Rhetoric Matters: Inviting Military Overreach with the Sheepdog Analogy

ABSTRACT Military personnel encounter analogies meant to help them understand their role and tasks. One such depicts military “sheepdogs” protecting ordinary-citizen “sheep” from predator “wolves.” But simple analogies of this kind combine surface appeal with ideological implications that make them hazardous. The sheepdog analogy's simplistic trichotomy is liable to undermine warfighters' battlefield restraint, both in how they fight and whom they fight. They may improperly expand the realm of “wolves” to be attacked, and exert less self-control in attacking. Worse, they may develop a sense of moral superiority and chafe resentfully and contemptuously under civilian control. Despite the sheepdog analogy's superficial attractions, it could end up undermining respect for democratic processes and constraints, civil liberties, and the Constitutional system that soldiers are sworn to defend. Nor can it be saved by well-intentioned revisions. Hence, it ought to be eliminated from circulation to the extent possible. Furthermore, a broader consideration of the conditions required for any acceptable warfighter analogy recommends avoidance of all beguilingly evocative simple tropes for soldier identity. Their intended constructive messages and effects are ever liable to be overtaken by unintended ones that subvert soldiers' rightful understandings of their relationships to other human beings and to the body politic.