Customer Reviews

Awakening Warrior: Revolution in the Ethics of Warfare (Suny Series, Ethics and the Military Profession)

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Awakening Warrior is a must read for anyone interested in our military and national security. Challans explains how and where the US went wrong in thinking about combat, just war, military ethics, and military training. His unusual background includes experience as both an infantry officer and classically trained philosopher, so he is one of the few people capable of this level of analysis.

His book is a kind of manifesto that provides the philosophical grounding for revolutionizing how we recruit, educate, promote, organize, lead, administer, and operate our national security establishment.

I wonder why the Army has relegated Tim Challans to his current job in Kansas when it could have him at the right hand of decision makers in Washington. Then again, of late we've seen too many talented, intellectually gifted officers pushed to the far corners of the Homeland or out of the military altogether because they didn't seem loyal enough, religious enough, conservative enough, or obedient enough to endure the erosion of a military that they probably love.

A century from now, if we are unfortunate enough to still need armies, the military may be ready to hear what this book has to say.

Every author should be able to reply to the objections toward his work, as Descartes replied to Hobbes' objection to his Meditations. I'm astonished by the innocence of the chaplain who objected to my logical assault on faith. Innocence is a nice way of implying ignorance. He called me ignorant...wow! And the guy who lambasted my book because he didn't understand it...amazing...his right, I suppose. The book did win third place in the Choice awards for Best Academic Title in 2007, so I hope the negative reviews don't dissuade people from reading it. I'm critical in my book of the higher order-thinking faculties of the higher ranking people in the military, but I did have a colonel tell me that he was surprised that they actually gave awards for book titles.

Challans offers a thoughtful perspective regarding the state of military ethics and how we train warriors to be moral. He traces various levels of moral reasoning, or lack thereof, through to those who are fully engaged in the moral self-awareness of warfare. He calls not for change or modification, but for "revolution" in how and what we teach to create an ethical military.
Challans in the end lays all at the bar of reason and philosophical instruction in Kantian ethics as the way forward. He begins with examining how we got here through leaders being militarily and culturally unreflective. Challans charges that the U.S. military, under the influence of the previous administration, lost sight of its most basic commitments and betraying constitutional values. We are where we are in the world because of unquestioned fealty to faulty leaders. In "Pseudo-Reflective Life," Challans directly accuses the military of becoming a mere instrument of power abusing politicians and of allowing religion to have an undue sway in moral decision-making, especially with the use of Chaplains teaching ethics. Challans has no tolerance for faith in a government environment. Effects Based Operations gets a good philosophical screening in the "Quasi-Reflective Life." If we imagine the ends, then we can determine the course to get there. However this is fallacious and asserts an imagined outcome which cannot justify the means used to get there.
Challans also has a bias against faith. He seems ignorant of the history of the laws of war, even beyond the Just War Tradition, which he has no countenance for. The laws of war, and even Kant himself, are steeped in the Judeo-Christian ethic and in the Christian faith in particular. Challans is either ignorant of or ignores this link entirely. This presupposition against faith is manifest in his call to remove Chaplains from ethical instruction, "Chaplains should get out of the ethics business in the military" (43). The author assumes the worst that Chaplains have no capacity to engage the instruction of ethics apart from denominationalism. He believes the application of separation of church from state should keep Chaplains from doing more than religious services. Morality to Challans is for public reason, not private faith.
Chaplains are very thoroughly grounded in pluralistic sensitivity at their Officers Basic Course. Many hours of instruction and several graded written assignments are required so as to ensure that particularism or denominationalism does not occur from Chaplains. We are trained to work with any and all faiths, and those of no faith. Challans assumes the worst of Chaplains, as if they are incapable of supporting or training Soldiers in any capacity outside the Chaplain's faith tradition. This is egregiously ignorant of the training Chaplains receive and completely undermines his premise. In fact, the type of three-level training he proposes is the type of education Chaplains who teach ethics have received. Chaplains are best equipped to educate warriors, because they own the context for the development of the laws of war, and unlike any other officers they enter the Army with a graduate degree in a philosophical discipline (religion). Even Chaplains who instruct in ethics have the very type of advanced degree Challans calls for. One can only assume that Challans is ignorant of these facts, because at worst he has ignored them if known in order to support his anti-faith stance.
Challans' greatest fault lies in his dependence upon his oft-repeated "bar of reason." This is troubling at several levels. Firstly, it assumes that anything else other than his stance does not pass the bar of reason. This is fallacious at best, assuming the end then proving it. But his greatest argument for reason is actually that upon which his argument ultimately fails. Reason has been tried and failed, as MacIntyre well shows in "After Virtue." And the Reason of the Enlightenment project has left western civilization morally bankrupt. We cannot fix bankruptcy by spending more of the same.

Awakening Warrior was a waste of time to attempt. It is replete with irrelevant philosophical notions that are completely baffling to the non-philosophy major. The author has done a mind dump of esoteric minutiae that left this reader stone cold. After 125 pages I threw the book in the trash.