Aaron MacLean, writing for the American Enterprise Institute, on how military culture “contributes to the American civic character”:
The military provides a clear benefit to the American polity: it is the country’s federal mechanism for the common defense. But what is its relationship to America’s civic culture? Do the professionals the military molds and employs in the nation’s wars affect the civic culture positively, as models of necessary virtues and keepers of specialized professional knowledge necessary to a healthy civic life? Or do they affect the culture negatively, as damaged and occasionally dangerous men perverted by violence?
My search for the answer to these questions may as well begin in the village of Ganjgal in Konar Province, Afghanistan, on September 8, 2009. The Battle of Ganjgal was smaller in scale than, say, the Battle of Normandy or even the Battle of Fallujah. On the friendly side were a few dozen American advisers from the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps fighting alongside about 100 Afghan government troops and policemen. The Taliban brought about 60 men to the fight.
But despite the comparatively smaller scale, in its own modest way the day-long fight at Ganjgal carried all the universal traits of men at war: questionable leadership, intense physical and mental hardship, lives ended, lives saved, reputations broken, reputations made, terrible suffering, conflicting accounts in the aftermath, and extraordinary valor.
My search for the answer to these questions may as well begin in the village of Ganjgal in Konar Province, Afghanistan, on September 8, 2009. The Battle of Ganjgal was smaller in scale than, say, the Battle of Normandy or even the Battle of Fallujah. On the friendly side were a few dozen American advisers from the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps fighting alongside about 100 Afghan government troops and policemen. The Taliban brought about 60 men to the fight.
But despite the comparatively smaller scale, in its own modest way the day-long fight at Ganjgal carried all the universal traits of men at war: questionable leadership, intense physical and mental hardship, lives ended, lives saved, reputations broken, reputations made, terrible suffering, conflicting accounts in the aftermath, and extraordinary valor.
Read the whole thing here.
