Marine Corps Character and the Warrior Ethos
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  1. #1
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    Exclamation Marine Corps Character and the Warrior Ethos

    The 19th-century British Army officer William Francis Butler tells us that a nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its laws made by cowards and its wars fought by fools.

    The U.S. Constitution requires subordination of our military to our Nation’s elected civilian and appointed leaders, yet the same Constitution also established a strong connection between our Nation’s military and civilian leadership. As military leaders, we retain the moral obligation of Butler’s great distinction by developing our character, building our warrior ethos, and binding our leadership to our respective oaths of office.


    Character, intellect, and integrity form the foundation for leadership for warriors and statesmen alike. Character is higher than intellect, yet intellect and experience combine to form the fabric of wisdom and its primary virtue—prudence. Integrity is the intellectual virtue that binds character to action and through it to our warrior ethos.


    Our character and our virtues define who we are—our ethos restores and preserves our excellences. We inherited the word “ethos” from the ancient Greeks. For them ethos meant “an accustomed place” or “instinct to seek an accustomed place,” and was first applied to animals.


    Homer used it to describe the place where the Greek warriors retired their horses after their frightened careening against Trojan chariots, their teams, and armor-clad warriors in fierce battles. Whilst in this accustomed place, horses remained at ease. This was possible because they knew each other through the camaraderie gained during their travel to Troy, from the cohesion earned training before the battles, through the virtue displayed by fighting together, and by returning together to their secure and accustomed place.


    Through their trials they were familiar to one another, therefore the ethos sustained and reinforced their integrity and character as warriors. Their ethos protected their character, enabled their resilience, and restored their ability to fight another day. Three hundred years later and by the time of Herodotus, the word “ethos” came to mean “that which generates the sense of custom, habit, usage, practice,” social skills we should learn from childhood on how to interact with one another—with civility.

    By 350 B.C., Aristotle embraced the concept so completely it fit easily into his purely practical discourse on ethics, the Nicomachean Ethics.

    In this timeless philosophical work, Aristotle built a practical understanding of ethos as character—seen through the lens of friendships. In Ethics, Aristotle penned several chapters on friendship, of which he articulated three distinct types: friendships of pleasure, friendships of utility, and friendships of character.


    His main point remained that different types of friendships exist, and they are all important for various reasons. He pointed out that the highest, and rarest, types of friendships are those of character. These binding relationships form between two people who wish to develop each other’s character through a virtue ethic.


    Friendships of character, he claimed, remained essential to living a happy, fulfilling, and virtuous life. His idea of character is rooted in the Greek word “eudemonia,” or well-being that is not a consequence of virtuous action; rather virtue is inherent in the action itself. Therefore, our character is what we do by habit and our character’s virtues are consequences of these habits.


    Aristotle asks us to develop habits of thought and action that enable us to manage our emotional life with wisdom. When leaders adopt a virtue ethic, they develop character in their subordinates and form habits that lead to moral outcomes.

    Homer explored this theme as well. When Odysseus departed Ithaca for Troy, embarking upon what he knew would be a long period away from home, he expected his son Telemachus to learn virtuous bravery even though Telemachus remained distant from the Trojan War’s great battles and its epic challenges.


    In Odysseus’ household there existed only one person he trusted to develop his son’s character during his deployment to combat. This person was one of his servants—Mentor.


    Mentors play an important role in leadership development. All leaders need mentors and all leaders should serve as mentors to others as well. Mentors help us understand how organizations function and how we succeed in it. They also play a key role in developing emotional intelligence in their protégés.

    Mentors are essential for balanced leadership in any successful organization. When we mentor each other, we serve the Greek idea of well-being, and through this relationship we develop friendships of character. The idea of ethos continued to evolve into “manners, customs, personal disposition, character,” and then became what we today call “moral character.”

    This distinction is important to the U.S. Constitution’s ideals because its intellectual fulcrum—per Madisonian and Hamiltonian logic in The Federalist—was moral integrity.

    This idea became an intellectual virtue essential to a people about to be governed by the brilliantly original documents founded upon moral reason: the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

    Additional intellectual overlays informed judgments at a particular 18th-century Philadelphia Convention that arrived through the reigning genius of David Hume’s A Treatise on Human Nature and Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

    Their political order and its corresponding free and capitalist market depended upon moral intuition and temperance. It also demanded personal conduct that induced trust, promoted legal order, and upheld respect for property.


    This idea appealed to the political science of a particular group of Continental Americans—our Founding Fathers. Their collective wisdom and character outlined our Republic, and, as American citizens, our warrior ethos must always represent this lineage.


    Our Nation represents liberty to the world, a universal concept that claims itself as an unalienable right along with “life,” “the pursuit of happiness,” and “equality”—bestowed upon mankind as an element of being human.


    In our view, we create governments to preserve our liberty, and our government derives its just power from the peoples’ consent. Thus, our government’s power is twice limited through both ends and means.


