Posting #38: The Story of "Warriors"(Part I)

This posting will appear as two parts. This is the first part, arriving in your inboxes on Wednesday, March 26. Part II will arrive two weeks later, on Wednesday, April 9.

The Story: Since the Global War on Terrorism began in 2001, the US armed forces have deliberately referred to its servicemembers as “warriors,” not soldiers, airmen, marines, or sailors. This alternate and ubiquitous naming, Americans come to understand, is a harmless way to depict servicemembers as active, not passive, and as the ultimate patriots. Though with the “Warrior Games” the entire Defense Department has embraced the word, the US Army especially has replaced “servicemember” or “soldier” with “warrior.” There are: hoped-for “Warrior Restaurants” (aka “chow halls”); “Best Warrior Competitions” in the active-duty, National Guard, and among units stationed in Europe; the “Wounded Warrior Project,” whose aim is to support wounded servicemembers returning from the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the “Warrior Transition Command,” dedicated to overseeing the medical care of returning servicemembers; the US Army “Warrior Ethos,” which reads: I will always place the mission first; I will never accept defeat. I will never quit. I will never leave a fallen comrade; and finally, The Soldier’s Creed, whose first and last of thirteen lines reads “I am an American Soldier” while another two lines—the second, “I am a warrior and a member of a team,” and eighth, “I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills”—suggest warrior and soldier are synonymous. Meanwhile, the Air Force, Marine Corps, Space Force, and US Navy all have their own “warrior ethos.” The Coast Guard alone has only an ethos and not a warrior one. And the new Trump administration threatens a “Warrior Board” to “remove officers unfit for leadership.”

My take on the story: Rather than being a harmless semantical difference intended to entice potential servicemembers with promises of warrior derring-do, this re-naming instead is substantially dangerous to the nation. “Warrior” is a floating signifier, meaning it can be given multiple meanings that vary across time and space. While in the most recent iteration the stark difference between “warrior” and “soldier/airman/marine/sailor” has been minimized and “warrior” is used to emphasize the patriotism and courage of those who serve, the peril of the word has reached its peak recently, with the Trump resignification of “warrior” and his administration’s subsequent politicization of the US Military.

But before getting to Trump’s politicizing the armed forces: why is “warrior” an inappropriate name for US servicemembers?

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN “WARRIOR” AND “SOLDIER”

When did this happen? After 9/11/01

Before the turn of the 21^st century, “warrior” was not widely used to describe all military servicemembers. It was certainly not used when I served in the US Army during the Cold War or when my father served, even as a combat helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War. Instead, using “warrior” is a recent phenomenon, an attempt by the military to resignify servicemembers (of all sexes) from what the videogame world calls inactive, pre-programmed, feminine, weak, inconsequential “nonplayer characters” (NPC) to players: active, noble, self-determining, masculine, strong, and patriotic.

For instance, a 1999 paper—so, before 9/11/01 and its’ subsequent wars—written by a US Army Major at the Naval War College draws a sharp distinction between those exclusively male military servicemembers who engage directly with the enemy and those who don’t. Those males directly engaging with the enemy are “warriors” and the other servicemembers are not. “Warriors” constitute a small “sub-culture” of military culture and are “distinctive from the less risky service of the broader military culture.”

The majority of today's soldiers perform important functions neither physically close to the enemy or directly engaged in his destruction. Soldiers in each of these groups operate within the professional military culture and some exhibit the ethos of the warrior. There remains, however, a caste of men who are required to both close with and destroy the enemy. It is these men to whom the peculiar ethos of the warrior is essential. (emphasis added)

Note the author’s claims for the uniqueness of warriors in military culture: “a caste of men” with “the peculiar ethos” of the warrior. This 1999 category of “warrior” excludes women (who not until 2016 were permitted to serve in combat units) and the vast majority of other servicemembers: “not every military position or specialty fits this definition of a warrior,” the author repeats.

But in the 20^th century, Americans already had a tendency to use “war” to describe social struggles

For instance, in a 2018 Psychology Today article, the author comments on this proclivity.

The Warrior archetype has become so dominant today that in the U.S. we tend to use war story labels to define problems. For example, we’ve had a War on Drugs [1971], a War on Poverty [1964], a continual War on Crime [1965], and now a Culture War—even though none of these are wars that can be won simply by going after the bad guys causing the problem. Considering our cultural differences as a war encourages citizens to identify with one side or the other (or check out), identify their group with the hero, and see the other side as the villain to be vanquished. Of course, this process makes reasoned debate difficult, as is generally true when the good/bad level of the Warrior is triggered (emphasis added).

