XBradTC

We hear endlessly that the solution to the so-called "civil-military divide" is to make the military more like  civilian culture.   And that whatever "divide" exists is somehow more the military's fault than anyone else's.  We are surrounded by such assertions, even from the mouths of senior officers.  The President of the Naval War College makes no bones about "normalizing" the institution responsible for preserving and advancing the intellectual and warfighting consciousness of the United States Navy, as if Brown University must educate Naval Officers about how to fight and win America's wars at sea.  

Such assertions have seemed to me to be much more the stuff of political claptrap than the astute observations of people who have fought and studied war.  It always seemed to me to be a deliberate effort to erode the warrior ethos and the culture of a military fighting force.  That "traditions of things endured, and things accomplished, such as regiments hand down forever" is merely toxic masculinity and must be stamped out.  Over at the Washington Examiner, Michael Ferguson writes an op-ed piece that makes the point superbly, far better than I ever have.  

Juan Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan, published a May 2017 article in The Nation suggesting pop star Ariana Grande's philosophy of open-armed inclusion might deter Islamic State more effectively than Secretary of Defense James Mattis' pugnacious strategy of envelopment, isolation, and annihilation. Cole describes Mattis, an erudite warrior-scholar, as symptomatic of a reckless military culture that creates terrorists.

Behold, the push for the female infantryman, or artilleryman, or tanker.  Because all-male units are "hypermasculine".   And, well, GIRL POWER!  Never mind what veterans of ground combat in many wars have cautioned.  Ignore Captain Kate Petronio's voice of experience in trying to keep up with men in harsh and unforgiving environments.    Or the numerous studies that told us everything we already knew.  Except that Ferguson tells us again about the supposed "changing nature of war".

Subjective notions of social propriety, however well-intentioned, will not change the fixed identity of ground warfare. It is a brutally masculine and inherently violent enterprise. Warrior culture serves as a utilitarian mechanism that not only allows our troops to ignore their instincts of self-preservation and rush toward gunfire, but also steel their minds to the psychological rigors of armed conflict. Stigmatizing this culture by making it a problem to be “fixed” instead of a core principle in the combat conditioning process is, for the men and women who will fight tomorrow’s war, a dangerous game indeed.

But not dangerous to Ellen Haring, or Juan Cole, or DACOWITS.  Or the President of the Naval War College, for that matter.  Because "lean-in circles" happen a long way from the furnace of combat.  URR Here.

H/T RMH