    Liberty is freedom with responsibility and accountability. As a virtue, liberty concerns itself with the societal situation where something or someone reduces coercion of some by others as much as possible. This means that as authentic leaders bound by an oath, we must restrain our leadership’s ends and means as well.


    Authentic leadership must represent the twice-limited balance of power outlined in our Constitution. Through this idea, all leaders remain primarily responsible and accountable for their decisions, the decisions of their subordinate leaders, and the results of both actions—as well as to and for those they lead.


    This ethic protects us from the corrupting influence of power and keeps us loyal to our oath of office. This personal accountability enables our ethos and our character to distinguish our excellences and to preserve our Nation’s liberty.


    Who we are shapes how we think and through this forms our actions. We are United States Marines, uniform in character and discipline. We become Marines through a deliberate process that ensures that every Marine is in essence a rifleman.


    Our training and education transform us all into our Nation’s ethical warriors—United States Marines with deep roots in an exemplary naval heritage. Our amphibious nature fosters an aggressive, offensive, expeditionary mindset. However, every individual Marine must forge his own expeditionary mindset that associates personal character, experience, and training intrinsically with personal education, imagination, and values blending “expeditionary” with “mindset” into his warrior ethos.

    The NCO provides the steel structure, the training and the discipline that form the Marine Corps’ backbone. The SNCOs advise, lead, and mentor the officers while they develop the NCOs.


    The officers teach, coach, and mentor the team to develop understanding of what we will accomplish with it. Together, our leadership’s character and ethos weave mental agility, resilience, self-reliance, and ethics into our daily activities. As leaders, the daily interaction, discipline, and activity of leading builds the ethos that ensures we all develop appropriate habits of thought and habits of action. This forms the character of our leadership as a corps of Marines that ensures victory—with honor.


    Finally, it is possible for what we do in this life to echo through eternity. This eternal possibility rests upon authentic, disciplined, educated, and inspirational leadership that establishes and enforces our values while enabling our ability to apply meaning to ritual and tradition. This opportunity only exists if reinforced by leaders who focus on character development in the most essential element in the Marine Corps—the individual Marine.


    The Marine Corps’ success depends upon leaders selflessly weaving an intricate web of friendships of character throughout it. The character of our leadership and our ethos must connect with our Constitution’s ideals, our oath of office, and with what our Marines value most in life—being warriors. Our character and our virtues define who we are as leaders; our warrior ethos restores and preserves our excellences as a corps of Marines.


    This understanding must represent a single thread from the Commandant of the Marine Corps to the most junior private.

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  2. #2
    Well written article.

    My personal belief is. Todays military is getting away from the warrior ethos - but not voluntarily. The warrior ethos is being eroded away as a result of the continued social experimentation by liberal politicians as well as the overall feminization (neutering) of the organization. Much to the delight of our enemies I might add.


  3. #3
    An excellent article, for sure - I'd like to cite it.

    And I do agree that the core of the warrior ethos is threatened by, as TTop said, interference in the system by social experimenters and others who don't understand what the ethos really is or why it's important.

    I guess I'm a bit less conservative about it in one way, though - I do think that women and men can serve in a brotherhood (I know, not PC and too gender-specific, but tough) to some (limited) extent and still keep this warrior ethos. It's extremely hard to do that well, though, and I don't think our current politically correct, sensitive-to-everyone civilian leadership is going to let it happen as it should.

    Not that I know how it should work, but I know that if "you" (the non-warriors) want "us" to integrate women, you should leave us alone and let us figure out how much it can work and how to do it. I don't think it will ever really work in fields like, for example, the infantry.

    Anyway, that's my heavy thinking for the night. Off to patrol the perimeter...

    s/f!


  4. #4
    My sentiments exactly, I agree with you guys. Let's keep the politicians out of Military strategy and decisions. The main goal is to keep our Military the strongest in the world, women have a place and are most capable to serve this great nation but I don't believe they should be integrated in a direct combat role along with male team members. It is in the best interests to operate


  5. #5
    Sorry, my post was cut off. I'm only speaking for myself but it is in my nature to want to shield and protect females, regardless of their capabilities. Not trying to be sexist, just how I was raised. it is the responsibility for any leader to complete the mission in the most efficient and effective manner possible with the least amount of casualties possible.


  6. #6
    Kevin, looks like we overlapped at Parris Island! I there May to August 84, but my point was...

    Oh right, got it! If the powers that be would ask Rocky how to shape things up, he'd get them squared away in no time!


  7. #7
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    You got that right Andy LOL.


  8. #8
    Mad Dog and Rocky for pres/veep in 2016!




  9. #9
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    I like it !!!


  10. #10
    If I drank, I would drink to that!
    I feel for ya madsox, I'd say those sand fleas were nasty little skin diggers that time of year. We practically know each other.


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