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Cue Up The Band
Peggy Noonan writes today in the Wall Street Journal that the US needs a military that acts swiftly and doesn’t brag. I agree with that first point — especially with the suggestion that we should have cut to the chase and sent in the troops to rescue the kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls. The military would have been delighted to execute such an assignment, a good thing would have been accomplished, and we would have demonstrated that America hasn’t completely forgotten how to flex its muscles. Nigeria’s not going to declare war on us. And is the international community likely to get on their high horse over the rescue of innocent girls? And so what if they do?
I wasn’t as convinced, however, by her assertion that great militaries shouldn’t brag. I understand the principle behind it: don’t showboat and let the guns do the talking. But I suspect the truth is that pomp and ceremony have always been a component of military might — and probably for good reason. Triumphalism is actually pretty effective at producing the “shock and awe” factor that great militaries like to inspire in civilian populations, both at home and abroad. I myself tend to react reflexively against propaganda, so the flag-waving jingoism often misses with me, but there’s no denying that plenty of people like it and it tends to make an impression. Compared to missiles and tanks, flags and musicians are cheap and safe. If there’s a chance of forestalling a war with a parade … throw the parade.
On a less utilitarian level, I’m inclined to think that the bragging may actually be a healthy and natural part of military prowess. Of course, I say that as someone who has never had any justification whatsoever to engage in that kind of self-aggrandizement. But I’m guided here mainly by reflection on how soldiers and military pomp were regarded historically. There seems to have been widespread agreement among the ancients that soldiers fought for honor and, insofar as they did their jobs valiantly, deserved it in a way that few other members of society did. Sedentary brainiacs (read: people like me or Peggy Noonan) find it easy to wrinkle our noses and piously suggest that war is no laughing matter. The people who are throwing the parades, however, know this far better than we.
In antiquity, I gather that it was pretty standard for victorious generals to throw themselves a showy parade after a successful campaign. I can recall a passage in St. Thomas Aquinas’ Disputed Questions on the Virtues in which he actually classifies these triumphalist displays as proper expressions of courage. He’s making a point about how virtue calls for different things at different times. He illustrates this through the example of a courageous solder, who before the battle manifests his virtue by soberly preparing himself to fight, during the battle manifests it by fighting valiantly, and afterwards shows the same virtue by participating in the parade. In other words, St. Thomas sees these displays of pomp as an organic part of the good soldier’s military life.
Are military parades pompously ostentatious? Or does the discomfort some people feel at them say more about our uneasy relationship to honor and military might more generally?
Published in General
I lost respect for her when she was on an early edition of the Colbert show. It wasn’t too long after Bush was re-elected, and he asked her about her role on the campaign, a role she grossly exaggerated. Specifically, he asked her her what she felt proud about Bush doing or standing for. She demurred, and he pressed her, reducing the demand to one good thing that Bush had done or was going to do. She said she couldn’t think of one.
I thought that that was one of the greatest moments of moral cowardice I have ever seen. I have absolutely no doubt that, while she “regrets” the Obama support, she could still respond to a similar question about Obama without difficulty.
This is true, but it can be a battle or a campaign that is over; there were, properly, VE day celebrations before VJ day. If AFRICOM were properly funded and the political will were there, finding and freeing the girls should have been relatively cheap and distinct enough that a victory celebration would have been entirely appropriate, the operation being entirely complete.
When did the “Obama Supporter Peggy Noonan” repent? Is there a link? Did she also apologize to Sarah Palin? Is there a link?
After such an epic display of poor judgment and viciousness, why do we care what Peggy Noonan writes?
Obama finds it hard to admit that Islamic militants exist, much less brag about handing them a defeat.
Yes you do. Colorado Springs. And we want you here to fight the rising tide of lefties abandoning California after having destroyed it.
Good grief, whatever gave you that impression? The military would not be delighted to do that at all. It would put our military in a weakened position by diverting forces from where they might be needed to protect us, they would be chasing phantoms and ghosts over a huge territory, and we would be entangled in a region that has no impact on our country.
Where were all these do-gooders when boys were being (and still are) kidnapped to fight in armies? They risk getting shot and killed at a much more deadly rate than these girls.
It’s not our business and not our fight. I don’t care enough to lose an American life to save these young girls. Someone else can save them. Or not. I don’t much care. We are not the world’s police force.
