.

Soldiers as Aggressors

This latter and now familiar critique has a long history. It had its heyday during the Vietnam War era but is in evidence among certain elites for much longer. Certainly, it has been detectable since at least World War I when the works of British poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon began to be used to support an argument that war, by definition, required the exploitation of young men by powerful states and inevitably returned them to society (if they returned at all), damaged in body and soul.

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In the contemporary American political conversation, those holding such views are cautious about giving voice to the full-throated version of this argument, partially because they do not believe it in every respect and partially because the American political center declines to accept that its young servicemen are turned into monsters by the military.

This alternative narrative has, however, met some success in the American mainstream and is dangerously seductive, based as it is on the kernel of truth that the battlefield can damage the soul of a warrior. When combined in the realm of policy with the seeming effort, even if inadvertent, to incentivize a victim mentality among veterans, it can become dangerous.

But for all of the confusion and suffering on that September battlefield in Ganjgal, can the Americans who fought there actually believe that their courage was ephemeral and their efforts to save their comrades without nobility or value? Can they really believe that nothing they did that day could ennoble them and make them better, prouder men, or that the stories of what they did could make American civic culture stronger?

Men who have been on such battlefields are trapped between two competing visions of their own experience: one that pushes them to see themselves as exploited victims and an opposite that envisions the battlefield as a somewhat sanitary, uniformly gallant place where every serviceman is a hero and nothing bad ever happens as a result of the incompetence or cowardice of an American. Trying to explain oneself in the face of these two popular accounts is difficult, especially when the truth—as it often does—lies somewhere in between.

Soldiers Standing Up

For veterans, the confused aftermath of the Ganjgal fight is not so much evidence of exploitative government mythmaking as it is illustrative of the chaos native to battlefields and to the memories men have of them.

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But amidst that chaos, men in Ganjgal that day saw things that defy easy placement in a narrative of exploitation. They saw some Americans, in the face of nearly certain death, get up and walk forward to save other men. When one sees things such as this, even in brief flashes, one knows that courage exists and that it is necessary for the survival of a group on the battlefield because the consequences for the group of the opposite behavior—cowardice—are devastating.

One can also see that courage can be motivated, often simultaneously, by love (of one’s comrades), hatred (of the enemy), and fear (of shame in the face of those whom one respects.) Of course, Aristotle would suggest that acts motivated by fear of shame are not really acts of courage. No historical account records that Aristotle was much of a soldier.

The complicated question of the nature of battlefield experience, and the even more complicated issue of a soldier remembering and reporting honestly on what happened to him on the battlefield, are principal themes of Karl Marlantes’s Vietnam War novel, Matterhorn, and of his memoir of his own experiences, What It Is like to Go to War. In Matterhorn, a young, somewhat callow and ambitious Marine lieutenant—clearly modeled on Marlantes—undergoes a battlefield education, coming to terms with the inevitability of his own death and the consequently limited list of those things that remain important in the face of that mortality.2

The fictional lieutenant turns into a fine officer, as did Marlantes, who brings to his writings the added credibility of having received the Navy Cross for his leadership in an assault up a particularly god-forsaken hillside in South Vietnam in 1969. When a company assault on a fortified North Vietnamese Army (NVA) strongpoint stalled and casualties were mounting quickly on the fire-swept slope, 24-year-old First Lieutenant Marlantes stood up and led the company out of the kill zone and certain death and to a costly victory.

Marlantes writes in his memoir with unusual directness and honesty of the political considerations that led to him being recognized with a medal while a fellow young Marine— whose actions were, in Marlantes’s opinion, no less heroic than his own—received no formal recognition, ostensibly because of the Marine’s participation in black-power activism. He writes

6 about his deep ambivalence about the award and his own struggles with trying to remain honest about what had actually happened that day.

Despite all of the remarkable things Marlantes is credited with doing on that battlefield, the only thing he states being uncomplicatedly proud of is the fact that, trapped with his Marines on the hillside and facing destruction if they remained there—but also aware of the near certainty of his own death if he stood up first and advanced up the hill—he stood up.

