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War & peace
6 min read

On war fighting

Why do soldiers go to war? There are a thousand different answers writes Owen, a serving soldier.

Owen is an officer in the British Army.

Soldiers silhouetted by dust and sunshine work at a fence with tools.
British soldiers dismantle a fence line in Afghanistan.
Jamie Peters RLC/MOD via Wikimedia Commons.

The car bomb went off at 0630, rudely awakening me from a deep sleep. The noise, big and bassy, was followed by silence, followed by the wailing of the camp attack alarm. I felt a range of emotions in those moments, but definitely present was a sense of relief. “So that’s what it sounds like…”. I had been in Kabul for two or three months by that point, and had always been slightly on edge whenever I walked between buildings, knowing that an explosion was inevitable at some point, but not knowing how loud it would really be. Afghanistan was my first operational tour – it was 2014 and the British presence in country was shrinking rapidly, and my reward for a good performance on my intelligence officer’s course was assignment to a unit deploying to the Afghan capital. It might seem a strange reward, but it was sincerely meant, and gratefully received. 

Why does a soldier go to war? You could ask a thousand men and women in the armed forces and get a thousand different answers. The most straightforward (and superficial) answer is “Because I was ordered to”, but delve below the surface and you find all manner of motivations and justifications. All I can offer you is why I think I wanted to join the British Army and fight (there are reasons that are probably hidden even to me) and how as Christian I make sense of war. 

I joined the Army at a time when what were known as Blair's Wars were stuttering to an unsatisfactory conclusion. We had withdrawn from Iraq, leaving behind a broken country and unwittingly paving the way for Islamic State, and soldiers were still fighting and dying in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. While I was going through the selection process for the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst there were a plethora of war documentaries on television that had been filmed using helmet cameras, giving an unprecedented first-person view of conflict. A normal person might have watched those programmes and thought they wanted no part on it whatsoever. I saw them and wanted in. Why? 

What appealed to me most was the responsibility; of deploying to a dangerous place with your fellow soldiers and doing everything in your power to keep them alive.

I look back and think there were all sorts of reasons floating round my head. There was undoubtedly a slightly boyish sense of adventure – it seemed like most of my peers at university were off to be bankers, lawyers or management consultants, and I wanted to do something a bit less grey. There was a desire to challenge myself too – a worthier reason, but still not the full story.  What appealed to me most was the responsibility; of deploying to a dangerous place with your fellow soldiers and doing everything in your power to keep them alive and to complete your mission. I saw soldiering as less a job than a calling. 

Throughout my career much has changed but that sense of responsibility is still there. It is at the heart of how I understand being a Christian in conflict zones, my personal ‘theology of war’, if you like. When I came home from Afghanistan, I was asked by a friend whether I had killed anyone. I said I hadn’t. He then asked if I thought I could bring myself to do so should the situation arise. I said that I hoped so, because I had been on armed sentry duty multiple times and so was the only person standing between my colleagues and the enemy. If I had identified a suicide bomber but decided not to shoot in that moment, then I would have been betraying the responsibility I had to my friends. Indeed, I doubt that any suicide bomber would have thought worse of me had I shot him – he would have recognised that I had my job to do, just as he had his. 

Who is anyone to judge between us, and who am I to claim the morality of what I do for a living?

Of course, this line of thinking is problematic. If I am just doing my job and the suicide bomber is doing his, then in moral terms we are surely are only as good, or as bad, as each other. His God calls him to do his duty and look after his brothers and sisters, and so does mine, and we are therefore equally right or equally wrong. Who is anyone to judge between us, and who am I to claim the morality of what I do for a living? 

And yet sincerely holding a belief does not make you right. The failings of moral relativism are well-documented, yet too often we act as the sort of people who treat Pilate’s question “What is truth?” as a viable philosophical position rather than as the moral evasion that it is. We in the West are jaded by complex and bloody counterinsurgencies with no clear end state, affirming Bart Simpson’s dictum that “There are no good wars, with the following exceptions: the American Revolution, World War II, and the Star Wars Trilogy”. But the conflict in Ukraine has shown that binary wars between an obvious aggressor and a nation defending their homeland are not merely history, and that today people can still take up arms for justifiable reason.  

