Means without Ends?

In two previous posts, DC has considered the military in terms of its means and ends. First, I asked about pragmatic pacificsm, and in response, US Army veteran, Michael Corey, discussed the use of war as a political tool. Today’s contributor, Kimberly Spring, is a PhD candidate at the New School. -Jeff

In my research, I work with military veterans who served in Iraq. For them, this Veterans Day was not a day for parades, but for political action and protests. It may be that many service members find themselves questioning the strategies and tactics of Pentagon privately, but these veterans represent the minority of active duty and former service members who publicly criticize the military.

Protesting in this way has caused them difficulties. Speaking against the military is taboo. Breaking the “code of silence” to talk about abuse and brutality among their fellow service members is a betrayal.

Thinking about the polarizing discourse around the military, I wonder how discussions about means and ends in war can ever achieve any depth. Our portrayal of those who serve in the military remains split between, on the one hand, blanket condemnation of the savagery of men who glorify killing and domination, and, on the other, unqualified, unabashed reverence for the honor and sacrifice of those who serve.

The veterans who I work with struggle between these two extremes. In the US, national discourse has taken an uncomfortable swing toward the latter depiction – any criticism of service members is impolitic, for the left and the right.

But the idealization of soldiers denies the much more ambiguous experience of the men and women who serve.

We should not confuse the economic and personal need that leads many men and women to enlist with the idealism of sacrifice. We should not forget that service members are flawed, just like the rest of us.

That sometimes they act bravely, and other times they act out of fear; sometimes with compassion and other times with cruelty; that they, like anyone, operate in an arena of uncertainty and ambiguity.

Somehow we never fail to be astounded by the My Lais and the Abu Ghraibs, and we insist that they result from bad apples, since it is easier to believe that there are clearly friends and enemies, the good and the bad, right and wrong.

“The distinctive characteristic of practical activity, one which is so inherent that it cannot be eliminated, is the uncertainty which attends it.”  This, as John Dewey wrote in The Quest for Certainty, leads us to construct a fortress of the very things that threaten us with this uncertainty. War is perhaps the most practical of activities, even if we believe it to be irrational.

For military service members today, the “rules of war,” an almost satirical attempt to impose a degree of order in the chaos that is the field of war, can no longer be defined by the strictures of battle lines and uniforms. War has come to better reflect the reality of conflict, where friend and enemy cannot be reduced to an easy dichotomy.

Yet, the desire for certainty remains strong. The film, The Hurt Locker, might have avoided the politics of war, but it brilliantly captured the intoxication of war – both in the physical rush of adrenaline and the psychological security of holding a meaningful role in the world.

It is certainly simpler to construct the world into friends and enemies, heroes and villains. Military service members are certainly not alone in this endeavor. What prevents us from seeing that we’re building the fortress of righteousness out of very wrongness that threatens us?

For me, the issue is not whether the ends justify the means, but how we might live with the uncertainty that there never is an end.