Red State website, a conservative news site, recently presented a political article [1] entitled,
“We Want to Elect Warriors, Not Saints”
The article is behind a pay wall and concerns politics so, as regards this blog, it is of no concern. It is only the title that caught my attention and it did so because the concept embodied in the title is applicable to so many organizations and endeavors other than electoral politics.
Consider the words, ‘warriors, not saints’. This is, at its core, a choice between good enough and perfect. Another way to phrase it would be a choice between practical (or pragmatic) and theoretical (theoretical because nothing is saintly perfect). Yet another manifestation would be a choice between brutally effective and unachievable. Real world versus perfect.
Consider the Navy’s many instances where this stark choice comes into play in its many variations:
We hold ship captains to ridiculously high standards of perfection and fire many COs for minor, non-combat related transgressions, real and imagined. Captains have been fired because mothers of disgruntled sailors have complained about their precious babies being unhappy. This leads to a quest for saints as captains instead of warriors who can win battles.
We embark on decades long, unimaginably expensive ship and aircraft designs that chase perfection instead of ‘good enough’ … and we never achieve it.
We promote based on ideals of perfect social enlightenment (gender, diversity, environmental, inclusiveness, etc.) while ignoring combat mindsets and capabilities.
We seek perfect global naval harmony by dumbing down our capabilities (the LCS was justified, in part, because it wouldn’t intimidate lesser navies) instead of ramping up our warfighting and not caring whether it makes smaller allied navies uncomfortable.
We seek to eliminate confrontational, fighting spirits while promoting ‘get along, go along’ mentalities.
The Navy needs warriors, not woke saints because when war comes, it is the warriors that will fight and win while the woke saints are cowering behind their platitudes and PowerPoint presentations. We need to recognize, accept, and embrace the reality that war is a foul, ugly, dirty, brutal business and warriors have to function in that environment. Saints may make admirable examples for us to aspire to in our spiritual lives but they don’t win wars. We need to shift our focus away from saints and back to warriors.
We need to embrace mean, dirty, functional, and effective and abandon saintly and perfect.
Warriors, not Saints
Indeed !
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[1]Red State website, “We Want to Elect Warriors, Not Saints”, Brandon Morse, 5-Oct-2022,
https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2022/10/05/we-want-to-elect-warriors-not-saints-n637856
Exactly right, and of course a further complication is that the definition of :Saints" in this context is determined politically, not Ecclesiastically.
ReplyDeleteYeah, politically it seems to just be anti Catholic, which fits the push from the Christian America crowd. It's tripe. https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Military_saint
DeleteIf the Navy was running fleet problems and doing worthwhile training in how to fight a ship and squadron.
DeleteYou'd have some basis to rate Captains on something other than deportment.
"If the Navy was running fleet problems and doing worthwhile training in how to fight a ship and squadron, you'd have some basis to rate Captains on something other than deportment."
DeleteYep. And that is both 1) the way the Navy (and, for that matter, all services) needs to go, and 2) the direction nobody is going.
The paper shufflers always win out over warriors in peacetime military organizations. Then a war starts, and you struggle until you replace the McClellans with Grants and Shermans.
I wrote about one solution a few years back. "Tenured General Officers".
ReplyDeletehttps://www.g2mil.com/tenured.htm
I would say rather the Navy needs 'Soldiers' (or Sailors or Airmen etc), not warriors. A warrior is selfish and fights for himself and for war as a life style. Achilles my win the final duel in the Iliad but as an ugly warrior he is certainly not to emulated vs the Hector who is the soldier. And is in the cut down by not great warrior but technology.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/call-us-soldiers-sailors-or-aviators-never-warriors
edit additionally
Deletehttps://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/19/united-states-afghanistan-citizen-soldiers-warriors-forever-wars/
"I would say rather the Navy needs 'Soldiers' (or Sailors or Airmen etc), not warriors. A warrior is selfish and fights for himself and for war as a life style."
DeleteI think you are being a bit harsh, and perhaps stereotypical, in your judgement of warriors. A true warrior despises war, because he/she knows how horrible war is. To one of the bureaucrats in the Pentagon, casualties are just a statistic. To a warrior, a casualty is the man/woman you grabbed lunch on the run with yesterday, and you shared stories about spouses, partners, children.
Any actual examples of this?
ReplyDelete"........Captains have been fired because mothers of disgruntled sailors have complained about their precious babies being unhappy. "
Yes, several. In those cases, the Navy's internal investigations were started because mothers complained on social media. I don't have time to dig out specific references but some Internet searching should give you what you're looking for.
DeleteAny 18 year old is going to complain, always, even if it is just to show how much he can endure.
DeleteI've just read a biography of the Royal Navy officer Edward Pellew. WKPD relates 'He ran away to sea at the age of 14, but soon deserted because of unfair treatment to another midshipman.'
ReplyDeleteEventually he became a ship's boy "before the mast" and went on to become an Able Seaman, and eventually an Admiral and the 1st Viscount Exmouth.
'Pellew described himself as "pock-marked, ugly, uninteresting and uneducated"; a naval historian adds that he was "tough, brave, skilful, lucky, and unscrupulous".'
