S.L.A. Marshall’s masterful work, The Armed Forces Officer, represents the officer corps, and by implication all warriors, as a repository that lifts the entire society the military serves. Though this ideal may exist more as a potentiality than a fact, Marshall deplores the waning of intellectualism as highly damaging to the correct ethos of warriors in democratic societies. Soldiering uniquely calls for an interdisciplinary grasp of the wider world to enable sound judgment in the prosecution of managed violence, making it effectively a branch of the humanities. Thus his work clarifies the ambiguities associated with citizen-soldiery and the responsibilities weighing on officers, who he sees as ideally persons of wisdom and vision who are adroit in both action and restraint