Furthermore, how would a commander in chief justify the use of the military to conduct this pure do-goodism mission? There’s no declaration of war. There is no emergency where the Congress hasn’t time to act to declare war. There isn’t a treaty to be complied with. The only way the President could act in this situation is to either ignore the Constitution and the laws of this country (though I concede that Prof Yoo would argue that the President has unconstrained executive power to do whatever he wants so long as it involves foreigners or American citizens who aren’t physically located within our borders), or the rely on the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that G.W. Bush used to invade Iraq and Afghanistan and the Philipines and Yemen . . . . Somehow the irony of Obama using that law to invade Nigeria is lost on his supporters and those who would blindly let our men get killed anywhere, so long as they get to feel like they are saving the world and they aren’t the ones getting killed.
I am forever amazed at you tackling subjects you have neither knowledge nor experience of.
Parades have two distinct purposes. One is performance of the LPM, the sign of proper discipline AND basis for previous combat maneuvering (see the Greek phalanx through the Roman legions, all the way to the Napoleonic era wars and the Civil War). Units then needed both the discipline and skill to maneuver on the battlefield to be able to change front and present to a different direction.
The second reason, both ancient and modern, is to allow the populace to demonstrate to the soldier that he is forgiven for his act of combat and killing and accepted back into society. No species desires to kill itself. The acts of war are harsh, not only in the physical sense, but in the psychological one too. The parade is a way of society saying, “Welcome back home. You’re still one of us.” Without it, you get the lost generation of soldiers that are represented by the Vietnam war, and to this day they are still the “forgotten war” (along with the Korean War vets).
You cannot imagine how empty men feel from that.
Eyes rolling.
Most men do not feel “empty” or need to be forgiven for killing. Killing the enemy is a good thing and there need not even be an implication that there is anything wrong with it.
Your take on this is a bizarre result of a hundred years of bad psychoanalysis. There might be some precious sensitive souls who react poorly to saving their family and descendants from tyranny, but they deserve pity, not parades.
The parades are quite simply nothing more than a celebration of winning. Why is that so hard to understand?
No psychoanalysis, Skyler. Just observation and fact.
No specie wishes to kill itself; that is the way to extinction. Review history and you find that men generally wouldn’t willfully kill each other. Review the experience of the Roman Legions, where attempting to teach legionaires to STAB and not SLASH was pretty much unsuccessful. Review the casualities of the Civil War. The average battalion sustained 9 casualties per minute. This with mass formations firing .58 cal bullets from a rifle capable of killing at 600 yards. Review SLA Marshall’s extensive review of troop shooting in both WWII & Korea. It is only modern training methods that have changed that.
(cont’d)
Society has always had its shooters. Read Band of Brothers and you find he called on his “known shooters” when he was in a pinch. This is the group that historically made up the warrior class. Many men served, but certain reservations existed in the average man before we learned to train it out of them. Deny that and you simply deny historical facts. No psychobable, just facts, Skyler.
Now you’re making things up, Deveraux. Even if the Romans couldn’t kill effectively (which is laughable) I’d say that Hannibal’s men could. At Cannae they only stopped killing Romans because darkness fell.
And General Lee said, “It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.” Men don’t need a lot of encouragement to kill, and it’s fun as long as you’re not the one getting killed.
My own experience is that Marines enjoy killing, generally.
SLA Marshall is fully discredited, with his own son admitting that his father fabricated his data. Militaries have relied on his writings for too long, and have adopted poor policies because of his lies.
For the benefit of those of us without Skyler’s experience, warrior-turned-antiwar Col. David Hackworth wrote a fairly controversial book, “About Face”, and one of the chapters that reads as trustworthy concerned SLA Marshall. Even if you dislike Hackworth (and opinions are all over the map), it’s an interesting human drama when “Slam”, Hack’s idol, begins to slide off the metaphorical pedestal.
My experience is not the same. Marines love fighting, and they love winning, but I didn’t find them particularly in love with killing. Else we would have left a lot of dead Vietnamese in the villes. We didnt. And we could have.
Intel questioned VC prisoners. They found Marines tended to shoot high. ?Why was that, Skyler – because they didn’t know how to shoot.
?How about John Keegan. ?Is he acceptable to you as a historical source (Sandhurst professor of military history, etc). He notes in Face of Battle that men die MOSTLY when they turn their backs – and no longer directly appear facing the opponents. And he uses widely differing time battles to demonstrate his point.
Men kill when they have other allegences. So crew-served weapons make you ally to the weapon and gun team. Artillery – again crew served and separate from you PERSONALLY pulling a trigger on a SPECIFIC human. Snipers – targets are distant and so details are not easily seen. Sherman said he would rather have one cannon than 1,000 men. ?Why would he say that, Skyler.
First, Sherman was a bit of a lunatic. Second, I’d rather have one artillery than a thousand men too, if I had two thousand men and no artillery first. I’m not sure what that is supposed to mean.
