If you listen to a certain high-profile radio talk show host, you recognize that headline as his description of the military’s job.

I remembered that description as I started reading Warlord: No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy (Threshold, 2006). That’s the recent book from Ilario Pantano, who will speak at a Locke Foundation event in Wilmington September 28.

In recounting his sniper training at Camp Lejeune in 1991, Pantano writes of his instructor:

In a single fifty-minute class, he had taught me an enduring secret of war: chivalry was for museums. My job was to kill or cripple the enemy….

That sentiment gives the lie to the idea that a military can conduct a limited or “proportional” war against a committed foe.