Humanising Warfare, or Why Van Creveld May Be Missing the Big Picture

Christopher Coker

A deep crisis would appear to be engulfing a significant, if increasingly, marginalised part of the male community. In the closing decade of the twentieth century the two largest demonstrations in Washington, DC were staged by men. A million protesters gathered on the Mall in October 1995. 750,000 staged a similar protest two years later. The first were black militants, followers of the fundamentalist preacher Louis Farakhans Nation of Islam, the second, were slightly overweight, middle-aged, lower middle-class white members of an evangelical movement called The Promise Keepers. Both were all male movements of a kind not seen before. Both reflected, or appeared to, a deepening of the gender war. For despite their racial and religious differences, they had much in common: the belief in the supremacy of men in the home, the stark difference between male and female roles in society, and a deep hostility to abortion. Both groups were deeply troubled by the mounting evidence of male dysfunctionality in social life: illegitimacy, violence, addiction, and disease. The Nation of Islam may have been the more radical in its analysis of racial injustice, but it was profoundly conservative on the issue of the sex war. It segregated women at its meetings. The white evangelicals banished them altogether. Both offered women a better deal in terms of male responsibility in the family, but one that would be compensated for by a restoration of male authority in general. It is not clear whether both groups are expressions of male chauvinism or whether they are uttering a genuine cry for help. It is not clear whether greater male social irresponsibility is related in some subliminal way to the progress of women in the last 50 years. In the African-American population women have been gaining ground in the market place at exactly the same time as black manhood is threatened by criminality, illegitimacy, and addiction. And this has occurred in a culture that socially is profoundly conservative and in which women traditionally have played a subordinate role. Is male dysfunctionality related to a crisis in self-confidence, asks the journalist Andrew Sullivan? Are men still more at risk from themselves, as a result of their own failure to adjust to the new times? Biology, concludes Sullivan, teaches us at the beginning of the twenty-first century that men have become the weaker sex. Sociology tells us that they are the inferior sex as well in terms of higher incidents of suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, and cardio-vascular disease. As the new
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2000. ISSN 0305-8298. Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 449-460

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Millennium millennium opens men appear to be the most threatened as well as the most threatening sex. Are they also becoming a socially maladjusted sex? For they tend to be emotionally volatile and more prone to promiscuity and physical risk which account, of course, in part for a reduction in their life expectancy.1 Put like this, one could make out a case that the military is urgently in need of women soldiers for the male stock is genetically not what it was. Women we are told, of course, have their deficiencies, mostly physical. They are accused of having less height, upper body weight, muscle mass, aerobic capacity, and endurance stamina than men. They do not meet the standards for seventy per cent of army specialists. They are injured at twice the rate of males. All of this may be true, but misses the point that many men, too, no longer seem to fit the bill given their reluctance to join up or stay once they are in uniform (in both respects Western militaries are experiencing a crisis despite a cut in manpower of over twenty-five per cent in the last decade). None of which should surprise us because war is becoming a very different experience, and requires a very different kind of soldier. It is this larger social context which Martin van Creveld does not address in an otherwise spirited and thoughtful paper.2 It is this missing dimension that I want to discuss because the presence of women in the military only appears an illusion if one takes a one dimensional view of it. The Revenge of Civil Society Van Creveld makes much of the cyclical decline in manpower since 1945, suggesting that the West is going out of the serious war business. But there is another development at work which he ignores in his essay: the civilian and military worlds are converging very fast. The arrival of what Martin Shaw calls a post-military society has undermined the Clausewitzian understanding of the relationship between state, people, and army in a way that challenges our late nineteenth century understanding of military service.3 One other writer terms this process the revenge of civil society, that is the reassertion of civil values and attitudes.4 The military is now expected not only to share the values civil society holds in high esteem, but even in the way it prosecutes war it is expected to reflect civility and compassion, in a word, a contempt for cruelty (the dominant position of civil society). Above all, civil society can no longer be self-consciously gendered as it was in the past. Throughout the modern era certain values were appropriated by, or
1. Andrew Sullivan, America on the March for its Lost Manhood, The Sunday Times, 12 October 1997, 7. 2. Martin van Creveld, The Great Illusion: Women in the Military, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29, no. 2 (2000): 429-42. 3. Martin Shaw, Post Military Society: Militarism, Demilitarisation and War at the End of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Polity Press: 1991). 4. Max Silverman, Facing Post Modernism: Contemporary French Thought on Culture and Society (London: Routledge, 1999).

