2023 DoD Manual Revision – What’s Chivalry Got to Do with It?

Regrettably, the recent update of the U.S. Department of Defense Law of War Manual continues to associate chivalry with the law of armed conflict. No change has been made in Section 2.6 of the Manual or the related footnotes, where chivalry is still celebrated.

Chivalry’s appearance in the 2015 edition was strongly condemned at the time by Sean Watts and Rachel VanLandingham. Their critiques remain valid for the July 2023 update of the Manual.

Chivalry in The Law of War Manual

The Manual invokes chivalry but is imprecise about its place in the modern law of war. It describes chivalry as the historic antecedent of, and basis for, the modern law of war, but neither chivalry nor the Manual’s preferred term, honor, is defined.

The Manual provides this explanation in Section 2.6.1:

Honor has also been called chivalry. Chivalry is often associated with a specific historical context – a code of behavior for knights in Europe during the Middle Ages. Rather than refer to this specific context, the term honor is used in this manual to indicate more clearly that the law of war principle of honor draws from warriors’ codes from a variety of cultures and time periods.

The Manual uses chivalry in two ways here I believe. First, it indirectly incorporates chivalry into the law of war by use of the term honor, which the Manual seems to say is substantially the same thing. A disclaimer mitigates somewhat the incorporation of chivalry, observing, “The citation of an older source should not necessarily be interpreted as an endorsement that every aspect of that source remains current law” (§ 1.2.2.2).

Second, chivalry is used to imbue the law of war with color and importance. That is, chivalry gives our law a noble lineage as well as the guise of ancient wisdom.

Issues with Chivalry

Chivalry’s male chauvinism has no place in our modern military. The chivalric knight (always male) is obliged to honor and protect women (weak and often in peril). Chivalry is thus an unsuitable ideal for female soldiers as well as for men who will encounter them among their superiors, teammates, and subordinates. Of course, women do need particular protection from the current “widespread and systematic use of sexual violence as a weapon or tactic of war.” But it is unnecessary to drag in the antique body of chivalric attitudes about women.

Instead, specific protections can be identified, as the Manual does: “Women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honor, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault” (§§ 10.5.1.2 and 11.6.1). Specific protections, without mentioning chivalry, are similarly provided in the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (art. 27), as well as the 1863 Lieber Code (arts. 37, 44).

I find another exclusionary message embedded in the knight’s role in the Crusades, that of the knight as a Christian warrior against Islam. Surely, this is not a good model for a military that serves, and recruits among, a civilian population of many faiths, to include non-believers.

Chivalry is also grounded in class exclusion as it is applied to the upper class only. The knight had a keen sense of his own superiority, and extended courtesy only to fighters of his elite social and political class; the common soldier had no call on his honor and could be slaughtered without damage to his reputation. It does not surprise to find this strong sense of hierarchy in pre-Enlightenment Europe. But, in egalitarian American society, class bias is largely absent, even repugnant.

Repugnance seemed to have been Dwight Eisenhower’s reaction to his staff’s suggestion that he “should observe the custom of by-gone days” and meet with German General Hans-Jurgen von Arnim, captured in fighting in North Africa in 1942 (p. 37). By contrast, a British commander, that same year, extended such a courtesy to captured General Johann von Reavenstein, shook his hand, and complimented his division’s fighting.

Archaic values can be made popular again, but not without damage to society. According to Mark Twain, that was the case with chivalry’s revival in the 19th century in the widely read works of Sir Walter Scott. In his memoir Life on the Mississippi, Twain claimed that Scott’s celebration of “the jejune romanticism of an absurd past” had the effect of retarding Southern culture, preventing its participation in the progress of the 19th century, and thus was “in great measure responsible for” the Civil War. Twain continued,

Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments . . . set the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.  He did measureless harm . . . . For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them (p. 348-49).

Fairness

Following the chivalric ideal, the Law of War Manual declares in Section 2.6. 2 that “Honor requires a certain amount of fairness in offense and defense.”

