Post Heroic Warfare

How does ‘post-heroism’ affect western strategy making in the twenty-first century?

Homer’s The Iliad is a poem about war and gives

prominence to kleos; an heroic glory basking violence and

death in reverence and whose acts are sung about for

eternity.12 The Odyssey, however, is a poem of peacetime,

set post-war; one about how war is put away, and hence

Odysseus’s acts of violence are not granted the reverence

given to Achilles in The Iliad.34 Therefore in the Homeric

cycle of violence, perceptions of heroism are contextually

derived and socially constructed.5 The same can be said

for violence throughout history.

Much IR scholarship, however, conceives post-

heroism as a modern phenomenon, one of the so-called

New Wars.6 This is mistaken. That is not to say that post-

heroism is a social construct outwith context, but rather

than being contained to merely post-Cold War7 it should

be considered as a construct formed during peacetimes in

response to war. Though its constructs are temporal, it is

not a temporary phenomenon – it repeats throughout

history. Post-heroism is about how war - its glorification,

its deaths and its heroes - is put away by society, and its 1 Charles Segal, ‘Kleos and its Ironies in The Odyssey’, L’Antiqué Classique, (1983), p. 22. 2 Anthony T. Edwards, Achilles in the Odyssey: Ideologies of Heroism in the Homeric Epic (Verlag Anton Hain, 1985), p. 92.3 Segal, p. 23.4 Michael N. Nagler, ‘The Proem and the Problem’, Classical Antiquity, (1990), p. 346.5 Jonathan Gottschall, The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer, (Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 41.6 Herfried Münkler, The New Wars (trans. Patrick Camiller), (Polity Press, 2005), p. 68. 7 Edward N. Luttwak, ‘Toward Post-Heroic Warfare’, Foreign Affairs, (1995), p. 109

120009551 Thomas W Ayling Dr Iain Ferguson


impact on western strategy-making in the twenty-first

century has seen further removal of the combatant from

the dangers of the battlefield as well as the proliferation of

drone warfare.

The concept of ‘post-heroism’ in IR was conceived by

Luttwak in his 1995 essay Toward Post-Heroic Warfare in

which he makes the highfalutin claim that “this new

season of war is upon us as one more consequence of the

Cold War”.8 This is not poor scholarship in totum; indeed a

period of post-heroism was constructed following the Cold

War, as the “culture of disciplined restraint in the use of

force” dissolved.9 This created a period of hot wars in

former Soviet territories as well as in the Middle East, after

and during which perceptions of glory and heroism in war

and regarding its fatalities constructed a post-heroic era,

but not the post-heroic era as Luttwak and his

contemporaries suggest. The images of flag-draped

caskets returning to Great Britain and the USA from the

twenty-first century’s Mesopotamian wars in Iraq and

Afghanistan have further conditioned society to not

perceive dying for a socio-political community as glorious.

Indeed, with such prevalent and regular death, war

becomes harder to put away and hence the construct of

post-heroism builds.

8 Luttwak, p. 1099 Luttwak, p. 111.



It could even be argued that Luttwak himself sees

post-heroism as a construct without tacitly saying it due to

the extent of the perceptive language in not just his essay

Toward Post-Heroic Warfare, but also in his later work A

Post Heroic Military Policy. There is discussion by Luttwak

of how use of violence in the Cold War era “came to be

seen”10 as serious, how wars were waged “without

perceptible restraint”11, how stealth aircraft are

“judged”12, and of a lack of “overwhelming pressure to

demobilize”13 post-Cold War.14 Such use of perceptive

language would appear to underpin the principle of

constructivism that one creates the world one sees and

sees the world one creates.15 Therein, Salter’s penultimate

paragraph of A Sport and a Pastime chimes true where he

writes “one must have heroes, which is to say, one must

create them… it is we who give them their majesty, their

power”.16 Just as heroes are created in “the social

construction of reality”17, period of post-heroism are so

10 Luttwak, p. 110.11 Luttwak, p. 109.12 Luttwak, p. 122.13 Edward N. Luttwak, ‘A Post Heroic Military Policy’, Foreign Affairs, (1996), p. 35.14 Above italicized text has been used for emphasis and is not present in either Luttwak essay.15

Nicholas Onuf, World of our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations, (Routledge, 2012), p. 37.16 James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime, (Modern Library, 1995), p. 180.17 K. M. Fierke, ‘Constructivism’, International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity Third Edition, ed. Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki and Steve Smith, (Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 188.



conceived in response to violence and hence the link

between post-heroism and constructivism is imperishable.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to infer that, in

terms of war, society is in, or does enter, periods of

aheroism. There is not absence of heroism in totum, and

soldiers who give their life for their country are held,

generally, in high regard. Processions of military

repatriation in the four years to August 31st 2011 in

Wooton Bassett saw 345 Union Jack-draped coffins pass

through the town, with over 2000 people attending the

final service.18 The same can be said of Armistice services

across the world each November 11th. These, however, are

not such celebrations of kleos as aforementioned, and

though the term ‘war hero’ is eminent almost to the point

of cliché, they are subdued and about remembrance19 –

they are about how war is put away both while it continues

and after it has finished and hence does fit into the

construct of post-heroism already laid out.

In the twenty-first century the construct of post-

heroism has led to attempts by western states to remove

the combatant from the immediate dangers of the

battlefield through uses of new military technology to

18 Sally Challoner, Wootton Bassett marks the end of repatriations, (BBC

News, 2011) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-14726697

19 Roger Mac Ginty and Andrew Williams, ‘Introduction: Commemoration and Remembrance in the Commonwealth’, The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, (2007), p. 656.



minimize fatality. A research paper for the Office of Naval

Research in the US Department of Navy opens with a

thought that directly shows the effect of socially

constructed post-heroism on strategy making:

“Imagine the face of warfare with autonomous

robotics: Instead of our soldiers returning home

in flag-draped caskets to heartbroken families,

autonomous robots—mobile machines that can

make decisions, such as to fire upon a target,

without human intervention—can replace the

human soldier in an increasing range of

dangerous missions.”20

Giving armed robotics decision-making capabilities is a

stage further in human removal than the current

proliferation of UAV (unarmed aerial vehicle) use by the

United States “against Al Qaeda and its associated

forces”.21 Indeed, even though drones are operated by

humans, their removal from the battlefield itself acts as a

disembodiment. Herein though there is not complete

detachment from killing, there is a tangible difference in

perception of the combatant – most importantly a lack of

danger for the drone operator. It is clear from the

evidence that not only do western strategy makers

recognize that post-heroism has been temporally 20 Patrick Lin, George Bekey and Keith Abney, Autonomous Military Robotics: Risk, Ethics, and Design, (Office of Naval Research, 2008), p. 1.21

President Barack Obama, Remarks by the President at the National Defense University, (Fort McNair, 2013), http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/23/remarks-president-national-defense-university.



constructed, but further than this strategy is adjusted to

accommodate for this in the twenty-first century by

making use of, and exploring further, the limits of modern

technology in warfare.

This is not, however, a new phenomenon in spite of

much of IR scholarship’s infatuation with the modern. That

the technology is new is not to say that the same process

in strategy making has not occurred throughout history.

This is not to be so bold or as Hart’s universalism and to

claim that “the idea that every war has been different

from the last is the delusion of those who know no

history”22, but the idea of containing IR in the modern

rather than in the international history foregoing the

discipline (as Williams, Hadfield and Rofe argue23), seems

bizarre. Most advances in military technology have sought

to distance the combatant from the target, under

pressures of socially constructed post-heroism.

In his lecture Predators, Reapers and post-heroic war,

Enemark highlights this historical recurrence, positing:

“throughout history, new military technologies

have occasioned debate over the character of

war. Stirrups, the longbow, crossbows, the

submarine, tank, machine gun, gunpowder

22 Liddell Hart, Thoughts on War, (Spellmount Publishers Ltd., 1999), p. 24.23 Andrew J. Williams, Amelia Hadfield and Simon J. Rofe, International History and International Relations, (Routledge, 2012), p.33, 58.



generally. In the case of drones the newness, if

anything, is about the users of force rather than

as in addition to the amount of force or the

means of applying it.”24

Indeed, to take the case of the longbow, not only was

there greater distance created between the combatant

and the target there was furthermore a new reality of war

whereby “a peasant armed with it could defeat an

aristocratic knight on horseback”25. This is not dissimilar to

the distance between an UAV operator and the target

many miles away.26 This illustrates that the only pre-

eminence of post-heroic strategy is in the newness of the

technological development itself, and not a newness in the

distancing of the combatant to lower risk of death and,

importantly, to do so because of the post-heroic construct

created by death in war.

