Empathy and the Officer

            Roughly the second half of the workshop consisted of prepared questions put to Capt. Maybaumwisniewski and me. We were asked about times we had experienced victories or failures of empathy in our careers. Capt. Maybaumwisniewski recalled some stalled discussions with the Japanese over anti-submarine warfare. A shared meal of noodles with a subordinate and a Japanese officer revealed that the Japanese felt that they were not being treated as equal partners in these discussions but were being dictated to. Greater regard for their feelings and self-respect resulted in far more successful negotiations. I cited OIF1 as a clear failure of empathy. I participated in OIF1, and I saw little sign that we were making an effort to understand the culture and worldview of the Iraqis. We saw them as a mirror of ourselves, and we told ourselves that a few material improvements (Pizza Hut, a Mall) would reconcile the Iraqis to our presence and a change in government. Any rigorous thinking was devoted to a fairly narrow understanding of the purely military aspects of the situation, as in a tactical exercise. I was complicit in this, once shrugging off a suggestion from another officer that some cultural education for the troops might be useful. I added, however, that I went home at the end of my deployment with a far greater sense of empathy for the victims of war and an understanding of the importance of allies. In fact, war had paradoxically given me an enlarged sense of my kinship with other members of the human race, however different on the surface. Seeing people in flight on the road from Nasiriya, having tea with a family living in a bombed-out ruin, visiting an artist’s studio where was hung his dead daughter’s picture, very possibly the recent victim of American firepower, these experiences forced an empathy on me that I had never experienced in the same intensity.  I felt it almost akin to agape.

            Capt. Maybaumwisniewski and I were asked about our participation in the “Partnership for Peace,” a kind of minor leagues for NATO. Capt. Maybaumwisniewski noted that, although this organization was instituted primarily to instill the concept of military subordination to civil authority, it had the added benefit of encouraging understanding among the member nations. My involvement in PfP was limited to a single exercise called Cooperative Determination 2000 conducted in Luzerne, Switzerland. I recalled having a meal in the dining facility with a group of foreign officers who observed that it was rare for an American officer to speak with them as I had. I was able to clear up a couple of misconceptions. (Some Europeans think of America as a land of rootless cosmopolitans.) I had the thought later that both Capt. Maybaumwisniewski’s contact with the Japanese Navy and my time in Luzerne illustrated the point that American officers and Americans generally fall too comfortably and naturally into the role of leader or senior service, and are sometimes incommunicative regarding their own culture and incurious concerning others. For empathy to be developed, these tendencies must be overcome. They both also illustrate the importance of shared meals to a growth of understanding.

            I was asked how empathy was involved with the three main areas of officer thought I had identified in my recent book How to Think Like an Officer: organizer, warfighter, and visionary. I replied that empathy was necessary in all three areas. As an organizer the officer developed and trained units to survive and prevail in the stress of armed conflict. The resilience required is material and tactical but also related to matters of the spirit, to morale and esprit de corps. To develop the resilience and fighting spirit required, the officer must strive to understand the feelings, fears, and hopes of her soldiers. In his role as warfighter, the officer must continue to empathize with those under his command, but also with the adversary, with the affected local population, and even with the people at home. The officer must not yield to the soldier’s occupational maladies of insularity and self-righteousness, to a Kipling-esque stance of unappreciated virtue. In her visionary role, the officer is often concerned with the post-conflict environment and her own life as a veteran.

            There is no doubt that military service and culture can impede empathy. The military path is arduous, and soldiers are taught to ignore or at least overcome danger and discomfort. If this stoical attitude is projected outwards, as it often is, it can tend to dismissal of others’ feelings. The competitive, hypermasculine atmosphere of many military units also works against empathy and can lead to a distrust of feelings in general. On the other hand, and in answer to those who find empathy a sticky or enervating business, I would cite as an example of empathy allied with humility the officer who may be America’s professional soldier par excellence, George C. Marshall. Marshall was the World War II Army Chief of Staff and the only American career officer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. Marshall was far from a slave to his feelings. In fact, he was notably self-controlled to the point that he struck some people as unfeeling. But Marshall had disciplined himself to keep his feelings to one side, lest they interfere with his judgment or wear him out. He warned his subordinates not to be people who felt deeply but who thought only on the surface. Marshall cultivated detachment but also a deep empathy with those who fought and who suffered the effects of war. He displayed this in a thousand acts of personal consideration and in the plan for European recovery that bears his name. From his small-town, nineteenth-century beginnings, he developed a vision of the world entire. His service was as global as national. I cited two Marshall quotations at the workshop.