Whatever can this mean? Isn’t the application of overwhelming force necessarily unfair and yet our ambition in every fight? Is it possible to square “fairness” with the war principle of surprise, that is, seek to fight the enemy when you can catch it unprepared? Department of the Army Field Manual 3-0 encourages surprise by striking “at a time and place or in a manner for which the enemy is unprepared” (Table 1-1).

Individualism

Literature has celebrated the knight errant for solo quests and individual feats. But these brilliant actions were typically pursued for personal honor and glory, with no particular benefit to the nation. In some cases, the knight even betrayed his sovereign’s purpose in favor of a fellow knight fighting for the enemy.

Eventually, as armies became large, knights disappeared from the battlefield and aristocrats who might have been knights became officers. Officers are burdened with concerns for their units and responsibility to their chain of command, nothing like the individualistic knights errant who were their predecessors.

Unit cohesion, teamwork, and fidelity to the chain of command are essential to the modern military. Chivalry, glorifying the lone knight, inspires a state of mind that undermines fundamental doctrine.

Generosity (sometimes called liberality or largess) is frequently cited as an essential aspect of the character of the chivalric knight. But generosity is unreliable as a combat standard.

The reality of warfare in the Middle Ages was far from that idolized in the romantic literature. In actual combat, quarter was frequently not given, and the defeated knight, exhausted under the weight of his armor, was easy prey. This resulted in widespread slaughter of the losing side. Often, the decision to spare a wounded enemy was not made out of generous feeling for a fellow warrior but by a shrewd assessment of the prospect of a large ransom; knights from families without wealth were killed.

A better assurance of the protection of prisoners comes from clear and understandable legal obligations, not as a matter of (undependable) generosity.

Pernicious Standards

That the Manual does not define chivalry is perhaps understandable, as chivalry has had many meanings over hundreds of years. But an undefined concept in a law manual is a dangerous thing.

Section 18.6 of the Manual itself states that “[a] basic step in implementing and enforcing the law of war is to ensure that people understand its requirements.” Adopting an undefined term—especially one as amorphous and elastic as chivalry—works in the opposite direction. Instead of a statement of clear principles and rules on which the soldier may rely, the Manual invites an anarchic resort to everyone’s personal conscience for what is right.

Does the incorporation of chivalry into the Manual allow military members to depart from law or from lawful orders in pursuit of the chivalric/honorable ideal as they see it? Conversely, could they be held accountable for failing to act generously, fairly, or otherwise in accordance with chivalry?

Despite the danger, some authorities advocate including chivalry to set a good tone for legal compliance. Professor Terry Gill, for example, acknowledges that “It can be highly dangerous to allow individual notions of morality to prevail over legal considerations, since the latter normally represent a communis opinio of what is acceptable conduct and what is an acceptable response to misconduct, rather than one’s own private sense of what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’” Nevertheless, Professor Gill still assesses chivalry as “a powerful incentive for particular conduct.”

The flaw in any plan to import chivalry into the law of war is that the meanings of honor and fairness and the like are not universally agreed upon. The idea that modern combatants share a common understanding of what is chivalrous is “dubious.” And, as I have tried to show here, not all chivalric values are benign.

It is certainly true that contemporary law draws upon ancient sources. We find concepts that can be traced to chivalry as well as many other systems such as Roman law, natural law, the Hebrew Bible, other religious texts, and a great accumulation of common law precedents. But none of these actually becomes our law except after legislation. Our society, through democratic processes, adopts laws for our time and circumstances, selecting some ideas from historic examples and abandoning the rest.  To imbue our law with chivalry (the principles of which were established before the Enlightenment and the American Revolution, among other events), runs contrary to our democratic and civilizing processes.

Concluding Thoughts

To be sure, chivalry’s romantic stories offer many admirable examples, and undeniably the knight in shining armor persists in his emotional and inspirational appeal. But the elitism of chivalry, its valorization of individual glory, its reliance on good character rather than law, and its amorphous and romantic ideals, all make chivalry a poor reference point for the military of a democratic society that cherishes the rule of law.

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Richard Salomon is a Department of Law Visiting Lecturer at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, and is the author of The Unsuspected Francis Lieber (2018).

Photo credit: U.S. Army, Sgt. Agustin Montanez