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Military Ethos In Thomas Rick's Making A Corps

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Since the First Agricultural Revolution in 10,000 B.C. which caused a global population increase and introduced the territorial culture, organized warfare has always been universal to humanity. Opposing forces have always conglomerated individuals into a collective with the common purpose of fighting another collective. But war has never been an intrinsically satisfying or popular activity for individuals to engage in; to go to war is to leave your family and friends behind sometimes for months, years, or even forever; to go to war is to know that at any moment you could lose your life—you may not even see it coming; to go to war is to come to terms with the notion that you will likely kill people who probably did nothing even nearly deserving of death. …show more content…

In the words of Thomas Ricks’ in his war-time novel Making a Corps, this phenomenon is described as “Discipline […] the instant willing obedience to all orders, respect for authority, self-reliance and teamwork,” (Ricks 71). That is, only when soldiers are indoctrinated or disciplined into a particular “military ethos” can they conduct themselves in this uncomfortable, unusual, and at times inhumane manner. According to this assumption, that military ethos is applied to each soldier; however, I’d argue that although individualism is prominent in war, individuals tend to act out of collective motivation more so than individual motivation. Based on that premise, we can see that it is in fact more accurate to apply the concepts of a military ethos to a collective, rather than to individuals. In this paper, I will provide examples to demonstrate the validity of this

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