Generation Warfighter

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As these events played through my mind, I marveled that I had the battlefield largely to myself. Not that I was alone, mind you. Tour buses circled; cars, trucks, and SUVs whizzed about, but many, perhaps most, Americans who visit Gettysburg get surprisingly little tactile or sensory experience of its difficult topography. Yes, a few kids (and fewer adults) joined me in clambering about the huge, claustrophobically placed boulders of Devil's Den, and I did spy a couple of guided tour groups on foot. But at the site of a bloodcurdling, distinctly septic nineteenth century battle, most visitors were clearly having a distinctly bloodless, even antiseptic, twenty-first century experience.

That day, I learned a lot about Gettysburg the battle—and maybe a little about us as well. As surely as my fellow tourists were staying in their cars and buses, we, as a people, are distancing ourselves from the realities of war. As we seal ourselves away from war's horrors, we're correspondingly finding it easier to speak of "warfighters" and to boast of having the world's best military.

As we catch a glimpse, from the comfort of our living rooms, of a suicide bombing in Iraq or an American outpost attacked, then abandoned, in Afghanistan, are we not like those tourists in buses at Gettysburg, listening to sanitized recordings telling us what to see and think about the (expurgated) reality in front of us? And who dares challenge the "expert" commentary? Who dares turn off the canned talking heads and stare into the face of war?

But if we are to end our militaristic, yet curiously sanitized, "warfighter" moment, if we are ever to return to our citizen-soldier ethos and heritage, this is just what we must do.

After all, it's later than you think. Our military now relies not only on a volunteer (if, at times, "stop-lossed") Army, but increasingly on tens of thousands of hired guns, consultants, interrogators, interpreters, and other paramilitary camp followers. Private, for-profit "security contractors"—companies like Blackwater and Triple Canopy—give a disturbing new meaning to our "warfighter" terminology and the rhetoric that marches in step with it. As even casual students of history will recall, a clear sign of the Roman Empire's decline was its shift from citizen-soldiers motivated by duty to mercenaries motivated by profit.

Replacing "warfighters" with true citizen-soldiers in the mold of Sledge and Winters would hardly be a solve-all solution at this late date, but it might be a step in the right direction—however unlikely it is to happen. For when we look at our troops, if we don't see ourselves, then we see aliens or, worse yet, superiors ("warfighters") in need of "support." And that's a clear sign of trouble for the republic.

Want to Be in the "World's Best Military"? Ask German Veterans

It may come as a shock to some, but the American army wasn't the best in the field in World War I, or World War II either. And thank heavens for that.

The distinction falls to the Kaiser Wilhelm's army in 1914, and to Hitler's Wehrmacht in 1941. Even toward the end of World War II, the American army was still often outmaneuvered and outclassed by its German foe. Because victory has a way of papering over faults and altering memories, few but professional historians today recall the many shortcomings of our military in both world wars.

But that's precisely the point: The American military made mistakes because it was often ill-trained, rushed into combat too quickly, and handled by officers lacking in experience. Put simply, in both World Wars it lacked the tactical virtuosity of its German counterpart.

But here's the question to ponder: At what price virtuosity? In World War I and World War II, the Germans were the best soldiers because they had trained and fought the most, because their societies were geared, mentally and in most other ways, for war, because they celebrated and valued feats of arms above all other contributions one could make to society and culture.

Being "the best soldiers" meant that senior German leaders—whether the Kaiser, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, that Teutonic titan of World War I, or Hitler—always expected them to prevail. The mentality was: "We're number one. How can we possibly lose unless we quit—or those [fill in your civilian quislings of choice] stab us in the back?"

If this mentality sounds increasingly familiar, it's because it's the one we ourselves have internalized in these last years. German warfighters and their leaders knew no limitations until it was too late for them to recover from ceaseless combat, imperial overstretch, and economic collapse.

Today, the U.S. military, and by extension American culture, is caught in a similar bind. After all, if we truly believe ours to be "the world's best military" (and, judging by how often the claim is repeated in the echo chamber of our media, we evidently do), how can we possibly be losing in Iraq or Afghanistan? And, if the "impossible" somehow happens, how can our military be to blame? If our "warfighters" are indeed "the best," someone else must have betrayed them—appeasing politicians, lily-livered liberals, duplicitous and weak-willed allies like the increasingly recalcitrant Iraqis, you name it.

Today, our military is arguably the world's best. Certainly, it's the world's most powerful in its advanced armaments and its ability to destroy. But what does it say about our leaders that they are so taken with this form of power? And why exactly is it so good to be the "best" at this? Just ask a German military veteran—among the few who survived, that is—in a warrior-state that went berserk in a febrile quest for "full spectrum dominance."

Fighting to End Wars

Words matter. Let's start by banishing the word "warfighter," and, while we're at it, let's toss out that "world's best" boast as well. Boasting about military prowess is more Spartan than Athenian, more Second and Third Reich Germany than republican and democratic America.

Indeed, imagine, for a moment, a world in which the U.S. is no longer "number one" in military might (and, at the same time, no longer fighting endless wars in the Middle East and Central Asia). Would we then be weak and vulnerable? Or would we become stronger precisely because we stopped boasting about our ability as "warfighters" to dominate far from our shores and instead redirected our resources to developing alternative energy, bolstering our education system, reviving American industry, and focusing on other "soft power" alternatives to weapons and warriors? In other words, alternatives we can actually boast about with the pride of accomplishment.

Think about it: Must our military forever remain "second to none" for you to feel safe? Our national traditions suggest otherwise. In fact, if we no longer had the world's strongest military, perhaps we would be more reluctant to tap its strength—and more hesitant to send our citizen-soldiers into harm's way. And while we're at it, perhaps we'd also learn to boast about a new kind of "warfighter"—not one who fights our wars, but one who fights against them.

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William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School. He now teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology, and is the author of Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism, among other works (Potomac Press, 2005).

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