Specialists in Violence
The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait.
by Morris Janowitz.
The Free Press. 464 pp. $6.75.

Generals and admirals are figures of no little mystery. Their well-fitting uniforms, their disciplined posture, their disconcerting good looks all combine to suggest that they are not like the rest of us—a breed apart, somehow. They keep their mouths shut and do not speak unless they are spoken to; and they wear the mantle of experts: professionals in violence. Like all professionals, they have a store of knowledge and the will to use it. We cannot do without the services of these erect, quiet men. Yet we know very little about what manner of men they are.

From Professor Morris Janowitz of the University of Michigan come some answers to the military mystery (sociology is at its top form here). The Professional Soldier is a study of the colonels, captains, and one-and two-star generals and admirals who are slated for top positions in the very near future. Making use of elaborate questionnaires and intensive personal interviews, Janowitz has put the right questions and elicited some fascinating answers. An interesting point immediately emerges: America’s military leaders are made, not born. The several hundred officers who were studied come from lower-middle- as well as upper-middle-class origins. Virtually none of them are upper class in the sense of belonging to Social Register families. Their beginnings, in fact, were rural rather than urban: the study shows that 66 per cent of the army, 56 per cent of the navy, and 70 per cent of the air force officers came from farms and small towns. (This contrasts with the business executives studied by Lloyd Warner and James Abegglen, only 26 per cent of whom were of rural origins.) In religion, they are chiefly Protestant: the largest single group, by the time they have reached the higher echelons, classify themselves as Episcopalians. However, the number of Catholics would seem to be growing, especially in the less tradition-bound air force. But Jews do not elect a career at arms: out of 2,177 cadets in the classes of 1959, 1960, and 1961 at West Point, only 15 were Jewish.

The rural preponderance would itself suggest an inauspicious high school education for these men, and the curriculum of the service academies stresses engineering with out-of-class emphasis on athletics. Obviously, too, the military career allows little opportunity for exposure to the “outside” during the formative years: one’s life is spent on ship and in camp, with one’s fellow officers and their wives. Only as the higher ranks and maturer years are approached does the officer begin to make substantial contact with the civilian world—on the whole, he works best in the environment he knows best. If he cultivates an appearance of laconic self-assurance, this is as much a protective device against the hostility of civilian society as anything else.

Why do these military men choose a career of killing? The simple fact is that more and more of them do not look at it in this light. Janowitz gives impressive evidence that the “heroic leader” is becoming the exception rather than the rule. Most modern officers are better styled “military managers”—increasingly expert in the lore of technological warfare. Many took to uniform, and this is especially the case in the air force, because a free education at the college level was offered. (The lower-middle-class and rural backgrounds must not be forgotten.) Others were “army brats” and followed, as do sons of other business and professional men, in their fathers’ footsteps. Those seeking glory are outnumbered by those building careers. If the picture is one of organization men, the difference between U. S. Steel and the U. S. Army is that the military managers are more attuned to the professional outlook. The officers are no less politically conservative than their opposite numbers in business, and if they voted with any regularity they would surely support the Republicans (or the Southern Democrats) down the line. Yet they retain a faint disdain for the commercial life. But to repeat: only a small minority look on themselves as men charged with the mission of taking human life. To the majority the military profession is a useful and honorable job.