I spy a pattern. 'At the age of thirteen [John] Jervis ran away and joined the navy at Woolwich, London.' He duly became an Admiral,1st Earl of St Vincent, and then First Lord of the Admiralty.
DeleteI appreciate your arguments, and do not completely disagree with them but let me play devil’s advocate for just a minute…. We can start by pointing out that the word “woke” has become for all purposes sense free. Nobody can agree on any meaning for the word other than “apparent trends in our culture I don’t like”. In fact an argument can be made that successful Armed Forces are, contrary to popular opinion, not conservative institutions but rather they are liberalizing organizations. (Liberal in the original small ‘l’ sense, not the pejorative American sense) A military that can find a way to use all the members of its society to its best advantage will have a serious advantage over one which staffs and organizes itself base on arbitrary criteria, you know-the usual suspects like accent, height, amount of melanin in skin, having the word “Von” in your name, type of genitalia, or whatever the current fashion dictates. Let’s be clear, it is not easy to do this, to integrate elements of your society, to find the warriors in those places you didn’t look before. Fortunately democracies are uniquely able to do this; it is one of our greatest advantages if we are smart enough use it.
ReplyDeleteAnd as long as I’m playing devil’s advocate we should also consider the possibility that Mom complaining about sonny boys (or girls) treatment by the nasty captain is not all bad. Feeling comfortable about complaining about something you think is wrong is another advantage democracy has. If Russian generals had to worry about parents complaining about how badly their children were being trained and equipped then the armies they lead would probably being having better luck in the Ukraine.
For what it’s worth, I agree that nobody needs a lot of Saints in the Armed Forces. We need what we always need, tough people to do the difficult jobs and make the hard decisions. Those people come in all shapes and sizes and finding ways to get them into the right places is not going to be easy, there is no question that mistakes are going to be made, but finding a way to do it is a war winning strategy
Militaries have always needed both managers and warriors, the problem is the managers always gain power in peace time as the warriors. It's happened again and again throughout world not just US history. When we're lucky the manager knows their role and helps the warriors, but that is rarely at the start of a conflict. If the Admiralty (we might as well call them that as they act like the puffed shirt nobles of old Britain) we now possess lacks that quality of recognizing the need for warriors as they are poor managers as well as poor warriors. A good manager would at least give the warrior proper equipment and logistics. The example I always like to contrast is Eisenhower and Patton's partnership in WW2.
ReplyDeleteThe managerial Eisenhower who excelled in logistics and politics, knew as well as anyone that hard, aggressive warriors were needed in the field and more than once provided political cover for the abrasive warrior Patton whose political faux paus were as legendary as his fighting. Patton worst weakness in fact was his tendency to outrun his supply lines, erring on the side of aggressive action over proper logistics control.
Eisenhower was far too shrewd to trust Patton for the Normandy landings.
DeleteWe must become intolerant of delay. We must tear our way through red tape. We must pillory bureaucrats who stupidly sacrifice time in the pursuit of an impossible perfection. Frank Knox, 1940
ReplyDeleteId agree that we need warriors. They may need to be hidden from veiw in peacetime. They may be eccentric and require special care and feeding instructions. They may be salty and brash. But, those that think consistently about actual combat, will suddenly stop being PITAs and become quite useful when triggers start getting pulled.
ReplyDeleteA recent article about some VLS reloading "at sea" makes this point. After flowery words about the exercise, further down it was noted that it took place not at sea, not even in sheltered waters, but pierside!!! It also noted that due to safety concerns, a non-pierside attempt that was planned, was cancelled. Now Im not suggesting we throw caution to the wind or needlessly endanger our young sailors, but at the same time, this is a critical capability that we'd better figure out. To be so timid as to not start trying to learn this capability...that shows a lack of warriors. There arent saints involved, its more like scared little girls (no disrespect to little girls intended), and the timidity shown doesnt speak well for the future capabilities or fighting spirit the Navy needs...
"this is a critical capability that we'd better figure out."
DeleteAs I've demonstrated many times, this is not a necessary capability and would serve no useful purpose. Ships simply don't fight that way. They execute a mission and return to base where reloading can be done in a leisurely manner. The history of warfare and a logical examination of combat operations demonstrates this quite clearly.
You may be absolutely correct. I think that having the ability, even if not ever needed or used, would be useful. Either way, Im not arguing that. I may have chosen a poor example, but in the overall context of your post, it still makes the point- which aligns with yours.
Delete"in the overall context of your post, it still makes the point"
DeleteYes, without a doubt!
The caution with your example is that every capability, no matter how remotely useful and unlikely, can be justified on the basis of 'someday, in some unforeseeable scenario, we might find it useful'. The problem with that is that it produces unaffordable militaries bloated with unlikely and generally useless capabilities - like the LCS. We have to ruthlessly run everything through the filter of 'how will this directly and significantly improve our warfighting capability?'. This is why having a CONOPS prior to production is so important.
Everything is potentially useful but few things are directly and significantly useful.
War is cruelty. There’s no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.
Delete– William Tecumseh Sherman
The Captain who got fired because he created a trophy to hang in the Mess of an AK-47 they had seized was one of the saddest episodes of this twisted culture.
ReplyDelete