True Faith And Allegiance: The Burden of Military Ethics

2. The U.S. Military: Sovereign or Subordinate?

2. The U.S. Military Sovereign or Subordinate? In its proper manifestation the jealousy between civil and military spirits is a healthy symptom. —Alfred Thayer Mahan (1903) In Robert Heinlein's remarkable novel Starship Troopers, a student is asked to explain the difference between a soldier and a civilian. Drawing upon his course text, the student responds: "The difference . . . lies in the field of civic virtue. A soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The civilian does not/'1 Aristotle argued that in order to understand something, one had to inquire into its functions: What, after all, was it supposed to do? To understand the United States military, one has to ask the same question. What is the United States military supposed to do? Military Tasks The preeminent military task, and what separates it from all other occupations, is that soldiers are routinely prepared to kill. Even policemen, who must also often deal with violence, do not routinely train to kill. One can argue, of course, using the Army as an example, that there are combat support and combat service support branches in addition to the combat arms (such as infantry and artillery). But every soldier undergoes initial entry training known as BCT (basic combat training), and every soldier has to be qualified in BRM (basic rifle marksmanship ). Every soldier, in short, is an infantryman. If U.S. Army positions are overrun in the heat of combat, enemy The U.S. Military 23 forces do not pause to investigate a soldier's MOS (military occupational specialty). Contending that every soldier is a "trained killer" brings on self-conscious chuckles among young soldiers and invites scorn from critics. For many years the U.S. military itself has downplayed this most basic fact of its existence: its purpose is to kill national enemies of the United States. Soldiers are, or are supposed to be, masters of the arts of violence. That is why they are paid. But the thought of killing is unsettling, as it should be, to decent and rational people. Military ethics is a burden precisely because the profession of arms is centrally concerned with killing but must also be a paragon of virtue, able always to distinguish the honorable from the shameful—one of the reasons military ethics must study examples both of integrity and of corruption. An army or a navy or an air force is thus not primarily about job training—or building roads, or delivering mail, or milking cows. There are many other organizations and agencies to do those things. But only the military is called upon, in time of war, to risk life and limb to protect the nation's safety. When soldiers are not actually killing, they should be training to kill. The president of Boston University, John Silber, explains this concept succinctly: I was once asked by a friend to recommend his son for the U.S. Naval Academy. I asked in response, "Does your son want to be a professional killer?" And he said, "Well, no, of course not. He wants to be a peacemaker." I replied, "Well, then, tell him to enter a seminary." A person not prepared to use his skill, knowledge, techniques , and all the weapons at his disposal for the purpose of killing on behalf of the United States of America when ordered to do so has no business in the military. That is the military's ultimate business.2 In addition to killing and preparing to kill, the soldier has two other principal duties, rarely discussed—and probably never discussed by recruiters. Some soldiers die; when they are not dying, they must be preparing to die. From time immemorial, 24 TRUE FAITH AND ALLEGIANCE young men (and now young women) have joined armies the world over in time of national peril. Only very occasionally are these youths forced to consider their mortality. (As we grow older, we attend funerals more frequently, an all too constant reminder of our own approaching end.) It is difficult enough— and a good thing too,—to convert decent young people into soldiers prepared to kill; it is practically impossible for them to think of themselves as the objects of others' military actions. Everyone who has been a soldier in time of war has witnessed friends go off to battle questioning, in most...