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Humanising War considered unique to men: work, politics, public affairs, and moral codes based on principle. Women were allotted the private sphere, i.e. ordinary (domestic) virtues and the morality of sympathy. Only comparatively late did society begin to recognise that just as human biological life needs the two genders to sustain it, so too social life needs an interaction of masculine and feminine values. What is often called the feminisation of society does not mean that masculine values are giving way to feminine ones. Rather it means that the space of public institutionsincluding armiesmust incorporate aspects of private life such as compassion, which being associated with women have not been thought worthy, until recently, of philosophical or moral reflection. Tztevan Todorov puts the case very well. What our world concedes is that it would be disastrous to align only with masculine values or even, in a less likely scenario, feminine ones. When we are asked to be more humane we are asked to take into account fifty per cent of humanity that has been traditionally excluded from the discourse of war: It follows that each individual must accept himor herselfas a heteroclite being irredeemably imperfect with respect to the terms of each set of values, and that we must eachin the way we liveaccept this alternation (or androgyny) along with the necessity of compromise.5 As Todorov concludes, the traditional gender-based division of values is not unavoidable. Gender, after all, like the cult of manliness in the late nineteenth century, can often be a social construct. It does not automatically follow from the biological fact of sex that women cannot be tough or men compassionate, that neither can perform well in each others traditional spheres: the public and private. Second, those values called feminine have been undervalued throughout Western history, more so than in many other cultures, perhaps in part because what the Western world has done well is war. And it will continue to do it well enough, not least because it is the first to incorporate one half of society that has been excluded from it by virtue of a warriors honour code which is now obsolete. For both Clausewitz and Hegel, keeping military and civil society distinct but in a working partnership, was vital to the ethical health of the nation. For both men the state was a spiritual, not merely a territorial entity. They advocated a citizen army because of their belief that the fighting spirit of a people was crucial in legitimising the role of the state itself. State institutions were only as strong as the spirit of the people who served them, manifest, of course, most expressly in war. The collective identification of citizen and state presupposed an Enlightenment understanding of society and citizenship. Service in the army was an ontological commitment, for waror the preparation for itcreated the conditions for the production, maintenance, and reproduction of a virtuous community through which

5. Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (London: Phoenix, 1999), 295.

