Chapter 9

The Military and Society

In the days when armies existed to fight the wars of the King, they might have consisted entirely of slaves, criminals and foreign mercenaries. In a democracy, and in any society which is based on the principle of popular sovereignty, this is not acceptable. Military forces have to be, in some senses at least, representative of the society which recruits, pays and deploys them. But, if the principle is clear, the practice is somewhat more complicated, and this chapter is concerned with what, in various ways, the relationship between the military and society should be.

Origins

For obvious practical reasons, the military can never be the precise mathematical reflection of the society from which it comes. Even conscript forces require career officers and NCOs, and those attracted to a military career will not necessarily be any more representative, in the narrow sense, of society, than will aspirant doctors, bankers or musicians. By definition, few pacifists will wish to join, and few of those who, for one reason or another, feel estranged from the general political culture of the country. There are military traditions, military families, and regions which have historically produced soldiers or sailors. There are also minority social, ethnic or religious groups who may feel, for a variety of reasons, that the military is not for them.

Moreover, the military does not necessarily want everyone who wants to join it. Obviously enough, many groups represented in society — habitual criminals, the mentally ill, those with extreme views and prejudices — will tend to be frowned on by any competent organisation, the military among them. But, the military, in general, is looking for individuals with a rather special combination of attributes. Some have already been mentioned, but some of the most problematic are stressed here.

Human beings are not naturally violent. Usually, it requires hysteria, hatred or intoxication to produce high levels of violence. Yet, the military, even if it socialises people into the acceptance of violence, still has to look for those with a basic tolerance of violence in the first place. While hand-to-hand fighting is not as common as it was, a soldier still has to be willing, if necessary, to run across a field and stick a bayonet in a fellow human being. With most civil violence directed against individuals known to the attacker, the killing of total strangers, with whom one has no personal quarrel, is the norm in war. It is, in fact, far more of a problem for the military to get soldiers to fight, than it is to contain their aggressive influences.

Moreover, everyone who has been on a battlefield has reported that it is a place of terror and chaos, a place from which any normal individual would want to run as quickly as possible. Yet, the military will not function unless individuals can be trained, not merely to stay on the battlefield, but to operate in quite complex and difficult ways on it, and to leave the relative safety of a trench or a building and move, on command, into an environment of greater danger.

As already stressed, the particular contribution of the military is that of controlled violence, which is about as removed from the sporadic and ad hoc violence of civil society as can be imagined. The military may be ordered, for example, to take casualties without retaliating, to stand for hours under a hail of rocks and bottles without shooting, or to co-operate militarily with a group it has previously tried to kill.

It is true that the training and socialising systems of the military are designed to mould recruits into approved patterns of behaviour. But, it is also true that certain characteristics are sought in soldiers and even more in officers, which are not necessarily better or worse than those in society generally, but are certainly different. It is for this reason that it is not practicable to expect to find a cross-section of society in an infantry platoon. Nor, for that matter, could one necessarily expect to find a cross-section of ethnic or religious groups in the same way. While some societies have, for good reasons, tried to use quotas or other systems to ensure that all ranks are, at least, broadly representative of the societies they serve, it is accepted that the end-result can only be an approximation. In any system based on personal choice, not everyone will want to do everything. But, this does not remove the need for a society to ensure that its military welcomes all those who wish to join, whatever their origins, and then treats them equally once they have. Any other policy will, in the end, weaken support for the military in society as a whole. In other words, there is a distinction to be drawn between the inherent differences that will always exist between the average soldier and the average member of society, about which only a limited amount can be done, and the organisation and behaviour of military forces, including their arrangements for recruiting and promoting their personnel.

Attitudes

Much the same is true of the attitudes of the military, although there is one further complication. Everybody understands that the various views and opinions within the military will not necessarily, on average or in total, be the same as those in society at large. On average, for example, the military is more socially conservative than society as a whole. At the same time, it should also be accepted that the behaviour of the military should not lead it into conflict with the norms and values of society generally. The difficulty comes when attempts are made to analyse what these values actually are. It would be absurd to argue that, for example, if racial prejudice is very common in society, then the military should also be expected to be racially intolerant. Yet, there is no logical reason why, in a society of that kind, the military should be taught to be racially tolerant instead. That tolerance is better than intolerance is widely thought to be true, especially among educated people, but it remains a subjective judgement.