_____________

Those who succeed in the job, who become generals and admirals, are top executives by any evaluation. And as is the case with all men who are given heavy responsibilities, the expectation arises-—partly from inside, partly from outside the services themselves—that the military men will have views of their own on matters of policy. Officers usually respond by taking one of two ideological stances: the “absolutist” school believes in fighting a war to the finish, defeating the enemy and getting it over with; the “pragmatic” school has accepted the idea of limited war, with limited budgets and limited objectives. The first view was given sharpest expression by MacArthur and his supporters in Korea, and remains today the dominant outlook of the air force. In the “pragmatic” camp are to be found the more anonymous managerial types of the army and navy, prepared to engage in police actions which simply hold the line. Janowitz’s sympathies are plainly with this side, and his portrait of the absolutists at times approaches caricature. The get-it-over quick syndrome of the absolutists, according to Janowitz, is more often rhetoric than reality. The fact is that American military policy since 1945 has been fundamentally pragmatic, and when paper tiger absolutists like Admiral Radford are floated, it is out of a politic unwillingness to admit that our objectives are indeed limited. Radford himself was appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a concession to the Republican jingoists just at the time that Eisenhower was making it clear that he would continue with Truman’s pragmatic approach. Janowitz offers an imaginative hypothesis as to why certain officers divide between the two schools. The pragmatists, by and large, held their commands during World War II in the European theater, while the absolutists saw their experience in Asia. But World War II was a single-front war for all but the final year, and the officers in the Pacific felt that they were shortchanged on men and materials and public support. Their frustration left deep scars, and they have since sought to redress the injustice they believed done not only to themselves but to the military cause. To be sure, the old Asia hands are retiring. But if the absolutist outlook is on the decline in the army and navy, in the new and independent air force it is as vigorous as ever, though often deceptive because its proponents are managerial rather than heroic types: speaking the language of total destruction in soft accents and by means of a technical vocabulary.

_____________

The professional officers are fully aware of their subordinate status as decreed by law and custom, and they are willing to accept what is vaguely called “civilian control.” Any problems that arise here have mainly to do with the civilians. First of all, it is not clear, judging from the evidence of the past several years, whether civilian officials in the Department of Defense always wish to see carried out the policies they profess to have. Charles E. Wilson of General Motors was Secretary of Defense from 1953 to 1957, and presumably a civilian policy-maker; yet Janowitz mentions him only once, in an unimportant connection. Perhaps what is needed in addition to an examination of the political outlooks of the military men is a study of the military outlooks of the civilian politicians. It is with genuine reluctance that a military man will give “his own” views to a Congressional committee, and he does so only when pressed. But in the Congress itself, no small number of Senators and Representatives from time to time give vent to their political frustrations by engaging in absolutist military panegyrics of far greater intensity than any general or admiral—one needs only recall the Joint Session reception given to the cashiered MacArthur. Armchair strategists of the heroic-leader mold are plentiful among Congressmen who would love to see matters come to a head. But the tough-minded talk heard on Capitol Hill is often enough matched by a pragmatic forbearance along Pennsylvania Avenue: a general-turned-president can, it is evident, be far more cautious than the solons of a peace-loving people.

Finally, it must be asked if our military managers are capable of defending us in the event of another shooting war. The suggestion that the heroic leaders are a passing breed was hotly denied by one young West Point graduate I know. In actual combat—he asserted—the military will appreciate the need for heroes, who will then receive rapid promotion: these heroes will emerge when needed from behind the desks where they are now chafing and where they are currently overshadowed by the organization men. But what about the amateurs who must be conscripted when the real fighting begins, who are no less important than the professional soldiers to a nation’s security? The experience of our men in Korean prisoner-of-war camps—not to mention the general combat record of our civilians-at-arms—shows that Americans are not cut out for being good soldiers. Not only do we demand luxuries even at the front lines, we are reluctant to accept the discipline that defies our democratic upbringing. And, most significant, the evidence is accumulating that we have no conception of what we are fighting for or even if it is worth fighting at all. Articles in Life magazine which “attempt to articulate the national purpose” are too little and too late. One may say that if a nation is in the attempt-stage in its efforts to give expression to a national purpose, the odds are great that it no longer has one. Still, there is no cause to worry about our professional soldiers: they will not let us down and they will not overstep their authority unless we ask them to. The real problems involve the amateurs, the civilian soldiers who will have to fill the ranks and occupy the front lines. To raise such misgivings is to pose troublesome questions about the strength of our society and the morale of the people who comprise it. Our best hope is, clearly, that our military heroism will not have to be put to the test.

_____________