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Millennium subjectivity could be experienced, existentially for the citizen, collectively for the state. But this was a model that excluded women. Women could enjoy the individuality and social membership that family provides. They could in their roles as wife and mother find emotional recognition of their particularity as women. But none of this could change the fact that in the social world women were excluded from civil society, the one sphere in which they could actualise themselves as individuals, as wage earners. That began to change, of course, in the two World Wars in which they were mobilised as workers for the collective war effort, and it has changed again as they have been allowed into the war business, the one sphere from which they have been excluded in western (but not always non-Western societies) since the Greeks.6 The Feminisation of the Military This development has been called by its critics the feminisation of the military. And its importance is precisely that it is seen to threaten traditional military culture. In the words of US congresswoman Pat Schroeder, what youve got is...culture cracking.7 For her, the de-gendering of war is to be applauded. For many enlisted men who see the admission of women as the enfeeblement of national defence it has generated frustration and anger. Indeed, a large number are having difficulty defending themselves. Thousands of women are sexually abused every year, ten times more than women outside the ranks. As one US Army study on sexual harassment concluded, the victimisation of women soldiers was clearly considered by many male soldiers to be a normal part of army life.8 The critics, however, should remember (as van Creveld himself is the first to acknowledge) that women only began entering the US military in serious numbers in 1971-72 because not enough men could be found to serve in the All Volunteer Force which was then in the process of being established. As male recruitment continues to fall at the very time that the overall size of military forces is rapidly
6. In the fifth century BC Greek society was unique in its exclusive, nervous maleness. The GrecoPersian wars were important in this respect, first, because the Greeks depicted the Persians as effeminate, and second because they handed onto the Romans the idea of a male dominated society, together with its corollary that political authority for women was a mark of barbarism. It was only to be expected that savages like the Iceni in Britain would choose Boudicca to lead their rebellion or that Gaulish women with huge white armsas Ammianus Marcellinus wrote in the fourth century AD would pitch in to save their husbands in a brawl. For an interesting discussion of the Greek attitude towards women soldiers, see Edith Hall, Asia Unmanned: Images of Victory in Classical Athens, in War and Society in the Greek World, eds. John Rich and Graham Shipley (London: Routledge, 1993). 7. John Hillen, The Rise of the Political General, in Not Fit to Fight: The Cultural Subversion of the Armed Forces, ed. Gerald Frost (London: Social Affairs Unit, 1998), 56. 8. For the abuse of women soldiers, see Evan Thomas and Gregory Vistica, At War in the Ranks, Newsweek, 11 August 1997, 32-33. For the report see Philip Shenon, Armys Leadership blamed in Report on Sexual Abuses, The New York Times, 12 September 1997, A4. For an outspoken critique of the feminisation of the military see Brian Mitchell, Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster (London: Brasseys, 1993).

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Humanising War decreasing, so women have been further integrated into the services. Starting in the early 1990s, basic training was gender-integrated in all of the armed forces except the Marine Corps and ground combat arms of the army. Beginning in 1995 Navy women were allowed to serve on warships (excluding submarines) and as combat pilots aboard aircraft carriers. And in the United States Air Force they were allowed to fly bombers and even fighter planes. But this further integration has also been met by the complaint that the US military is now facing declining combat effectiveness. It has been turned, the critics argue, into a safe haven for young mothers (the average age for producing children in the military is 22-23 at a time when the average female has her first child at 29).9 It can even be argued that many women, especially the enlisted, are entering the services precisely because they expect not to fight. According to a Harvard study carried out in the mid-1990s, only three per cent of army women believe they should serve in combat on the same terms as men. Given the opportunity, only eleven per cent of enlisted women and fourteen per cent of female officers would volunteer for combat and fifty-two per cent (or more than half) of all army women would probably or definitely leave the service if forced into combat positions.10 This combat-shyness is reflected in public attitudes as well. It is part of the humanity of civil society that sixty-four per cent of people polled in the Gulf War opposed sending single parents of young children to the war zone.11 A number of bills were even prepared by the Congress to prevent women from being deployed, but the war came to an end before they could be enacted. When they do so some do not serve for long. In Bosnia between 1995 and 1996 a female soldier was evacuated every three days because they became pregnant. Many reportedly conceived to avoid hell-tours.12 Not all these criticisms are unfounded, but we should also look at the feminisation of the American military in much broader sociological terms than do many of its critics, even those as well informed as van Creveld. Whatever these arguments, the feminisation of the military is yet another manifestation of the closing of the gap between the civilian and military worlds; it is another feature not of the decline but revaluation of soldiering as a profession. With it has gone one of the most cherished features of the traditional military ethos, although in one respect a very recent late nineteenth century one: the end of the ideal of manliness. In turn this has transformed not only the character of the warrior but also her nature. Case Study: The End of the Heroic Warrior As Aristotle tells us, men find it easier to be courageous, women to be moderate. The feminine virtues of empathy and caring, caution, protection, apology, and sentiment are regularly exalted above the masculine ones: heroism, daring, and
9. Evan Thomas and John Barry, At War over Women, Newsweek , 12 May 1997, 28. 10. Kate OBeirne The War Machine as Child Minder, in Not Fit to Fight. 11. Ibid. 12. Thomas and Barry, At War over Women.