“We have acquired, I think, a feeling and concern for the problems of other peoples. There is a deep urge to help the oppressed and to give aid to those on whom great hardship has fallen.”

“Don’t expect too much. There will be no miracles of an abiding peace. We must take the peoples of the world as we find them, with their imperfections, their prejudices, and their ambitions, and do the best we can to live with them.” 

Next: Empathy in Literature, History, and Philosophy            

Introduction/Prof. Yorke’s Remarks

          Recently, I participated in subject workshop, which was sponsored by the Kissinger Center at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). I was invited by Mary Barton. Mary and I were both World War I Centennial Fellows in a project run by the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. She is currently an America in the World Consortium Postdoctoral Fellow at SAIS. She is the author of the recent Counterterrorism Between the Wars: An International History, 1919-1937 (Oxford, 2020). Also participating were Johns Hopkins doctoral candidate Ashlyn Hand and retired Navy Captain Susan Maybaumwisniewski. Prof. Claire Yorke, Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Grand Strategy, King’s College London, was the real “duty expert” on this subject.

           We had a few introductory meetings among ourselves to work out the sequence of events and develop some of the questions and issues we wanted to pursue. Then on 11 May we had the main event, with about 30 in attendance. All of this was on zoom. 

           For my first blog on this event, I will try to summarize the opening remarks made by Professor Yorke. In subsequent posts I will go on to the remarks made by others, myself included, perhaps followed with a concluding call to action/further study and my own reflections.

            Prof. Yorke led off by quoting Robert McNamara to the effect that there is no contradiction between a soft heart and a hard head. Empathy is a matter of seeking to understand another person’s perspective. This may be difficult, particularly perhaps when it crosses cultural and other boundaries. Empathy can lead to compassion, although it is not the same as compassion. Empathy can humanize relations and also open up opportunities for more information and data in the diplomatic and political arenas. Empathy involves humility, the realization that ours is not the only possible world view. Prof. Yorke identifies three types of empathy, while acknowledging that there are others discussed in the relevant literature. Her three are interpersonal, strategic, and manipulative. The last category may not be true empathy. How do diplomats and others “signal” that they are open to or intending to show empathy? Despite the literature on empathy, which includes writings by “realist” theoreticians and work on “cognitive biases,” the subject of empathy in politics and foreign policy is probably under-theorized. The effect of such feelings as anger, shame, grief, and joy on people’s actions in the public sphere is little understood. Foreign affairs theory tends to focus on questions of power, interest, and security. These are important matters, and an understanding of empathy can improve our grasp of all three. Empathy can serve to break down the walls of mistrust that are at the heart of what has been called the “security dilemma.”            

        Prof. Yorke discussed “Constructivist” theory, which is concerned with how we construct meaning. Some Constructivist writing is concerned with marginalized voices. Prof. Yorke cited the work of Franz Fanon, Edward Said and others on this subject, along with feminist writers. The practice of empathy raises the question of with whom do we empathize, and why. In the foreign relations arena, it may be important that empathy is institutionalized. It may not be enough that heads of state or principal negotiators form bonds of empathy, if rank-and-file diplomats and bureaucrats do not cultivate empathy as well. Seeking empathy can be an uncomfortable and even offensive undertaking, involving compromise and difficult ethical choices. Empathy must also be theorized so that we better understand its nuances and the insight it offers, and so that we continue to ask questions about empathy as feeling, state of mind, and aspiration. What is the story we don’t know?

            For empathy to be practiced more effectively, we need a greater, more detailed and nuanced picture of empathy in action as well as in theory. Done right, empathy has the ability to provide vital information to practitioners, and to transform crises.

