Iraq, Afghanistan, and rethinking the post-heroic turn: Military decorations as indicators of change in warfare

Abstract

This article compares the awarding patterns of the two senior Anglophone military decorations, the British/Commonwealth Victoria Cross and the American Medal of Honor, to challenge arguments that a shift to ‘post‐heroic’ warfare has been in progress in Western societies since 1990. Despite the two decorations being independent of each other, each born of a particular military, political, and social context in their respective parent societies, the article reveals strong consistencies across the two. These include common understandings of military heroism centred on infantry‐ rather than machine‐intensive combat, and a shared neglect of armoured, aerial, and naval combatants. Crucially, the medal data suggests that, despite academic suggestions to the contrary, there was no discernible shift towards ‘post‐heroism’ in the post‐Cold War era. Such a shift, however, is observable between 1916 and 1920, suggesting that the ‘new Western way of war’ began far earlier than is often suggested.