The Rise of American Bushido
Part I: The Cult of Lethality, Warrior Ethos, and Tactical Prowess Rolled into One
In the decades since the end of the Cold War, the United States military has undergone a cultural transformation—not merely in terms of technology, doctrine, or geopolitical posture, but in its self-conception. What has emerged is a new martial identity, one that fuses an idealized warrior code with fetishized notions of lethality and tactical superiority. This identity, what might be termed an “American Bushido,” is not merely a rhetorical or symbolic phenomenon. It is an ideological formation with material consequences for how wars are planned, how personnel are trained and selected, and how national security strategy is interpreted through the narrow prism of combat prowess. At its core, this American Bushido enshrines tactical skill and lethal capacity as ends in themselves, rather than as tools in service of coherent political objectives. But has also branched out more broadly into American society in unhealthy ways, corroding civic culture. This elevation of the warrior ethos risks distorting strategic judgment, encouraging a professional military caste isolated from civilian oversight, and glorifying violence as the central expression of national power at home and abroad.
The concept of Bushido, the feudal Japanese code of honor among the samurai, was historically a synthesis of martial discipline, spiritual rectitude, and absolute loyalty.1 In the twentieth century, however, Imperial Japan weaponized Bushido as state propaganda stripping it of nuance and repurposing it to justify fanatical nationalism, unquestioning obedience, and mass sacrifice in the service of empire leaving a trail of destruction and war crimes that rivaled Nazi Germany in World War II.2 On the tactical level, that meant banzai charges into machine gun fire and kamikaze missions that turned pilots into human-guided cruise missiles. On the strategic level, that meant one decisive battle that would single-handedly win the war in an era of mass mobilization. In the American context, however, Bushido has been appropriated and reimagined as a branding tool and cultural phenomenon: a way to market military service as a modern warrior whose path translates to all walks of life, stripped of its philosophical depth but saturated with over-the-top aggression.
For much of American history, the military was composed through a flexible blend of volunteers and conscripts, with the balance shifting depending on the scale and nature of the conflict. During peacetime or in more minor engagements, the United States typically relied on volunteers motivated by patriotism, adventure, economic opportunity, or civic duty. However, in times of major war, such as the Civil War and World Wars, the government instituted conscription to rapidly expand the ranks and meet the demands of sustained combat operations. This hybrid model reflected a pragmatic approach: maintaining a relatively small standing army while retaining the capacity to mobilize the broader population when national security required it.
There were concrete and compelling reasons behind the decision to transition to an all-volunteer force in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. By the early 1970s, the U.S. military was in a state of institutional crisis. The quagmire in Vietnam had severely degraded the force; operational readiness was low, morale had collapsed, and public trust in the military had eroded to a place not seen before in the institution’s history. Draftees, who composed a significant portion of the ranks, were often poorly trained, reluctant to serve, and deeply disillusioned with the war’s unclear objectives and prolonged duration. Discipline broke down across units, and desertion and drug abuse spiked, and leadership struggled to maintain cohesion.
Compounding these issues were intense racial tensions within the ranks, mirroring the civil unrest erupting across American society. The military had become a microcosm of national discord, with episodes of racially motivated violence and breakdowns in unit cohesion becoming disturbingly common. Meanwhile, public support for conscription cratered, particularly among middle-class Americans, who increasingly viewed the draft as an unjust burden falling disproportionately on the poor and minorities.3
In this context, the move toward an AVF, formalized by President Nixon in 1973 and championed by the Gates Commission in 1970, was seen as a political necessity and a strategic recalibration.4 The commission drew a sharp analogy between military service and public infrastructure, framing the draft as a form of taxation in service of national needs. As they put it, “It can expropriate the required tools and compel construction men and others to work until the job is finished or it can purchase the goods and manpower necessary to complete the job.”5 In this view, conscription was not a moral aberration but a practical mechanism through which the state could marshal resources, including human labor, to fulfill collective obligations.6 But this collective obligation had been pushed to the brink, and an all-volunteer force offered a path to professionalize the force, improve quality and morale, and insulate the military from the social upheavals tearing through the nation. Voluntarism was framed as a means of restoring legitimacy and operational effectiveness, ensuring that those who served did so by choice, not coercion. In many ways, voluntarism was a return to the American tradition but did so embracing the concept of the professional soldier and not the citizen soldier. While this shift solved many short-term problems, it also began a long-term process of separating the military from the broader public, contributing to the rise of a distinct warrior class and the cultural isolation of the armed forces from civilian society.