I'm a Christian so I am a pacifist in the sense that peace is vastly preferable to war, and I have seen first-hand the suffering and misery it causes. Yet as a Christian too I cannot affirm peace at all costs when it means that rights and lives of innocent people can be callously disregarded by an oppressor who can only be resisted by force. I look at pictures of bombed-out apartment blocks in Ukraine, of kidnapped schoolgirls in Nigeria, of civilians murdered in Afghanistan and cannot affirm anything less than this, that there are things in this world worth fighting for.  

I would reflect too that both my calling as a soldier and my faith have given me a sense of the value of life not as something not to be clung too at all costs, but as a gift to be made the most of. One of the things we did in our first week of Sandhurst was to make a will. There I was, fresh out of university, deciding who should inherit my meagre possessions (I didn’t even have a car), and asking the bloke next to me, who I’d only met 24 hours ago, to witness my signature. To be honest, it didn’t really feel real. What felt much more real was posing for a photo in the unit sports hall two years later, arms crossed, Union Jack and regimental flag behind me, knowing that it was the photo that would be used in the newspapers if I was blown up in Afghanistan. 

You see that mutual love in tight-knit units where one soldier is prepared to die for another.

When you’re forced to confront the fact that you might die, you start to realise what it is that you are living for. I believe in the sacredness of life as a God-given gift, which makes the idea of sacrifice which lies at the heart of the Christian faith all the more powerful. “Greater love has no one than this” Jesus says in John’s Gospel, "to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”, and you see that mutual love in tight-knit units where one soldier is prepared to die for another. I think it’s that idea of living and possibly dying for something or someone more than just me is what keeps in the Army, when many of those who made their wills in that room at Sandhurst have left for civilian jobs.  

Which brings me back to my initial reflection, that there are myriad different reasons why people join the armed forces and go to war. My Christian faith is at the heart of my reason(s), but I'm realistic to know that many of my colleagues do not share that faith and so would have a different motivation (though perhaps not quite as different as one might think). We all have stories to tell about why things matter to us, and matter to us so much that we think they are worth fighting for, in whatever guise 'fighting' takes. You have heard my story. What’s yours? 

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Football
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6 min read

Fed up with today’s football? Blame this passion killer

How the beautiful game became boring

Sam Tomlin is a Salvation Army officer, leading a local church in Liverpool where he lives with his wife and children.

An AI image of apathetic football players being watched by dis-spirited fans.
Nick Jones/Midjourney AI.

The football season has begun. And with it, the usual rigmarole of adverts, fantasy football and over-priced shirts. But this season has a slightly different feel to it. Perhaps it is the obscene - and record - amount of money that was spent in the transfer window (benefitting the biggest clubs), or the sour taste of the Isak saga between Newcastle and Liverpool.

Or maybe there is just a malaise with the game that has been growing for years and is now perceptible just below the surface. Friends and family tell me they have lost interest in football, echoing the words of former Chelsea and England player John Terry who recently made headlines by lambasting the state of the modern game as ‘boring’ . The tendency for one team to defend while a more technically gifted and drilled team tries to break them down means ‘You don't see many shots,’ according to Terry. 

His thoughts reminded me of comments made by pundit Gary Neville a couple of months ago after a dull 0-0 draw between Manchester United and Manchester City: 

‘This robotic nature of not leaving our positions, being micro-managed within an inch of our lives, not having any freedom to take a risk to go and try and win a football match is becoming an illness in the game'. 

Neville and Terry are referring to the style of play inaugurated by Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola who has undoubtedly revolutionized how football is played in the last decade. The style is geared towards complete control and domination, ironing out any potential errors and minimising risk. It is statistics and data driven, with managers and coaching staff constantly looking at iPads during matches and clubs employing data analysts. 