The author draws distinctions between some warriors who protect and some warriors who attack. Still, she concludes, “The Warrior values strength and fears being, or seeming to be, a wimp. Collectively, Warriors often share a belief that competition, sports, and military service build such strength.”

And servicemembers don’t want to be called “warriors”

For instance, in 2016 an active-duty US Army commissioned officer, “AngryStaffOfficer” angrily demands that servicemembers should not be called warriors: “there’s a problem with all this ‘warrior’ rhetoric; warriors are not soldiers. Warriors don’t transition [from injuries], because warriors are part of a class. Warriors don’t have tasks, because tasks are antithetical to the undisciplined and chaotic warrior” (emphasis added).

AngryStaffOfficer goes on:

The connotation of the warrior is often of one who fights alone—think Achilles or Hector or Agamemnon, or any of the classical Greek warriors. They fought for glory—and mainly themselves.

Warriors also fight with an overriding passion, often an undisciplined one—“overreaching” is the way that Homer often describes it—taking that one extra step that ends in disaster. Warriors are chaotic, tribal, and lawless—often times only governed by a loose code of conduct.

Warriors came from a specific class of people, those whose lives were dedicated to violence—not violence for a specific end, but often just violence for violence’s sake. Warrior classes were—and are—often propped up on the backs of the people, the people they are supposed to be serving. They are supported by the state, segregated into a specific class, and essentially become diametrically opposed to a democracy—since democracies do not easily finance the exorbitant cost of keeping up a bunch of entitled elites. (emphasis added)

AngryStaffOfficer concludes that, in fact, “soldiers” are the opposite of “warriors.”

Soldiers are disciplined masters of warfare, acting out of a sense of duty and devotion to their homeland, families, or an ideal, who do not love violence but understand that there are cases where violence is necessary. They are self-sacrificial, putting the needs of others over their own. They do not seek glory, they seek victory. They are thinkers who understand that passions must be controlled in the heat of battle, that sometimes the answer is not always to attack in a frenzy.

We [soldiers] are not a warrior class that stands apart from the people of the United States. We [soldiers] are not crusaders, carrying religion on the point of the sword. We [soldiers] fight together, side by side, for the people of the United States. We [soldiers] support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic and bear true faith and allegiance to the same. (emphasis added)

Nor do American national security officials think “warrior” is appropriate

And in a 2021 Foreign Policy article entitled “The US Military Needs Citizen-Soldiers, Not Warriors: The recent obsession with the term is misguided and harmful,” Bret Deveraux, a military historian, insists that “U.S. military personnel are not warriors, and more importantly, they should never become warriors. Indeed, the very nature of a warrior is inimical to a free people under a constitutional government” (emphasis added).

Plus, other western militaries have encountered severe problems with “warrior”

The British and Australian militaries also suspect that “warrior” is perilous. A British combat officer comments in 2020 that “even a basic review of the historical evidence shows that the warrior ethos is both toxic and dangerous to modern militaries. ‘Warriors’ are rapists, murderers, and slave owners. Their values are the opposite of those that modern armed forces should aspire to” (emphasis added). The combat officer points out how, following the French army’s 1954 failure in Vietnam, the “warrior ethos weakened the French Army to the point of mutiny.” He concludes that:

Warriors make their own rules. Soldiers are bound by regulations.

The warrior ethos fosters a sense of being and separation from society. Warriors wield arms because they were born to do so. This is the direct opposite to the values that modern military professionals, and especially the British military, should stand for.

And prompted by warrior culture comments by the new US Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, an Australian “Defence Connect” 2025 article draws a sharp contrast between “soldier” and “warrior.”

To put it simply, a soldier is disciplined, trained in arms to operate within a chain of command and employed to carry out the sharp end of a country’s wider political aims. They wear a uniform, carry a rank and are paid for their service. They are, in short, professionals, and—perhaps more importantly—can be stood down once a conflict is concluded.

A warrior, however, is a far more nebulous construct. They are rarely professional and often ununiformed. They are loosely organised under tribal or similar structures and blur the line between civilians and fighters. Once an Afghan tribesman puts aside his rifle and vest, he looks like any other farmer or herder. Warriors fight for a cause, rarely a nation, per se. The Taliban, to again push that analogy, have never fought for Afghanistan – they fight to protect and enact their fundamentalist religious beliefs. Warriors, in this sense, also rarely have little care for international humanitarian law and are prone to acts of violence that all too often escalate into full-blown war crimes (emphasis added).

Australia would know something about this latter point. Due to a rampant “warrior culture,” Australian special forces “unlawfully killed 39 people during the war in Afghanistan,” otherwise known as committing war crimes.

The second part of this posting—”So What?—will appear on Wednesday, April 9.