Indeed, the argument that the military should reflect the values of its society is a dangerously double-edged one, since, if the values of a society are themselves suspect, the military is not likely to be much better. Whatever complaints can be laid against the German military in World War II, failure to reflect the values of its society is one of the few that cannot. The same has happened more recently in the former Yugoslavia and in Central Africa. In each case, it is clear that, while those who did the actual killing may actually have been more willing than their compatriots to perform the deed, they carried out the atrocities with, at least, the tacit approval of the majority of their own communities. Indeed, the evidence suggests that, in most wars, populations will generally support the harshest measures adopted by their governments, and sometimes demand more. This is particularly true in societies which have a concept of war different from the European and American norm of a limited liability organisational struggle. Generally, the worst atrocities have been committed when entire nations or communities have felt themselves in deadly peril from an outside force, and obliged to fight with every means at their disposal, ethical or not.

What is dealt with here, therefore, is the suggestion that the military should not reflect the actual values of its society, but rather the values that the society ought to hold. Most people who talk about norms and values are really saying that they would like the military to adopt the same values they would like society as a whole to adopt. The debate is, in other words, prescriptive rather than descriptive. The problem, as already indicated, is that there is no way, apart from subjective judgement, in which some values can be pronounced better or worse than others. Most people believe that their educated, liberal values are superior to other sets (those of Genghis Khan, for example), but have to recognise that they are incapable of ever proving it. Moreover, there are cases where it can be argued that the military can have values which are superior to those of civil society — honesty in a corrupt society, for example.

Yet, it has to be questioned how much this really matters in practice. The military is, after all, an instrument of the state, and it ought to be required to do what the state wants. This includes not only carrying out the orders of the legitimate government, but also not acting, even privately, in a way which undermines what the legitimate government is trying to do. Even more, the military should not act, individually or collectively, in a way which affronts the values of the society it serves. The most obvious case is that, whether or not the military happens to like the political system it serves, it should refrain from criticising it, not just openly, of course, but also privately to conscripts and others it may influence. A military which is unconvinced of the virtues of democracy, for example, will be a problem, but will not be much of a direct threat as long as it keeps its views to itself, and does not try to impose them on others.

This argument has been presented to various audiences in the past, and sometimes criticised as that of a comfortable middle-class white male from a developed democracy. Surely, it has been argued, there is a need to go further, and implant the norms and values of society in the soldiers themselves, so that they will, if necessary, disobey orders which transgress these values.

It is true that, where the military plays the role of the school of the nation, these issues can be important. In the case of countries with military service, it is arguable that civic education, for example, should form part of the curriculum. But, the fundamental problems remain that there is no objective way of deciding which values are supposed to be taught, and that whatever values are chosen will change in any event over time. The greatest danger, however, lies in trying to offload onto individuals the kind of ethical judgements which really have to be made and implemented by society. Those who advocate the instilling of norms and values are not really saying that a soldier should decide for him or herself what to do in a given, ethically ambiguous situation. They are advocating that the soldier should be taught values (theirs, in fact), which will determine what he or she does. After all, it is clear that personal judgement could go either way. A young soldier may be admired who refuses an order to take part in the killing of prisoners, because this conflicts with his or her ethical assumptions. But, logically, there is no difference between this and the situation where a soldier who has been ordered not to harm prisoners nonetheless kills them, because he or she believes it is the right thing to do. In the end, it is unfair and unreasonable to expect young soldiers to act as independent ethical judges in this way. When the military has acted in an unacceptable fashion, it is usually because there is either something wrong with the state itself, or with civil-military relations, or with the system of command and discipline in the military itself. It is these problems which have to be addressed, not the individual responsibility of the soldier. If the political system is healthy, and civil-military relations are good, then these problems, in general, will not arise. But, if the political system is unhealthy, and civil-military relations are not good, then no amount of harping on individual responsibility is going to help.

All that said, it needs to be remembered that the military, as an institution of the state, is one of the ways in which a government can and should put some of its policies into action. These are not only defence policies; more importantly, they are also policies concerning social, economic and even environmental issues. For example, if a government legislates in an attempt to ensure better treatment for racial or ethnic minorities at work, then it must apply these new rules to its own workforce, including the military. Likewise, greater tolerance of minority sexual orientations may well lead government to pass antidiscriminatory laws, which it must expect the military to obey. Indeed, much of government legislation will have an impact on the military anyway: environmental protection is now a major ingredient in the management of military-owned land, for example.

