Note: This segment is Part II of V in a outline prepared for a future long-form commentary
One key premise that drives this work is that the nature and character of the American military member has fundamentally changed. As this work aims to show, the depth of the American military is filled with far more variety of individual and diverse talent than the one which Huntington examined.[i] In 1957, he rightly judged that the military is actively and fundamentally directed and operated by its officer corps as the key construct of how the American military is populated and constructed. Examples of that paradigm predate the American military, going back to the mercenary and aristocrat officer corps of the Thirty Year’s War, through French and Prussian institutionalization and professionalization of the skill of arms, to the twentieth century and the First World War’s and interwar period (1919-1933). In those examples, the professionalization of violence was purposeful: the state’s monopoly on violence was to be entrusted to men whose unique skills are standardized and codified to effectively be applied to policy. Unique skills included formal education which, due to class structures and other social constraints, were not broadly available to the common man, thus the sacred relationship between the state and its military was largely contingent upon a select group of de facto ombudsmen who could be trusted with violence for the national purpose. Huntington gives recognition to the implicit synergy between those select military officers and the civilian power architecture as necessarily aligned in terms of politics, but notes that the relationship which constitutes objective civilian control exists as dependent upon differing views of national objectives while recognizing that limits of absolute authority to be used by those officers.
This shift is subject to the trans-national reality that security must be pursued, to include the deprivation of other states’ security as a realist application of international relations. In that theory, the state is the primary actor, its functions are first unitary, and that it is rational, making decisions based on the criteria of risk, benefit, capacity, and whose penultimate aim is the maximum utility in its rationally selfish decisions. The transition from assumed security to pursued security is the most basic manifestation of realism in international relations theory, and thus the changing character of the military and the nature of its relationship to the state becomes paramount, as history shows.
With the change in the relationship, the character of a military’s members becomes equally paramount to the evolution of violence as a lever of national power. Huntington’s distinction of the officer corps versus enlisted masses – the select ombudsman relationally subordinate to objective civilian control
Today’s military, and the most recent warfighting generation – being those millennials who came of age and spent most of their adulthood fighting in the Global War on Terror – is made up of officers and enlisted personnel whose education, awareness of global and social events, and sheer information access is far deeper, comprehensive, and more multifaceted than the American military examined in The Soldier and the State. To oversimplify this phenomena, we could say “nouveau riche” and point to the fact that the enlisted cohort of today’s military are indeed better educated, more aware of global events, and less inclined to serve for the sake of mere economic opportunity but are motivated to serve in a far more complex spectrum of influences.
What must be considered in this evolution of the nature of the warfighter is the significant and dramatic specialization that occurred over the ensuring decades following the Korean conflict. Again, Huntington placed emphasis on the segregation between the officer and enlisted cohorts – the former an empowered, specially trained and developed keeper of the public trust, the latter a generic and even inferior caste requiring deliberate management and oversight – but the remainder of the 20th century would see these two groups equalize in specialization and synthesize in profound ways which were not the paradigm in Huntington’s review. This carries its own significance as this work examines the modern phenomenon of the civil-military relationship.
Therefore, the first phenomenon that bears reconsideration is just how much the servicemember has evolved from Huntington’s soldier over these last seven decades.
The second key point of this work is the complexity of conflict and its impact on the servicemember and the military writ large. Scholars and pundits errantly suggest that there is some underlying change in the nature of warfare, that it has somehow subtly changed to become some new mechanism of state versus state competition. This is fundamentally untrue; the nature of warfare – the monopoly of professionalized violence to achieve a state’s political priorities – has never changed. The character of warfare, rather, changes frequently. Narrowly, and inexpertly, these appear one and the same. The character of conflict ranges from bombs and bullets, as is most easily understood by the historical observer, to novel information domains, electronic signals, cyber operations, and other levers of state power that are not quantified in terms of casualties or loss of resources through destructive means.
Thus, the second phenomena of consideration in this review is how the world has changed, how the spectrum of state competition has progressed and evolved as has the warfighter, but at the base of it all, war endures as the lone value proposition for any military.
The third key point to this work is to examine how the established phenomena influence the subject and context of the work. To do this, an examination of a recent shift in that character of war and evolution of the warfighter has in fact fundamentally altered the paradigm of the relationship between the soldier and the state: The Global War on Terror stands in stark contrast to previous iterations of American conflict and, as it pertains to this work, has in fact eroded and undermined the integration between those who fight the war, and the society which they secure in doing so.
This work concludes with that eroded paradigm, what I like to call the “Sacred Relationship” between the soldier and the state. This paradigm is based on a fundamental theorem that is both uncomfortable and necessary: the Violent Professionals.
[i] It is necessary to assert here that the term “diverse” is not used in reference to cultural, ethnic, sexual orientation, creed, identity, or other categorization which has coopted the phrase “diversity” which inherently upsets and triggers a conservative-leaning cohort. Rather, the term “diverse” in this context points to the variety of specialties and domains which the modern servicemember must necessarily have familiarity or expertise in – cyber, information and its mis- and dis-information subcategorizations, space, electronic warfare – which Huntington’s soldier specific did not require knowledge, talent or familiarity for.
