I’ve been hearing this word “warfighter” a lot lately, often coming out of the mouths of macho assholes like Pete Hegseth. It implies that the role of the military is simply fighting, fighting, fighting — and I’d rather see the military as a stabilizing force, less about fighting and acting more as resilient response to threats, and also as a practical investment in a region that would be squandered if they were actually fighting.
I’m not alone in feeling as if the term misrepresents what our soldiers (what’s wrong with that fine, familiar word?) actually do.
someone binged on YouTube videos of old recruiting commercials or watched “Top Gun” too many times in a row. He (or she) birthed the term “warfighter,” which quickly took root in all the government circles and is spreading slowly into conventional media as well.
“Warfighter” is perfect. It’s dripping in red, white, and blue at a time when the military has never been more popular, or more lionized.
I hate it. “Warfighter” is the rhetorical equivalent of a “Support the troops” bumper sticker or an American flag lapel pin. It reduces the complexity and ambiguity of modern national security, dragging it back to an imagined era of good wars, bad guys, and clear-cut victory. It’s hard not to hear the phrase and picture a G.I Joe lookalike waving an American flag.
Using “warfighter” destroys our capacity for reason at a time when it’s desperately needed. With strategic flops in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s clear that the U.S. needs to take another stab at the national security paradigm. We should be thinking objectively about how to stabilize the international system, promote free enterprise, and share that burden across the full range of our allies. We need a clear strategy that Americans understand, but as well as our friends and, most importantly, our actual or potential enemies.
I have a son in the army. He’s never fought in a war. What he seems to do is plant his men into a place, build up infrastructure and facilities just in case a war breaks out, and then come home, or get transferred to another place that needs maintenance or upgrading. I would never call him a “warfighter,” because being a “warfighter” means you’ve actually failed.
Can we please get rid of Hegseth?
Speaking of Hegseth:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently ordered modifications to a room next to the Pentagon press briefing room to retrofit it with a makeup studio that can be used to prepare for television appearances, multiple sources told CBS News.
The price tag for the project was several thousand dollars, according to two of the sources, at a time when the administration is searching for cost-cutting measures.
I’m not qualified to use the term as a hard-core civilian, but my uncles who served in WWII did teach me what a “REMF” was, and I’ve also read Catch-22 a few times.
“Warfighter” sounds like the name of an 80s military b-movie. Some cheap Rambo knockoff that missed the point of the original in favor of just showing a big macho guy running around with a machine gun.
The Norwegian armed forces are called “Forsvaret” which literally means “The Defense”. I have always liked that name.
One of my favorite lines from Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon” (p442): The United States Military (Waterhouse has decided) is first and foremost an unfathomable network of typists and file clerks, secondarily a stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another, and last and least a fighting organization.
I fucking hate the phrase “support the troops”, because almost every time I’ve heard it, it has meant “support the war du jour, and the psychopaths who started it”.
“Support the troops” should mean: Don’t send them to fight unless absolutely necessary; If you have to send them, make sure there’s an exit plan, and that they are equipped with what they need; When they come home, give them all they need to recover (as much as that is possible); If they don’t come home, give their families all they need to recover (as much as that is possible).
Apart from everything else…
A good hard look should be taken at the actual results of all this “warfighting”.
The only major conflict the US actually won after WW2 was the first Iraq war and that thanks to a clear mandate, a solid network of alliances, a quick withdrawal after victory on the field.
All the rest were either tragic defeats (Vietnam, Afghanistan) or equally tragic quagmires (Korea, Iraq 2). Enormous suffering inflicted on local populations, troops bloodied and traumatized, enormous material losses and everything for nothing at all, alles für die Katz.
Points to ponder indeed.
What Rob Grigjanis said —
outis@5,
I’d have to disagree that the Korean War achieved “nothing at all”. Plenty to criticise, and I strongly suspect I’d have opposed it at the time if I’d been around with anything like my current politics, but I’d rather live in South Korea than North Korea; and while one can’t be certain of the outcome if Kim Il Sung had been allowed to complete the conquest of the South, I suspect Korea in 2025 on that timeline resembles the North as it is IRL rather than the South.
The price tag for [Hegseth’s makeup room] was several thousand dollars…
Maybe that’s why Noem had about that much cash in her purse: she was about to pay for the makeup room (using cash instead of going through wasteful inefficient bureaucratic channels donchaknow), and a leftist BLM rioter stole it to make Hegseth look bad! Yeah, that’s it…
Also, Dalke @3: That’s true of almost any modern nation’s armed services. Even if all they do in any situation is killing people and blowing things up (and they’d do more than that if they have even minimally competent political leadership), that still requires a lot of support activity; like maybe 6-7 support personnel for each “warfighter” actually firing weapons at enemy targets. The word “warfighter” may have some more specific understood meaning among military experts (I’ve seen it in defense-contractors’ ads), but ignorant chickenhawks like Smegseth are just using it to mean “tough manly men who aren’t law-abiding pussies (or DEI hires).”
KG: I more or less agree with you about our defense of South Korea, but with one quibble: NK was a major industrial power before we bombed it all to hell (worse than we bombed Nazi Germany’s infrastructure). So I suspect that if we hadn’t done all that to keep NK from conquering SK, Korea would likely be worse off than SK today — but considerably better off than NK today.
The only thing wrong with “Support the Troops” is that it doesn’t go far enough. “Support the Troops , Dump the Politicians” is much better.
This country is in deep trouble (dare I repeat it: a death spiral). I am still so angry that the drooling sheople were able to elect an imbecilic, convicted felon as (alleged) president. It is obvious to anyone who is paying attention, and has any sense of decency, that all the cockroaches tRUMP has gathered around him to run this country are COMPLETELY INCOMPETENT, IRRESPONSIBLE SOCIOPATHS.
We live in a culture where violence is praised and considered almost mandatory. Patriotism is a term that has been degraded to the point of being meaningless by the bible thumping, gun fondling idiots wrapping themselves in the flag. The billionaire sociopaths and cockroaches running this country don’t care how many lives they destroy.
Even though I’m tempted, I won’t engage in a lengthy rant here. Just know that our organizations have been dedicated to being pacific (as in peaceful) since the mid-1960’s.
que: Martha and the Vandellas – nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide.
The term’s been in use for over a century.
The “Department of Defense” is a newer term than “warfighter.” It used to be the “Department of War,” which was more honest. Thanks, Truman! (After FDR, the Democrat machine took over the party again, and we leftists were effectively silenced, blacklisted, our unions busted, and more. Well, the machine took over except for the brief blip of the first neoliberal President, Jimmy Carter.)
Go to bed, drewl, and maybe come back when you’re sober and a little more coherent.
That doesn’t sound like it directly enables lethality.
Warfighters endure unimaginable pain after being wounded in Iraq fighting for our freedoms. Oh, sorry, that’s a commercial for a hemp cream.
“Warfighter” sounds like a Walmart knockoff GI Joe.
Hegseth should be called “GI Joke”.
We need to build makeup studios for all our warfighters.
When someone tries to play the ‘patriot’ card on you, remind them that we have all seen the January 6th video of a federal police officer being beaten with the staff of a U.S. flag while a fascist mob chanted “U-S-A, U-S-A.”
@5 outis
… and it was such a clear ‘victory’ that we had to go back in and do it again a decade later.
@18: When someone tries to play the “I’m a Better Patriot Than You” game with me, I reach for my wallet and ask the other person to show their VA card. I have only had one person ever actually show a valid VA card to answer mine.
