Eliot Cohen is a respected military historian. I have most of his books in my professional library and I was one of his students at the national defense security studies course at Syracuse at the turn of the century. However, I think he wandered off the path in a recent article for the Atlantic titled “The U.S. Needs Soldiers, Not Warriors.” In the piece, Cohen suggests that the Pentagon needs a soldier’s ethos rather than the warrior spirit that Pete Hegseth has vowed to return to the American military establishment. Professor Cohen is implying that the two mindsets are mutually exclusive.

I don’t buy into that view.
Cohen’s view of a warrior mentality is that it is self-centered and overemphasizes battle and killing at the cost of discipline (self-discipline and general good order and discipline of the force as a whole). He cites Achilles of the Trojan War as an example. Achilles sulked in his tent when his honor was impugned and threatened to kill his commander — Agamemnon — in a dispute over a concubine.
He argues that real soldiers have the traits of self-discipline, respect for authority, and professionalism demonstrated by leaders such as Ulysses S. Grant as opposed to the Confederate cavaliers that he eventually defeated.
I disagree. The two are not mutually exclusive. Not all warriors are soldiers, and not all soldiers are warriors. The most successful soldiers in history were soldier-warriors. They had an equal respect for both discipline and valor under fire. Almost all were students of the profession of arms as well as being cool under fire. But all were strict disciplinarians. Alexander, Caesar, Gustavus Adolphus, Patton, and even Genghis Khan shared these traits. Each was a careful student of military history — Genghis was supposedly illiterate, but carefully listened to tales of military history as well as studying the strengths and weaknesses of opponents.
The famous commanders who utterly failed went too far in either direction. Napoleon and Lee let...