From author, Beth Wagner:

Modern-day American soldiers are carefully indoctrinated into a masculine military culture that is designed to promote the unquestioned execution of violence and dominance. The linchpin of this indoctrination is the instillation of the idealized warrior mythology, which situates the US military service member – and implicitly the US military itself – as heroic, honorable, and good. The military fosters unit cohesion as an accountability mechanism to reinforce conformity, replacing loyalty to one’s own moral code with loyalty to the group. The result is self-justified soldiers who are trained to abdicate moral responsibility for their violent actions within a culture that punishes dissenters. While it is easy to understand how this mindset serves US military objectives, this literature review contends that unconditional fidelity to the myth of US military morality precludes an honest examination of military violence that ultimately harms service members, Veterans, and millions of other human beings around the world. The paper will examine the origin of moral injury, the perpetuation of military sexual trauma, the commission of torture, and finally the justification of war itself through the lens of system justification theory to illuminate the trauma spawned in the yawning gap between American word and deed.

To read the full paper, click here.