Nuremburg and Bid Laden

by John Thompson

September , 2001

Norm Dixon, in The Psychology of Military Incompetence, clinically dissected everything that could go wrong in a military commander and noted the characteristics that made a good one. Although a bomb disposal expert in Britain during WW-II, he told his readers that he could personally make no real claim to being a good soldier, but could recognize one when he saw one. The author must make a similar admission.

In a BBC interview, General Sir John Hackett once observed that a superb physicist, musician or scientists could still be a horrible person; but a good soldier had to be a good man — one that other people had to trust under enormous pressure in horrible circumstances. There are reasons why this should be so.

Battle — in the Western world anyway — is about an extraordinary violence that pushes the limits of the human ability to inflict and withstand it. Any human being can fight if sufficiently motivated, but to "go over the top" into machine-gun fire, or "stick to your guns" on a sinking ship requires a complex combination of relationships and conditioning. The total of these comprise what Hackett described as the military ethos.

The ethos spells all the difference between soldiers and warriors (rioters, terrorists, guerrillas, tribal militias, gangsters, and suchlike scruff). Warriors — like Voltaire’s rational army — will not fight under circumstances that do not appeal to them if they can help it. Soldiers and sailors must confront horrific circumstances and stay there.

In discussions of motive, many civilians have assumed that soldiers are motivated by personal reward — money, loot, or even the prospect of survival, such as the three square meals (served on square platters) that Royal Navy sailors received in the Napoleonic Wars. Yes, such things can attract people to military service, but are not what compels them to fight effectively. Indeed, soldiers who are mainly motivated by such things do run away. Likewise, patriotism or ideology add little to the motives of the fighting man; they might bring him to battle, but do not keep him there.

Militaries have long understood the importance of habit, drill and discipline. More important are the ties between soldiers. Hegel understood (before modern sociology appeared) that men will compete for status and that each also craves respect from other men. The very opening of his Philosophy of History attributes this as a main driving force in history. Long before modern sociologists understood the importance of small-group interactions, militaries divided men up into squads, files and gun crews; and understood that the relationships here played a vital role in combat efficiency.

Essentially, the ethos concerns a balance of trust and respect. Subordinates and superiors have to trust and respect each other, and peers have to be able to rely on each other. Very little comes on credit, but discipline and tradition give newcomers some space in which to operate. Discipline and tradition can backstop trust when human relations start to crack under strain, but trust and the desire for respect is much more important.

For those who have never been in a military environment, this is a difficult point to understand, but the relationships that characterize an effective military unit are remarkable — even in peacetime. The soldier (or sailor) craves that respect, and soon realizes how special it is under those difficult circumstances where people’s true worth can become apparent.

The institutions, customs and traditions that sustain the military ethos cannot be readily created overnight. They have to be carefully preserved against the time they are needed in earnest, and yet must remain vital and vibrant — for a military must be a mirror of the society from which it is drawn. Balancing these two necessities is a real challenge too, but it is one that Canada is failing badly.

Firstly, the real fault does not really lie with Canada’s soldiers, for the military ethos demands stability and constancy: Units need to serve together for a long time for all components in a unit to come to know each other. It does not also help when "career" is more important than "leadership", because then the motives of leaders can (and have) become suspect. The worth of any leader is based on their sense of responsibility and loyalty to their subordinates — other concerns are secondary.

In a military environment, respect has to be earned: Official demands for "tolerance" and "equity" conflict with this fundamental requirement and undermine the ethos again. And, again, anybody familiar with a military knows, respect comes with capability — complexion and culture are irrelevant unless someone is incapable of earning respect, whereupon they still wouldn’t matter anyway.

Other liberal democratic nations (especially those that are more intimate with the violence of history) understand that their militaries — however much they mirror society — must be illiberal institutions. Canada’s government doesn’t understand this point and has interfered far more in the internal workings of its Armed Forces than they should have. We may all come to regret this, when it comes time to place our military in the way of serious harm.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca