Warrior Ethos

[marct]

Hi Wilf,

Thanks, but I am not doing this to be a semantic pr*k. There is a real danger now that some, maybe a lot, think there is something called COIN and something call "War fighting" so the all the diverse reasons and conducts of warfare, are now in two boxes. When you they find another conflict that doesn't fit, they'll invent another box. In fact if you look at "Hybrid" and the Lebanon, they did.

Totally agree! (Of course, I expand the singular box a little further than you do). Let's add another part of the danger of constantly expanding taxonomies: for every "new" taxon, you need new "experts". Of course, that means that you have to hire new consultants, pay for new research (and translators), and set up new organizational units. Now, I would never say that that was a bureaucrats dream, but...

Words matter, and so does the meaning. If it doesn't you can't have doctrine, because you cannot teach it.

I think Lewis Carroll captured this nicely...

I can empathise with them on a very basic human level. That's entirely normal, and you don't need to be taught to do it.
You can't tell soldiers to respect a culture that holds values they don't understand and are in some cases abhorrent to them.

Hmm, I'm not sure about the first - 'tis a little too optimistic for me.

On the second point, of course you can tell soldiers to respect a culture that they find abhorrent! Of course, telling them to respect it is one thing, getting them to respect it is another. And, if they totally do "respect" it (in the cultural relativity suffering from PMS [Post-Modernist Syndrome ] sense), then you have probably just helped your enemy.

Somewhat less on the tongue-in-cheek level, this is a problem Anthropologists have been dealing with for a century or so, and the British military has been dealing with for longer. "Respect" should, IMO, always be interpreted in two different, and distinct, ways: a) for the commonality between two people (whatever that may be - it varies), and b) for utilitarian purposes of completing the "mission", whether that be countering an insurgency or getting an ethnography published.

Do you think it's okay to deny women's right? Allow male domestic violence? Arrange marriages? Honour killings? Consider some races sub-human? These are unacceptable, and you should not respect cultures, or those elements of culture that advocated such things.

Wilf, I had no idea that you hated 19th century British culture so much !

Culture is a highly complex area with many different forms of expression, and vastly variable, so the blanket guidance "respect culture," is so simplistic as to cease to be useful.

Actually, I would go further - it is outright dangerous simply because it is so semantically loose. One of the worst things I ever saw as a graduate student was another grad student so traumatized by being told she had to "respect" the people she was studying that she ended up having a nervous breakdown. BTW, her fieldwork was with a group that is considered to be "nice" by most people.

Cheers,

Marc