Soldiers and Civilization covers the history of the military profession in the Western World from the ancient Greeks to the present day. Drawing from military history, sociology, and other disciplines, it goes beyond traditional insights to locate the military profession in the context of both literary and cultural history. Reed Bonadonna maintains that soldiers have made an unacknowledged contribution to the theory and practice of civilization, and that they will again be called upon to do so in important ways. The comprehensive nature of the book and the extent to which Bonadonna draws on the disciplines of the humanities to make his points set this volume apart from others on the subject. The military profession, in its broadest consideration, might be viewed as an interdisciplinary branch of the humanities. A soldier is made of the words of history, poetry, and the laws and language of his calling. With each new conflict, the military may be called upon to preserve the values of civilization. To fulfill its future role, the military professionals of today must know, heed, and apply the examples and narratives of the most successful and exemplary military professionals of the past at their best.

I have some fairly complete drafts of the book dated late 2013.  I suppose at that point I had been working on the book for 2-3 years. Around that time (I think), I mentioned to my friend Betsy Holmes (retired captain USN), that I was working on a book, and she suggested sending it to a publisher for feedback. Not long after that I sent a partial draft to the Naval Institute Press, thinking that a book on military professionalism should be published by a military imprint. I waited a few months and, getting no response, finally called them. I was very glad to hear that they were interested, which made it worth the wait!  I continued to send them draft and revised chapters as fast as I could turn them out. On the recommendation of Nick Reynolds, my old Marine Corps History Division CO and a published author, I hired an editor to check my work.  I’d say that was helpful.  Working with an editor kept me on track, and most of her corrections were on-target, although we didn’t always agree in matters of style.

The book evolved over time.  Having grown out of the course “Leadership in Action: War and the Military Profession,” it might have been written as kind of a primer or play-book on leadership, military-style.  But my interest in ethics and my thesis on the “Military Revolution” kicked in, and I wound up writing  about the “why” of military professionalism and leadership as much as the “how.”  In my unpublished article on the Military Revolution, I had hypothesized that a revolution in professionalism in the years 1560-1660 had saved the early modern profession of arms from the two demons greed and religious fanaticism. I came to see a similar  pattern in other periods.  The military profession can be undone by covetousness, by amorality or immorality.  It takes regular revivals in professionalism, in ethos especially, to hold these temptations at bay and reconnect with our better angels.

I wrote a lot on weekends, and sometimes during working hours, especially during my telework day on Fridays. I was open about this with my superiors (and with the Academy lawyer), and I believe it was a justified use of some working hours as a form of professional development. I eventually used a draft version of the book as a text when I taught “Leadership in Action.” The research for the book was mostly in secondary sources, and it gave me the excuse to read a lot of good books.  I plan to blog in the future about some of my favorites.

By October, 2015 I had a signed contract with Naval Institute Press. The last 18 months we have been copy-editing, choosing pictures, proofreading, and marketing. As I recall, I only paid for one one picture, that of Henry V.  The rest were public domain. I submitted several pictures to NIP as possible cover illustrations. My favorite was the shot of U.S. soldiers marching in Paris with the Arc de Triomphe in the background that is the banner for this blog. None of the cover pictures I submitted was used. An NIP cover artist designed the excellent cover you see pasted over the banner.  I think it gives a nice idea of the narrative structure of the book.  I hired my son Erik (Cornell `15 BA Information Science) to do the index, and he did a smashing job.  I visited the offices of the NIP twice. This was not required or really necessary, but I was down at Annapolis anyway on other business.  (The McCain Conference and Project Coming Home, both of which I shall write about later.)

I decided to use my full name on the book partly because I thought it might stand out more, but also as an act of homage to my father Robert, who died age 91 in 2014. He was on the Destroyer Escort USS Dufilho and other vessels during World War II, mostly in the Pacific, finishing the war as a Radioman 1/C.

Next post: an excerpt from SAC.

Victory,

Reed

I started working at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, Kings Point, NY as a member of the Commandant’s Department in 2001. With my English Ph.D., I did some adjunct teaching in the Humanities Dept. Eventually, I created some new courses and got them through the gauntlet of approvals at the department, curriculum committee, faculty forum, and dean’s office levels.  One of the courses I created was titled, “Leadership in Action: War and the Military Profession.”  The idea was to provide a course on leadership for the midshipmen, using the military profession as a kind of vehicle. In putting together this course, I searched for a text that would suit the purpose. I eventually settled on Victor Davis Hanson’s Carnage and Culture, which is a very good and even a great book, but one that did not quite fit, or at least it wasn’t quite what I wanted. I came to realize that the book I wanted for the course, and one which I would very much have liked to read as well as teach, just didn’t exist. So it was up to me to write it!