This is to say that the effect that post-heroism has on

strategy making in the twenty-first century is similar to the

effect that periods of post-heroism has always had on

strategy-making as fewer deaths end cycles of violence

quicker and make war easier to put away. In lieu of causal

reductionism, there is the undeniable existence of other

motives in this pursuit – most obviously that minimizing

24 Professor Christian Enemark, Predators, Reapers and post-heroic war, (National Security College, 2011), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLBDqy6pj28.25 Enemark, (2011).26 M.A.J. Smith, R. Dekker, J. Kos and J.A.M. Hontelez, ‘The Availability of Unmanned Air Vehicles: A Post-Case Study’, The Journal of the Operational Research Society, (2001), p. 162.



casualties and fatalities maximizes the chance of victory in

war for multitudinous reasons that need not elaboration.

This is, however, a perennial concern of war and is not –

like post-heroism – either temporally constrained or

temporally constructed.

Ultimately, the premonition of much International

Relations scholarship on post-heroism that it is a new

phenomenon has been proven to be mistaken.

Nevertheless post-heroism does, in the twenty-first

century, have a profound effect on strategy making and in

light on the century’s wars in the Middle East has spurred

huge innovations in military technology. Such innovation

has begun to remove the combatant further from danger

and has even – in the case of UAV usage – begun to

redefine what it means to be a combatant. Strategy

making has thus been affected to – in the cycles of

violence it endures – help society put war away, the

solution to the problem of post-heroic society.



Word Count – 1816

Bibliography

-Sally Challoner, Wootton Bassett marks the end of repatriations, (BBC

News, 2011) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-14726697.

-Anthony T. Edwards, Achilles in the Odyssey: Ideologies of Heroism

in the Homeric Epic (Verlag Anton Hain, 1985).

-Professor Christian Enemark, Predators, Reapers and post-heroic war, (National Security College, 2011), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLBDqy6pj28.-K. M. Fierke, ‘Constructivism’, International Relations Theories:

Discipline and Diversity Third Edition, ed. Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki and

Steve Smith, (Oxford University Press, 2013).

-Roger Mac Ginty and Andrew Williams, ‘Introduction:

Commemoration and Remembrance in the Commonwealth’, The

Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs,

(2007).

-Jonathan Gottschall, The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the

World of Homer, (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

-Liddell Hart, Thoughts on War, (Spellmount Publishers Ltd., 1999).

-Patrick Lin, George Bekey and Keith Abney, Autonomous Military

Robotics: Risk, Ethics, and Design, (Office of Naval Research, 2008).

-Edward N. Luttwak, ‘A Post Heroic Military Policy’, Foreign Affairs,

(1996).

-Edward N. Luttwak, ‘Toward Post-Heroic Warfare’, Foreign Affairs,

(1995).

-Herfried Münkler, The New Wars (trans. Patrick Camiller), (Polity

Press, 2005).

-Michael N. Nagler, ‘The Proem and the Problem’, Classical Antiquity,

(1990).


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-14726697


-President Barack Obama, Remarks by the President at the National

Defense University, (Fort McNair, 2013),

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/23/remarks-

president-national-defense-university.

-Nicholas Onuf, World of our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory

and International Relations, (Routledge, 2012.

-James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime, (Modern Library, 1995).

-Charles Segal, ‘Kleos and its Ironies in The Odyssey’, L’Antiqué

Classique, (1983).

-M.A.J. Smith, R. Dekker, J. Kos and J.A.M. Hontelez, ‘The Availability

of Unmanned Air Vehicles: A Post-Case Study’, The Journal of the

Operational Research Society, (2001).

-Andrew J. Williams, Amelia Hadfield and Simon J. Rofe, International

History and International Relations, (Routledge, 2012).


http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/23/remarks-president-national-defense-university

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/23/remarks-president-national-defense-university

Documents

Post Heroic Warfare