The last real victory parade in the United States was after the first Gulf War in 1991. It involved 9,000 troops and plenty of kit, which spectators were free to gawk at and climb over at the Mall. This was a different kind of celebration: for a professional force, not for draftees and for-the-duration volunteers about to return to civilian life. It made more of a victory over a third-rate opponent than was seemly. In keeping with the over-the-top mood of the time, in fact, military leaders had given serious consideration to having the Iraqis sign the armistice on the quarterdeck of the battleship Missouri, where MacArthur had imposed peace terms on the defeated Japanese in Tokyo Bay in 1945. That ludicrous proposal, like the parade, reflected less the experience of the war than a deeper, if still uneasy, sense of having wiped away a disgrace. Like so much else from the First Gulf War, it was an attempt to banish the ghosts of the unsatisfactory outcome of Korea and the failure of Vietnam. A parade served, in this case, as exorcism.

Victory parades make one kind of sense. But there are other kinds of parades, such as those at the inaugurations of Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. These included tanks and, in the cases of Eisenhower and Kennedy, atomic artillery and missiles. The United States stopped doing that. So too has another country which once celebrated its independence with a big military parade including hardware: Israel. The Israeli military parades ended in the 1970s. France, of course, has its elaborate and always spectacularly staged Bastille Day parade, which is the inspiration for our current debate. Its origins go back to 1880. France had suffered a humiliating defeat in 1870 at the ends of Germany; its politics were deeply factional, riven between secularists and Catholics, democrats and royalists. A military parade was a way of binding the country together. It became as well a symbol of French glory and power despite the unexpected defeat of 1870, the carnage of World War I, the catastrophe of 1940, and the humiliations of Indochina and Algeria.

Military parades with lots of hardware appeal to countries that have something to prove. For Israel in the 1950’s and 1960’s, it was that the tiny state had the muscle to survive; for France in the late 19th and 20th centuries that defeat and ruinous victory had not dimmed her martial prowess; for the first three presidents of the Cold War that the United States was the same country that had won World War II and could triumph in an entirely novel global contest against an opponent with weapons that could obliterate cities at a stroke.

Parades are also a way of paying tribute to the troops. The troops of the past, however, were citizen soldiers in the old sense: temporarily uniformed men (and later, women) who had answered their country’s call. As war has become for the vast majority of Americans a spectator sport, the problem becomes why, how, and to what extent public thanks is due. At one extreme there is the sentiment—darkly put out by John Kelly on a number of occasions, and most recently in his October 17, 2017, news conference about fallen soldiers—that civilians can not only never be grateful enough, but rather, must accept a position of permanent moral inferiority to those who serve.