The New Warrior Class

Bibliographic Data

ID20138694
AuthorsRalph Peters (corresponding author)
Year1994
Volume24
Issue1
Pages29
Publication date1994-07-04
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe US Army War College Quarterly Parameters (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-1723 • E-ISSN: 0031-1723
PublisherUnited States Army War College Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.55540/0031-1723.1713
OpenAlexW3139338060
LanguageEN
Citations received14

The soldiers of the United States Army are brilliantly prepared to defeat other soldiers.Unfortunately, the enemies we are likely to face through the rest of this decade and beyond will not be "soldiers," with the disciplined modernity that term conveys in Euro-America, but "warriors"--erratic primitives of shifting allegiance, habituated to violence, with no stake in civil order.Unlike soldiers, warriors do not play by our rules, do not respect treaties, and do not obey orders they do not like.Warriors have always been around, but with the rise of professional soldieries their importance was eclipsed.Now, thanks to a unique confluence of breaking empire, overcultivated Western consciences, and a worldwide cultural crisis,[1] the warrior is back, as brutal as ever and distinctly better-armed.The primary function of any civilization is to restrain human excess, and even Slavic socialism served a civilizing mission in this regard.But as the restraints of contemporary civilization recede and noncompetitive cultures fracture, victim-states often do not have the forces, and the self-emasculated West does not possess the will, to control the new warrior class arising in so many disparate parts of the world.We have entered an age in which entire nations are subject to dispossession, starvation, rape, and murder on a scale approaching genocide--not at the hands of a conquering foreign power but under the guns of their neighbors.Paramilitary warriors--thugs whose talent for violence blossoms in civil war--defy legitimate governments and increasingly end up leading governments they have overturned.This is a new age of warlords, from Somalia to Myanmar/Burma, from Afghanistan to Yugoslavia.In Georgia an ex-convict has become a kingmaker, and in Azerbaijan a warlord who marched on the capitol with a handful of wheezing armored vehicles became prime minister.In Chechnya, on the northern slopes of the Caucasus, a renegade general carved out the world's first state run entirely by gangsters--not the figurative gangsters of high Stalinism, but genuine black marketeers, murderers, drug dealers, and pimps.[2] Their warriors are the source of power for these chieftains, and the will of the populace, enervated and fickle, matters little when it matters at all.This article will briefly consider who these new warriors are in terms of their social and psychological origins, and will examine the environment in which they operate.The objective is to provide an intellectual passport into the warrior's sullen world for US military officers and defense analysts, who, given their cultural and professional conditioning, would much rather deal with more conventional threats.This is an alert message from a very dark place

Class (philosophy) · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Gender, Security, and Conflict · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East · Zygmunt Bauman's Sociology

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