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Millennium endurance. Today the very word manliness seems obsolete. The womens revolution has succeeded to a degree that even now goes unacknowledged. We are in the process of making language gender-neutral. As for manliness, the quality of one gender or rather of one sex, seems to describe the essence of the enemy which is being attacked: the social evil we are intent on eradicating. Even at the height of the modern era the old warrior ethos (especially the masculinist image) was not always considered desirable or helpful. Indeed some would claim that industrialised warfare rendered the manliness cult redundant long before the testing ground of the Somme or Iwo Jima. Before the war, wrote the infantry platoon commander, Sidney Jary, he would have listed such masculinist qualities as physical stamina, a competitive nature, hunting, and aggression as the necessary qualities of a good soldier. After experiencing war from Normandy to north-west Germany in 1944-45, his ideas changed radically. He now recognised that good soldiering depended on: Sufferance without which one could not survive...A quiet mind which enables the soldier to live in harmony with his fellows through all sorts of difficulty and dreadful conditions...There is simply no room for the assertive. Thirdly...a sense of the ridiculous which helps the soldier surmount the unacceptable.13 Given the dilemma between choosing sportsmen or poets for a dangerous mission, Jary declared he would unhesitatingly recruit the latter. And that would appear to be our case too. We judge warriors by this new standard or at least encourage them to judge themselves. Ian Long, one of the first Tornado pilots to take part in the air war against Iraq was applauded by one British public relations executive as presenting a relevant, caring, 1990s face to the camera, rather than the historically sanctioned military mode of aggressive jingoism.14 When the US Marines went back to Somalia in February 1995 and were the first to use non-lethal weapons in a combat zone, Colonel Michael Stanton talked of gentler operations other than war: We would like to see the development of non-lethal weapons as proof of civility and restraint. Non-lethal weapons show our reverence for life and our commitment to the use of minimum force.15 Two key words that spring out from Stantons statement are civility and restraint. A third is the word gentle. This is what humane warfare promises: the chance for the first time to eliminate the incivility of warfare. All of which begs the

13. Cited in Hugh McManners, The Scars of War (London: Harper Collins, 1994), 24. 14. Bryan Appleyard, Unattributables March to an Antiquated Drum, The Sunday Times, 27 January 1991, 11. 15. Cited in Lawrence Freedman, The Revolution in Strategic Affairs, Adelphi Paper no. 318 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1998), 16.

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Humanising War question, whether the feminisation of the military is consistent with warfare, or more accurately the way we fight it? Modern military culture provides one answer, the postmodern another. Is the military being emasculated, is that the meaning of civilianisation? It all depends on what we mean by manliness and what we mean by the culture of war. The question is indeed one of military culture. We bring young men and women into the armed forces to be warriors in a warrior culture, Colin Powell told The New Yorker after an incident in Okinawa in which three American sailors raped a twelve-year-old girl. Soldiers, he claimed, were not social workers.16 In traditional societies warrior cultures have always been all male, based on honour codes, male prestige, and competition for retaining self-esteem. Women have sometimes played an important role in this, from the Spartan mothers who demanded their sons either come back with their shields or on them, to the Chechen rebels of today. Wiry, resilient, and disciplined young Chechens pick up their military skills when they are children. Men are not allowed to display emotion or affection for their children in public; but they may teach their sons the workings of a Kalashnikov early in life, before they reach adolescence. Western armies, of course, have long ceased to be based on the warrior castes which traditionally composed them. Today we do not have warriors: we have soldiers. Our information societies put a premium on technical versatility and knowledge rather than muscle as a source of power. Western soldiers, like citizens, interface with computers. Databases, simulation programmes, expert systems, holograms, all cast doubt on traditional categories of analysis and thought such as the value of a job, the ownership of merchandise, and the copyright of ideas. And all cast in doubt the traditional understanding of war, devaluing the job of the soldier as traditionally defined in the eyes of some. But then perhaps, what is happening is that soldiering in the Western world is being re-valued. Even in the twenty-first century it is difficult to imagine that Western armies will not be predominantly male or that they will be effectively degendered. But women will significantly change attitudes to war itself, which is why their presence in uniform is so important. This is, of course, very much in conflict with the spirit of the military ethos which still predominates in the West, and partly explains the controversy which the presence of women in the military continues to excite. If their presence excites controversy this is largely because Western armies are still tied to a traditional code which is non-material. Generals still talk of honour and tend to play up or talk up the irrational and emotive as if dying for a material interest is somehow demeaning. What this amounts to is putting the biological above the social and treating the military as being different from civil society precisely because civilian life relies on social and materialist constructions such as wealth creation as opposed to those human attributions: hatred and courage, which Clausewitz identified as being intrinsic not only to the character of war but also its true nature.
16. Peter J. Boyer, Admiralty Board at War, The New Yorker, 16 September 1996, 85.

