The dangers of a small volunteer army
I must confess to knowing nothing of what I speak today. I have never killed a man, nor donned a uniform, nor endured basic training. I have never taken orders, given orders, served in combat. I have never looted a conquered city, raped its women, burned its palaces. I have never been wounded in battle, nor crippled, nor killed. I have never won a medal, nor ordered men to march into certain death, nor been splattered by a friend’s brains.
Therefore, you may well ask, why do I dare to even broach this topic?
I dare because it is of the greatest importance. To the freedom and liberty of the citizens of a great nation, and the safety of its neighbors and the world.
Everything I have learned, or dared to learn, of combat and soldiering, has come to me through the tales I have read and heard and watched enacted. And it struck me that there is a deep difference between war stories told by men who have gone to war, and those told by men who have not; there is a difference between wars ordered and commanded by men who have not served, and those commanded by men who have served; there is a difference between the attitude of the populace towards its military whether that populace is made up of men who have served, or men who never served.
There is also a difference between the warrior and the soldier.
The warrior has existed since the first conquest. We can liken him to the chimpanzees, the young males who have no females to mount, who dare not fight tooth and nail against the dominant male, and who roam in small punk-bands about the edges of the clan’s territory. The warrior lives for plunder and loot. When he gets it, he calls himself a prince and gets to play dominant male himself, and mount all the females he fancies.
Most sports and athletic games are trials for youths, training to be warriors. In societies where warriors are allowed, they are honored, and boys dream of one day being warriors themselves.
The soldier acts out of duty (or orders) to defend his city’s interests, or advance them. His dream is not to be a soldier, but to be something else – or he takes to soldiering as another man takes to tinkering or tailoring or wood-cutting, as a trade.
In any society where most of the young men are put into the military, they become soldiers. In those societies where only a few of the young men enter the military, they become warriors.
Soldiers think of themselves as common men like any others.
Warriors think of themselves as an elite class, superior to the civilians for whom they feel disdain as weaklings unable to defend themselves, dependent upon the few, the proud, the warrior caste.
In the society where soldiering is the rule, most men out of the military have been in it, and they know it, inside and out. They know its foolishness, its bravado, its insanity, and its glory. They have no great love for the military and have no delusions as to the unsullied perfection of its soldiers; but they have a fondness for it, and some pity for the poor bastards at the bottom rungs of command. For the generals they feel only contempt – the same sarcastic contempt office workers feel for the top levels of management. Like management, generals take all the prizes, do none of the work, suffer none of the risks, and strut about spouting profane boasts in their own arcane lingo.
In the society where soldiering is rare, and hence only warriors fight, civilians know nothing of what goes on during the campaign; they only know what the generals tell them, and thus they believe all the generals’ lies. They worship their warriors, and think they are all moral, unimpeachable, just, right, fearless, unconquerable.
In every warfaring community (by this I mean the community of the military, whether of soldiers or of warriors) all newcomers must undergo a process of hazing. This is something known to fraternal orders of all kinds, at least in masculine society – I will not hazard a guess as to the initiatory procedures among the female societies. Among warrior castes, the hazing tends to be more informal and individual; among soldiers in armies, the hazing is professional, universal, and operates under formal strictures: it is known as basic training or boot camp.
An army of warriors is a collection of individuals, each striving for individual prizes of glory and loot. An army of soldiers is a mass, and must be soldered together into a mass. Basic training is the process whereby the individual citizens are made into that mass.
When the general gives an order to send 500 men into certain death, at issue is the success or failure of the campaign, perhaps the war and the polis itself. Whether any one soldier lives or dies is immaterial – perhaps not entirely immaterial, for the loss of each soldier lessens the total force the army has at its disposal for the next assault or defense – but what matters is the success of the campaign, the assault, the defense. If one out of every three soldiers dies, if the losses must mount so high to reach the hoped-for results of the generals’ plans, then so be it. The price must be paid.
Of course, this is not the outlook of the soldier who will be so immolated. He naturally would rather live. He will live, he will desert, he will flee, rather than get blown to bits.
Only the esprit de corps, the madness of the soldering that basic training has accomplished, will keep him a unit of his command, and not an individual man. Thus it is that the process of basic training is to destroy each recruit’s soul, break him, and remake and rebuild him as the brainwashed soldier, who will obey the order to cast himself into the fire, and who will do anything to preserve the integrity of his platoon.
It is a hallmark of a republic that it musters its armies from its citizens, as soldiers, who take up arms to defend their city, and put them down again when peace is won. It is a hallmark of an empire that it musters its armies from the few, attracting them with promises of loot and glory, exalts them to a false feeling of superiority, and wields these warriors for conquest – the conquest of faroff cities, neighbor cities, and even their fellow-citizens.
When a republic trades in its soldiers for warriors, it cannot stand as a republic for long. It will turn empire, with all the folly and ugliness that term brings.
And we will cheer our warriors, and imagine they are pure, and stalwart; and we will honor our generals, and imagine they know what they are talking about; and we will support our princes when they tell us conquest is defending the homeland.
And we will deserve it richly, when in due course of time, our warriors take up arms against our princes, and put the generals upon thrones, and take their loot from our own treasuries, and rape our sisters and daughters and wives.
(Composed on keyboard Monday, September 15, 2008)
