Warriors in combat – what makes people actively fight in combat?

Abstract

This article discusses what it is that makes some soldiers overcome the challenges and suffering of combat to such an extent as to master rather than being overcome by it. It adds insights to the combat motivation literature emphasising the properties of combat while presenting a theoretical definition of the difference between soldiers and warriors. The implications of the existence of warriors for organising, recruitment, selection, motivation, leadership and training, equality, cost and employment are discussed, and it is found that there are two basic ways of organising warriors, the most prevalent being into Special Operations Forces. The paper concludes with reflections on the circumstances in which even warriors refuse to fight.

Key words:

• Warriors
• combat-motivation
• Special Operations Forces

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Christopher Coker, Anthony Vinci, Anna Kate Farmer, Colin Steinbach, Louisa Sunderman, Mark Hoffman, Chris Hughes, Andrew Walter, Jon Petter Rui Johansen, Jørn Henriksen and especially the anonymous reviewer for constructive comments on this article. Any inaccuracies are of course entirely my responsibility.

Notes

¹Sean Naylor, Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda (London: Penguin 2005), 37.

²Harry Constance and Randall Fuerst, Good to Go: The Life and Times of a Decorated Member of the U.S. Navy's Elite Seal Team Two (New York: Avon 1998), 238.

³Carl von Clausewitz, On War[1832] , trans. and ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton UP 1976), 101.

⁴Christopher Coker, Waging Warfare Without Warriors (London: Lynne Rienner 2002); J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper & Row 1970); John Keegan, The Face of Battle[1976] (London: Pimlico 2004); Martin van Creveld, Transformation of War (London: The Free Press 1991); Theodore Nadelson, Trained to Kill: Soldiers at War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP 2005), 112.

⁵Gray, Warriors, 27.

⁶Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press 1999), 24.

⁸Christopher Coker, Warrior Ethos: Military Culture and the War on Terror (London: Routledge forthcoming 2007), 34.

⁷Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (Washington DC: National Defence Univ. 1996).

⁹Olya Gayazova, ‘Sublime Alienation? Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche on “supermen” and the sublime’ (2006, unpublished, presented at International Studies Association Annual Convention, San Diego), 1.

¹⁰J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Vol. XVII (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1989), 39.

¹²Clausewitz, On War, 111.

¹¹Edmund Burke, ‘A Philosophical Inquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful’[1756], in Isaac Kramnick (ed.), The Portable Edmund Burke (London; Penguin 1999), 64.

¹³Evan Wright, Generation Kill (New York: Bantam Press 2004), 37.

¹⁴S.L.A. Marshall, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War[1947] (Univ. of Oklahoma Press 2000), 185.

¹⁵Clausewitz, On War, 112.

¹⁶Burke, ‘A philosophical inquiry into …’, 65.

¹⁷Ibid., 71.

¹⁸Bruce Newsome, ‘The Myth of Intrinsic Combat Motivation’, Journal of Strategic Studies 26/4 (Dec. 2003), 24.

¹⁹Newsome, ‘The Myth of Intrinsic Combat Motivation’, 25–33.

²⁰Ibid., 32.

²¹Ibid., 33. This is of course patently untrue, as countless war anecdotes testify. Particularly if one focuses on combat motivation, as opposed to mere presence in combat zone.

²²Hew Strachan, ‘Training, Morale and Modern War’, Journal of Contemporary History 41/2 (April 2006), 211–27.

²³Newsome, ‘The Myth of Intrinsic Combat Motivation’, 33–5; Marshall, Men Against Fire; Samuel Stouffer, The American Soldier (Princeton UP 1949); Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz, ‘Cohesion and disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II’, Public Opinion Quarterly 12/2 (Summer 1948), 280–315; Martin van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and US Army Performance, 1939–1945 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1982); William Henderson, Why the Vietcong Fought (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1979).

²⁴Newsome, ‘The Myth of Intrinsic Combat Motivation’, 33.