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Millennium One of the intrinsic consequences of civilianisation (and feminisation that accompanies it) is that military culture is beginning to turn its back on the biological (which has traditionally excluded women) and is beginning to focus on the rational and material instead. In a discussion of military codes, Francis Fukuyama takes a very modern view which sits ill with postmodern military thinking in arguing that what distinguishes the human from the non-human is that the former are not programmed to act by instinctual behaviour. But is not dying for prestige in human society often instinctual as well? Is the warrior who dies for honour necessarily a moral agent? Are mercenaries any less warriors, for example, because they do not fight for honour, certainly not their own, even if they fight for the honour of their employers? Is materialism in war necessarily dishonourable? Fukuyamas argument in The End of History is important because it would appear to be predicated on my own proposition: that civil society has triumphed and that part of the cost which he himself regrets is the civilianisation of military codes.17 Let us return to Clausewitz, and by implication Hegel and their endorsement of the moral and subjective importance of war. Neither of them glorified war. Both thought it morally liberating for its secondary effects on human character and the community. War prevented the citizen from becoming self-absorbed at the very moment in history that citizens were beginning to take over the state. Both men agreed with many eighteenth century writers including Dr. Johnson who thought professional armies effete (just as Clausewitz thought mercenaries) precisely because war to be vigorous had to involve society as a whole. Hegel disliked the bourgeois spirit because of its materialism, because it put the quiet life before the noble one, because he considered it to be spiritually demeaning. Fukuyamas own reading of history is influenced by Alexandre Kojeves reading of Hegel in the 1930s which put an emphasis on the existential nature of life, the constant fight for recognition. Man is not an animal, for though he too fights for self-preservation, he rises above his nature by showing a willingness to risk his life for a non-material reward. And the two examples Kojeve cited in defence of his thesis were both military: a medal or the enemys flag.18 Soldiers fight to secure both, not for their intrinsic usefulness but because they are desired by others, by the society they serve. Soldiers live in the recognition of their fellow citizens, in the soldiers tale told of their lives after their death, and in warrior societies they even live in the esteem in which they are held by their enemies. Moreover, Kojeves Hegel tells us, we want to be recognised by other men because we want to be recognised as men.19 What makes us superior as a human being is our willingness to risk what we all, as human beings, value most: our own lives. One of the foremost sources of self-esteem which the soldiers still derive from their service is the oldest of all, which dates back to Homer: that society is
17. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992). 18. Cited in Fukuyama, The End of History, 147. 19. For an excellent discussion, see Shadia Drury, Alexandre Kojeve: The Roots of Post Modern Politics (London: Macmillan, 1994), 185-86.