Let this be submitted, then, as the first identifiable benefit that the military provides to American civic culture: it helps make men such as Will Swenson, Dakota Meyer, and Karl Marlantes— who not only are confronted with the likely death of their friends but also faced with the likelihood of their own death should they attempt to save their friends—stand up.

Not only do men such as these serve as individual champions in the overseas service of the nation, but they also make Americans proud that, despite the relatively unheroic quality of most Americans’ daily lives—filled with, for example, dilemmas about commutes, grades at school, and whether or not the family budget will allow a trip next summer—America still produces men who will stand up under circumstances that few of us can realistically imagine.

At their best, these men who stand up have the humility and maturity to recognize that there is usually some level of disconnect between acts of courage on the battlefield and those acts’ just and consistent recognition in America’s system of public honors. The level is not that of total disconnection, but neither is there total consistency between acts and recognition. As one character in Marlantes’s novel says about a Bronze Star he has just deservedly received for valor, “A lot of people have done a lot more and gotten a lot less, and a lot of people have done a lot less and gotten a lot more.”3

But the inevitable inconsistencies in the public recognition of acts of bravery do not negate the need for a system of recognition or for the quality of the courageous acts themselves, which are real things as opposed to medals, which are symbols of real things. These public recognitions are the efforts of an institution to recognize what is best about its members and to contribute to a

7 useful side effect of the existence of heroic men: that their stories and the respect that their honors command in the community inspire other Americans to be courageous.

Americans will see in these men’s examples that courage is not a masculinist fiction but rather a necessity for group survival and an intrinsically noble thing. The battlefield is a place where being courageous might get you killed, but being cowardly will get everyone killed.

Training for Virtue

How does the military bring men with the capacity for such extraordinary sacrifice into being? In large part, it does not. These men already exist, brought into being by their parents, educated by their teachers, and forming their own view of the world and shaping their own characters through what they choose to read and watch and through which activities they choose to pursue.

Yet certain aspects of America’s peaceful, wealthy, and liberal society—with its emphasis on individual achievement, the acceptability of diverse ways of life, and the fact of human equality—are in tension with the virtues required for battlefield success: selflessness, commitment to a single group ethic, and a recognition that on the battlefield, human equality is a dangerous principle on which to rely.

In the classical liberal political theory developed by Thomas Hobbes, all men are equal in part because they all fear violent death and thus have an interest in the creation of sovereign states where they surrender some of the perfect freedom of the state of nature in return for safety and peace.4 But the battlefield is a place where in very noticeable ways, some men do not fear pain or death as much as others and where human inequalities of various kinds prove determinative of outcomes. It is a place where stronger, better equipped, and more daring men kill weaker, ill- equipped, and timid men with great regularity.

Thus, reducing military training to the act of handing out uniforms and weapons and then sending men off to war would obviously lead to disastrous results. Beyond simply providing familiarization with equipment and procedures, training must involve a reorientation to life and

8 must indoctrinate soldiers to the undemocratic world of the military, an illiberal institution that must succeed in an illiberal place, the battlefield, to defend America’s liberal polity.

All serious military training, then—from basic recruit training (boot camp) or a service academy’s summer indoctrination for its freshmen to more elite programs such as the Marine Corps’ Basic Reconnaissance Course or the Navy’s Basic Underwater Demolition School— display certain common traits: they inculcate physical and mental toughness, comfort with being uncomfortable, discipline, and a host of virtues that are less spectacular than the sorts of courage discussed earlier, but nonetheless necessary as antecedents for the flourishing of that courage.

One of the more challenging transitions a civilian must make as he leaves the democratic world of civil society and enters the armed forces is that of becoming accustomed to showing instant, willing obedience to orders. This can even be an issue in officer training programs, where, typically, the young men and women who make up the candidate pool have most or all of their college education already completed.

To observe the initial weeks of officer training is to note that college-educated young Americans tend to think they are good at commanding, but they are not always good at obeying. Those with worse problems than the average are typically dropped from the program while the rest must regularly demonstrate humility in their training environment—sometimes to a humiliating degree.