²⁵Marshall, Men Against Fire, 54.

²⁶Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill and War and Society (Boston: Little, Brown 1995), 153. Even though Marshall's findings have been questioned on methodological grounds, the essence of the findings seems to be corroborated by the investigations of others. Grossman argues ‘every available scholarly study replicates [Marshall's] basic findings’. (Ibid. xv)

²⁷Ibid., 251.

²⁸I will use the term ‘original firers’ to refer to those Mashall identified, and ‘natural firers’ to similar types of soldiers today. Ultimately these terms will be replaced by the term ‘warriors’ below.

³⁰Bowden, Black Hawk Down, 256.

³³Franklin D. Miller, Reflections of a Warrior (New York: Pocket Books 1991), 88.

²⁹Ibid., 161.

³¹Marshall, Men Against Fire, 44.

³²Henderson, Why the Vietcong Fought.

³⁴Marshall, Men Against Fire, 58–9.

³⁵Ibid., 173.

³⁶This is because people can have all sorts of romantic and biased notions about what war is like before they experience it. Someone who is willing to re-engage, however, knows what it is about.

³⁷This means to maintain initiative as opposed to for example merely staying more or less passively in the line, like the majority of soldiers do.

³⁸This dimension is of course more relevant in today's all-volunteer militaries, or in terms of voluntary combat assignments in conscript militaries. It is also highly relevant in assessing combat motivation in Vietnam, where the compulsory duty was limited to one tour.

³⁹Ibid., 178.

⁴⁰Cited in Grossman, On Killing, 180.

⁴¹Murphy and York's infantry skills are institutionalised in the case of snipers in the modern military. However, they often operate in pairs, so they still have a semblance of coherence, but that is not true about all fighter pilots. Gwynne Dyer has noted that less than one per cent of US Army Air Forces fighter pilots accounted for between 30 and 40 per cent of the kills in World War II (Cited ibid., 181).

⁴²Ibid.

⁴³Ibid., 180–1.

⁴⁴Simpson et al., Oxford English Dictionary Volume XIX, 935.

⁴⁵Ibid., 954. Soldier in this context means any member of a military establishment, and not specifically a serviceman in the Army.

⁴⁶Wright, Generation Kill, 31.

⁴⁷Tillman was ultimately killed by ‘friendly fire’ in Afghanistan. San Francisco Chronicle Online, 25 Sept. 2005; ‘Family demands the truth’ <www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/09/25/MNGD7ETMNM1.DTL>.

⁴⁸Samuel Hynes, The Soldier's Tale-Baring Witness to Modern War (Harmondsworth; Penguin 1997), 112.

⁴⁹J.T. Hansen, A. Susan Owen and Michael Patrick Madden, Parallels – The Soldiers' Knowledge and the Oral History of Contemporary Warfare (New York: Walter de Gruyter 1992), 16.

⁵⁰Existential psychologists hold that if we try to understand man as a bundle of discrete drives or a composite of reflex patterns, we may end up with brilliant generalisations but we have lost the man to whom these things happen. See David I. Sills (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences Vol. 13 (London: Macmillan 1968), 76.

⁵¹Audie Murphy is an example of the latter. Having been turned down both by the Marines and the Army Airborne divisions because of his small size, he served with distinction in a conventional infantry division and became the American with the most individual kills and with 28 medals the highest decorated US soldier in all of World War II.

⁵²Eric Haney, Inside Delta Force (London: Corgi Books 2002),134, 139–40.

⁵³Ibid., 141.

⁵⁵Bowden, Black Hawk Down, 8–10.

⁵⁴Elite infantry, often operating with US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), but technically not a Special Operations Unit (SOF).

⁵⁶There is also an interesting but rather large gender question concerning to which extent the warrior archetype is a masculinity ideal, and how that shapes the relationship between war and gender. This has been partially addressed by Martin van Creveld, Men, Women & War: Do Women Belong in the Front Line? (London: Cassell 2001) and Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender (Cambridge: CUP 2001) but deserves more attention.