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Humanising War divided into two, between those willing to risk their lives and those who are not. With it was born that aristocratic, later meritocratic ethos which we call the warriors honour; the warrior being not only a more honourable man than the civilian, but a more complete one: one who experiences more. Talking about his own combat experience in Vietnam, William Broyles wrote: If you come back whole you bring with you the knowledge that you have explored regions of your own soul that in most men will remain uncharted.20 Broyless comments are quoted in an article in Harpers subtitled Is Americas Military Training Warriors or Humanitarians?. It seems an apt question. In 1998 more civilians working in NGOs died than peacekeepers. The 10,000 civilians sent on essential war-related work to the Gulf showed much greater discipline than the soldiers: fewer were sent back home for disciplinary problems.21 In Kosovo civilians have to defuse unexploded cluster bombs dropped by NATO planes because of the refusal of the Clinton administration to allow soldiers to carry out such work.22 It is precisely the obsession with preserving individual life that is causing so much anguish amongst high-ranking officers in the US Army. Brigadier-General William Boykin admits that the US Army has gone too far, that it has allowed its soldiers to think that their mission is not to get hurt. He is aware, of course, that they are higher value targets in situations such as Somalia and Bosnia than their British and French partners. American deaths would net their enemies much higher political capital. But some generals are becoming increasingly critical of civil societys reluctance to allow soldiers to take risks. One unnamed Lieutenant Colonel complained after the Kosovo War: I hate to say it but there seems to be a parting of the ways between society and the military. Were citizen-soldiers, but were used to getting on ships and sailing away from society taking care of ourselves. Weve asked nothing from our country but to be allowed to go to the forefront and fight without complaint.23 One of the doubts that soldiers have about their profession is that in todays world the honour code means increasingly little. And if that is true are soldiers and civilians in fact all that unlike? To be sure, many soldiers are angry at the civilians for quarantining them from danger even if they often have their reasons for doing so. But there is an increasing belief in civilian society at large that even when it
20. Cited in Bob Shacochis, Soldiers of the Future: Is America Training Warriors or Humanitarians?, Harpers Magazine, December 1999, 44. 21. Charles C. Moskos, Towards a Post Modern Military, in The Post Modern Military: Armed Forces after the Cold War, ed. Charles C. Moskos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 70. 22. Jonathan Steele, Death Lurks in the Fields, The Guardian, 14 March 2000 [http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3973654,00 .html] (30 August 2000). 23. Shacochis, Soldiers of the Future, 53.

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Millennium comes to fighting warsfrom a distance, by remote controlthe materialist ethos of zero casualties is increasingly defining military service. Even Fukuyama regrets the fact that: In our world there are still people who run around risking their lives in bloody battles over a name; or a flag; or a piece of clothing; but they tend to belong to gangs with names like the Bloods or the Crips, and make their living dealing drugs.24 For Fukuyama, as for Hegel, a man is most human when he risks his life, when he allows his human desire to prevail over his natural instincts. In showing his contempt for life at any price, he puts his dignity first and in doing so becomes a true moral agent. But it can also be argued that the Clausewitzian ideal of the honour code speaks to an era which has long passed. Is not the equation of nobility with nonutilitarianism socially conditioned too? Is it not in this regard dangerous because it is fundamentally inconsistent with the liberal ethos of our societies at home? Did it not survive because we were conditioned to accept it because of the enemy stereotyping during the Cold War? The liberal idea of freedom is precisely that we do not defy nature, that we accept we cannot perfect man, that we reconcile ourselves to our human nature (both feminine and masculine). One of the principal liberal philosophers tells us that our first principle must be to avoid pain.25 The liberal experience of war should be liberal too. We should fight it for a material cause, to spare others pain or to terminate oppression. We should not fight for an existential end, or a metaphysical principle that reduces humanity itself to an agent of history. Hence our increasing respect for humanism and human life. War can be a perfectly rational activity and to seek to minimise death or undue suffering is the only response which such acceptance can sanction. In such a moral universe there is no room for the exaggerated manliness of allmale gangs in Miami or LA Central which Fukuyama celebrates for their humanity (for being more human, for showing themselves moral agents even though engaging in an amoral trade). The repudiation of manliness in the postmodern military is therefore a reflection of its repudiation in society too. And this brings me to my point of departure, men feeling sorry for themselves. They are unhappy with the change in roles history has brought about. As the historian Peter Gay tells us in his study of the late Victorian mentality, manliness was grounded in a late nineteenth century idea.26 So too was the Clausewitzian ideal of subjectivity: war as an existential experience which separated the civilian from the soldier by opening up those uncharted regions of the soul which soldiers like Broyles lauded as a reason for serving in the military
24. Fukuyama, The End of History, 148 and 32930. 25. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially chap. 7. 26. Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, vol. 3 (New York: Norton, 1993).