This process is necessary because of the nature of the human capital that is brought into the military. By its nature, the military tends to attract aggressive young people, and typically, the subsets of the service with the strongest reputations for discipline—primarily, ground combat organizations such as the Marine Corps—attract the most aggressive and, in a sense, most ambitious recruits.

This is a seeming paradox, but the tension between the natural aggressiveness of the individual recruit and the imposed discipline and obedience of the organization allows the military to succeed in combat. Individuals, and especially those in leadership roles, must be able to take

9 initiative when they are at a critical place on the battlefield, but they must also subordinate their needs and opinions to the good of the group and the whole organization.

Additionally, by channeling the natural aggression of young people—and especially, in practice, of young men—and offering an outlet for tempered and controlled aggression in service of the nation, the military performs yet another service to American civil society.

A regular corollary of polities with endemic political instability is not only poverty but also a high rate of underemployed young men. Young men tend to be not only aggressive but also honor seeking—that is, they desire the recognition of society. The military provides a well- designed path to that recognition, and works to return these young people back to society with their aggressive instincts melded with a sense of outward-focused duty. The US military makes Hectors, and works to keep Achilles off the streets.

One might be tempted to joke that military culture—this empire of subordinated egos and fetishization of the group—is a world that only a socialist could love, until one realizes that the role of the individual within this culture is actually very reminiscent of Edmund Burke’s observation on the old virtues of the aristocracy, among which is their capacity to both command and obey and to know the appropriate time for each.5

The Social Mixing Bowl

So, the military molds courageous Americans, reminds civil society of the importance of such a virtue, inculcates a plethora of more modest virtues necessary for courage, and tempers and imposes an awareness of duty on naturally aggressive young people, all of which are ingredients for the military’s success on unforgiving battlefields. It performs all of this molding, inculcating, and tempering at its training establishments and in the disciplined units that it fields in places such as Ganjgal. These subordinate institutions provide yet another benefit to civil society that, in the all-volunteer military, is diminished but has not disappeared: training establishments and operational units that are social mixing bowls.

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Even since the end of the draft, the military has remained reasonably well integrated in terms of race, region, and class. In racial matters, it carries the distinction of having been, institutionally, a national pioneer as a result of President Harry Truman’s order that it end the practice of segregated units. Today, it is entirely unremarkable to see someone of African or Hispanic descent commanding or supervising a military formation composed largely of those of European descent.

To the extent that the end of the draft has caused problems, it is with questions of economic class and regionalism: certain parts of the country and certain schools send many more children to the military than do others; it is uncommon to encounter a military officer who graduated from a civilian university regarded as “elite.” While the all-volunteer military has many benefits, this phenomenon is to the nation’s detriment.

In any event, there is some regional- and class-based mixing in the services, where college- educated young people from suburban Northern Virginia serve alongside enlistees from East Los Angeles or Upstate New York. This mixing is of obvious benefit to the country at large, insofar as it contributes to a greater sense among veterans and their families of the nation as a whole and unitary enterprise.

This mixing of people from different social backgrounds is also beneficial to the military. Servicemen and officers who come from well-off neighborhoods where you rarely need the police tend to approach problems in a certain way. (Typically, servicemen from this sort of background have often never been in a physical fight before their military training when, for example, training requires them to wrestle with other recruits or officer candidates.) Those who come from neighborhoods where the social and political fabric is a bit thinner— where individuals and families must aggressively protect their own interests, lest they be taken advantage of—tend to approach problems in a different way.

The battlefield tends to favor those with a wary attitude that inclines them to self-reliance and those with a tragic view of human nature. With some exceptions, those who grew up in better neighborhoods tend to mistake the success of the wealthy liberal democratic order as an

11 inevitable human phenomenon, meaning they have a habit of expecting others to be as civil and tolerant as their parents raised them to be. This can be a positive thing in many circumstances but, from the standpoint of battlefield preparation, can also be problematic.

Although a more pessimistic vision of human nature is problematic in many circumstances, it tends to be a useful attitude for those who will be engaged in fighting the Taliban, al-Qaeda, or America’s other enemies. It must be tempered with compassion and respect for, for example, noncombatants, but there is less of a moment of violent cognitive dissonance for someone with this view than for a more sheltered soul who suddenly finds himself in a place like Ganjgal where, despite his good intentions, his enemies simply want him dead, and violence is the only answer.