⁵⁷Notable early examples are those mentioned in the anonymous Roman tract entitled Women Intelligent and courageous in warfare, of these possibly five were historical figures (see van Creveld, Men, Women & War, 68–70).

⁵⁸Creveld, Men, Women & War, 13.

⁵⁹Goldstein, Gender and War, 60–1.

⁶⁰Creveld, Men, Women & War, 140–4; Goldstein, Gender and War, 66.

⁶¹Goldstein, Gender and War, 68–9.

⁶²Creveld, Men, Women & War, 141.

⁶³Goldstein, Gender and War, 69. Goldstein also cites a report about a female Soviet sniper being decorated for killing over 300 Germans. Presumably it is Ludmilla Pavlichenko who was credited with killing 309 Germans, although the accuracy of that number is disputed.

⁶⁴Shooting from treetops (thus failing to find cover or escape route) the women demonstrated expert marksmanship, but a lacking in elementary fieldcraft, which suggests limited combat experience. See Geoffrey Brooks, Sniper on the Eastern Front – the Memoirs of Sepp Allenberger Knight's Cross (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Military 2006), 70–1.

⁶⁵Creveld, Men, Women & War, 142.

⁶⁶Hansen et al., Parallels, 21.

⁶⁷Recon[naissance] Team. These teams ran cross-border reconnaissance missions into Laos and Cambodia for MACV/SOG, often with complete deniability from the US government, which of course added to the risk, and status.

⁶⁸Miller, Reflections of a Warrior, 89.

⁶⁹Nathaniel Fick, One Bullet Away – The Making of a Marine Officer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 2005), 138.

⁷⁰Malcolm MacPherson, Robert's Ridge (London: Bantam Books 2005), 4 (original italics).

⁷¹See in particular John Plaster, SOG – The Secret War of America's Commandos in Vietnam (New York; Simon & Schuster 1997); Audie Murphy, To Hell and Back (New York: Henry Holt 1949); Derek Leebaert, To Dare to Conquer – Special Operations and the Destiny of Nations, from Achilles to Al Qaeda (New York; Little, Brown 2006); Miller, Reflections of a Warrior; Wright, Generation Kill; Constance, Good to Go; Bowden; Black Hawk Down; Max Hastings, Warriors: Portraits from the Battlefield (London: HarperCollins 2005).

⁷²Thomas Adams quoted in Bernd Horn, ‘Special Men, Special Missions: The Utility of Special Operations Forces – A Summation’, in Bernd Horn et al., Force of Choice: Perspectives on Special Operations (Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP 2004), 10.

⁷⁴A.A. Gill, AA Gill is Away (London; Phoenix Paperback 2004), 285.

⁷³Interview, American World War II veteran, San Diego, California, March 2006. ‘Manhood’ in this context is synonymous with general toughness such as is associated with combat effectiveness.

⁷⁵Anna Simons, ‘The Evolution of the SOF Soldier: An Anthropological Perspective’, in Horn, Force of Choice, 84.

⁸¹Quoted in Susan L. Marquis, Unconventional Warfare – Rebuilding U.S. Special Operations Forces (Washington DC; Brookings Institution Press 1997), 36.

⁷⁶Thorne had fought the Russians in Finland commanding his own guerrilla group winning all the country's military decorations, including the Mannerheim Cross. Later he fought with the Germans, escaped the Russians to the United States and signed up with the US Army as a private, joined the Special Forces and climbed up to the rank of Captain. Thorne went missing in action in his first mission with SOG in Vietnam (Peter Harclerode, Fighting Dirty: The Inside Story of Covert Operations from Ho Chi Minh to Osama Bin Laden (London; Cassell Military Paperbacks 2001), 463; Plaster, SOG, 33).

