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...as disputable. For example, it mentions, among other things, the problem of how to induce high spirituality in soldiers. Though describing it as a very important matter, the article approaches it from a rather unexpected technocratic perspective. Specifically, it claims that "the higher the ideological and moral-psychological training of a soldier, the more efficient is the process of him acquiring and using the specific military-scientific knowledge in his military profession, or in the 'man-military equipment' system. A soldier possessing a high morale is also, as a rule, a fine military professional. It can be accepted as a law that the degree to which a soldier is skilful in handling his weapons depends on how spiritually mature and patriotic he is."1 Actually the writers assert a certain "applied" value of a soldier's spirituality as a sort of a spare part to military equipment, rather than its value unto itself. That this is so is confirmed by the next passage where they quote Clausewitz as saying that it is impossible to separate the matter from the "moral forces inspiring this matter" and pronounce this dichotomy as anachronistic in the modern environment.
I, on the contrary, see as anachronistic the very idea that a soldier's valuable-unto-itself spirituality becomes less important in consequence of improvements in technology. Isn't it the same idea that always popped up in the heads of certain thinkers, rulers and generals each time a fundamentally new type of weapons was invented? Listen to what the great philosopher Nikolai Berdiayev wrote on the subject of World War I, "It is not the struggle of armies, nor even the struggle of peoples that makes the war; the war is made by the struggle of chemical laboratories, and it will be accompanied with a monstrous extermination of peoples, cities, and civilizations, i.e., will threaten mankind with extinction. The war's chivalrous aspects connected with courage, gallantry, honor and loyalty are dying out completely and losing all their importance. They almost didn't play this role in the last war either. The war is emerging as a phenomenon of a totally different order and requires a different name." (2) The Russian thinker has some...
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