The Military-Narrational Complex

What Stories Do in an Age of Conflict

Elizabeth D. Samet

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The U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial, Arlington, Virginia, March 2025Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Elizabeth D. Samet is the author of Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness and Professor of English at West Point. The views expressed here are her own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.More by Elizabeth D. Samet

Since 1989, an estimated four million people have died as a result of armed conflicts around the globe—740,000 between 2021 and 2024 alone. A thorough understanding of these violent decades and of today’s persistent geopolitical volatility demands policy expertise, of course, but it also calls for a perspective beyond the realm of political science, which for all its rigor does not always account for certain human elements of war: desire for glory, thirst for vengeance, and other irrational passions that shape the belligerence of warriors and nations. In other words, the stuff of literature.

Nations weave myths out of victories and erase defeats with the promise of future triumphs. They tend to calibrate “bad” wars against “good” ones while memorializing the latter with a wistfulness that lures them into vainglorious and ultimately inglorious quests for new conflicts.

There are a few things to know about stories. First, humans have fed on them for millennia, from the Bible and the epic in ancient times to the nineteenth-century novel and the twenty-first-century Marvel franchise. Second, the hard-nosed realists and instrumentalists who are most contemptuous of the worth of stories, in particular of fictional ones, and wary of the enterprise of literary study are often the most gullible consumers of fables, swept away by the power of fictions yet ignorant of their limits, constraints, and capacity to delude. Third, the story has become many people’s primary way of understanding the world. As the literary theorist Peter Brooks argues in his 2022 book Seduced by Story, “Narrative seems to have become accepted as the only form of knowledge and speech that regulates human affairs.” In the process, Brooks observes, story has eclipsed rational argument as the dominant purveyor of social, political, and historical truths.

We operate in a world in which the teller of the best story triumphs over the one who reasons most clearly. The most successful stories attain the quality of myth, at which point, as Brooks writes, “their status as fictions . . . is forgotten and they are taken as real explanations of the world.” In the face of this “narrative takeover,” Brooks exhorts readers “to oppose critical and analytical intelligence to narratives that seduce us into the acceptance of dominant ideologies.” What listeners and readers need, he urges, is “to resist a passive narcosis of response.”