I don’t see a problem with killing at a distance, but ask the Marines of WWII if they didn’t get a rush from hand to hand fighting the Japanese. Scary, yes, but also exhilarating if you win.
As for dying when you turn your back, sure, that’s hardly even debatable. The ones who are losing a battle turn and run, and get killed. The winners are the ones who face the danger and win. How does this make your point?
It’s a myth that men despise killing. Our culture has tried very hard to teach us to think that way, in much the same way that they try to teach us that we should all have PTSD if we ever miss a meal or stub our toe.
Skyler, discussing issues with you can be terribly frustrating. You seem to take stands that show no regard to the actual issues being discussed. It’s almost as if you either can’t or won’t see the debatable points. Else you just like to blow smoke, which would be quite infantile of you.
Take “It a myth that men despise killing”. The contention isn’t that men despise it; it’s that most men have a natural aversion to taking a human life, especially in specific situations (like FTF). Were it truly otherwise, there would be no laws against murder and mayhem everywhere you turned. Yet we think people shouldn’t kill to advance themselves, nor for fun. Even in obvious self-defense situations, many men hesitate to fire, and even then don’t make serious efforts to KILL. Indeed, if you have followed any of the several conversations on this forum about killing in SD, you will have found the large variety of positions people take on the subject.
Yes, firefights are exhilerating, but because you risked your life – and won, not because of killing another human. But that may be a nuance beyond your grasp.
?What was your MOS. ?How did you get this view of the Marine Corps being a bunch of mechanical killer bots. ?What did your platoon commanders in Basic School try to teach you. It wasn’t simply killing the enemy. Indeed, if you were awake during those classes and exercises, one of the most important aspects of being an officer was staying alive and keeping your Marines alive to come home. Yes, you killed along the way. You were tough. You didn’t shrink from tough situations. But you also didn’t wantonly kill others. ?Or did you, Skyler. ?Which war were you in.
No they don’t. I simply do not believe that. Most men have no such aversion naturally. Civilization might try to teach them otherwise, but it’s not innate.
They kill on order, and they trust their officers to only order them to kill lawfully. I never saw a single Marine shirk from going out on patrol, even though 48 men were killed in my battalion in 2005, and I have no doubt that every single one of them would kill without hesitation should the opportunity have arisen, and it often did but not for everyone. The hatred of the enemy and the desire to extinguish their attacks was very real, and I don’t think any would say that they were mechanical killer robots. They were well trained men who didn’t mind killing.
I don’t recall mentioning wanton killing. I said there was no aversion to killing the enemy. And I’m not just speaking of Marines, I’m speaking of the Wehrmacht, the Nationalist army in 1936 Spain, the Indian Wars, the Peloponnesian War, and in fact every war and by every gang in the streets of America today. It’s not that hard to get men to kill other men. Claiming otherwise is to ignore all of human history.
Well, seeing as how you’re not really paying attention to what I’m saying, it’s hard to take this complaint very seriously.
This is very strange logic. We have laws against murder because too many people can’t restrain themselves and would murder for gain or profit. We have to have laws defining when killing is allowed or else there would be a lot more killing. Morals exist without laws, I’m not saying otherwise, but without the laws to back up the morals, it would be far too easy for individuals to justify killing others, because there simply isn’t a natural aversion to it. The aversion has to be taught.
I don’t know what FTF is.
Sorry it’s taken a while to respond, Skyler, but I had to work the holiday weekend, and the shifts were killers. I’m getting too old to just keep plowing on and need a rest after that kind of mauling.
FTF= Face to Face.
Modern training methods can teach a turnip to kill. So let’s look back at the Civil War and before eras, when scientific training wasn’t around. We might expect then to see men in their native nature, fighting for a cause they believed in.
John Keegan and Richard Holmes, in their book Soldiers, speak of a Prussian military experiment in the 1700’s. They set up a white piece of paper 100′ wide and 6′ high. Then they lined up a battalion of infantry, armed with muskets, and had them fire one volley at the paper at varying distances, and scored the hits. 25% hits @ 225 yds, 40% hits @ 150 yds, 60% hits @ 75 yds. With muskets, mind you – relatively inaccurate firearms compared to the Civil War era Springfields and Enfields.