The battlefield is a pitiless tutor, and if the soldier is to survive and succeed, the gentler soul must learn his lessons about human nature quickly. Back in the days of conscription, a certain balanced and tempered attitude about the human condition tended to trickle back into American elites because veterans were well represented in those elites.

Facing the World’s Putins

There is something about men like Vladimir Putin that is, on a basic level, beyond the ken of liberalism’s progressive assumptions. If in the past humans behaved as if they sometimes preferred war and strict hierarchies, this was simply because history had not yet progressed to the point where we collectively learned that such things were not appropriate for human flourishing. US Secretary of State John Kerry’s remark in March 2014 that, by seizing Crimea, Putin was behaving “in a 19th-century way” is an unintentionally self-parodic example of this attitude.6

Americans’ first instinct is not to believe that, on a fundamental level, Putin-like leaders or Iran’s leaders do not want what we want. As a result, Americans are often slow to understand that the only thing that will prevent or forestall their efforts to reduce the scope of the liberal order will be the firmest of hands or, in the extreme, either violence or the threat of violence. A liberal democratic order cannot defend itself without recourse to illiberal observations and practices.

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Thus, there is a need for the military’s illiberal attitudes and for the partial proliferation of those attitudes throughout civil society. The military—specifically, military professionals—provides a hard but necessary element to the heterogenic American character: the aggressive, spirited element that allows the whole to defend itself.

This element is necessarily in tension with the whole, inasmuch as its basic principles are often in tension with the basic thrust of daily life in the West.7 Thus, military professionals face the task of maintaining their art while also maintaining the trust of the other dimensions of society.

The military has, by and large, successfully maintained that trust, even after the Vietnam War era. Typically, it does so through the creation of a particular kind of career professional—the dutiful, reserved senior officer who could explain to policymakers and the public the role of the armed services as part of the larger picture of national policy; paradigmatically, this category of professional includes men like George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower who seemed, in the words of MacArthur, to pray for peace but be ever prepared for war.

And prepared they were as practitioners of the technical aspects of organized violence and as men who were thoroughly comfortable with the grim aspects of their art. Despite public perception of him as a tough but mild-mannered Kansan, Eisenhower was capable, as his aide Harry Butcher recorded in July 1944, of proposing the following to the British ambassador to Washington over lunch:

Ike repeated his views that the German General Staff regards this war and the preceding one as merely campaigns in their dogged determination first to dominate Europe and eventually the world. He would exterminate all of the General Staff. . . . Ike guessed about 3,500 [men made up the General Staff]. He added he would include for liquidation leaders of the Nazi Party from mayors on up and all members of the Gestapo.8

Note that Butcher said this in July 1944, before knowledge of the Holocaust was widespread among Americans, and during the European theater of World War II, the good theater of the good war.

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The Real Civil-Military Divide

Having successfully defended the nation from the existential threat posed by Fascism, the US military faced a more complex challenge during the long struggle against Communism when the far left, with some success, promoted the case that the true threat to the American polity was not the Soviet Union but American militarism in concert with nationalism, capitalism, and everything else that stood in the way of the Politburo’s genuine desire for international peace and human rights.

The defeat of the Soviet Union and the effective transformation of Communist China into a regime that, whatever it is, is not recognizably Marxist has somewhat blunted this complaint, and the American public remains favorably inclined toward the armed services. But the character of the American public has changed since the conclusion of World War II. Some of these changes have been positive—for example, the long-overdue civil rights revolution, which ended the acceptability of using skin color as grounds for discrimination. Some changes—such as the sexual revolution—have had more complicated legacies for American civil society.

Whether positive or negative, these social changes—which could fairly be described as progressive in character—also affect the military. While the civil-military divide is a genuine problem for the country, it is not the case that there is no social communication between the military and civil society. The military, after all, answers to the president and his civilian appointees and is regulated and funded by Congress. The military is also composed of men who, by definition, were raised in civil society.

