Though seldom an accurate guide to a word's use, etymology is often the best guide—sometimes because it is the only guide except a dated definition, more often because it is the most interesting guide. Like all history, etymology has the advantage of a good story over naked fact. Certainly that is true of "profession."

Its story begins under the dark vault of some crowded church in medieval Europe. Then a profession was merely a formal avowal, the words of commitment a novice pronounced in a public ceremony to become a full member of a religious order. A professional was merely someone who had made such a profession.

How much learning originally preceded such an avowal is a matter of conjecture. But when advanced learning, beginning with "theology," revived in Europe, its special institution, the university, drew its teachers from the religious orders. These teachers were called "professors."

Learned or Common Profession?
Over the next few centuries, "profession" came to refer to any avowal of a calling, whether religious or not. A professional was then someone who followed a specific calling, someone distinguishable from both the ignorant and the jack-of-all-trades. This wider use of "profession" opened the way for a distinction between the "learned professions" —theology and its university off-shoots, law and medicine—and the rest, the "common professions," silversmith, merchant, and so on, trained through mere apprenticeship.

Until the Renaissance, war was not a profession in either of these senses. Europe fought its wars with short-term volunteers and conscripts, officers coming from the nobility, a class for whom war was a duty of their position, not an independent calling. Nobles fought their country's enemies for the same reason they fought personal duels, to preserve honor or make a reputation. They did not sell their service as "commoners" had to. They gave it free, depending for livelihood on the family's lands.

By the Renaissance, war was fast changing in ways unfavorable to the nobility. The nobility had begun as armored men on horse back, moving forts each worth many common soldiers. By the Renaissance, new weapons, especially, the crossbow and gun, had made the noble's heavy armor more burden than protection. The foot soldier —what the nobles had calle "infantry," that is, children —could now kill a horseman almost as easily as the horseman could kill him. Organized under a condottiere, the infantry formed permanent bodies, more skilled than the armies the nobility could raise, lightly armed cavalry doing some of what heavily armed horsemen once did.

The armies of the condottiere sold their services to governments or individuals. Though forming a (common) profession (in our second sense), they soon bore a less flattering name, "mercenaries."

Alternative to Mercenaries?
For any government, mercenaries, though skilled, have at least four serious disadvantages. First, of course, is that they will fight only if paid, and generally will serve those paying most. Mercenaries can be quite expensive. Second, in a tough situation, say, a siege, they might renegotiate their pay, further straining their employer's treasury. Third, because they are free contractors, they may change sides at the end of a contract, today's defenders becoming tomorrow's attackers, with all the secrets of the defense in their hands. Fourth, the chief interest of mercenaries is in making a living, preserving their reputation, and so on, not defending their employer. Their tactics may be more conservative than the welfare of their employer requires.

For almost two centuries, the old temporary armies and the newer mercenaries competed, with the mercenaries slowly gaining a clear advantage. Then, late in the 17th century, the French tried something new, a standing army. French nobles would command this army as they had the older temporary armies, but now they would train for war in the way mercenary officers did. Their subordinates, paid by the king in peace as well as in war, would always be ready to fight for France.

France experimented a good deal with formal training for officers over the next century. At first, the emphasis was on swordsmanship, horsemanship, dancing, and the like noble arts. Soon, however, the advantages of mathe- matics, physics, chemistry, and other sciences became clear, especially in the specialized arms of the mili- tary—artillery, engineering, naval warfare, supply, and so on. Increasingly, military officers (first in France, and then throughout Europe) began to look like (what the medievals had called) "a learned profession" (except that their training, though formal, was always outside the universities). Nonetheless, these officers could not be professionals in our second sense. Being noble, they still had to give their service, not earn a living by it.

Liberal Profession or mere Trade?
About this time, we may see a new distinction, that between the "common professions" and the "liberal professions." A noble could not work in a common profession without loss of honor. He could work in a liberal profession, because—by definition—the liberal professions were occupied by those who were free not to work. Pay was not essential to the practice of a liberal profession, even if it was accepted when offered. To the older professions of church, law, and medicine could now be added war (but at the cost of reconceiving the learned professions as liberal professions).

The French Revolution sped the nobility's long decline. By the early century, the distinction between common professions and liberal ones was almost gone. In its place was a new distinction between "professions" (so called) and "trades" or "mere money- making callings." Members of a profession (in this new sense) did, or at least could, earn their living by charging for their services. They could nonetheless be "gentlemen," something better than mere tradesmen, if they met standards of conduct beyond what mere tradesmen held themselves to. To be a professional (in this third sense) was to carry on business according to "a higher standard."

Military Professionals Today?
Whether an officer, much less a common soldier, can be a professional in this new sense is an open question. If the higher standard required for officers to form a profession must exceed what law, market, and morality demand, then military personnel governed, as they are in the United States, by a body of rules as compendious as the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), seem to have little room to organize as a profession.

So, this issue of Perspectives, devoted to professions and war, naturally begins with a definition of "military professionals." For Manuel Davenport, what distinguishes military professionals from others in uniform is responsibility for managing military power. Because a military professional is a manager, the foot soldier cannot be a military professional. And because what military professionals manage is the destructive power of the military, certain professionals in the mili- tary—physicians, lawyers, clergy, and so on—are not military professionals.

The military professional is a subclass of people subject to the UCMJ (or its equivalent in another country). They are distinguished from other professionals by special responsibilities, deriving from their special power. Davenport does not say whether these responsibili- ties go beyond what law, market, and morality would otherwise require. But it seems clear from what he does say that they must. The professionalism of the military consists not in its ability to win wars (or otherwise deliver what is asked) but to win in ways consistent both with explicit orders, laws of war, and other formal regulations, and with certain "basic values" (as Davenport calls them).

Lawyer, Chaplain, and Psychologist
Given Davenport's effort to distinguish military professionals from others in uniform, what is striking about our next two pieces is the emphasis in both on the dual obligations, the double professionalism, of serving both as a lawyer or clergy and a member of the military.

For Charles Myers, for example, to be a military lawyer is to be both a lawyer bound by the lawyer's code of ethics and an officer bound to do what every officer is bound to do. While Myers argues that this dual role makes the military lawyer uniquely qualified to be an ethics advisor in today's military, it is also clear from his discussion that it generates a good many special ethical problems.

For all the differences we might expect between lawyers and clergy, Arthur Gans' list of ethical problems confront- ing a military chaplain are surprisingly similar to Myers's list of ethical problems of military lawyers.

With Craig Summers' piece, we leave the military. Summers is concerned primarily with psychologists who, though civilians, do work having a military use, for example, developing programs to enhance the willingness of recruits to kill on command. While arguing that psychologists should not be involved in such work at all, Summers concludes that, at a minimum, the psychologists need a clear statement of how "military work" comports with the standards embodied in existing codes of professional ethics.

—MD