iscover
It may seem like a debate about semantics, but how we describe the brave individuals who defend our society can shape their mindset – for better or worse.
When the United States’ new Secretary of Defense was sworn in last week, he promised to “revive the warrior ethos and restore trust in our military”.
“We are American warriors,” Pete Hegseth said. “We will defend our country.”
Many modern militaries and the politicians who control them – and the US is particularly guilty of this – are fond of painting their service men and women as a warrior elite, each of whom espouses a warrior ethos to overcome whatever enemy they are called upon to defeat.
They’re proud, they’re fierce and they possess the will to win at all costs.
At least, that’s the theory, but it can be argued that it is a dangerous way to frame any professional force based on citizen soldiers. At the end of the day, soldiers and warriors are two very different things, and more often than not – particularly in the last 20 or so years – conflicts have historically been between one and the other.
Two decades of counter-insurgency warfare have seen professional soldiers take on tribal and religious warriors across the Middle East and further afield, and the mindsets of the two could not be more different.
To put it simply, a soldier is disciplined, trained in arms to operate within a chain of command and employed to carry out the sharp end of a country’s wider political aims. They wear a uniform, carry a rank and are paid for their service. They are, in short, professionals, and – perhaps more importantly – can be stood down once a conflict is concluded.
A warrior, however, is a far more nebulous construct. They are rarely professional and often ununiformed. They are loosely organised under tribal or similar structures and blur the line between civilians and fighters. Once an Afghan tribesman puts aside his rifle and vest, he looks like any other farmer or herder. Warriors fight for a cause, rarely a nation, per se. The Taliban, to again push that analogy, have never fought for Afghanistan – they fight to protect and enact their fundamentalist religious beliefs.
Warriors, in this sense, also rarely have little care for international humanitarian law and are prone to acts of violence that all too often escalate into full-blown war crimes.
Is that the warrior ethos Hegseth is talking about?
The Australian experience
Writing for The Australian in 2021, former Australian Army officer Rodger Shanahan responded to an Anzac Day address to his staff by then Secretary of Home Affairs Michael Pezzullo with some dismay.
“I had concerns, too,” Shanahan said, speaking of the general response to the address, which had been published a few days before in the same publication, “but less because of some of its alarmist phrasing – ‘free nations again hear the beating drums (of war)’ – and more because of the worrying way the author described military personnel. Nowhere could there be found a reference to soldiers, sailors or aviators, servicemen and women, or even ADF personnel.”
“Instead, we heard reference to warriors six times – including, perhaps in deference to the Amazons, a reference to our female warriors.”
Shanahan noted that throughout his military experience, the appellation of warrior was rarely, if ever, used to describe serving members of the Australian armed forces. In his experience, serving was exactly that – providing a necessary service, as a professional soldier, before returning to private life as a citizen once more.
“But more recently there has been some effort made to craft an identity onto the role of servicemen and women that is at odds with what that service is about,” Shanahan wrote.
“Use of the word warriors to describe them places them somehow above other citizens, rather than just performing their service.”
As a case in point, Shanahan referenced the Brereton report, which had only been published the year before. The term warrior appears 19 times in that report, and never in a promising light, but rather criticising the rise and celebration of a “warrior culture” within the military. The fact that domestic commanders of the Special Air Service Regiment were also embracing this culture, the report said, led almost directly to an environment where war crimes became not just acceptable, but something to be proud of.
According to Shanahan – and it’s difficult not to agree with him – any reference to Australian Defence Force personnel as warriors “should ring alarm bells that the lessons of the Brereton inquiry about embracing a warrior culture, if only in the words used to describe the military, may not have been absorbed by the senior civilian leadership”.
And now we have the United States’ senior civilian leadership embracing that same, troubling warrior myth.
The same week that Shanahan published his piece, the American historian Bret Devereaux wrote something similar for the journal Foreign Policy. In a piece called The US Military Needs Citizen-Soldiers, Not Warriors, Devereaux framed the idea firmly and simply.
“For the warrior, war is an identity,” Devereaux wrote.
“For the soldier, it is a job done in service to a larger community, polity, or authority.”
Which answers this article’s question pretty neatly. We should strive to train and support professional soldiers, not warriors for whom a state of war becomes a dangerous default.