            Some questions from the audience, moderated by Ashlyn Hand, followed Prof. Yorke’s remarks. One listener asked about the elected officials who seem to display empathy in foreign relations, but who rely on simplistic, even callous formulas and stereotypes when discussing domestic issues. Prof. Yorke expressed the hope that people would see through such hypocrisy. Another listener asked what features of government lent themselves to empathy. Prof. Yorke identified a willingness to tolerate failure and a healthy media that encourages discussion and that tolerates different points of view. Prof. Yorke concluded by noting the importance of curiosity. This may be vital in all forms of learning, but in empathy it is likely especially important that difference and strangeness provoke curiosity rather than fear, incomprehension, or distaste.

Next: Empathy and the Officer          

How to tap the considerable potential of veterans to the larger society?  The armed forces, the civil community, and veterans themselves, in groups or as individuals, can contribute to this undertaking. Maximizing the contributions made by veterans can begin during military service. Without endorsing any organizations, but perhaps offering choices of veteran’s groups, the armed forces might include a conversation on continuing service as part of the transition to civil life. This conversation could involve current veterans, to include those with disabilities, who have continued to serve after being discharged.  Some veteran’s organization are largely social, others political or service-oriented, or a mixture of all three. Some have largely been concerned with veteran’s rights and privileges. Others, especially recently, have served wide causes of social justice and civil rights, in effect extending the soldier’s ideal of selfless service beyond the period of enlistment. College students have formed veteran’s groups to foster community and explore solutions to the problems of the transition from the military to the academy. Other groups specialize in creative and artistic pursuits for veterans, sometimes as means of therapy. The veteran’s organizations that are active in a newly discharge veteran’s hometown or region should welcome the returning veteran, in person if possible. Of course, not all public service organizations are composed of veterans. Volunteer firefighter and rescue, service clubs, scouts, big brother/sister, to name only a few, offer opportunities for service and for the membership, affiliation, comradeship and sense of purpose many veterans find lacking in their post-military lives. Steering veterans towards lives of useful service could also serve to draw them away from affiliation with extremist groups or gangs, from rootlessness and self-destructive behavior.        

Veterans themselves have the biggest role in deciding whether and how they will contribute to society. Some may find meaning in the kind of work they do, as public servants, teachers, professional activists or artists. For others, work may be just a job, and they will seek greater meaning elsewhere, as a volunteer or amateur. But perhaps the greatest choice of all for veterans is the spirit with which they pursue their post-military selves. Veterans must decide how to interpret and live with their own backgrounds of military service. In simplest form, the choice is this, whether to retreat into a small tribe, perhaps consisting of fellow veterans and family, or to join a wider circle of their community and of humanity. In many cases, the choices veterans make affect not just themselves but others, and sometimes many others. Aside from troubling their own friends and family, veterans can become a burden and even a threat. Unfortunately, his service has often equipped her to be serious threat, just as it has given her some of the skills and abilities to be useful and helpful.

Military service has the potential to either limit or expand a person’s range of of the people we regard as fully human. It can result in a broadening or narrowing of sympathies, in feelings of responsibility or of entitlement, in humor or humorlessness, in righteousness or self-righteousness, in kindness and charity or callousness.  The veteran’s attitude will of course be shaped by her experiences, by the caliber of leadership to which he was exposed, frankly in part to fortune. Veterans have seen people at their best and their worst: heroism and cowardice, kindness and cruelty. They may be both proud of their service and ashamed of things they’ve done, witnessed, or been a party to.   I admit to being lucky in this regard. Most of the leadership and conduct I was exposed to was on the plus side, and my interactions with local people on campaign, in Lebanon and Iraq, served to enhance my sense of a shared humanity. I remember visiting a family in Iraq. They were living in a bombed-out building and seemed to own almost nothing, but they insisted on us taking tea with them. We gave their little boy some hard candy from our MREs, and his delight in this treat was infectious, maybe to me especially, as one who had left three boys of my own at home, standing on the train platform with their mother in Larchmont, New York.

The veteran’s attitude and approach to civil life is also a matter of choice. Veterans with severe physical or psychic wounds have nevertheless gone on to lives of service, while others who are unscathed descend to bitterness and self-righteousness, blaming others for choices of their own and for troubles of their own making.  The veteran may be suffering from trauma or some other form of impairment that make good choices difficult, but positive relationships with a diverse group of people can be part of the cure.  The veteran has the choice of whether to seek out and cultivate human relationships, some of them perhaps outside his own circle, not all of them with veterans, and some at least with people different as to race, religious and political views, or to reject them.

