Soldiers are instructed to live by the creed, which evokes the warrior spirit of the modern US army. It begins with the stirring vow, “I am an American soldier”, and goes on to affirm that “I will never accept defeat. I will never quit . . . I stand ready to deploy, engage and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat”.

Admirable though this may be in the heat of battle, the Warrior Ethos’s emphasis on annihilating the enemy is inimical to the type of patient, confidence-building counter-insurgency warfare in which America is engaged in the Middle East, according to Lieutenant-General Gregory Newbold, former director of operations to the joint chiefs of staff at the Pentagon.

“The future crises that relate to Iraq and Afghanistan will be a struggle for hearts and minds,” Newbold said. “We’re in a different environment now and that requires different techniques.”

The Warrior Ethos replaced the Soldier’s Creed drawn up in the post-Vietnam era which stated: “I am an American soldier . . . No matter what situation I am in, I will never do anything for pleasure, profit or personal safety, which will disgrace my uniform. I will use every means I have, even beyond the line of duty, to restrain my army comrades from actions disgraceful to themselves and the uniform.”

The degrading treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and atrocities such as the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl in Mahmudiya have highlighted the conduct of individual American servicemen.

“A strategic corporal can have a lot more impact on the course of the war than a general, so it’s critical that soldiers and marines appreciate the consequences of their actions,” Newbold said. “The old Soldier’s Creed came down to ‘doing the right thing’. I like that.”

Andrew Garfield, senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and former British intelligence officer, believes that the Warrior Ethos has encouraged American soldiers to respond to threats with overwhelming force, so creating new enemies, not friends.

“The United States army is phenomenal at conventional warfare, but soldiering — even in a Victorian sense — meant building roads and bridges, forging links with tribal leaders and very occasionally killing them,” said Garfield, who travelled to Iraq to canvass the views of more than 100 British officers and officials about American tactics.

In a paper published by the institute last week, British Perspectives on the US Effort to Stabilise and Reconstruct Iraq, he notes: “The perception of the British military, many independent observers and almost every Iraqi interviewed is that the US military continues to employ excessive force in Iraq.”

Many British interviewees complained that “the vast majority of the American military personnel . . . viewed their job as to kill the enemies of the United States”. They believed “peacekeeping was for wimps”, prided themselves on their aggression and “openly expressed the desire . . . to destroy the enemy”.

In their eagerness to hunt down insurgents, they would “clear the homes and businesses of the innocent as well as the guilty” and place bystanders at risk in firefights.

Garfield added: “In contrast, the British consider themselves first and foremost soldiers and recognised that the business of soldiering includes many essential tasks, most of which do not involve fighting.”

The Warrior Ethos was introduced in November 2003 after General Peter Schoomaker, the army chief of staff, expressed alarm that soldiers in Iraq considered themselves to be support troops — cooks, mechanics and supply staff — rather than fighters. Schoomaker insisted that no matter what their job, every soldier should be a “rifleman first”. Soldiers now affirm that “I am trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills. I always maintain my arms, my equipment and myself . . . I am an expert and a professional”.

However, the shock and awe period of the Iraq war gave way three years ago to the long slog of winning the trust of the Iraqi people. British Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, in a controversial article in the US journal Military Review last year, noted that the Warrior Ethos enjoined the soldier “to have just one type of interaction with his enemy — to ‘engage and destroy’ him: not defeat, which could permit a number of other politically attuned options, but destroy”.

Aylwin-Foster’s criticism has influenced a new counter-insurgency doctrine, which is being drawn up by General David Petraeus. It will state that “US military leaders must be nation-builders as well as warriors”, but will not call for the Warrior Ethos to be ditched.

A spokesman for Petraeus said the Warrior Ethos was consistent with winning hearts and minds because the creed also states that “I will always put the mission first”. If the mission is counter-insurgency, then there is no contradiction, he argued.

General John Batiste, a leading critic of US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s conduct of the war, said there was no need to change the creed: “When I first read the Warrior Ethos, I thought: yes, good. It concludes with, ‘I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life’ and to me, that says it all.”

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