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When I was in Iraq, on patrol and during emergency response training, I was allowed to choose my own radio call signal. I always choose Sushi. I do this because it’s one of my favorite foods, because I think it’s funny, and most of all, because I’m deliberately avoiding the call signs that some other people would choose, words like Darkor Lightningor Gad.
No one ever says anything out loud, but many of us will roll our eyes and make eye contact, silently shaking our heads when we hear such self-consciously macho terms come up on the radio. This was long before the term “cringe” was coined, but it could easily be applied.
There’s a scene from the 1981 Bill Murray movie Striped where a soldier introduces himself to his colleagues as “Psycho”, even though his real name is Francis. He continued to threaten to kill them if they called him by his real name, touched his belongings, or touched him. At the end of his prayer, the sergeant, unimpressed, directed him to “relax, Francis.”
This scene captures the same shiver I feel every time I hear a call signal on the radio conveying the user’s unease to everyone listening. It goes against the mantra of the “quiet professional” that permeates military culture, a kind of sober maturity that is vital to the judicious use of deadly force. This description encapsulates the reality Warrior characteristics: Humble, quiet, just working. Quiet professionals understand that violence is dangerous and costly and use it only as a last resort. Boasting, threats and posturing are all frowned upon. The values of this culture are obvious. It is designed to weed out the insecure and excitable, the reckless hotheads who have something to prove.
This culture is at the heart of a competent military, and is absolutely essential to the spirit and cohesion that makes America’s armed forces the envy of the world. Voices from across the military praised the humble, dignified professionalism that is essential for morale and demonstrates confidence from leadership down to the ranks. That spirit and confidence is vital to performance.
That’s why it’s especially worrying to see the current leadership toss these ideas in the trash and embrace Francis’s ethics, causing something like a constant war cry. Bogged down in his chosen war and finding himself unable to retreat, Donald Trump has agreed to suspend threats to attack civilian targets in Iran for two weeks. This is the latest in a wave of chaotic and humiliating overthrows of global power by the United States over the past month, and with the Iranian regime stubbornly clinging to power, it is unclear what this way out will look like.
But even more publicly, the quiet professional has been replaced by the sword-wielding bully. Our armed forces are now directed by a secretary of defense whose ideology directly frames American military power in terms of a “crusade.” He demonstrates this ethos with pride in his Jerusalem cross tattoo and Latin script tattoo. God wants (“God wills it”), both are symbols of Crusader power that have no place in our armies. This is combined with Trump’s promise to “bomb the Stone Age, where they belong,” and threats to target civilian infrastructure on the one hand even though such attacks could be considered war crimes. Trump’s absurd and childish renaming of the Department of Defense to the Department of War is the icing on this self-conscious cake. Or, it would be if we didn’t have so many nasty comments from Hegseth, such as: “maximum kill ratio, not superficial legality”. The ousting of his high-profile senior staffers, who were truly quiet professionals, deserves careful scrutiny:
We fight to win. We unleash overwhelming violence and punish our enemies. We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie our soldiers to intimidate, demoralize, hunt down and destroy the enemies of the Fatherland. No more overbearing and politically correct rules of engagement, only common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for warriors. … You kill people and destroy things for a living. You are not politically correct and do not necessarily always belong to polite society.
This is simply not how senior American military leaders are trained to talk. Looking back at Hegseth’s military career will see this clearly. I disagree with those who mock his service (no one should mock anyone’s service). Hegseth has had a long and solid career of exposure to real combat. That record was destroyed when he was removed from active duty based on his Francis-like tendencies, which may have contributed to his inability to rise above the lowest field-level officer rank of the United States Army. He left the Army with the rank of major (O-4), which was a good achievement, but it was also a far cry from the kind of senior military leadership that prepares one to run a branch of the military, let alone the whole thing. The results are predictable. People in the Pentagon called Hegseth unprofessional, reckless, even “wild.” They are doing this for a reason. Behind all the eye rolling and laughter, Francis is a genuine concern. We don’t like insecure aggression not just because it’s embarrassing, but because of it inefficient. Tough guys with chips on their shoulders are poor fighters. Judgment and alertness are central to effective military decision making. The Army itself advises soldiers to “keep the high ground,” and research shows that calls for rapid fire made under pressure from the morally immature lead to disaster.
The very history of warfare, going back to ancient times, has reinforced this view. Almost since humans first organized killings of each other, we have warned of the dangers of reckless use of violence and extolled the virtues of quiet professionals. Sun Tzu, perhaps the most famous military strategist in human history, wrote in the fifth century BC that subduing one’s enemy Not available Combat is the pinnacle of military skill. The ancient writer Pausanias, describing the Celtic attack on Thermopylae more than 200 years after Sun Tzu wrote his famous book, took pains to describe how the Gauls “march against their enemies with the anger and unreasonable passion of brutes” while “the Greeks attacked silently and in good order.” In the Middle Ages, the disaster at Crécy in France became a concrete lesson in the dangers of storming.
The quiet professionals of our modern American military history are characterized in the famous anecdote about the 1862 Battle of Shiloh when General Ulysses S. Grant was surprised by his own poor judgment. But instead of reacting rashly, he mounts a tenacious defense, without losing his temper or allowing himself to be tempted into an impetuous action that could lead to disaster. Wounded on the first night of the battle, he was resting in the pouring rain under a tree when General William Tecumseh Sherman found him. “Oh, Grant, we had a bad day, didn’t we?” Sherman asked. Grant did not shirk responsibility for the drunken behavior he had just suffered. He did not beat his chest and threaten to cause death to the enemies of the Confederacy. He did not promise to bring harm to their civilian families. Instead, he gave one of the most famous and perhaps the most professional, quiet answers ever uttered. “Yeah. Lick them tomorrow, though.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruitment has famously used aggressive, masculine memes to attract the world’s Franciscans. The Department of Homeland Security itself has described this as a “wartime” recruitment surge, attracting those seeking to hunt down “the worst of the worst.” The results included horrifying inflection points in Minneapolis, the brazen murder of two American citizens exercising their right to protest. We are drowning in evidence that, where violence must be used, it is imperative that there is a silent expert calling the shots when, where and to what extent.
Thousands of deaths on the battlefields of Iran, billions of dollars in damage and economic consequences, and the tarnishing of our country’s reputation on the international stage are the costs of ignoring that warning, repeated consistently since humans first sharpened sticks to make spears.