No one knows what kind of courage they will have until the moment of decision.

Upbringing and training in fortitude, self-denial, and service to others, and prayer and presence of God, all which can be to some degree “engineered-in” by upbringing, can prepare you to some degree for the day. Without them, you will likely fail.

One of the great attractions of war is people want to be tested and know what they will do at the moment of decision.

Apparently my question was poorly framed, because your answer is skew to what I am seeking (though I agree with all your points).

Assume someone who has been brought up well, goes out into the world and for years acts in ways we would describe as morally courageous. Is that person then immune from loss of his moral courage?

I ask because you mentioned people who had moral courage and those who did not (and, in your opinion, never would). You made no mention of those who once had moral courage, but no longer have it. My question is whether you think this is a null class.

Or perhaps, such a person never did have moral courage, but managed to fool everyone until his true nature was revealed?

“Brave but stupid, was acceptable.”

Those were the days.

One could be a brave but stupid hussar, living by your wits and the edge of your sword, the world’s prizes were within your grasp if you were bold and tough and if the Emperor heard of your name and your deeds — and an early grave was what you risked with every roll of the dice.

The Duellists shows a classic stupid but insanely brave, and homicidally proud, cavalry officer. Feraud, played (brilliantly) by Harvey Keitel.

D’Hubert: I see no reason whatever for us to fight.
Feraud: What reason shall I give you? Shall I spit in your face?

Based on Joseph Conrad’s story The Duel. Such men could only stand so much peace. A few months of boredom, and they’d probably start killing each other out of sheer pent up animal spirits.

The movie is a masterpiece, and the story is probably a little bit better than the movie.

Of course not.

Upbringing is in most cases a necessary but not sufficient condition.

We all know people with great parents who turned out bad. It happens.

I’m a parent. I will do what I can. But they will do what they decide to do. Period.

I agree on the “Unfortunately.” Given that, I notice that you do not mention the possibility that those who were brought up to have moral courage may lose it. Do you agree that this is possible? Or do you believe that moral courage cannot be corrupted?

Unfortunately.

I do not know how a person who is already an adult can be trained to have moral courage if he was not brought up to have it. I do not think it is possible. Such people are uncommon.

Does “such people” refer to those who were “not brought up to have it”?

I think that you are correct that leadership is intrinsic to military genius, but then again, so is Courage (the “first requirement” of the solider), yet CvC chose to delve into Courage and not Leadership.

I think it’s an omission on CvC’s part.

However, I think this omission might be more explainable due to the social strata the officers came from. Perhaps military leadership was seen as more of the right of the relatively wealthy, rather than a personal gift or a skill to be developed. Consequently Leadership would have been seen as something intrinsic to social or economic position, rather than to military genius.

Semper Fidelis,
NTL

The 1992 novel Double Deuce by Robert B. Parker, featuring his characters Spenser and Hawk, is largely a meditation on the issues you raise in the paragraphs starting from “Men, especially young men….”

I did not mean to suggest that I do not know the overall history of conscription in the USA.

A related book is Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence, which builds on a similar model.

Michael Lind’s book, Vietnam: The Necessary War, has a nice capsule history of the settlement pattern and the attitudes of the various cultural communities.

So do I. It’s a one-sentence oversimplification of a very large topic.

You are right that there are lots of reasons lots of people were opposed to conscription. We only had conscription very briefly in World War I, and it was unpopular, with good reason.

But, still, given all that, I’ll stand on the statement, for what its worth.

American popular anti-militarism has lots of roots and lots of reasons, many of them sound ones.

I have some arguments with this, but there’s a different point I’d like to make.

Many immigrants to America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were fleeing conscription (in Wilhelmine Germany, for example) or violence of various types (related to the Russian Revolution or the rise of Hitler, for more examples). It’s not surprising that their families, having experienced war firsthand, would feel that it was not a good thing.

Is this not implicit in the nature of Military Genius? If you accept the combat power definition of Will, Skill and Equipment (Moral, Physical and Conceptual) I think he was rightly assuming that Military Genius is completely useless without the ability to get people to do things they would rather not, because it might get them killed.

As I said in another comment, don’t separate CvC words from whom he was intending them for. CvC would be shocked and stunned to find us still discussing him today.