The Way of the Warrior

Article from the Spectator about how the US military is reinventing its self-image -- not as soldiers, but as "warriors." This is more than a semantic change, it is a change in role and in meaning.

US soldiers were to be pure war-fighters. Achilles was resurrected as the model.

And it has consequences for the place of the military in our society:

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.

This attitude is retrograde, primitive -- at best, the reactionary modernism of fascist warrior bands. It is antithetical to democracy, as the Iliad itself shows. Achilles' rage threatened the social and political fabric of Greek democracy; the poem describes the problem of integrating warriors into a democratic society.

More comments on this from Wolcott, here.