The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present - Book Review

Parameters, Spring, 2004 by David L. Perry

The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present. By Shannon E. French. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. 272 pages. $24.95.

This is a rich survey of military values in diverse cultures, from ancient Greek and Roman to medieval Scandinavian, from Native American to Chinese and Japanese. The book also has the virtue of treating each of its disparate traditions in depth and with care. Eight of its nine chapters were written by Shannon French, an ethicist who teaches at the US Naval Academy. The remaining chapter was penned by Felicia Ackerman, a professor of philosophy at Brown University who was one of French's Ph.D. advisers.

Although Code of the Warrior exhibits close reading of primary texts as well as mastery of pertinent scholarly commentaries, it is fortunately free of burdensome academic jargon, and would thus be useful in undergraduate ethics courses and among general audiences. Its value would be greatest for budding officers in military academies or university ROTC programs, but senior military leaders would also benefit from its reading. This is one of the best books in military ethics since the 1989 publication of Anthony Hartle's Moral Issues in Military Decision Making. In fact, French's and Hartle's books might profitably be read together, since they cover different but important and complementary topic areas.

French is not satisfied with approaches to teaching military ethics that rely exclusively on lists of rules, believing that they unwisely neglect motivation and character. In that connection, she draws on a number of studies bearing on the moral psychology of warriors, such as Mark Osiel's Obeying Orders: Atrocity, Military Discipline, and the Law of War, and concludes that detailed briefings for soldiers and officers on the laws of war must be reinforced through (a) stories of "role models who remained true to their codes of honor even in the face of nearly overwhelming challenges or temptations," and (b) shaming tactics to inculcate a strong aversion to behaving in ways inconsistent with their organizational codes.

Code of the Warrior contains a wonderful examination of Homer's Iliad, helping the reader to understand how a particular sense of honor on the part of its characters could produce admirable figures like Hector on the one hand, yet also generate a devastating and tragic war between Greeks and Trojans from a seemingly trivial affair between Paris and Helen.

The author also presents a perspective rarely discussed in books on military ethics: the Vikings. What, we might ask, could those bad boys (and girls) possibly teach modern warriors about ethics? Quite a bit, in French's view, though her examples from the Nordic sagas tend to illustrate variations on fairly predictable themes of courage, determination, generosity, and honor.

Later in the book French explores the values of 18th- and 19th-century Native American warriors of the Great Plains region. As she narrates various stories told by and about those tribes, the reader may be struck by the contrast between the widespread reverence and respect accorded to the souls of animals hunted for food, and the desire of each tribe to show its superiority over every other tribe through violent conquest and domination, even occasionally by killing unarmed women and children or torturing prisoners of war to death. But French reminds us that whites, too, tended to regard Native Americans as subhuman, a view which served to rationalize their own indiscriminate war tactics.

French then shifts dramatically, this time to a description of the curious combination of Buddhist and martial values evinced by the Chinese monks of the Shaolin Temple. Another dramatic swing in subject brings the reader to the code of the Samurai. French narrates the emergence of that fascinating set of values from an amalgam of Shinto, Confucian, and Zen Buddhist beliefs, combined with uniquely Japanese forms of warrior honor and shame, which typically dictated suicide over surrender.

In her concluding chapter the author addresses the intriguing question, "Are Terrorists Warriors?" Given that terrorists are usually regarded as murderers by definition, and that French concluded in her first chapter that authentic warriors are not murderers, one might assume that her answer to the question would be an easy "No." And in a sense that's exactly where she ends up. Along the way, though, she cites the doctrine of double effect to remind us of the moral difference between directly targeting the innocent versus accidentally killing them in war, as long as one tries one's best to minimize "collateral damage." She also points out that the tactics oral Qaeda--terrorists who profess to be Muslims--in reality violate many core Islamic teachings. French too quickly disposes of the question of whether the 9/11 hijackers exhibited some form of courage: Aristotle's view that real courage must be in the service of the right cause, which French cites exclusively, is not the only credible phenomenology of courage.