This strategy has of course been wildly successful for Man City in recent years. I don’t think these former players are contesting these remarkable achievements or that this style of football can’t be inspiring and entertaining when executed by players at the top of their game. But because it has become such a dominant way of playing, worse players and teams feel that they have no option but to mimic it. The result is often a boring game with neither team willing to take risks as they are desperate to keep possession. Just look at popular memes comparing wingers from 20 years ago putting crosses in the box compared to simply passing backwards.

Liam Manning, the former manager of my team, Bristol City, very much models himself on this data-driven Guardiola style. Tellingly, one of his catchphrases in interviews refers to ‘taking the passion out of the game’. By this he means ensuring that players keep cool heads and stick to the game plan - but I wonder if he inadvertently betrays the philosophy Neville and Tarry rail against: it is passionless, soulless and mechanical, less open to moments of surprise and unexpected brilliance. 

To put my cards on the table, I agree wholeheartedly with Neville. Modern football in my estimation has changed beyond recognition even from the 90s when I grew up. While I cannot deny that some of this has been for the better – stadia safety and decrease in hooliganism for instance – I lament the introduction of VAR and its flawed search for objectivity, the replacement of stadia rooted in the heart of the communities which gave rise to them with soulless bowls located outside of town and the expense that often prices poorer fans out of the game. 

Are Neville, Terry and I just hopeless Luddites longing for a past that would inevitably pass away, or is there a deeper philosophical point to all of this? Perhaps. The French Christian thinker Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) critiqued modernity’s propensity to seek ever more efficiency no matter the cost. The French word he gave to this was ‘technique.’ While this is often translated simply as ‘technology,’ it is wider and deeper than this. He describes it as ‘the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of activity.’ 

In a ‘technological society,’ efficiency rather than creativity, beauty or freedom becomes the norm. It is not hard to see this all around us as we scan our shopping on machines to minimise time-consuming personal interaction, use our pocket computers to organise our lives and dominate our attention all the while we do not know our neighbours’ names. Most Western institutions, the systems of business, politics and morality (and perhaps now football?) have been consumed by this system. 

Technique, according to Ellul, is not any one person or group’s fault, but develops its own internal and de-humanising logic which will never reach its goal as it searches forever greater efficiency:  

‘proceeding at its own tempo, technique analyses its objects so that it can reconstitute them; in the case of man, it has analyzed him and synthesized a hitherto unknown being.’  

But the spiritual consequence of technique is a flattened and banal account of human life, desacralizing the world. ‘Technique denies mystery a priori. The mysterious is merely that which has not yet been technicized… Nothing belongs any longer to the realm of god or the supernatural. The individual who lives in the technical milieu knows very well that there is nothing sacred anywhere… He therefore transfers his sense of the sacred to the very thing which has destroyed its former object: to technique itself.’  

There is a clear parallel here with the principalities and powers the Apostle Paul warns against in the Bible: ‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.’ 

What is the antidote to technique in football and elsewhere in life? It is tempting to collapse into a fatalism assuming the march of technical and de-humanising efficiency is unstoppable. Ellul acknowledges the potency of technique but suggests that the greatest weapons against its totalising control are both an awareness and consciousness of its methods and consequently a certain conception of freedom which will willingly not conform to its pattern. ‘Freedom is completely without meaning unless it is related to necessity, unless it represents a victory over necessity… We must not think of the problem in terms of a choice between being determined and being free. We must look at it dialectally, and say that man is indeed determined, but that it is open to him to overcome necessity, and that this act is freedom.’ 

In footballing terms this might be seen in an enigmatic figure like Khvicha Kvaratskhelia who seems to belong to another era and whose national team Georgia lit up Euro 2024 with their fearless and free flowing play, or by supporters applauding players who take greater risks even if they do not come off. In life in general this might be expressed through consciously avoiding the ‘necessity’ of efficiency: like choosing to do things more slowly like queueing at a supermarket checkout rather than using the automated machine, or walking to rather than driving where possible.  

For Ellul and Christians, however, the ultimate liberation from enslaving systems comes in the form of a God revealed in Jesus Christ, who lives a life wholly free from such slavery and takes upon himself the debt and weight enslaved humans hope to escape on their own. As Paul puts in another one of his letters: ‘It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by the yoke of slavery.’ 

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