The development of the AVF worked about as one could expect through the 1980s, eventually culminating in the 100-hour war in the Persian Gulf, a campaign that showcased overwhelming American technological and tactical superiority with just 63 American dead.7 In the aftermath, President George H. W. Bush famously proclaimed, “By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!”8 But while the battlefield triumph seemed to bury the ghosts of Vietnam, the underlying mentality never truly died; it was only displaced. What had definitively died was the draft, and with it, the citizen-soldier model that had once anchored the American military to broader society. In its place emerged an increasingly professionalized force, insulated from the public and shaped by the lessons and traumas of a war that continued to cast a long shadow over American strategy, civil-military relations, and the political appetite for sustained conflict.
The U.S. military’s post-9/11 transformation unwittingly accelerated this. Terms like “warfighter,” “operator,” and “lethality” replaced earlier bureaucratic or strategic vocabulary. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, nicknamed “Mad Dog” and revered for his battle-hardened persona, became the symbolic vanguard of this transformation. Phrases such as “unleash lethality” began appearing in speeches, documents, and strategic vision statements.9 Underlying all of this was a single premise: that the decisive instrument of American power was the warrior, and that the ultimate measure of military effectiveness is the capacity to kill.10
There is no doubt that tactical excellence is a prerequisite for military success, and nobody has done it better than the modern American military. But the rise of American Bushido has elevated tactical proficiency to the level of doctrine itself, often at the expense of strategic clarity. This phenomenon is not unique to the U.S., but it is particularly acute within a military-industrial ecosystem flush with funding, prestige, and cultural deference. The result has been a proliferation of elite units, special operations forces, and kinetic capabilities, often deployed with great fanfare but little discernible strategic gain, as given by the recent two-billion-dollar campaign attempting to pound the Houthis into submission in Yemen from the air.
Consider the Global War on Terror (GWOT) and the American adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Special forces executed daring raids, cleared compounds, and neutralized high-value targets with surgical precision. Yet none of these tactical victories translated into strategic success. The wars dragged on, objectives blurred, and insurgencies adapted.11 Meanwhile, the mythos of the operator flourished. From Hollywood portrayals to TV shows to podcasts to memoirs on the New York Times Bestselling list, the American public was inundated with narratives of valor, often divorced from the broader context of the wars. This dissonance reflects the logic of American Bushido: war as performance, where the valor of the warrior eclipses the question of whether the war itself was smart or winnable.
Perhaps the most conspicuous component of American Bushido is the military’s obsession with “lethality.” In contemporary defense discourse, lethality has become a catch-all term; a synonym for military effectiveness, professional competence, even moral clarity.12 Budgets are justified in their name, programs are assessed by their contribution to it, and leadership is measured by its commitment to maximizing it. The 2018 National Defense Strategy, for example, listed lethality as one of the strategy’s main lines of effort.13 You can’t watch congressional testimony from a general without the term being invoked every five minutes.
This has been taken to a hilarious extreme by Secretary of Defense Hegseth. In his first message to the troops, he stated that he would be “restoring the warrior ethos.”14 He reiterated that proclamation just a few days ago at SOF week in Tampa, FL.15 If one actually goes to the official army website and clicks on the warrior ethos, it displays the following:
This seems reasonable for a professional soldier and the author is unaware if any of these principles had radically changed in previous years but I suspect the warrior ethos the army puts out and the one the Secretary thinks it is might be different given the fact that in the same speech where he mentioned his priorities, quipped that, “our combat formations don’t need to look like Harvard University, they need to look like killers.”16 Of course, if Hegseth took the warrior ethos to the extreme that bushido requires, he would have committed seppuku over signalgate but that has yet to occur.17
Even still, it’s a bizarre framing because there never was a “warrior ethos” in the American tradition to nostalgically return to, at least not in the mythologized sense currently being invoked. The foundational ideal of national defense was not the professional warrior, but the citizen-soldier: an ordinary individual who took up arms out of civic duty, served for a finite period, and then returned to civilian life. Soldiering, in this tradition, was a temporary obligation, not a permanent identity. It was a job—necessary and honorable, but not meant to confer moral superiority or define a lifelong caste. Only a small number of officers and NCOs were considered to be professionals who led a variety of militia and volunteers in American conflicts.