From time to time, military leaders have objected to some of these policies, often on the grounds that fighting efficiency will be undermined. This has been argued, for example, against the employment of homosexuals and lesbians, and against the widespread employment of women in combat roles. In each case, however, it is likely that what is really at stake in most nations is the masculine (indeed almost macho) image of the military, more than military efficiency. This kind of argument tends to be self-defeating in the long run. If the military does not, at least, make some attempt to adjust to changing social patterns and increased tolerance, then it risks marginalising itself, losing public and political support, and no longer attracting the best people, which can hardly be good for military efficiency either. As already shown, while it cannot be a freeze-frame impression of society as a whole, the military has to be and is reasonably required by governments to be representative in the widest sense.

Images

One reason for the complex nature of the relationship between the military and society is that the military’s importance is at least as much symbolic as it is practical. The attitude taken to the military often tells more about the public than about the military. The military is best seen as the collective ‘id’ of a society. It does the things which the public wish to have done, but would rather not do themselves. It acts out people’s fantasies of destruction, and incarnate fears of domination and annihilation. It speaks to that part of human beings which is prepared — even eager — to contemplate violence against those whom are disliked and feared. Militarists give this part a dangerously important place: pacifists refuse to acknowledge it altogether. It is not only violence which is symbolised by the military: organisation and discipline, efficiency and bravery are all deeply ambiguous qualities which the public may approve of or not, depending on circumstances.

Anyone who has been involved in politico-military affairs knows that there is almost no point of contact between the armed forces of the popular imagination, and those which really exist. The factual presentations and careful qualifications are, in practice, largely wasted, and the popular image of the military, largely supplied by an inventive media, by folk memory and their own fears and hopes, is altogether more powerful than the mundane reality. It is likely, indeed, that the image of the military in most societies is largely created by the mass media, and books, newspapers and the cinema further reflect the distorting perspective which each shows. In societies which have large-scale military service, this is less of a problem, although the popular view of the military may not be very current. In countries with professional armed forces, however, the gap between assumptions and reality can be very wide.

These distortions also influence the way entire nations are perceived, and the relations between them. For example, it is common to be told in Asia that the Japanese should not be allowed to take part in peacekeeping operations, since this is (to use the most common formulation) ‘like giving chocolate liqueurs to a reformed alcoholic’. The fact that even sensible and well-travelled journalists and government officials say such ridiculous things suggests that what are dealt with here are not the timid and inoffensive self-defence forces, but a folk memory of the Imperial Japanese Army which is more powerful than the present reality. (The same applies, incidentally, in the domestic debate: most Japanese, even though they are bombarded with accurate information about the self-defence forces, still think of them, symbolically, as the blinkered nationalists who brought so much suffering to Japan in the 1930s and 1940s.)

An attempt was made so far in this monograph to give helpful and practical examples of ideas which have worked elsewhere. But, in this case, it is not really possible. Clearly, anyone concerned with defence policy, anyone working with or in the military, and for that matter politicians as well, need to accept that there will always be a gap between the reality of the military and how the public perceives it. This is also true in many other areas of government: public opinion is seldom well-informed on the economy, health or education, but it is at perhaps its most dangerous in the defence area. Everyone has experience of education, everyone gets ill, most people have a job and act as consumers. But, because the vast majority of the population have little involvement with the military, the gap between theory and practice is probably at its widest here. As a result, it is quite possible that, for example, measures genuinely taken to bring the military closer to some of society’s widely accepted norms will be judged as too radical by some, damned as too little by others, and ignored, in any event, by the majority.

Nonetheless, there are some practical steps which any sensible administration takes to explain itself and what it is doing, taking into account the problems alluded to. These include:

Keep it simple: Nuances and qualifications will otherwise be lost. No initiative, no matter how well-intended, will be understood unless it can be summarised in a sentence.



Do not expect to convince everyone: It is impossible to please all of the groups who are addressed. Attempts to promote greater ethnic tolerance in the military, for example, although always a good idea, will be deeply unpopular with some sections of society, and there is little that can be done about it in the short term.



Do not worry about it: Trying to convince everyone, or trying to get every last nuance of policy across is wasted effort.