The Army: A Profession of Arms

[TheCurmudgeon]

I am reopening an old thread because this is as close to the subject that I was interested in that I could find. Recent events in Iraq have brought out two types of news articles lately. They are the “Soldier’s worry about Iraq’s potential failure” or “Soldiers worry that they fought for nothing” type or the earlier “U.S. Soldiers died in vein” type. Here is an excerpt of a “fought-for-nothing” article:

Matt McGuire, a former Fort Bragg soldier, was among the first inside Iraq in 2003, and he was deployed there a second time two years later. He said many veterans are "sick and disgusted" to see the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria group quickly overrun much of Iraq.
"I think it's almost expected because we pulled out early, in my opinion, before the country was really stable," McGuire said Wednesday.

http://www.wral.com/veterans-of-iraq...hing/13745667/

These articles seem to bother me because they seem to be an affront on the idea of a Soldier being a professional. The problem I am having is I can’t articulate why. I know that, in this case, like the case of the Soldiers who came forward to say Bergdahl was a deserter, the Soldier is being used for political fodder. They are being used in order to invoke the ideal of the “Soldier” as a tool to forward a political agenda.


Despite what the Soldier’s Creed says we are not Professional Soldiers in the purer sense of the term – we are not mercenaries. U.S. Soldiers are not Professional Solders for Hire. We fight only for what our national leaders tell us to fight for.

Nor, would it seem, that we are professionals in terms of any oath of confidentiality with those leaders, except where we are making direct criticism while still in uniform. Still, there seems to be something oddly disturbing about Soldiers making these politically driven statements. It’s like the Revolt of the Generals.


In post #6 of this thread Bob’s World made the following observation:

Perhaps part of our current problem are our efforts to overly expand the "profession" of arms to all who bear arms in the defense of their country. Certainly this is not the historic approach in the U.S.

European "professionals" rightfully looked down upon American armies made up of armature citizen soldiers as lacking the doctrinal uniformity of training, dress, mannerisms and tactics found in their professional forces. We wore the fact of our military being made up of such armatures as a badge of honor, and similarly mocked them for their stilted, predictable, "professional" ways.

Too much of a good thing, however is a bad thing, so we created the military academies so as to always have a core of professionals to build our citizen armies around whenever the need for such a force drove its formation.

The current professional force, like the strategies of containment it was formed to implement, is as obsolete as the smooth bore musket. The challenge is to get senior leaders to embrace such thinking after the current model being "what right looks like" for three generations.

Americans like their army being a little rough around the edges, and they like it being something that good citizens form in times of need, and that melts back down to its professional core once that need is over. The irony is, that the "profession of arms" that prevents the formation of such a citizenry, is perhaps the group that grieves their fading from the American fabric the most.

Do the American’s really want a “professional” Army? Is that what we should be striving for? or should we remain "a little rough around the edges"? A little more human.