Further to the point, on Rear Echelon Military Fellows:
Warfighters win (at least in their dreams/soundbites) individual engagements, and sometimes limited-scope-and-time battles. REMFs win wars: The training, the equipping, the supplies and repairs in the field, the patching up of the
cannon fodderwounded warfighters, the plans and analysis, the diplomacy to actually bring things to an end are all done by REMFs. As an excrutiatingly obvious example, the Battle of Midway was won in a basement at Pearl Harbor beforehand (so that US forces were actually in position) and by heroic repair efforts to get the third carrier to the battlefield; Torpedo 8 mattered only because it was there, and it wasn’t there because the warfighters rebuilt an engine room in 72 hours (ordinarily at the time, a two-month job).Historically, the American Way of War has been “We will impose our will on you through our superior logistics while further degrading your inferior logistics.” That has been pretty successful thus far (Vietnam and Afghanistan are not the exceptions one would think — US forces faltered when logistics were withdrawn for themselves and the opposition redeveloped its own logistics).
@19 Reginald
No, not quite. The first Gulf War was about reversing the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq. It did this quickly and decisively. A clear win. That, at the time, there was a large call to chase Saddam back to Baghdad is precisely the sort of reasoning that leads to quagmires and forever wars. The fact that the same people who supported chase back to Baghdad and are fans of quagmires happened to be in power 10 years later (and look what happened, a quagmire) does not take away from the fact that Gulf war 1 was a clear win or that it was, arguably, a just war. So far as ‘just war’ is a useful term. There are better wars, that one was one of the better ones.
Warfighter as a term is not one I’ve heard before, but I’ve heard similar for sure (I served 11 years in the Royal Australian Navy). The vast, vast majority of the time we weren’t warfighting. But we were always, training for it. That the skills and (in my case) ANZAC class frigates we were using and training on were more often used for Search and Rescue or disaster relief or whatever was and is very much beside the point. The warfighting skills that were not transferable were trained for just as much. It is a happy accident that some of the warfighting skills are transferable. And the cooks who were stationed ashore would not have been considered warfighters. Nor the stores people in the warehouses full of spare parts. Nor the Coxswains (military police) ashore or the… you get the idea. But the chopper crews who spent almost all their non training time at sea plucking people out of the ocean, ie not warfighting, instead of hunting submarines, ie warfighting, did not make them warfighters any less. The same reasoning applies to any ,military person, sailor, soldier, airman (still the term, sorry), or marine.
“… the fact that Gulf war 1 was a clear win or that it was, arguably, a just war. So far as ‘just war’ is a useful term. There are better wars, that one was one of the better ones.”
Much bigger country invades small neighbouring country, coalition steps in and fights.
(Iraq had no nukes, that’s the big diff)
ummm ie it sounds like it might be a useful term when used properly is my TL:DR
And John? Back in ’91, no one was talkng about, or trying to justify anything, by way of mythical nukes or other WMD’s. It was all about the international order enforcing the rules.
I’m about 80% sure that the point of the “warfighters” thing is that he wants to exclude generals, secretaries, chefs, everyone who is a member of the military but does not personally kill people on a battlefield.
Re: Stuart Smith @25:
Whenever I see the term, I’m contrarily reminded of the Corps of Engineers.
Come to think of it, who are Space Force supposed to be killing?
indianajones @24, well, Russia has nukes.
(That’s the diff)
It sounds to me like a five year old’s attempt to construct a word for soldier when they don’t know the actual word. Though we actually do have a word for people who fight that doesn’t also imply belonging to a formally established army, and that word is “warrior”.
But the connotations are revealing. The attempt is being made to remove aspects of formal belonging and military structure from the equation and focus entirely on the fighting. Which is a rather peculiar type of fascism, as traditionally fascists have been all about the marching and the hierarchy and the jackboots, more so perhaps than the actual state-sanctioned murder. It is also rather out of keeping with the US’s traditional fawning over military hierarchy and the institutions of the military.
Which suggests to me that the people running this farrago are inspired less by traditional fascistic ideals than by a particular brand of toxic masculinity first and foremost.
