Recently, there was a campaign to stop the Blue Angels, the Navy’s flight demonstration squadron, from their performance at Seattle’s annual “Seafair,” for being “too loud,” causing pollution, and triggering war trauma. Being from Seattle, I have fond memories of watching, but mostly hearing the roar of the F-18’s. While such performances may seem unremarkable, the truth is that they are of incredible importance — not just for the sake of military preparedness, but also as a source of intense psychological terror for our enemies, something illuminated by Book V of Virgil’s Aeneid. 

While the first half of the Aeneid is more akin to Homer’s Odyssey, with a long series of dangerous run-ins with supernatural Mediterranean beings, the latter half shifts to the Trojans’ campaign to settle in Italy. There, they engage in a brutal conflict with the native Italic tribes, ultimately securing a union with the Latins through Aeneas’s marriage to Princess Lavinia, laying the foundation for the future Roman people as descended from both Troy and Italy. 

The pivotal scene between these two halves is Book V, the funeral games held in Sicily in honor of Anchises, Aeneas’s father, whom Aeneas carried out of burning Troy in Book I. The games include contests of rowing, running, boxing, and archery, and conclude with the equestrian drill: 

The practiced, studied maneuvers, on horseback no less, of the Trojan youth are not so different from those of the Blue Angels today. And, just as in antiquity, the process of planning and executing wargames is as complicated and potentially dangerous as anything outside of real war, and that’s the point. Sadly, we constantly hear about American soldiers dying or being injured in the course of training exercises. This is often due to incompetence, but the more unpalatable truth is that keeping a fighting force of over a million people in reasonable shape to go to war is just intrinsically very dangerous. 

But this is why wargames are so important: being able to successfully conduct extremely complicated drills with minimal issues, especially with the best, most expensive equipment (for the Trojans, horses, for us, fighter jets) is how a nation signals martial prowess, at home and abroad. Picturing the beauty and grace of those equites, one can’t help but feel awe at their splendid maneuvers and the organizational capacity human societies become possessed of only when facing war or some great struggle. A warship only functions according to the combination of hundreds of sailors performing in perfect concert, all within an embodiment of modern naval science; how much more amazing then is the harmonious cooperation of an entire fleet. 

While displays of military capability like the Blue Angels are entertaining, their real purpose is to inspire fear and therefore deterrence in our enemies. Well-ordered columns advancing in synchronous, rehearsed lockstep may evoke wonder in children at how such a body of individuals, a corps, could function together so seamlessly; yet, ultimately, the point of such performances is to elicit intense dread at the thought of the decisive, coordinated violence such assemblages exist to inflict, deterring conflicts before they begin. 

The truth is that, even if a government spends billions not just on cutting-edge military tech but also the human capital necessary for modern combined operations, that does not necessarily mean anything. Nations like Saudi Arabia may possess advanced avionics, but that is not the same as mastering the operational complexity they demand. Yet, when I watch the Blue Angels “mock a mimic fight” as “they meet, retreat, [and] unite,” engaged in play “like dolphins, in the deep,” their maneuvers “so Labrinth,” like King Minos’ “Cretan maze,” I know that the US military, for all its issues, is certainly capable of making good on threats to kill people and break things.

As a kid, I watched the Blue Angels and experienced what Edmund Burke described as the beautiful elements on display: those of harmony, practiced synchronicity, symmetry, and gracefulness. But today, when I recall the roar of those jets and their zero-margin-for-error aerobatics, my reaction is much closer to feelings Burke would associate with the sublime: horrible awe at our capacity to scientifically engineer and technically master such destructive machines and pity for those who must face them. As Burke writes in The Sublime and Beautiful (1757), experiences of the sublime result from terrified awe at some unbelievably powerful phenomenon. Examples include thunder, the vastness of the ocean, a tempestuous storm, and cannon fire, but in all cases “terror… is the ruling principle of the sublime.” 

Today, as in antiquity, any display of supreme military might is bound to convey a sense of sublime terror; that was how I felt watching B-2 bombers fly over the White House on July 4th, less than two weeks after the June 22nd strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. That war and preparations for war can be so awe-inspiring in ways both terrible and beautiful reflects the ambiguity of human conflict as something horrible yet at times morally necessary. It’s difficult to hold in tension admiration for all the positive things associated with the military, including self-sacrificial patriotism and service, with the terrible tragedy that these things are necessary because of our fallen, sinful state. As St. Augustine argued in The City of God, this is indicative of the “now and not yet” nature of this world: militarism qua militarism, the pagan libido dominandi, is categorically unacceptable, and yet Christians are still at times called to be righteous defenders and avengers of the innocent. 

And yet, while it is true that competent and even fear-inducing militaries on the side of justice can play a redemptive role in our fallen world, we must remember that we are ultimately not called upon to trust in B-2 bombers, but in the Lord:

Amen.