One might mistake the famous Call of Duty tagline “there’s a soldier in all of us,” as a manifestation of American Bushido. But in truth, it gestures toward the opposite. The commercial depicts ordinary people stepping briefly into a role demanded by extraordinary circumstances, the very ethos of the citizen-soldier tradition. However stylized or commercialized, the message remains: soldiering is not a sacred vocation reserved for an elite few, but a responsibility that can emerge from within the ordinary citizen. In that sense, there is a soldier in all of us.
From the militias of the Revolutionary War to the mass mobilizations of the Civil War and World Wars, the American military ethos was historically rooted in democratic accountability and the belief that military service should remain subordinate to civilian life, not exalted above it. Many of the founders were inherently skeptical of a standing military or military professionalism. Samuel Adams wrote in 1768 before the revolution that, “even when there is a necessity of the military power, within a land, a wise and prudent people will always have a watchful and jealous eye over it.”18 The citizen-soldier fought not for glory or professional validation, but to defend the republic and, most crucially, to return to it. The Greek city states and pre-empire Romans followed this to a tee and were generally successful.19 This model was intentionally designed to avoid the formation of a warrior class untethered from the society it claimed to defend. Even the original prophet of American military professionalism, General Emory Upton, conceded that the citizen soldiers he led in the Civil War were “the best in the world.”20 The embrace of a permanent warrior ethos in recent decades thus represents not a return to tradition, but rather a complete rupture from it; a cultural and institutional shift toward professionalized militarism that elevates “warfighting” as a way of being, rather than a civic responsibility undertaken in exceptional circumstances.
Furthermore, the “warrior ethos” and “cult of lethality” reflect a troubling inversion: rather than asking what tools are necessary to achieve a political outcome, policymakers and military leaders often ask what outcomes can be justified by the tools already at hand. The proliferation of drone strikes, raids, and air strikes becomes an end in itself.21 The enemy is not defeated so much as continually targeted. Victory is measured in kill counts, bombs dropped, and targets destroyed, not durable peace or political reconciliation. This tactical treadmill perpetuates conflict, erodes moral authority, and normalizes violence as policy.
The embrace of a warrior ethos has also profoundly shaped the modern American servicemember's identity. In contrast to the citizen-soldier ideal that animated the American military tradition for nearly two centuries, today’s warrior is imagined as a trustworthy and lifelong professional: highly trained, ideologically committed, and increasingly distinct from civilian society.22 Military service is no longer a temporary civic duty but a specialized vocation, wrapped in the language of sacrifice and honor that is present throughout their entire life. These values are indeed crucial to a professional soldier, but that professionalism creates a separate identity away from a regular citizen. This was always the logical endpoint of an all-volunteer force, but the political capital that would require the return of the citizen-soldier would likely be too significant for any politician to embrace, no matter the benefits.
The cultural consequences of this shift are significant. While the warrior ethos reinforces discipline, resilience, and unit cohesion, it also fosters insularity. In some cases, it creates a caste mentality; an elite subculture that views itself as morally superior, uniquely burdened, and politically detached. This dynamic is most visible in the special operations community, where a lack of accountability has coincided with a repeated pattern of ethical lapses, war crimes, and institutional cover-ups.23 The failure to rein in such behavior is not simply a matter of command climate or oversight; it is simply the logical endpoint of an all-volunteer force and a civic culture that venerates the warrior over the citizen.
