There’s been a lot of speak of warriors from the current US government. This isn’t new. A senator (Tom Cotton) even called us Finns a ‘warrior race’ when the discussions over our NATO membership were going on. It might work as a form of propaganda, but the thing is that they don’t exactly treat their soldiers like they warriors.

So, here’s the key difference: Being a warrior is all about personal glory. Being a soldier is all about being a cog in the military machine.

In many cultures, being a warrior is something you need to achieve. There’s certain deeds you need to do to be able to call yourself a warrior. While physical prowess in combat comes up often, it might also be something like horsemanship or being able to show mercy to your opponents.

Being a soldier is all about optimization, because military is about that. Soldiers are pieces on a map you can move from position to position. They are resources. They are not afforded value by the system. They are expendable. Sure, it’s harder to produce a new soldier than, say, a tank, because raising one takes about 18 years plus incubation plus training, while you can build a drone in a few days, but most countries have at least hundreds of thousands you can put into service.

For example, my native Finland, with a population of 5.5 million, has 900.000 soldiers ready to go. Not exactly sitting around in uniforms, but trained people for who can take various roles in the military with just a little bit of additional training. Not much room for personal glory there. Even people like Simo Häyhä (the White Death, a sniper from WWII with a mythical level reputation and hundreds of confirmed kills) was always very humble about his life as a soldier. He never sought glory. He was not a warrior. He was a soldier. Extremely effective one, but still a soldier.

You don’t graduate from being a soldier into being a warrior. In fact, a soldier has missed the point if they ever try to become a warrior.

Now, right-wingers are all about maintaining hierarchies. That does not allow for a soldier to stand out. They need to keep their heads down and feed the machine with their blood. At the same time, the propaganda requires these people to believe there is an opportunity for glory. But when there’s tens of thousands of soldiers on the field, or maybe even hundreds of thousands, or millions, like during the World Wars, how does one gain personal glory? There is no glory in under those circumstances.

A long time ago, I was on a day tour around Ieper (formerly Ypres). Well over a million soldiers died in that area over the “Great” War. Can you name any of them? Certainly, since all countries hadn’t realized that maybe the nobility weren’t the best officers, there were officers who were specifically out for that (this is what the ending of All Quiet on the Western Front is all about). But again, we don’t remember most of them. The ones we do remember, we remember for the horrible mistakes they made.

Sure, there are some generals from WWII who are quite famous for being efficient, but if we actually look at what a general does, that is not very romantic. They push papers. They figure out logistics. They don’t see battle from the front. There is no glory.

So, yeah, if someone talks about warriors in modern context, maybe just assume they are trying to spill propaganda.