⁷⁷Dick Meadows had passed selection with the British 22nd SAS, fought with SOG in Vietnam, played a key role in the 1970 Son Tay raid, participated in setting up Delta Force, and worked undercover for Delta gathering tactical intelligence and arranging transportation inside Tehran during the Iranian Hostage Crisis. [Plaster, SOG; Michael Smith, Killer Elite: the Inside Story of America's Most Secret Special Operations Team (London: Weidenfeld 2006); Benjamin Schemmer, The Raid – The Son Tay Prison Rescue Mission (New York: Ballantine Books 2002)].

⁷⁸Miller, Reflections of a Warrior.

⁷⁹SOG operative Navy SEAL Lt. Tom Norris rescued Lt. Col. Iceal Hambleton from behind enemy lines in April 1972 in a dramatic mission just south of the Demilitarised Zone in Vietnam. Darrel D. Whitcomb, The Rescue of BAT 2 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press 1998).

⁸⁰SOG operative Sgt 1st Class (later Colonel) Robert Howard served five tours in Vietnam and was submitted for the Medal of Honor three times in 13 months. He remains to this day the most highly decorated American soldier with all of the U.S. Army's decorations for valour, including the Medal of Honor, Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star, 3 Legion of Merit, 4 Bronze Stars and 8 Purple Hearts. (Audie Murphy, by comparison, received one more Silver Star, but one Legion of Merit, two Bronze Stars and three Purple Hearts.) For more about Howard's actions, see Plaster, SOG, 203–17.

⁸²Personal interview with Norwegian Naval Special Forces operator (‘Marinejeger’) ‘Anders’.

⁸³Ibid.

⁸⁴Ibid.

⁸⁵Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (London: Penguin Books 2006); Creveld, Transformation of War.

⁸⁶Bowden, Black Hawk Down, 34.

⁸⁷This distinguishes the Norwegian Naval Special Forces from Army Special Forces, for example. The former unit's commander has always been through selection. (Interview, ‘Anders’).

⁸⁸Wright, Generation Kill, 33. 1st Recon is of course a special unit and not representative of conventional marine units. But this particular situation could easily have taken place in any unit.

⁸⁹Ibid., 152.

⁹⁰Creveld, Men, Women & War, 152–3; Goldstein, Gender and War, 161–2.

⁹¹‘Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces’, Report to the President,. C-64 (quoted in Creveld, Men, Women & War, 153).

⁹³Creveld, Men, Women & War, 194 (original italics).

⁹⁵Col. David Hackworth, Newsweek, 5 Aug. 1991 (quoted in Goldstein, War and Gender, 159).

⁹²Swetlana Aleksijewitch, Der Krieg hat kein weibiliches Gesicht (Hamburg: Galgenberg 1989), 165 (quoted in Creveld, Men, Women and War, 142).

⁹⁴ Aftenposten[Norwegian Daily] 11 April 2003, ‘Verdens Beste Marinejegere’; Forsvarsnett (Norwegian military official webportal), <www.mil.no/start/article.jhtml?articleID=21667>.

⁹⁶Except in the tri-service UK Special Reconnaissance Regiment, operational from 6 April 2005, which is part of UK Special Forces <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4412907.stm>.

⁹⁷Ian King, Muscle (London: Rodale 2004), 106.

⁹⁸Francis Fukuyama, The End of History, and the Last Man (London: Penguin Books 1992).

⁹⁹Horn et al., Force of Choice, 11; Colin Gray, Explorations in Strategy (Westport, CT: London; Greenwood Press 1996), 155–6.

¹⁰⁰Charlie A. Beckwith, Delta Force (Glasgow: Fontana 1985), 290.

¹⁰¹Miller, Reflections of a Warrior, 231–5.

¹⁰²The tier 1 SOF Task Force 11 in Afghanistan designated to respond to intelligence and then raid suspected Al Qaeda leaders on short notice was stationed in Bagram rather than forward deployed, something which led to an unnecessarily long response time (Naylor, Not a Good Day to Die, 43).