Generally speaking, if a given change has been positive for society, as in the case of the civil rights revolution, then it has been positive for the military, too. But other societal shifts have the potential to damage the military’s necessary illiberal character and its ability to perform its primary function: defending the nation and its interests.

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Integrating Women into Ground Combat Arms Communities. The first example of such a potentially devastating shift is the effort to integrate women into ground combat arms communities within the services. Women have served in the military—as of recently, in aviation and at sea—with distinction, but it has always been national policy to restrict them from the infantry, special operations, and related roles because of the average disparity between male and female physical capacity and the disciplinary problems involved with combining very young men and women in austere environments.

This changed in January 2013 when Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta decreed the reversing of this policy and required the services to consider whether to apply for exemptions, with a final decision forthcoming in January 2016. The policy of segregation according to sex had fallen victim to one of the most important arguments made by proponents of American feminism: that in principle, there should be no professional opportunities in America unavailable to women, and proportional differences between the number of men and women within any given profession is primarily a sign of unjust social inequality.

Therefore, insofar as a small number of women should, in proportion to the available pool of men, be able to meet the physical standards of these communities, women should be allowed to serve in them. There are at least two serious problems with the change. The first is that there is no way that those who have promoted this shift will allow standards to be maintained at their current levels, which would have the consequence of permitting only an extremely small number of women to serve in these units.

Already, there is pressure in the services to think through various physical standards and events in the training programs for these communities and to rationalize them and justify their necessity on an increasingly technological battlefield—that is, to consider lowering or weakening standards. The military, it appears, is slowly but surely moving toward lowering its physical standards in the name of social justice.

The second problem is that even assuming that standards can be maintained, there will be immense disciplinary problems involved in the shift. In particular, in the infantry—the largest

15 community affected by this shift—the average age within operational units is extremely young. The consequences of integrating male and female 19-year-olds and sending them not only to war but also to the front lines—away from the relative order of the camps where the majority of deployed service members live and work abroad—will be devastating to the efficiency of the units in question. The resulting problems will amount to far more than a “leadership challenge.”

Proponents argue that similar points were made against the racial integration of the military and were proven false. Proponents can argue this because they are committed to the premise that gender is, like skin color, a superficial distinction and that the differences between men and women are, like race, social constructions rather than meaningful consequences of biology.

Reasoning of this quality leads to the seeming paradox that at a time when policymakers are concerned with sexual assault in the military, they are simultaneously pursuing this dramatic gender policy change, despite the fact that its enforcement will, without a doubt, lead to more rather than less sexual assault in the military.

The Victim Mentality. A second example of the way social shifts are harming the military’s character is the proliferation of a victim mentality in society at large and especially among combat veterans, in the form of what General James Mattis has thoughtfully called the “disease- orientation,” which is increasingly associated with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Rather than seeing posttraumatic stress as a natural and inevitable consequence of the experience of combat—and as something that naturally fades—and PTSD as a (much) more rare but nonetheless manageable psychological response to severe trauma, civil society and the military are increasingly persuaded by what used to be a left-wing argument that to be a veteran is necessarily to be a victim, or to be damaged and in need of society’s care and wary pity rather than respect.9

Lack of familiarity—among the public at large and their representatives in Congress—with the nature of military service also plays a role in this issue. Well-meaning civilians, including those who certainly would not claim to agree that veterans are by definition victims, end up supporting

16 veteran benefits that are structured in such a way that veterans are incentivized to claim ever more in the way of disabilities.

This phenomenon could be explained by a desire on the part of the nonserving public and their representatives in Congress to “pay back” those who have served, but it is problematic. Many veterans have been disabled by their service, either physically or otherwise, and deserve robust benefits and support from society. But benefits that are structured in ways that incentivize victim mentality have a negative effect, and both ends of the political spectrum contribute to the problem.

But while it is understandable that those who have not served might not appreciate the threat to the military of such social and policy shifts, surely military professionals themselves ought to be aware. One would expect that they would be responding—respectfully but forcefully—in public to these efforts. And yet they are not. Why?

