Battle Exhortation: The Rhetoric of Combat Leadership

Battle Exhortation: The Rhetoric of Combat Leadership is now a selection of the Marine Corps Professional Reading List. In this groundbreaking examination of the symbolic strategies used to prepare troops for imminent combat, Keith Yellin offers an interdisciplinary look into a mode of rhetorical discourse that has played a prominent role in warfare, history, and popular culture from antiquity to the present day. In Battle Exhortation he focuses on one of the most time-honored forms of motivational communication, the encouraging speech of military commanders, to offer a pragmatic and scholarly evaluation of how persuasion contributes to combat leadership.
Yellin establishes battle exhortation as a distinct genre of discourse originating from humankind's war-prone history and the age-old need to inspire troops to fight. In illustrating his subject's conventions, Yellin draws from the Bible, classical Greece and Rome, Spanish conquistadors, and especially American military forces. Yellin is also interested in how audiences are socialized to recognize and anticipate this type of communication that precedes difficult team efforts. To account for this dimension he probes examples as diverse as Shakespeare's Henry V, George C. Scott's portrayal of General George S. Patton, and team sports.
Yellin also examines the constraints that shape battle exhortation, including the specific circumstances of a given war, the combat arm of the audience, the presence of nonmilitary observers, and the personal character and style of the speaker. Speculating on the future of battle exhortation while honoring its rich tradition, this work will be of keen interest to students of communication, history, and military leadership.