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
How does ‘post-heroism’ affect western strategy making in the twenty-first century?
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.
120009551 Thomas W Ayling Dr Iain Ferguson
How does ‘post-heroism’ affect western strategy making in the twenty-first century?
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.
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How does ‘post-heroism’ affect western strategy making in the twenty-first century?
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.
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How does ‘post-heroism’ affect western strategy making in the twenty-first century?
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.
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How does ‘post-heroism’ affect western strategy making in the twenty-first century?
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.
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How does ‘post-heroism’ affect western strategy making in the twenty-first century?
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.
120009551 Thomas W Ayling Dr Iain Ferguson
How does ‘post-heroism’ affect western strategy making in the twenty-first century?
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.
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How does ‘post-heroism’ affect western strategy making in the twenty-first century?
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).
120009551 Thomas W Ayling Dr Iain Ferguson
How does ‘post-heroism’ affect western strategy making in the twenty-first century?
-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).
120009551 Thomas W Ayling Dr Iain Ferguson