There are various reasons for this state of affairs, not the least of which is that for officers at all levels, there is little to no incentive to be controversial. The officer personnel system generally rewards the avoidance of failure, not the achievement of success, which are two very different things. If the generals and admirals that this system has conditioned and produced are naturally hypersensitive to the demands of Congress and the president (which in the US system of government is of course not entirely a bad thing), then the officers who serve at lower levels are, in turn, hypersensitive to the generals and admirals.

Perhaps most critically, we should not ignore the fact that every military leader is by definition a product of civil society. The “civil-military divide” is in some ways a useful concept, but an overemphasis on it can obscure the fact the civil society and the military exist in a complex and subtle interaction. Again, America’s officers grew up and were educated by civil society. Those officers who attended a military service academy received more or less standard-quality college educations, with all that entails. It is no surprise that they are not immune to the shifts in civil society’s mores.

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Additionally, politicians and civilian leaders who have not served in the military provide little resistance to these changes in military culture. Despite the interaction between the military and civil society, the all-volunteer force has in fact created a situation where the bulk of Americans have no military service experience and thus have less of an innate sense regarding what might or might not be reasonable policy.

Many civilians who have not served, including those who have been elected or appointed to public office with oversight over the military, tend to defer judgment about these matters to the military. Thus, if military professionals are inclined to promote or at least make no public objections to these changes, they and the policymakers driving the changes will continue to meet little resistance, even among those civilians who might have reason to be skeptical.

Conclusion

The military’s contribution to the American civic character has been a positive one. At their best, military professionals have contributed an essential voice to the national political conversation, reminding the world that there are illiberal forces beyond the boundaries of the liberal order and that the military—America’s necessarily illiberal institution—knows how to deal with them, when necessary. Veterans have brought elements of that world view back with them when they reenter civil society, consequently contributing something tough and resilient to the national character. But as society grows increasingly uncomfortable with what the military has to believe and do to be successful on the battlefield—such as harsh training, strict discipline, and a preferential focus on battlefield excellence at the expense of other potential social goods—both the national defense and national character are likely to suffer.

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Author Biography

Aaron MacLean is a combat veteran, having served in Afghanistan in the Marine Corps. He previously taught English literature at the Naval Academy and is currently the managing editor of the Washington Free Beacon.

Notes

1. David Nakamura, “For Medal of Honor Recipient Capt. William Swenson, a Rocky Path to the White House,” Washington Post, October 12, 2013. 2. See Karl Marlantes, What It Is like to Go to War (New York: Grove Press, 2012); and Marlantes, Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War (New York: Grove Press, 2011). 3. Marlantes, What It Is like to Go to War, 168. 4. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 1994), 74– 78. For an excellent discussion of why and how Hobbes’s liberal theory fails to account for why some men seem to fear violent death less than others, see Waller Newell, Tyranny: A New Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 75–80. 5. See Edmund Burke, “An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs” (Liberty Fund), http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/660. Burke notes that aristocrats learn this skill by being “habituated in armies.” 6. See Reid J. Epstein, “Kerry: Russia Behaving like It’s the 19th Century,” Politico, March 2, 2014, www.politico.com/blogs/politico-live/2014/03/kerry-russia-behaving-like-its-the-th-century-184280.html. Kerry’s remark was an echo of sorts of President George W. Bush’s remark in the wake of the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008: “Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century.” See “President Bush’s Statement on Georgia,” New York Times, August 15, 2008. 7. At an even deeper level, the classic warrior type—the man who does not fear death and wants only glory—may be fundamentally at odds with a liberal society predicated on the fear of death and the desire for pleasure. But this is beyond the scope of this paper. 8. Harry Butcher, My Three Years with Eisenhower: The Personal Diary of Captain Harry C. Butcher, USNR, Naval Aide to General Eisenhower, 1942 to 1945 (New York: Simon and Schuster: 1946), 609. 9. For an excellent discussion of this issue, including its background in Vietnam and observations on General Mattis’s remarks on the subject, see Mackubin Thomas Owens, “Life After Wartime: Combating the Veteran-as- Victim Narrative,” Weekly Standard, June 2, 2014, http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/life-after- wartime_793486.htmlwww.weeklystandard.com/articles/life-after-wartime_793486.html.

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