The rise of American Bushido is not merely a military phenomenon, but also reflects a broader issue in civil-military relations that has warped national security decision-making.24 Civilian leaders, often lacking military experience and dazzled by the imagery of modern warfighters, often defer to the generals and admirals not as advisors but as oracles. This deference is compounded by the operator cult within national security institutions, where those with tactical backgrounds dominate the current administration.25 The result is a feedback loop: strategy is shaped by tactical logic, and tactical action is validated by strategic ambiguity.26 One of the principles invoked by civilian control of the military is that elected politicians have “the right to be wrong” but that only really works if civilians think they have the right to be wrong.27
This dynamic helps explain the strategic drift that has characterized American military engagements since the early 2000s. In place of clear objectives and end states, there are missions to “disrupt networks,” “degrade capabilities,” or “defend the rules-based order.”28 These goals are functionally endless, easily rebranded, and tactically convenient. They require no coherent theory of victory; only the perpetual readiness to deploy force abroad without any real consequence to the rest of society. The warriors are always prepared; the policy never is.
Glorifying the warrior class also carries domestic risks. It fosters a militarized political culture in which dissent is treated as betrayal and critique is misread as weakness. Military service is a very useful credential when seeking elected office and is often invoked when discussing any policy or cultural issue, even if it has absolutely nothing to do with the military. It also contributes to the militarization of law enforcement, as police departments adopt military equipment and adopt warrior training models designed for combat, not policing.29 It also places extraordinary psychological burdens on servicemembers themselves, who are asked to embody a mythic ideal that often bears little resemblance to the brutal ambiguity of real war. The use of volunteers forces many into tour after tour, resulting in far-reaching consequences physically and psychologically.
Reclaiming a more grounded, strategic, and democratic military ethic will require confronting the American Bushido. This does not mean abandoning the virtues of discipline, skill, or courage. It simply means reorienting those virtues toward civic responsibility, strategic coherence, and accountable leadership. It means redefining military excellence not as the ability to kill, but as the capacity to serve political ends through professional means, within legal and ethical boundaries.
The path forward requires several changes. First, civilian leaders must reclaim strategic oversight and reassert the primacy of political judgment over tactical enthusiasm. Second, military education must integrate history, ethics, and strategy as seriously as it does marksmanship and maneuver. Third, public discourse must challenge the mythology of the warrior by honoring service without glorifying violence.
Ultimately, the strength of the American military should lie not in its capacity for destruction but in its disciplined subordination to democratic control. A republic that worships the sword risks becoming what it once opposed: a state ruled by warriors, not laws; by prowess, not purpose. American Bushido was always the logical endpoint of an all-volunteer professional military, but now the challenge is not to destroy the warrior ethos but to ensure it serves the citizen, the Constitution, and the cause of peace, not merely the cult of lethality.
See Inazō Nitobe, Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900), Cameron Hurst, “Death, Honor, and Loyalty: The Bushidō Ideal.” Philosophy East and West 40, no. 4 (1990): 511–27. Tasuke Kawakami, “BUSHIDŌ IN ITS FORMATIVE PERIOD.” The Annals of the Hitotsubashi Academy 3, no. 1 (1952): 65–83, Karl F. Friday, “Bushidō or Bull? A Medieval Historian’s Perspective on the Imperial Army and the Japanese Warrior Tradition.” The History Teacher 27, no. 3 (1994): 339–49, and Stephen Turnbull, The Samurai and the Sacred (Osprey Publishing: Oxford, 1999).
For Bushido in the Imperial Japanese context, see John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon Books: New York, 1986), Edward J. Drea, Japan's Imperial Army: Its Rise and Fall (University Press of Kansas: Lawrence, 2016, S. C. M. Paine, The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2017) The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949, (Cambridge University PressL Cambridge, 2012), and Robert Edgerton, Warriors Of The Rising Sun: A History Of The Japanese Military (Basic Books: New York, 1999).
Amy J. Rutenberg, “How the Draft Reshaped America,” New York Times, October 6, 2017.
Thomas S. Gates, The Report of the President’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970).
Ibid., 23.
Milton Friedman, the 1976 Nobel Prize-winning economist, played a pivotal role on the Commission, where his influential intellectual arguments helped overcome the significant institutional resistance.