¹⁰³British SAS and SBS operatives were only 20 minutes behind Osama bin Laden, tracking him around Tora Bora in Dec. 2001, only to be called off to allow US forces go for the kill. The latter took several hours to get there and bin Laden escaped (Smith, Killer Elite, 226).

¹⁰⁴Smith, Killer Elite, 207–12.

¹⁰⁵Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now (1979) <http://corky.net/scripts/apocalypseNow.html>.

¹⁰⁶Goldstein, Gender and War, 258; Grossman, On Killing, 184. A few exceptions exist of course. Sgt York and Lt. Audie Murphy from World Wars I and II respectively, and Medal of Honor winner Franklin Miller who had to be forcefully evacuated out of Vietnam and ‘the eternal warrior’ Dick Meadows seem to be among these.

¹⁰⁷This was particularly widespread in Vietnam. Famous examples are 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry and Ron Kovic, from Oliver Stone's film Born on the Fourth of July, based on Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July (New York; McGraw-Hill 1976); Samuel Hynes, The Soldier's Tale (London: Penguin 1997), 178.

¹⁰⁸British SAS soldier Ben Griffin, who quit over legality and tactics concerns in Iraq, particularly with respect to cooperating with Americans. He is the first SAS operator ever to quit on moral grounds. ‘SAS soldier quits Army in disgust at “‘illegal” American tactics in Iraq’, Daily Telegraph, 12 March 2006.

¹⁰⁹Again this was widespread in Vietnam. Hynes, Soldier's Tale, Chapter 5; Grossman, On Killing, 271–80.

¹¹⁰Coker, Warrior Ethos, 61.

¹¹¹Examples are Americans fighting in Vietnam to the very end, or Germans in World War II, even though the wars were clearly un-winnable.

¹¹²On the eve of the 1980 Iranian rescue mission, Delta squadron commander Major Lewis Buruss took particular pleasure in the fact that the public would not know who the Delta men were, only their achievements would speak for them, whereas knowing soldiers would recognise them: ‘For the rest of their lives, behind them knowing soldiers would whisper, “He was at Eagle Claw.” That was honor worth having’. See Mark Bowden, Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis, The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam (London: Atlantic Books 2006), 436.

¹¹³The military psychiatrist Jonathan Shay quotes one of his patients, a Vietnam veteran who initially identified with the whole battalion. But after failing to be saved by the neighbouring Bravo Company, the social horizon shrunk to only a few men: ‘It was constant now. I was watching the other five guys like they was [sic] my children … It wasn't seventy-two guys [in the company] I was worried about. It was five guys’. Quoted in Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam – Combat Trauma and Undoing of Character (New York: Scribner 2003), 24. These five men became the entire social world for the combat soldier.

¹¹⁴See Al Santoli, To Bear Any Burden (Bloomington: Indiana UP 1985), 109–10; Hansen et al., Parallels, 26–7; Plaster, SOG, 89; Robert Mason, Chickenhawk (London: Corgi Books 1984), 183 for examples.

¹¹⁵Hanson et al., Parallels, 28.

¹¹⁶Shay, Achilles in Vietnam, 198.

¹¹⁷Terry O'Farrell, Behind Enemy Lines – An Australian SAS Soldier in Vietnam (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin 2001), 168.

¹¹⁸Grossman, On Killing, 273.

¹¹⁹Coker, Warrior Ethos, 64.

¹²⁰USSOCOM's total authorized manpower for 2006 is 52,846 personnel. [Posture Statement 2006, United States Special Operations Command, <http://www.socom.mil/>] By comparison the total for the entire Netherlands' military is 53,130. See International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 2006 (London; Routledge for IISS 2006), 88.

¹²¹Creveld, Transformation of Warfare, 108.

¹²²Smith, Utility of Force.