The Warrior Ethos: Military Culture and the War on Terror (review)

Christopher Coker's slim but ambitious The Warrior Ethos: Military Culture and the War on Terror offers an intriguing thesis. Coker posits a "warrior ethos," a set of values and beliefs that defines a kind of Western fighter, and examines how that ethos evolved over time and has come under attack in recent decades. At heart, The Warrior Ethos is a meditation on the values and expectations society attaches to warfare and their effect on the individuals who bear the fighting in wartime.

The author bases the warrior ethos on Achilles, his archetypal Western warrior, and attributes to it values like self-sacrifice, valor, and a willingness to go beyond the call of duty. Coker argues that contemporary culture has "hollowed out" the warrior ethos by failing to honor those values: we have become a society skeptical of those who adhere to the warrior code and suspicious that those who do may love war too much. Later chapters discuss the influence of technology on warfare and the warrior ethos, arguing that the isolating effects of modern technology have removed the warrior from the battlefield, throwing those who maintain the warrior ethos into an existential crisis. The erosion of the warrior ethos, Coker contends, occurs at great peril to societies still dependent on these values in those they send to fight, for it is the warrior's ethos that limits atrocity and the deliberate targeting of civilians.

Coker draws on a wide variety of sources to sustain his arguments. Each of the six chapters draws evidence from popular culture, psychology, ancient history, philosophy, literature, and memoir. Because of the varied source material, some readers may find the discussion disjointed; one typical three-paragraph passage includes references to Hobbes, The Terminator, Serbian rebels, Russian commandos, and a Vonnegut passage that in turn cites Miami Vice and Clint Eastwood. The roundabout nature of the discussion is both a benefit and a liability: it allows the author to introduce an enormous variety of ideas and evidence, but prevents the analysis from dwelling in any one place for long. Given the breadth of material on display here, one wonders whether Coker has selected evidence that supports his observations while avoiding that which does not. Nevertheless, many of Coker's insights are intriguing and salient, particularly those drawn from popular culture. Hollywood, he contends, has detached the warrior from his mythic past by introducing irony and postmodernism into its war films, yielding a new warrior archetype who must be tormented by his participation in battle.

The meandering path of the analysis will frustrate some, and the subtitle is somewhat misleading, as only a small part of the book deals directly with the warrior ethos since 2001. But anyone interested in the meaning societies attach to warfare and the way it affects the individuals who prosecute it will find much to consider in these pages.