The essence of a profession is that there is an ethic of service underlying it, especially the military, and even more especially its officers.

As Col. John Cross put it:

Late-nineteenth-century warfare never stopped,” Colonel Cross told me, “though it was masked for a time by the Cold War emphasis on atomic bombs. And in this type of warfare that you Americans must master, only two things count: the mystic dimension of service and the sanctity of an oath. It’s about the giving of one’s best when the audience is of the smallest.

I quoted him in this post, and added:

This sounds correct. We are retrogressing into an era more like the 19th Century in many ways, and politico-military tasks will be the responsibility of relatively small communities of long-service professionals devoting themselves to hard, dirty and thankless work over many decades in remote places.

The industrial-era military of the 20th Century has to die off, to make way for something newer which is at its core something older. The soldiers who fought Gernonimo and Aguinaldo, and Shaka and the Mahdi, would recognize our new world, even if the era 1914-1989 would be incomprehensible to them.

What you bring up is important–economic calculations are important to the health of a given profession, and level of capitalization greatly influences this.

At the same time, armies that find it’s difficult to retain qualified personnel, like Captains [1], will probably find it’s difficult to retain them by merely raising salaries and benefits. Running the military like it’s a business shortchanges the nature of the job–people are not a mere commodity like in other realms. This doesn’t mean that we must pay more for those professionals–it means we might be able to get away with paying them less, if we listen to them more. Pay the professionals adequately, and treat them well, and they will stay. Pay them well, and treat them poorly, and they will leave.

Of course, recruiting and retaining are different tasks, but economics affects both tasks in similar manners.

In closing, Professing is an affair of the heart. The pocketbook has influence, as do intangibles like social prestige, quality of life, etc.

[1] http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2007/0712.tilghman.html

Thanks for your reply.

The general welfare of a population can be approximated by L / C, the labor of a country divided by the capital of the country. Capital grows exponentially in modern economies (providing something like a yearly return of 3%, compounded), while labor grows slowly. Thus, over all, life in a modern economy keeps getting better and better — more and more capital per unit of labor, means more wealth for you, your wife, your children, and so on.

It only becomes a problem when we want people to do something for us. Because they’re richer too. We find that we have use our capital to substitute for labor we can no longer afford — so we have washing machines instead of washer women, dishwashers instead of maids, etc.

The same problem appears for the military. As there is less and less labor per unit of capital, we can either (a) substitute some of the labor for capital (a smaller army with better equipment) or (b) accept lower-quality labor (why not accept gang members?).

In the short and medium term, we can get around this through immigrants using the military as passage to a green card, creating a foreign legion, using auxilleries, etc., but the basic logic in written in iron.

I wasn’t advocating we encourage lower-quality labor, but it’s important we recognize what we hold dear (like Professionalism) when it comes time to make sacrifices.

The Soldier and the State, by Huntington
To Serve with Honor, by Gabriel
The Challenge of Command, by Nye
The Passion of Command, McCoy
Knight’s Cross, by Fraser
Boyd, by Coram
Once an Eagle, by Myrer
Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot, by Stockdale

Andre Maurois suggested that fad-followers tend to be *intelligent men who are not in any way creative*…and that those who are not capable of formulating a system for themselves tend to throw themselves “voraciously” on those they come across, and to apply them more vigorously than would their inventors.

Smitten Eagle’s Military Professionalism Reading List:

The Soldier and the State, by Huntington,
To Serve with Honor, by Gabriel
The Challenge of Command, by Nye
The Passion of Command, McCoy,
Knight’s Cross, by Fraser,
Boyd, by Coram,
Once an Eagle, by Myrer
Thought’s of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot, by Stockdale

Huntington speaks about the nature of the military profession, touching on the relationship of the officer to the society at large, and is a classic. Gabriel speaks to the necessity of a formalized code of ethics beyond the mere Oath of Office, and examines intensively the methods of maintaining professionalism through modern history. Nye writes about how to implement an individual study program relating to the arts and sciences of war. McCoy writes about how to maintain your professional ethos in a combat environment, where moral concerns relating to mission accomplishment are opposed by moral concerns for troop welfare. Fraser and Coram provide two case studies of actual warriors and the professional/moral/ethical decisions they make. Myrer, in Once and Eagle, idealized, through fiction, the a military professional for officers to emulate. Stockdale discusses, through this compilation of speeches, how his Stoic philosophy helped him through dire moral straits.

“The “cost disease of the service sector” implies that it will be harder and harder to attract a professional workforce in any trade or profession, as time goes on. Immigration can reverse this for a generation or so, but eventually even that taps out as a sensible source of new labor.”

My post actually runs very much against this line of thinking. At least in the military, professionalism seems to be about growing into the role as you learn the ropes. I would guess that this would be true in all trades where a long apprenticeship is required. Therefore “recruiting” ready-made Professionals is really not something that’s done.

Furthermore, I think that true professional trades are capable of regenerating their ethos. Sometimes this ethos is regenerated from within, as Boyd worked to do, and sometimes this regeneration is done with external pressure, as Wyly suggests is happening with pressure from the SecDef. I would go so far to suggest that with each generation the ethos must be regenerated as the new generations of practitioners undertake their obligations to society.

Dan, I’m not familiar with what you speak of. My studies into the ethos of Professionalism are qualitative, not quantitative, and would appreciate examining your sources.

Militarism is the use, or misuse, of the particulars associated with the military to accomplish other than the function of military. When the appearance is used as an indicator requiring future inquiry it’s military function or effectiveness, then it has a military purpose. When the appearance becomes an end in and of itself, it becomes militaristic. I’ve seen a lot of smart spiffy dressed doormen through this world. Probably not very effective in a military situation. Dictators and tyrants probably can show you on a moments notice a whole brigade of similar doorman.

Now there can be a fine line between esprit de corps which imbues appearance through group identification and unit cohesion, and the imposition of appearances that only give the managers and supervisors the illusion of such. A leader can tell the difference. A manager can not.

Then I went through the SF qualifications courses and over to 7th Group, that time still at Ft Bragg. Lumpy uniforms, low shine boots, hardly ever an inspection and always at a range, or out in the field, or taking or giving a course. I can remember the hairy eyeballs from 82nd Officers, and wistful looks and comments from the enlisted.

In SF we were clean, our equipment in good order, and after that uniforms were an obvious time eater, known to be superficial, and a quite a bit fetish.

I don’t know much else about the whole subject, but I know my female cousins with their hobby of gay popular Hunter/Jumper horse riding love for me to do a three-hour shine of their show boots. So, I got something out of the regular Army, and that’s nice.

Regarding the Major’s emphasis on appearances, I think this is a typical example of how people often confuse cause and effect. He thought the outward signal (looking and sounding good in uniform) was the cause of individual excellence while it was merely a superficial outcome of desirable underlying qualities (discipline, awareness, self-respect) which are part of the arsenal of qualities that give rise to excellence. Encouraging this array of habits goes far beyond making sure everyone “looks the part”.

And indeed if bad outward appearances actually interfere with the effectiveness of a person, they seize being mere appearances. Special Forces wearing beards are effective enough though.

So a great post, and a critical one to think about.

Good job.