So let’s look at Gettysburg Day 1. This was a pretty clean infantry fight involving regular Rebel and Union forces…
… Buford (Union cavalry) is fighting a stubborn rearguard, guerrilla style, using the horses to redeploy quickly, then resist against Archer’s Rebels. Late morning they are finally stuck on MacPherson’s Ridge, no longer mobile, hoping for the appearance of Reynolds – who, indeed, shows up late morning with the Iron Brigade in the lead. 2nd Wisconsin wades into the fight, blazing away at the surprised Confederates of Archer’s Brigade, exchanging volleys, then charging and driving Archer out of the woods. The fight goes on for the rest of the day, with the Iron Brigade finally, and tenaciously falling back and giving ground to the rebels. Casualties are high – on both sides. Up to 30% of the units.
30% after hours of fighting!?!? This ain’t no modern fight, Skyler, from foxholes, crawling on the ground, looking for cover, limiting one’s exposure. This was the Civil War, when men stood and delivered. Lines of infantry firing volleys at each other. The distances were <300 yds. AND we know from the Prussians that muskets hit a target 25% of the time (single volley) at 225 yds. ?So where are all the dead infantrymen. …
… We know an average infantry unit of that time could fire 2-3 volleys per minute. 5 minutes should have been enough to totally wipe out Archer. OR the Iron Brigade. Instead these units fought for hours. That’s 60x3x3=540 volleys. So take a little time for maneuver, rest, what have you – at least 300 volleys. Even with muskets this should be 25% hits at this distance, lots more with the rifles.
Ardant du Picq, a French officer, did early work in this area, questioning French army officers about battle behavior of their troops (back when the French had a fighting army). They confirmed that most men did not fire at the opposition directly. Paddy Griffin has studied a lot of Civil War battles and concluded that large numbers of casualties did, indeed, occur, but not at a high rate; high casualties were because of long engagements. His estimates are that 1-2 men were hit per minute; others estimate it at 8-9 hits per minute. But none of these match the lethality of the rifle of the time and the packed formations!
You may denigrate SLA Marshall all you want, but his observations have stood the test of time. Most particularly, they have been validated by a lot of WWII vets. The military took his observations seriously, and changed the method of training, to teach soldiers to fire at a “target” – not another human being. Today Western military training results in far higher firing rates and far more killing. But it also inflicts a cost on the psyche of the men doing it. Killing the first is the hardest, less so after that. But it changes you. Or at least it did me.
?Want more demonstration of basic human nature. Check out gangs. Chicago kills a huge number of people in a year, but most of them are not gang bangers but collateral damage. The gangers are posturing, trying to show dominance, not trying to kill each other.
Exceptions can, of course, be found. There appear to be about 5-15% of men who don’t have a particular difficulty killing another – the “shooters” that are mentioned in Band of Brothers. The ones you can count on to take the shot, kill the enemy, when it is clear just who he is.
Modern western military organizations, with the Army in the lead, took SLA Marshall’s observations to heart and changed the training methods to more resemble Pavlovian training to kill on presentation of a silhouette target, thereby removing much of the innate reluctance to kill. American police train the same way – one reason you see so much more p0lice shooting than you once did.
You can research all this on your own. Or you can read Lt. Col. Grossman’s book, On Killing and get the summary results.
And you still haven’t told me your MOS.
I think if you look at the Marines in the Pacific war you would not come to the same conclusions. I do not agree with your conclusions at all. I did not see this behavior in my Marine Infantry battalion in Iraq.
I think historians have been unduly influenced by SLA Marshall and his bogus research. There are any number of reasons the casualties in that famous battle with the Iron brigade were relatively low compared to what you seem to expect. The Iron Brigade was very new and got its reputation for bravery because they were so new to battle that they didn’t realize that other units would have broken and run much much earlier. The Confederates facing them, as I recall, were in a bit more defilade, while the Iron Brigade was standing in the open. So Confederate casualties were low because they were in defilade.
They were capable of shooting several times a minute, but I doubt they did so in practice.
Adrenalin makes men have bad aim.
I think it is more a modern phenomenon for men to be squeamish about killing because we no longer butcher our own food.
The Iron Brigade was commissioned on 1 Oct, 1861, At Gettysburg it was better known as the Iron Brigade of the West, and consisted of the 2nd, 6th, and 7th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, the 19th Indiana, Battery B of the 4th US Light Artillery, and the 24th Michigan. They got their reputation supposedly at Turners Gap in the Battle of South Mountain, a prelude to Antietam, where they also fought with great valour. As well as Second Bull Run, Chancellorsville, and Fredericksburg,
“New unit” indeed.
You have it exactly backwards. It is uncommon for modern men to not kill because they have had it trained out of them. But it still affects them.
Species don’t kill themselves, but they certainly kill other species. So among wolves, eg., you get posturing and submission, but not killing. But they certainly kill other animals – it’s how they live.