Veterans should also be aware of that for which they are most admired. It is neither for combat skills nor toughness nor for the figure they cut in the combat or dress uniform. It is for the ideal of service that they represent, their professed willingness to subordinate self to a worthy cause and to others. It is humility, not pride, which most becomes the veteran, although perhaps both have their place. To serve was a privilege for which they should be grateful. They may choose inclusion or isolation, service or entitlement. Even if damaged, they could play a great part in the healing of our divided country. 

Heroes and Villains: Military Veterans and Civil Society, Part 1

            Since the beginning of armies and organized warfare, that is, since the start of human society, soldiers and former soldiers have been feared and revered, deified, and despised in roughly equal measure. The extremes of opinion have often been unjustified, if not entirely incomprehensible. Soldiers and military veterans have been associated with some of humanity’s highest ideals and aspirations, and inescapably with scenes and acts of atavism and barbarity.  They have played a unique role in the saga of nations, culture, and civilization.[i] Recent events have raised the question of the veteran’s role in civil society. There is an historic gap, it would seem, between the potential of veterans to contribute to society and the success with which they realize and fulfill this role.   

            The veteran story is very old. One of the seminal works of western literature, the Odyssey, is concerned with the life of a veteran. Another veteran of Troy who returns home to his wife and a different reception from that experienced by Odysseus is his commander Agamemnon!  The legend of Robin Hood is based partly on the medieval soldiers who took to the woods and turned outlaw. Bandit veterans became a scourge during the early modern period. In later years veterans became the object of sentimental social concern, perhaps culminating in the works of Rudyard Kipling and his many appeals for veterans’ relief and respect.  Veterans again become centers of attention after World War I and the “lost generation,” some of whom formed the nuclei of the fascist organizations that troubled the peace of Europe and the world for decades, and of which remnants survive to this day. The dysfunctional, unassimilated veteran was a subject of both fear and solicitude in America after the Vietnam War. Consideration of the veteran has not been limited to the west. The unemployed Samurai is a stock figure of much Japanese literature. The prestige of American soldiers and vets rose in the latter years of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, but veterans have also been linked with higher rates of mental illness and suicide in recent years.[ii] Finally, revelations about the disproportionate number of veterans among those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 raised questions about the nature of military and veteran culture.  The dangerous, outlaw veteran has not left us, it would seem. Since the attack, greater attention has been focused on the appeal for veterans of certain extremist groups, and it has been learned that these groups often actively recruit service members and veterans. Veterans have skills that might be useful to an extremist organization, not in weaponry or combat skills only, but in organizing, leadership, and communications. Because of their service, veterans often possess what social scientists term charisma, a quality of leadership often based on unusual experiences. Further, given the continued prestige of the armed forces in America, the presence of numbers of veterans in the ranks of an organization may serve to give it an aura of legitimacy that it would not otherwise have and that it may not deserve.    

The relationship of the veteran to her military experience may be complex. Leaving the service is often experienced as liberating and humanizing. No longer is one subject to discipline and command. The military dictates where a person lives, the work he does, and what he wears; every moment of the servicemember’s day may be subject to a rigid schedule and set procedures. At any moment, someone of superior rank can make demands that may seem unreasonable or overbearing. Service members often live in harsh, comfortless, dangerous conditions. They may experience painful and debilitating mental and physical wounds, and the wounding and death of friends. Given all of this, it may be surprising that veterans often experience nostalgia for their service. It is sometimes their departed youth that they miss, but it is often much more than that. They may long for the sense of purpose and order, the admiring looks a person in the unform of his country often receives, and perhaps especially the experience of comradeship. For many, at least in retrospect, military service is the most significant period in their lives. The absence left by the termination of military service may be hard to fill, and some veterans spend their lives searching for a substitute. Veterans’ search for meaning may make them vulnerable to the appeals of false gods and corrupt ideologies, or it may empower them to serve. Their charisma may be meretricious, but if united with  strength and probity it can be a great force for good. The adaptability, resiliency, and leadership skills  that veterans may acquire in their service can be useful in bringing about positive change.   

---

[i] Reed Robert Bonadonna, Soldiers and Civilization: How the Profession of Arms Thought and Fought the Modern World into Existence (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2017).

[ii] 2019 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report. Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Accessed online 31 March 20.