The Last of the Human Warriors
Advancing technology is changing the way we fight wars and our understanding of heroism.
Europe now faces the possibility of war in a way it has not since 1945. The Balkan wars of the 1990s were brutal but containable, even if the cost of containment was many thousands of dead and an uneasy cold peace that left the belligerents frozen in hostility. The ongoing war in Ukraine, the growing possibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and the fighting in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, however, all threaten to escape the containment now sought by the US and become total war. Such a war will need warriors, and after nearly eight decades of peaceful consumption in Western cultures, it remains to be seen if Western states are capable of providing them.
One British academic gave the nature of the warrior his close attention. Christopher Coker, a historian at the London School of Economics, died a year ago, but his brilliance did not produce vast biographies, like Robert Caro’s four volumes on Lyndon Johnson (with a fifth in the works) or Andrew Roberts’s remarkable revisionist history of George III. Instead, Coker’s approach was informed by the novel, poetry, sociology, and above all philosophy, and nowhere did the quality of his thought shine more brightly than in his reflections on warfare, and particularly on the figure of the warrior and the West’s readiness for conflict.
Coker feared that the warrior—still as essential to the backbone of the modern army as Achilles was to the Greeks in their siege of Troy—was on his way out. That once-mighty figure is no longer seen as a hero, a shield for society and a sword for its enemies. “When we contemplate war,” he wrote in The Warrior Ethos, “we seem to be increasingly critical of the heroic temper—perhaps because we rarely see ourselves in a heroic light.”
In fact—though Coker did not comment on this—the only figure who does see himself in a heroic light is Donald Trump, who described the mob that invaded the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 as his “warriors” and enjoined his followers to “fight!” immediately after his own attempted assassination. But Trump’s warriors are fighting an undeclared reprise of the American civil war against the enemies of the über-warrior, Trump himself. They are not being groomed for foreign deployment, for which Trump has no appetite—instead, he has claimed that, even before he becomes President, he will agree a settlement to the Ukraine conflict with Vladimir Putin that would almost certainly lead to the carve-up of Ukraine (he has been characteristically vague about the details).
The warrior is not just a gutsy soldier. Coker cites the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), still Europe’s most quoted military strategist, who observes that “war is the realm of physical exertion and suffering. These will destroy us ... [unless we have] a certain strength of body and soul.” For a warrior, fear is a welcome companion in combat. “Fear,” Coker writes in The Warrior Ethos, “is transformative ... it allows him to tap into the vein of his own heroism ... allows him to lead an authentic life.”
Western societies are comfortable and spend extravagantly in their search for security. Risk is felt to be everywhere—from pandemics, climate change, mental collapse, and mass immigration. Our societies may be “characterised by technological hazards,” but since the end of the Cold War, they have not—at least, until recently—had to face the prospect of invasion, war, or a nuclear strike. The last of these has been threatened most recently and explicitly by Putin, in an attempt to deter Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles like the British/French Storm Shadow. Russia poses the most credible threat of nuclear escalation in part because it continues to pay homage to the warrior and to the environment within which he flourishes. “At the heart of the paradox that constitutes the ‘risk age’,” Coker writes in his 2009 volume War in the Age of Risk, “is the fact that other societies are willing to take very large risks indeed. It is their predisposition for risk-taking that may force us to confront and overcome our own predisposition to be risk-averse.”
Shmuel Bar
The great wars of the 20th century called forth heroism from millions—the heroism of the enlisted men and women, the civilians under bombardment, the bombers under anti-aircraft fire, and the medical staffs. But in those vast conflicts, there were only a few individuals, avid to “tap into the veins of their own heroism,” who might be called warriors because they changed the course of battle to their nations’ advantage. They were participants in the most dangerous sort of soldiering—the special-operations groups working behind enemy lines, executing lightning raids, and liberating captives.
In the US, Master Sergeant (later Major) Richard Meadows laid down the template for special forces by demonstrating extraordinary courage in freeing hostages. In the UK, Lieutenant Colonel David Stirling created what became the Special Air Service, originally a hit-and-run unit operating against German airfields in the deserts of Egypt in the early 1940s. In the Soviet Union, Colonel Ilya Starinov used the ideas of military theorist Mikhail Svechnikov (who was executed on Stalin’s orders aged 55) to develop the use of small, highly trained groups operating against German bases—groups that became the model for the Soviet, then Russian, special forces now named the Spetsnaz.
These men were often regarded with suspicion by their commanders and always with dread by their targets, and they laid the groundwork for the special-forces operations everywhere by example and by exposing themselves to great danger. They were consequently lauded and decorated by their leaders who, conscious of the world’s continuing risks, sought examples of courage and fortitude to inspire the young. But from the 1960s onwards, as the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam altered the notion of what warfare involved in the West’s cultural perception, the best-known fictional warriors became self-declared cynics about honour and cowards in uniform.
The most famous of these is probably John Yossarian, a pilot in a US bomber squadron based in Italy in the late stages of World War II and the anti-hero of Joseph Heller’s anti-war novel Catch 22. Yossarian is a frank and fearless coward, forever seeking a way out of fulfilling what he has been told is his duty. Accused of irresponsibility, he replies: “I’m not running away from my responsibilities. I’m running to them. There’s nothing negative about running away to save my life.” Anti-heroes like Yossarian, Coker contended, are the exact opposite of the hero. The hero is an outer-directed figure, who seeks “an authentic life”—an existence only to be found in confronting great peril, and whose life is merely a means of overcoming mortal danger in the service of a greater good. Heller’s anti-hero, on the other hand, is inner-directed, and is prepared to lie, dissemble, and betray in pursuit of self-preservation.
Heroes may be examples to us all in a time of impending war, but are they now impossible to find in the comfortable and affluent West? “It’s assumed,” Coker writes in The Future of War, “that even warriors as we traditionally understood them would appear to be disappearing [because] war is now more cerebral than visceral.” But he discards that assumption in favour of a technological fix: “When it comes to the warrior ... digital biology is redrawing the rules. The warrior is now a subject that can be enhanced through cyborg techniques [biotechnologies, implanted within the human body] and genetic engineering.”
Thus, the warrior is granted further life, even within technologically defined warfare. Coker was looking far ahead: the cyborg-ism of warriors is still developing, and initial efforts have concentrated on keeping soldiers active on a battlefield under various sorts of stress. Experiments with implants in France have focused on developing an interface between the human brain and machines, thereby enhancing cerebral capacity.
In time, it’s possible that new and developing technologies will take up more and more of the warrior’s “nature” until, potentially, he is no longer defined by courage at all, but by the workings of an ultra-sophisticated assemblage of inputs, outputs, processes, and controls arranged to overcome similar assemblages operated by the enemy. The warrior will no longer be an example of heroism, he will be the product of the most creative builders of humanoid weaponry, seeking victory not by superior manoeuvrability on the battlefield but by a greater ability to turn abstruse mathematical models into killing machines. This process already has a substantial history, and it is likely to yield an even more vibrant future that forever alters how we understand heroism.
