OFF THE WIRE
IF YOU CONSIDER YOURSELF A REAL WARRIOR YOU'LL READ THIS AND UNDERSTAND IT:
The following quote epitomizes the gap between what soldiers wish they were, and the modern battle field today:
“Out of every hundred men, ten shouldn’t be there, eighty are are just
targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for
they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will
bring the others back.” (Attributed to Heraclitus, I have a sneaking
suspicion this quote has been mis-attributed; the same page has a common
misquoting of Orwell and Churchill. I've read too many popular "clever"
quotes that I later find are inaccurate.)
True or not, the above
quote has joined “We sleep safely at night because rough men stand
ready to visit violence on those who would do us harm,” as one of the
quotes that make up the military psyche, and ethos of the military. Many
soldiers point to this and say "This is what a warrior is. This
describes war. This describes me." But this quote doesn't describe war
or warriors, at least not in the last hundred years. The warrior, if he
ever existed, was long ago replaced by machines, mechanization, and the
new modern battlefield.
First, the modern battlefield is one of
specialization. Only half of the Army is involved directly in combat
duties, many are human resources technicians, electricians or
repairmen. This battlefield is a battlefield of naval aircraft carriers;
where one person's entire job is changing food and drinks in the
vending machines. Is a vending machine operator a warrior? (One could
make the argument this is a great thing, that we have isolated our "real
fighters," according to the quote, in the combat roles. But of course,
there is no "warrior" test.)
Second, modern weapons commit
massive violence on a massive scale that is often random and
unpreventable. They do not distinguish between warrior and non-warrior,
fighter and non-fighter, nor can the warrior defend himself from those
weapons the way he could sword and spear. The modern battlefield is a
battlefield of cruise missiles, guided bombs and TOW missiles; a
battlefield made up of IEDs and mortar shells. When soldiers ran over
the trenches in World War I, the machine gun bullets didn’t distinguish
between warriors and the rest. There is nothing the warrior could have
done to prevent his death. Often, there is nothing he can do today to
prevent the IED exploding. (Again, you could argue the soldier could
prevent IEDs by winning over the local population with great
counter-insurgency, but this also goes against the common view of the
"warrior" and certainly isn't what Heraclitus meant.)
Which gets
at the point behind this quote. There is a rugged individualism, a sense
in which the warrior (and by extension every soldier who reads the
quote and sees themselves in it) controls his own destiny. His skill and
bravery alone will win the battle. But in the random capriciousness of
bombs from the sky, this just isn’t true. One man can't, and won't make
the difference.
Third, distance destroys the warrior. How far
away can a soldier be from a battlefield and still be considered a
soldier? Is the bomber pilot a warrior? Do his remote bombing make the
difference in the battle? What about the analyst sighting targets safely
in a Super FOB, does he make the difference? What about the Sailor who
fires the cruise missile? The pilots flying predator drones in Nevada
consider themselves soldiers, but I don't think anyone would call them
warriors. At least not on the same level of the soldiers Heraclitus was
talking about.
When did the warrior die (or at least stop making a
difference)? Certainly he was dead by World War I and II; two wars
fought in such numbers, no individual made a difference. Bullets,
killing thousands in Antietam, fired at near random did not distinguish
warrior and fighter. Once the bullet was invented, the warrior knights
were killed; once armor was invented, peasant warriors were slaughtered.
The impact of the warrior pales in comparison to the impact of
technology. Perhaps, if the quote refers to the inventor of the long bow
and the bullet, it would be accurate.
I said in the beginning
“if the warrior” ever existed. Michael recently forced me to read a
section of John Keegan's A History of Warfare, and his description of
the phalanx style warfare of the Greeks--the age in which Heraclitus
wrote--is a model of randomness. Two phalanxes crash into one another,
then poke and spear at one another to find a gap. Once the phalanx is
cracked, they push through, and the phalanx disperses, and everyone runs
away. And once again, the warrior doesn’t make a difference, the
weakest link does.
