Essay 95: “What Marks Democratic Armies Weaker Than Other Armies At The Outset Of A Campaign And More Dangerous In Prolonged Warfare”, “Discipline Democratic Armies” & “A Few Remarks On War In Democracies” (Vol. 2 Pt. 3 Chs. 24-26)

Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

The essays in our study reference the following edition of Democracy In America: University of Chicago Press – 1st edition translated by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Today’s essay references pages 626 – 635 of this edition of Democracy in America.

Alexis de Tocqueville is most famous (in America anyway) for his observations on our democratic republic, and for good reason—he was especially gifted in observing the nuances of social evolution and those of the American experiment in particular. But America, per se, was not the center of his attention – rather, he was more interested in the evolution of Old-World culture as “democracy” dragged it from its traditional aristocratic past, and he looked to America as a kind of case study for aspects of what Europe might reasonably expect.

One subject upon which this evolution touched was that most venerable of European activities—Warfare. Carl von Clausewitz’s On War, published in 1832, preceded Democracy in America by only a few years and it touched on many of the same themes—in particular the changes Europe faced from the democratic revolutions springing from France, and the subsequent military imperialism of Napoleon Bonaparte.

War was (and is) a convoluted subject to be sure, and was certainly not confined to the Old World, but Alexis believed that American democracy offered a distinct vantage point with which to assess ancient military traditions. He felt that differently structured societies approached war in fundamentally different ways. In aristocracies (of which he was intimately familiar), war was the purview of the landed class with its rigid hierarchical structures. In democracies, however, he believed that war tended to be a less professional but ultimately more sustainable enterprise, since winning or losing had greater implications for a democratic society accustomed to greater equality and broader wealth distribution. One might loosely say that war in aristocratic regimes was the purview of the rich, while war in democracies was the purview of the middle class (the poor, of course, suffered equally).

He observed that democratic armies possessed less “natural obedience” compared to the slavishly docile soldiers of an aristocratic army which, though it was a “very formidable animal trained for war,” lacked essential staying power.  “Democratic peoples,” on the other hand, “must despair of ever obtaining from their soldiers the blind, minute, resigned, and always equable obedience that aristocratic peoples impose on theirs without trouble.” Aristocratic armies had an advantage in short, overwhelming campaigns while democratic armies had an advantage in long campaigns that required a strong economic base. Democratic armies, he wrote, tended to be filled with “intelligent troops, who know what they are fighting for” and their troops, he noted, will “stiffen with resolve when they understand the threat.”

Nearly a century after he drafted these observations, one could see elements of this at play in the First World War which pitted the aristocrat-heavy ranks of the German Wermacht against the famously unruly Americans. “The prevailing opinion in Germany before our entry into war,” wrote Karl Finkl von Bolingen, “was that America was a money hunting nation, too engrossed in the hunt of the dollar to produce a strong military force. But since our troops have been in action, the opinion has changed…[we] would be victors in a war with any nation in the world with the exemption of the United States.” Walter von Minderlittgen wrote that, “the attitude of the American officer toward enlisted men, is very different than in our army in which officers have always treated their men as cattle.”

The phenomenon can even be observed in the Ukraine conflict today. Ukrainian society has evolved in a considerably more democratic direction than its autocratic Russian cousin, which, while technically not aristocratic, retains many of its heavily hierarchical elements. In the Russian army, soldiers are considered expendable and sent to the front lines in semi-suicidal “meat waves” –treated by their commanders every bit like the “cattle” of an aristocratic regime. The Ukrainian army, meanwhile, while trying to shed the last vestiges of Soviet-style tactics, is markedly more egalitarian and less reliant on “blind, minute, resigned” obedience. 

De Tocqueville was on to something: the structure of a society enormously influences the structure of its military, with important implications on a nation’s ability to sustain defensive and offensive operations. Some of his observations, applied in the American context today, might rightly cause us pause: he says, for instance, that “in democratic nations, in times of peace, a military career is little honored and ill pursued.” This is clearly no longer the case, where today the military is one of the most highly regarded national institutions. Does this mean that De Tocqueville’s observations on democratic armies were flawed in some way? Or does it mean, more provocatively, that America has strayed from its earlier democratic forms? There is good reason to think the latter, and De Tocqueville himself points out just how such a thing comes to pass: 

There is no long war that does not put freedom at great risk in a democratic country… War does not always give democratic peoples over to military government; but it cannot fail to increase immensely the prerogatives of civil government in these peoples; it almost inevitably centralizes the direction of all men and the employment of all things in its hands. If it does not lead one to despotism suddenly by violence, it leads to it mildly through habits. All those who seek to destroy freedom within a democratic nation ought to know that the surest and shortest means of succeeding at this is war.

And yes, America has had its share of long wars, and it seems appropriate to wonder aloud whether the military success enjoyed by our “democratic armies” since World War II has not, in some deep and lasting way, altered the trajectory of the republic itself.

Dr. Paul Schwennesen is an environmental historian and military affairs analyst. His major research interests are in the geopolitics of liberty and the environmental and transatlantic history of the 16th century, with special focus on the entradas of De Soto and Coronado into North America, 1539-1542. He holds a PhD from the University of Kansas, a Master’s degree in Government from Harvard University, and degrees in History and Science from the United States Air Force Academy. Paul served ten years in the US military in weapons-systems acquisition, foreign area intelligence, and flightline operations which included deployments to Central America and Afghanistan. In 2022 he volunteered in Ukraine to provide civilian aid and combat training on the frontlines against the Russian invasion. He was presented with the Verhkhovna Rada medal by the Ukrainian Parliament for “Merit to the Ukrainian People.” He is a regular contributor to the American Institute for Economic Research, and his writing has appeared at the New York Times, American Spectator, Claremont Review, and in textbooks on environmental ethics (Oxford University Press and McGraw-Hill).

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