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Humanising War even in a war as demoralising as Vietnam. This was an era when humanity was thought to carry no biological purpose, only an existential or metaphysical reality with which it should remain in tune. I see many soldiers, would that I saw warriors Nietzsche has Zarathustra complain about the soldier-citizens who were being enlisted even in his day to fight the modern eras nationalist wars. 27 Today he would be even more alarmed that soldiers, even professional ones, now outnumber warriors, a breed who have been banished by Alvin and Heidi Toffler (in a book lauded by the US military) to a minor niche in the warfare market. The Marines and special services, they conclude, have become pioneers of niche warfare.28 Conclusion One might say that the military is becoming more responsive to the public wish for greater civility and less cruelty, and is being forced to search for alternative technologies that allow it to honour both. As the American sociologist Ronald Ingelhart concludes at the end of his survey of post modernisation in 43 different countries, our societies have moved away from an emphasis on economic efficiency and bureaucratic authority and scientific rationality that characterised modernisation towards a more humane society with more room for individual autonomy, diversity, and self expression.29 Reflecting new civil values, it can be said that we are witnessing the rise of a new kind of soldier, not one who has gone soft but one who has become, by necessity, more humane. Against this claim, it can be argued that war is notand never can be humanised if winning is still important. Officers in the field claim that extended focus even on peacekeeping makes for a deterioration of combat skills. A study of GIs in Bosnia showed that their six months of duty caused war fighting morale to plummet for both men and women.30 Like Martin van Creveld, I spend a lot of time lecturing at military institutes and I understand very well that the picture I have painted of a de-traditionalised profession, more democratic and liberal, less manly and hierarchical, a military more like the civilian world, will horrify many soldiers who feel that todays soldier-scholars, soldier-statesmen, humanitarian warriors, and yes, women
27. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. William Kaufman (New York: Viking, 1968), 159. 28. Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Antiwar: Survival at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century (New York: Warner Books, 1994), 154. 29. Ronald Inglehart, Modernisation and Postmodernisation: Cultural, Economic and Political Changes in 43 Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 92. 30. Hillen, The Rise of the Political General, 52. For a study of whether soldiers are going soft in humanitarian missions, see Lara Miller, Do Soldiers Hate Peacekeeping?, Armed Forces and Society 23, no. 3 (1997): 415-50.

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Millennium soldiers too will prove wanting when the next important war breaks out. Are we training the military to fight only mirror-images of themselves? Are we producing a postmodern military that can only fight other postmodern nations (a paradox, of course, since we are told that democratic societies do not go to war against each other). Van Creveld is right to sound a note of caution even if I do not share his analysis. It can indeed be argued that we cannot revalue war in the way we are trying to do. And if the military finds the logic of war still demands the principles Clausewitz considered essential to its nature, what does it do? Unable to retreat, to reinvent itself again, it does have an alternative: posthuman warfare, i.e. the prospect of reducing the moral agency of the warrior by removing him or her from danger altogether. If, as one US general was heard to comment after the Gulf War, the battlefield is no place for a soldier does twenty-first century technology offer a way out of the dilemma, a way to reinvent war even if these means devaluing it as a human experience? Were that to be the way forward, of course, the warriors code would be de-traditionalised too, more so than it is being already, but in ways that may detract even further from what civil society would consider consistent with the warriors honour. Taking the soldier out of the loop might mean taking civil society out too, and thence lies its danger. In losing any claim to being human, war would also lose any claim to being humane. Christopher Coker is Reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science

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