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U.S. Marines on the March
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More important, van Creveld notes
that the sustained, intensive effort to create a “unisex” military has had serious
second-order consequences. Measures
such as putting men and women
through separate courses with different
physical performance requirements
and “gender norming” are inherently
suspect from a combat-effectiveness
perspective. The problem is that fair
treatment implies equality, meaning
that unit members essentially must be
interchangeable, because “cohesion, the
ability to stick together and stay together
even when—particularly when—things
go disastrously wrong, is the most
important quality any military formation must have.” Writes van Creveld,
“since men and women are not identical,
treating them as if they were is unfair.
But treating them as if they were not is
also unfair, though in a different way.”
The contribution to a climate of
intellectual dishonesty within the U.S.
military is a more serious second-order
effect. Van Creveld suggests that female
service members actually receive
preferential treatment, including
higher promotion rates and more lenient
treatment during disciplinary proceedings, and in connection with pregnancy.
What is more dishonest is that “service
personnel are prohibited from saying
that such privileges exist,” or, for that
matter, from writing or commenting
in any way that might suggest there
are problems or challenges associated
with full integration of women into all
military fields. “The accusation of being
‘hostile to women’ will follow almost
automatically,” and being branded as
such “can easily bring about the end
of one’s career.” One other form of
dishonesty concerns charges of sexual
harassment; as one female U.S. pilot
told the author, “sexual harassment is
what I decide to report to my superiors.”
Whether that is an accurate reflection
of reality or not, it is widely perceived
that way among many men in the U.S.
military. As a result, van Creveld notes
that “to avoid trouble, men, military
men more than most, are expected
to believe—or at least conceal their
disbelief in—two contradictory things.
The first is that military women can
serve and fight just as well as men can
and that they therefore deserve the kind
of equality they and their supporters are
demanding. The second is that, being
equal, they do not enjoy privileges of
any kind.” These contradictory ideas are
“precisely the kind of thing that George
Orwell in
1984 called ‘double-think.’”
The author concludes this discussion
with one final point. “Feminizing
the forces and having women take
an active part in war and combat
threatens to take away one of the most
important reasons, sometimes even
the most important reason, why many
men enlist and fight: namely, to prove
their masculinity to themselves and to
others.” The “end of masculinity” as
a desideratum for a military force is
bound to undermine its “culture of war.”
With regard to “constructing PTSD,”
historically there is little record of it as a
widespread phenomenon. Van Creveld
suggests that this was in part because
war from ancient times had been
associated with notions of
arete (excellence) and
virtus (prowess), and more
recently with “honor” and “pride,” all of
which helped to forestall or suppress it.
But over the last century, “what changed
was the way [war] was perceived and understood. From a revelatory experience
akin to a religious one, it was turned
into a thoroughly rotten business [that]
was without either virtue or honor or
knowledge of any sort, merely a process
whereby obtuse generals sent millions
to be slaughtered. . . . As a result, almost
anybody who spent enough time
fighting was bound to suffer psychological damage.” Or so it was claimed.
Western militaries in the world wars
came to accept notions of “shell shock”
and “combat fatigue.” What is notable,
however, is that U.S. forces suffered
proportionately ten times the rate
of such psychiatric casualties as did
the German Wehrmacht, which was
accepted generally as having displayed
far greater cohesion and fighting
power than its Western counterparts
throughout the second war. Interestingly, postwar East Germany saw far
lower rates of such conditions than West
Germany, although both were treating
the same ex-soldiers. This suggests
that “there can be no doubt that social
factors—politics, culture, organization,
leadership, what have you—do much to
determine the way PTSD is treated. The
same seems to apply to its frequency
and, perhaps, even to its very existence.”
Psychiatric cases spiked in Vietnam
and PTSD claims remain at high levels.
Various causes are postulated: concussion; “the sheer terror of modern war;”
guilt feelings from surviving while
comrades died; guilt feelings from
killing others, especially in close combat.
But as van Creveld demonstrates, many
of those factors were always present in
war, yet did not manifest themselves
in large-scale PTSD. In more-recent
conflicts, van Creveld notes that there
was a far lower incidence of PTSD
among North Vietnamese than among
U.S. veterans, suggesting that “victory
is the best cure for the soul.” Nor is
defeat linked to widespread PTSD, as
evidenced by the German experience
in two world wars or, more recently,
that of Serbs after the Yugoslav wars—a
Serbian attaché informed the author
that “PTSD is not a hot topic” in Serbia.