At about the same time, I became interested in the “Military Revolution” of 1560-1660 hypothesized by Michael Roberts in 1955, and the subject of debate and much excellent writing ever since. I wrote an article saying that the revolution was in essence a revolution in military professionalism, knowledge and ethos.  I submitted the article to one journal. They claimed to be interested, but threw out so many suggestions for change that I retreated in confusion.  Also, contact with medieval military historian Clifford Rogers convinced me that some of the advances in professionalism had actually begun earlier than 1560. I expanded my reading to include the Renaissance and Middle Ages, and eventually got the idea that a much expanded version of the article on the Military Revolution could become the book I wanted.

My participation in the invasion of Iraq left me with some thoughts that fed into the book. First, the ease with which Iraqi society crumbled in 2003 gave me a sense of the fragility of civilization, and of the soldier’s responsibility, not just to tear down, but to help rebuild. What takes the place of the beaten order should always be better than what had gone before, since wars are always terribly destructive and must be worth the cost. Second, as I wrote in my notebook on returning home in May, I came from war with a renewed sense of the “brotherhood of all men (and the) universalizability of values.”  I didn’t write “universality,” I think because even then, in a rather giddy, starry-eyed mood (I was so glad to be home, and I’d just won a war, I thought), I understood that values aren’t universal, not yet. I did write “men,” which probably should have been “people.” I meant that people, free from brainwashing and fear-mongering, want much the same things: love and fulfillment.

So the war enhanced my sense of a mighty mission for the soldier, one that only he could perform, or anyway one for which he was needed, which is to save civilization, both from its own bouts of blindness and vulnerability and from those outside the pale of civilization who think that they want to see it brought down: “civilization’s discontents,” for whom the passing of civilization would be,I think, a bitter triumph.

More to follow.

Peace,

Reed

After I joined the Marine Corps, my ideas about the profession of arms and my place in it waxed and waned. I went through some fairly idealistic periods. I might call them my bouts of chivalry. At other times, I succumbed to the mercenary model, the idea that I was a guy trained and paid to fight, and don’t bore me with the causes involved. In fact the less cause the better, since that made it a purely “professional” matter. Either way, starry-eyed idealist or hardened cynic, I wasn’t so much thinking about the military profession as feeling: reacting to or against the company I kept, the views of my superiors or staff NCOs, maybe the latest book I’d read (or movie I’d seen).

This started to change when I left the active duty ranks, remaining as a Marine reservist, marrying and attending grad school.  The move to reserve duty and grad school was partly prompted by a nagging sense that I wasn’t using my head enough and that I had a lot to learn. In grad school, I wound up writing both my masters thesis and doctoral dissertation on war literature, so grad school became both my training as an academic and my advanced education as an officer.

In the 90’s I took on the additional duty of adjunct faculty for the Marine Corps Command and Staff Course, non-resident program. I conducted a seminar to discuss the required readings, which ran from theory and history to nuts and bolts tactics and operations, the whole course tapped off by a war game.  The students were mostly reserve Marine majors, although we almost always had some officers from active duty, the other services, and of greater or lesser grade.  These were officers of some experience, getting ready for the broader responsibilities of a senior command and staff positions. I came to think of the course as an inquiry into the nature of military professionalism.  What were military professionals expected to know, to be able to do?  What ethos ought we hold to?  Were reservists professionals? What had we learned from our earlier service that would be valuable going forward, and what assumptions did we need to question?  How could we communicate our knowledge and beliefs to others?  As either reserve officers or active duty officers on independent duty, the subject of civil-military relations was one we lived with every day.   These experienced men and women had ideas of their own about these topics.  Being away from the big Marine Corps and in most cases pursuing civilian careers gave us added perspective, a basis for comparison between the military and other  professions.  From our conversations about the nature of military professionalism arose the conviction that military professionalism consists of a deep knowledge of the nature and impact of armed conflict, and that the POA (profession of arms) was in essence, and considered most broadly and contextually, a subset of the humanities, in its concern with language and values, with history and the goals of civilization. Although ours could be a brutal business (by the mid 2000s, I and most students were coming back from deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan), only a civilized person was fit to do what we did. Only a student of the humanities could see armed conflict in all of its tragedy and complexity.

All for now. More to follow.

RRB