For scholarship on the military’s post-Vietnam recovery and AVF transition, see James F. Dunnigan, Raymond M. Macedonia, Getting It Right: American Military Reforms After Vietnam to the Gulf War and Beyond (William Morrow & Co: New York, 1993) and Suzanne C. Nielsen Lieutenant Colonel, An Army Transformed: The U.S. Army's Post-Vietnam Recovery and the Dynamics of Change in Military Organizations (US Army War College Press: Carlisle, 2010).
Quoted from Maureen Dowd, “After the War: White House Memo; War Introduces a Tougher Bush to Nation,” New York Times, March 2, 1991.
U.S. Department of Defense, Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: DoD, 2018), 1.
The emphasis on the warrior ethos was set in motion in part because the events of March 23, 2003, when an 18-vehicle convoy from the 507th Maintenance Company took a wrong turn and was ambushed by insurgents in Nasiriyah, southern Iraq. See Vernon Loeb, "Army Plans Steps to Heighten 'Warrior Ethos,'" Washington Post, September 8, 2003.
For Afghanistan, see Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021), Wesley Morgan, The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley (New York: Random House, 2021), Carter Malkasian, The American War in Afghanistan: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021) on Afghanistan. For Iraq, see Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin Press, 2006).
See Zachery Tyson Brown, “A Cult of Lethality?” The Strategy Bridge, December 14, 2018 and Jared Keller “James Mattis’s Bizarre Cult of "Lethality",” The New Republic, September 9, 2019.
Department of Defense, 2018 National Defense Strategy, 5.
Pete Hegseth, “Secretary Hegseth's Message to the Force,” DOD, January 25, 2025.
Samuel Adams quoted by Michael F. Cairo. Civilian Control of the Military. International Information Program (Washington: U.S. Department of State, 2005).
See Steele Brand Killing for the Republic: Citizen-Soldiers and the Roman Way of War, (Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 2019) and Richard A. Billows The Spear, the Scroll, and the Pebble: How the Greek City-State Developed as a Male Warrior-Citizen Collective (Bloomsbury Academic: London, 2023).
Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox (Army of the Potomac, Vol. 3) (New York: Doubleday. 1953), 111.
Micah Zenko, Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy (New York: Basic Books, 2015), esp. chapter 4 on the overuse of kinetic tools in place of strategy.
Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
See David Philipps, Alpha: Eddie Gallagher and the War for the Soul of the Navy SEALs (Crown: New York, 2022) and Matthew Cole, Code Over Country: The Tragedy and Corruption of SEAL Team Six (Bold Type Books: New York, 2023).
For the classics, see Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957) and Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier (New York: The Free Press, 1960). For more recent scholarship see William E. Rapp, "Civil-Military Relations: The Role of Military Leaders in Strategy Making." Parameters (2015), Richard H. Kohn, “The Erosion of Civilian Control of the Military in the United States Today.” Naval War College Review: (2002), Daniel Bessner, Eric Lorber. 2012. "Toward a Theory of Civil–Military Punishment." Armed Forces & Society 649-668, Feaver, Peter. 1998. "Crisis as Shirking: An Agency Theory Explanation of the Souring of American Civil-Military Relations." Armed Forces and Society 407-434. 1996. "The Civil-Military Problematique: Huntington, Janowitz, and the Question of Civilian Control." Armed Forces & Society 149-170. 2007. "The Right to Be Right: Civil-Military Relations and the Iraq Surge Decision." International Security 87-125, and Brooks, Risa. 2020. "Paradoxes of Professionalism: Rethinking Civil Military Relations in the United States." International Security 7-44.
This will be covered more in depth in a 2nd part.
Peter Feaver. "The Civil-Military Problematique: Huntington, Janowitz, and the Question of Civilian Control." Armed Forces & Society (1996): 154.
Michael J. Mazarr, “The Real Problem with the Forever War,” Foreign Affairs, September 2021.
Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013).
Definitely a threat of a Rajput caste forming, though I wonder if that is a worship of the military by civilians, especially by nationalists. Most active/vets I've spoken with really dislike the fetishization of soldiers because they are just normies with jobs. Pete Buttigege and John Kerry don't get soldier's deference.
The south was purely a military camp. While the North the soldiers were scholars and trades people smart and able. Wishing to finish the fight to return to productive work. -Grant