So why is the PTSD rate in the United
States so high today? “Is it really war that
is generating PTSD? Or is it present-day
society’s
idée fixe that war is bad both
in itself and for the soul of those who
participate in it, so that over enough
time anybody who does so must break
down,” in which case there is no disgrace
involved? Van Creveld suggests that
the cure may be driving the disease;
there may be perverse incentives to
over-diagnose PTSD, with the fear of
liability at the societal level driving
the process. There are large numbers
of claims and claimants, and medical
specialists, mental health workers, and
lawyers all have strong incentives to
keep the process going at full speed. Van
Creveld poses the difficult question: “Is
it conceivable that the compensations
and pensions are providing at least some
soldiers with an incentive to invent or
exaggerate symptoms and retain them
for as long as they can?” He concludes
by quoting a speech by General Mattis:
“I would just say there is one misperception of our veterans and that is they are
somehow damaged goods. I don’t buy it.
If we tell our veterans enough that this
is what is wrong with them they may
actually start believing it. While victim-hood in America is exalted, I don’t think
our veterans should join those ranks.”
Van Creveld then segues to his fifth
category, “delegitimizing war,” by noting
that “to wage war two things are indispensable: armed force and legitimacy.”
He briefly reviews various notions of
legitimacy, including war as civic duty in
ancient times, defense of the sovereign
power of the state, doctrines such as
jus
ad bellum and
jus in bello, war as the
“school of the nation,” and finally the
linking of war to Darwinian theories
regarding natural selection, survival of
the fittest, and nations’ “will to live.”
The rise of powerful anti-militarist
feelings after the world wars deeply
eroded the idea of duty to the nation,
even while “the language of rights now
dominates political debate in the United
States.” The post-Vietnam shift to an
all-volunteer force further diminished
the sense of individual obligation to the
whole, while military service often came
to be seen as being only for those with
no better prospects. Van Creveld notes
darkly that “where rights reign supreme
and duty has become an object of neglect, suspicion, and even derision—as it
has in most Western societies—whether,
if and when the test comes, they will
be sufficient is anybody’s guess.”
The 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions
initiated the idea that there were,
or should be, better ways to settle
international disputes than by war.
This trend was reinforced strongly after
the ruinous world wars by numerous
subsequent conventions and treaties
and the establishment of the United
Nations. In parallel, concepts of “war
guilt” and rejections of the national use
of force except strictly in self-defense
supplanted older notions of “the right of
conquest” and have tended increasingly
to delegitimize war, at least in the West.
Thus, for many Western thinkers, the
search for a replacement for war ought
to favor nonmilitary alternatives, such
as police training teams, mediators, and
“dialogs.” In van Creveld’s view, “both
intellectuals and politicians keep promising their audiences security without
sacrifice, privilege without responsibility. But what if terrorists/guerrillas/
insurgents/freedom fighters refuse to
answer empathy with empathy?”
In van Creveld’s view, these five trends
collectively have deeply undermined
Western military effectiveness and
societal resilience, aggravated by the
inability or unwillingness to examine
the underlying causal factors rigorously
and honestly. He closes by asserting
that the bedrock cause is that “large
parts of both European and American
societies, each in its own way, have come
to see war not simply as an evil that is
sometimes made absolutely necessary
by circumstances but as the ultimate
one that almost nothing can justify.
This will have to change. Or else.”
Many readers will reject various of the
author’s arguments as anachronistic
or, in any event, “overcome by events,”
hence not of interest or worthy of further debate or assessment. However, that
at least some of them represent significant threats to contemporary policies or
agendas is suggested by the ruthless de
facto suppression of vigorous debate on
sensitive topics by senior officers and top
civilian leaders (which invariably leads
to self-censorship, particularly among
ambitious officers). Such intimidation is
pure intellectual thuggery, which in itself
is a great institutional danger, especially
in the military profession, where free
thinking, combined with robust debate,
is the essential prerequisite for not being
out-thought and out-fought by future foes.
Almost as dangerous as intellectual
thuggery is willful ignorance of “unpleasant truths” or empirical evidence.
This was illustrated most notoriously
by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus’s
recent
a priori policy decision, made
in the fashion of Alice in Wonderland’s
Red Queen (“Sentence first, verdict
afterwards!”), to open all ground combat
positions to women regardless of any
data that might result subsequently
from the Marine Corps’s rigorous
year-long study regarding the performance of mixed-gender units. That
sort of thing corrosively undermines
the institutional trust essential to the
success of any military organization.
Pussycats doubtless is controversial.
However, van Creveld’s arguments are
coherent and intellectually substantive,
even if one may disagree with some of
the assumptions he makes to support
them. Because they explicitly address
the most fundamental criterion for
assessing military forces—their combat
effectiveness—they are very worth
pondering by serving military officers
and civilian policy makers, especially
those more senior. Certainly the question of why Western military might, in
conjunction with the other elements
of state power, has not been more
effective during the past half-century
is a crucial one, given the multiple
dangerous challenges the West confronts
both today and over the longer term.
Jan van Tol, the original article appeared in the Naval War College Review, Winter, 2017
