THE WARRIOR ETHOS

This is Don Rumsfeld's Army. A senior British military officer who fought in Iraq critiques the U.S. performance:

The Army's "Warrior Ethos" is also illuminating in this respect. It was introduced in 2001. At its core is the Soldier's Creed. Note that it enjoins the soldier to have just the one type of interaction with his enemy -- "to engage and destroy him": not defeat, which could permit a number of other politically attuned options, but destroy. It is very decidedly a war-fighting creed, which has no doubt served well to promote the much sought conventional warfighting ethos, but cannot be helping soldiers to understand that on many occasions in unconventional situations they have to be soldiers, not warriors.

As important, the Army needs to learn to see itself as others do, particularly its actual or potential opponents and their supporters. They are the ones who need to be persuaded to succumb, because the alternative approach is to kill or capture them all, and that hardly seems practicable, even for the most powerful Army in the world.

Read the whole essay. Whether meant to be or not, it's an allegory for the entire Bush administration style.

Tags: Bush administration, U.S. Army