A more negative word than REMF would be “garritroopers”, a play on paratroopers (but without ever getting mud on the boots). As mentioned above the REMF people actively contribute.
And, yes, I have read the Willie and Joe cartoons.
The worst category of all: Chickenhawks.
See: Dubya, D. Cheney, Trump.
…And “Warfighter” sounds too much like the atrocious post-apocalyptic B film “Blastfighter”. But David Carradine at least made an effort, unlike the chickenhawks.
Myself @ 31
Erratum: Michael Sopkiw was in that particular B film.
Sopkiw and Carradine kept turning up in post-apocalyptic films made in that era, after the first fifty films the names flow together.
Chuck Norris turned up in war/adventure films too.
But at least he worked out, providing impressive musculature for the unrealistic action scenes.
The only ‘warfighter’ scenes I really enjoyed was Roger Moore’s tongue-in-cheek 007 stuff.
It’s the Department of Defense, not the Department of Agression
Rweiss @ 33
Not for much longer…
Fortunately Hegseth and Trump antagonise pretty much everyone in Pentagon, if they try another WMD ripoff people on the inside are likely to leak and otherwise sabotage the agenda.
birger: I inherited my dad’s copy of “Up Front” too. Their definition of “garritrooper” was “too far forward to wear ties and too far back to git shot.” So yeah, necessary support personnel, though Mauldin portrayed them as assholes and pretenders (who were known to spend good money on other people’s fatigues if they had gen-yu-wine bullet-holes in them). (And he found himself apologizing to paratroopers and swearing up and down that he never meant any offense or insinuation toward the latter.)
If soldiers have become warfighters, they could go back to calling the Department of Defense the War Department. I could see it could happen with this bunch.
And don’t even get me started on that Support Our Troops bullshit. I still seethe when I recall all the times people tried to shut me down with that line. Don’t agree with the war? You’re undermining the troops. You’re unpatriotic. What are you, a traitor? The Nazis had a word for criticizing the war — Wehrkraftzersetzung, undermining military morale. Punishable by death, usually hanging from a lamppost in the town square to make a point that even the mildest dissent wasn’t allowed.
Yes, Abby Zimet is ‘intense’. But, this is really worth reading:
https://www.commondreams.org/further/look-ma-i-m-a-warfighter-leading-the-warfighters
Its always sad when even US outlets crotical of the imperial war machine call pointless unjustified warfare with mass casualties, hundreds of thousands of dead alongside immeasurable destruction and trauma “strategic flops in Iraq and Afghanistan”. Like the “oopsie-woopsie” of Vietnam, I guess, and the “silly blunders” of Cambodia and now Palestine..
… “warfighter” …
… reminds me of circa 45 years ago, when the War Resisters League published an April Fools edition of their magazine WIN, parodying themselves (“Whine“) and The Movement generally. This included a mock interview with their own spokesperson claiming that their organization was terribly misunderstood: “We’re the Wharf resisters, because every wharf attracts big, smelly ships!”
cartomancer:
Good point. Actually, it’s like a five year old’s attempt to construct a word for warrior.
I vaguely recall this is actually called “warrior mentality” in English? I’m thinking of a parallel concept in Finnish language, or particularly WWII-era military slang.
lumipuna, I think that in English that locution would imply more of a tactical sense than a strategic one.
Better would be “warrior ethos”.
John Morales – You mean like, warrior mentality is when soldiers focus on fighting, warrior ethos is when that is respected (by soldiers themselves, fellow soldiers, civilians and potentially officers) and accepted as an excuse for certain amount of autonomy and lax discipline?
Yes, lumipuna.
Thanks, John.
“warfighers”, ya that sounds like some baby-talk gibberish from a saturday morning cartoon
i had to go hunt down this clip from gi joe sigma 6, when they come up with the name “sigma 6”. it doesn’t go exactly the way i remembered it (long time ago), but ya this is what i was immediately reminded of: