Earlier this year, The Strategy Bridge asked university and professional military education students to participate in our fourth annual writing contest by sending us their thoughts on strategy.
Now, we are pleased to present one of the essays selected for Honorable Mention, from Joshua O. Lehman, a student at Boston College.
Partnered security operations are central to contemporary warfare, and strategists ought to employ rigorous ethics to the construction of strategies that employ other political communities. Consider American operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria as prominent examples. When partnerships occur between formal security forces of nation states, the obligations between partners are often well-codified. Long-standing alliances, like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), have comprehensive conceptions of the common good the alliance seeks to defend. Unlike these formal state-to-state alliances, partnerships with non-state actors present strategists with ethical problems. The American partnership with Kurdish fighters in Syria conducting Operation Inherent Resolve is a primary example. This complex situation exposes a lacuna in American strategy making, most notably a poverty of moral thought in considering the obligations that result from entering into partnerships with non-state political communities for the purposes of war.
These communities are composed of human persons with inherent human dignity. As such, they must not be used merely as means. The philosopher Immanuel Kant described a philosophical anthropology that insists on human persons as ends in themselves according to their rational nature: “For all rational beings stand under the law that each of them should treat himself and others never merely as means but always at the same time as an end in himself.”[1] Kant’s philosophy undergirds the arguments below. The authoritative Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes universal human dignity clear: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”[2]
These philosophical premises must inform strategists who consider the employment of partner forces. The common human dignity of these groups, especially below the level of the state, forms the basis for a state to seriously examine its obligations to any foreign group of persons. The art of this examination and the actions that follow are inherent to contemporary strategy conceived morally. It is the formulation of the common good that is integral to a just war aim. To do this, strategists need to recover two elements of strategy. First, strategy must come to rigorously include moral theory. Despite realism’s supremacy in strategic studies, realist derived strategies often end in the moral tarnishing of a state and moral injury to actors. Both of these infirmities detract from human rights and the common good towards which the entire enterprise of national security is ordered. Second, strategists must become adept at articulating the common good. This is more than defining the war aim, which may be too narrow when partner forces of different political communities are involved. As in the present Syria case study, the destruction of the common enemy did not provide a complete good towards which relationships of trust and justification of sacrifice could ultimately be fulfilled. Articulating a common good between partners is the key to morally grounded strategy among partners in war. Traditionally, the common good has been the central grounding for just war. The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria in 2019 will serve as a case study to illustrate these points.
On October 6, 2019, the United States White House press secretary announced online that the United States was withdrawing from Northern Syria. While the withdrawal could be conceived as rational from the strategic perspective, officials in the United States and in the Middle East roundly criticized the move as a morally reprehensible abandonment of an ally. Kurdish official Shervan Darwish gave voice to that outcry when he lamented, “The worst thing in military logic and comrades in the trench is betrayal.”[3] He appealed to a morality rooted in camaraderie and shared military burden. American soldiers echoed the Kurdish position that the withdrawal was unjust and deployed moral language to criticize the withdrawal: “They trusted us and we broke that trust.”[4] These experiential accounts present the moral dilemma between the war aim and a sense of common good between partners.
T.E. Lawrence recounts this moral predicament in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence was a British intelligence officer with an official mission to organize and direct surrogate forces to support British operations in Palestine during World War I. In doing so, he also became a trusted advisor to the Arab forces. Lawrence’s deep embedding with the partner force presents a tension between the logic of camaraderie and the necessity of duties to the war aim. Lawrence recounts:
But, not being a perfect fool, I could see that if we won the war the promises to the Arabs were dead paper. Had I been an honourable advisor I would have sent my men home, and not let them risk their lives for such stuff. Yet the Arab inspiration was our main tool in winning the Eastern war. So I assured them that England kept her word in letter and spirit. In this comfort they performed their fine things: but, of course, instead of being proud of what we did together, I was continually and bitterly ashamed.[5]
The Arabian Commission to the Peace Conference at Versailles and its advisors. Emir Feisal with, from left to right, Mohammed Rustum Bey Haidar of Baalbek, Brigadier General Nuri Pasha Said, Captain Pisani, T E Lawrence and Captain Hassan Bey Kadri. (Imperial War Museum/Wikimedia)
Lawrence’s shame at lying to his allied comrades resonates with the morality of camaraderie. It is based on an honor owed to others sharing the same, hard experience. This shared experience is one in which lives and relationships are at stake first and war aims second. Yet, even though Lawrence experiences shame at deceiving his comrades, he chooses to lie to fulfill his formal obligations. His choice identifies the war aim as the ordering principle of his actions. Lawrence’s actions demonstrate his own submission to the logic of duty against the logic of comradeship.
The agony of Lawrence’s experience is instructive in considering strategy holistically and morally. Holistically, it points to the deep personal implications of strategy. Plans made and executed do not remain incorporeal realities. Strategies come to be embodied in those executing them, and these are human persons with reason, dignity and moral being. For Lawrence, the strategy bifurcated his person into one of duty and professional excellence against the moral integrity of his person. He lied and used other human persons to achieve the goals of his government, which was, in turn, lying to the Arab forces. Ends justified means. Moral strategy making takes all of this into account, because the moral good of the persons engaged in security is a part of the entire purpose of security—the common good of the community, including all those who fight.
Strategies animated by realist power calculations do not adequately consider the moral wholeness of war as exemplified in the Lawrence case. Returning to the Syria case study, the official rationale behind the American withdrawal seems to fit a realist calculus. The 6 October announcement from the press secretary only indicates completion of the mission (defeating the Islamic State) as the reason for withdrawal. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper offered a different reason for the withdrawal on 13 October. He stated, “Fifty service members are not going to stop a Turkish advance.”[6] This reason for the withdrawal literally provides a quantitative calculation as decisive. President Trump expanded on the strategic thinking behind the withdrawal. He seems to ground the withdrawal action in a stark, but not illogical, strategic calculation that American mission completion means the end of American involvement in the war:
American forces defeated 100 percent of the ISIS caliphate during the last two years. We thank the Syrian Democratic Forces for their sacrifices in this effort. They’ve been terrific. Now Turkey, Syria, and others in the region must work to ensure that ISIS does not regain any territory. It’s their neighborhood; they have to maintain it. They have to take care of it.[7]
Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, second from left, and President Donald Trump, right. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)
The several reasons for withdrawal are grounded in chronology (the end of the mission) or in force ratio calculus (we can’t stop Turkish forces). Even critics of the action often framed it in terms of realist calculation. Retired General Joseph Votel wrote in The Atlantic, “This policy abandonment threatens to undo five years’ worth of fighting against ISIS and will severely damage American credibility and reliability in any future fights where we need strong allies.”[8] Votel’s concern here is that abandoning partners is mostly strategic folly rather than moral. Coalition and security through partners is prominent in the 21st century and the withdrawal damages future access to this currency. Finally, seeing the withdrawal as a decision from realism is consistent with the Trump administration’s theme of cost benefit analysis in defense matters.
Clausewitz observes, “One country may support another’s cause, but will never take it so seriously as it takes its own. A moderately-sized force will be sent to its help; but if things go wrong the operation is pretty well written off, and one tries to withdraw at the smallest possible cost.”[9] In the framework of realism, the decision to withdraw forces from Syria to prevent further costs and to capitalize on current benefits is “fundamentally correct.”[10] This is to not say right or just. Realism is not interested in concepts of betrayal, abandoning brothers in the trench or other like concepts that contribute to the moral experience of those enacting strategy. Realists at the Cato Institute pointed out, “The Syrian Kurds used Americans much as the Americans used them, to battle a common foe.”[11] This observation recalls and deflates the enthusiasm of the logic of comrades. Battling the common foe is a visceral experience, but it is subordinate to the political ends of the respective allied political communities. The realists importantly point out that the war and its operations serve political purposes. As Clausewitz outlined, “The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose.”[12] Realists would argue that security partnerships are means and not ends. What this line of thinking fails to deliver is just how to account for the moral reality of human persons, their communities, and their collective actions.
President Trump’s appeal to the region appears as the only moral language in the reasons for withdrawal. The region ought to be responsible for its own security. The claim is that the United States, formerly directing the operations in Northern Syria, is not responsible for anything beyond its concluded operations to defeat the Islamic State. Stated positively, the sole responsibility of the United States was achieving the enemy-centric war aim for which it set out. But what about the sacrifice that the President mentions? Does this not demand a substantial moral obligation? Considering Lawrence’s experience, the human persons by and for which a strategy is enacted comprise both the means and, ultimately, the ends towards which the strategy moves. Failing to properly account for human ends damages persons and political communities.
Do moral categories have any bearing on decisions in war? Thucydides famously presented this question in his Melian Dialogue. As with the Kurds, the Melian appeal to rightness and to friendship with the Spartans resonates emotively but results only in destruction. Lawrence seems to have sensed the same thing. The war aim mattered more than the allies, more than truth telling. Betrayal of the Kurds may be a tragedy, but it is not wrong according to the cold strategic logic. The Athenians would summarize, “...since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”[13] This illustrates the problems with strategy formulated along realist lines. Political goals formed in realist conceptions weighed against relative power leave moral agony at all levels of war. The war aim may be achieved, but it is purchased at the expense of human persons and communities as means to ends. Classically, this is descriptive of subverting the common good and waging unjust war.
Philosopher Michael Walzer presents an argument against realism by considering the relationship between strategy and morality in Just and Unjust Wars: “Moral concepts and strategic concepts reflect the real world in the same way.”[14] He sees the similarity in that both use normative and descriptive terms to describe human activity.[15] These terms bring coherency to situations and, “when their substantive content is fairly clear…can be used imperatively, and the wisdom they embody expressed in the form of rules.”[16] Walzer then presents the similarity between the strategist and the moral theorist as they evaluate the messy situations they are describing or directing. The key is that the strategist can see when the plan is not being executed as described just as the moral theorist will witness “that his rules are often violated or ignored.”[17] The casting aside of moral principles does not make them unreal. The choosing itself is the act of a responsible human agent. As Walzer says, the moral theorist “does not surrender his sense of war as a human action, purposive and premeditated, for whose effects someone is responsible.”[18] Walzer calls this common understanding of agency and responsibility in war the “moral reality of war.”[19]
This is evident in the Lawrence case. He knows the shame of misleading those who trust in him. He also knows the obligation of fulfilling his duty. It is tragic that these are brought into conflict. But it still stands that the actors understand the moral meaning of their choices. Moving from the personal tactical actions of Lawrence to the operational and strategic levels of his war, the British undoubtedly recognized the dishonor in lying to their Arab allies. They chose to lie to achieve their strategic ends. Walzer’s theory of the moral reality of war explains that the British knew the meaning of lying when they chose to do this and thus they chose a moral wrong. Moral meanings exist even if they are neglected. The moral reality of war shows that strategists can and do find moral meaning in war decisions. It is a question of whether or not they make these meanings central to strategy.
The moral reality of war is what those who participate in war experience. Consider What It Is Like to Go to War, the war memoir of Vietnam veteran Karl Marlantes. The entire work wrestles with the morality of war and its spiritual impact on those who participate.[20] The moral reality of war is also what the people of a democratic republic experience when their nation goes to war. Public questions revolve around whether it is right to go to war; people take stands for or against the war according to moral arguments. This matters because war in a democratic society is inherently public. It’s why jus ad bellum calls for war to be declared publicly by the proper authority. When strategists read Clausewitz and see the centrality of policy, they should understand that policy in a democratic society is, in some fashion, rooted in political dialogue and shaped by national values. Strategists cannot practice their art devoid of a moral language. Without it, they cannot articulate the common good towards which a war must aim and under which operations are ordered in such a way that the moral integrity of the state and those who act on behalf of the state remain intact. Formulation of the common good is the capstone requirement for a moral strategic theory in any case, and especially of fighting along diverse partners in the trench.
While the principle of human dignity forms the basis on which to build a moral strategy of working with partners, the classic Just War Tradition offers a rigorous framework on which to build moral strategies. Ancient in origin, the Just War Tradition benefits from the longevity of historical experience. More importantly, it is deeply concerned with the moral reality of war. The tradition has long held that the common good is central to understanding war. Augustine, one of the earliest philosophers of just war, explains:
A great deal depends on the causes for which men undertake wars, and on the authority they have for doing so; for the natural order which seeks the peace of mankind, ordains that a monarch should have the power of undertaking war if he thinks advisable, and that the soldiers should perform their military duties in behalf of the peace and safety of the community.[21]
Augustine’s first principle is the cause of the war. The Just War Tradition makes this the point of departure for understanding the morality of war. Brian Orend has convincingly argued that just cause today is linked to the purposes of the state’s existence, namely, “realizing the human rights of its people.”[22] When a state comes to the defense of another state in alliance, shared interest in human rights must be assumed. It takes the form of security pacts, treaties, formalized alliances, etc. More often than not, non-state actors do not receive the same opportunity to participate in conceptions of the common good. In Syria, American interests directed the efforts of Kurdish fighters, but there was no overarching common good beyond the destruction of the enemy. The withdrawal decision in 2019 and the subsequent offensive actions of Turkey demonstrate the United States did not have a fully formed sense of mutual security with the Kurdish force. At the root of the American-Kurdish partnership was a shared enemy, but little else.
Second in Augustine’s explanation is the decision for war by proper authority. War is not a private citizen’s enterprise. It is an effort of the community and for the community. Augustine’s monarch considers if the war is advisable. Strategists can consider the monarch as the entity that makes decisions for war in dialogue with advisors. The competent authority does not make war decisions for its own considerations of power, but rather with respect to the community. Here, contemporary just war theorists point to the moral weight of the civil-military dialogue, the “strategic level, the level at which senior political and military leaders set war aims, identify strategies and policies and conduct campaigns to achieve those aims, and establish the coordinative bodies necessary to translate plans into actions.”[23] This is also the level where diplomats, military and intelligence officers, and political leaders form alliances and partnerships to prosecute the war aim. In World War I, this is the level where those entrusted with the British war effort determined it was best to use Arab forces and mask political goals for the region, leading to the moral agony of the operators on the ground and an instance of immoral colonialism woven into the national heritage. This is the level where American officials made decisions to employ Kurdish surrogate forces toward the end of achieving American security objectives.
These examples serve to show the poverty of strategic theory when it fails to conceive of the security of the community, that is all who share the military burden, as the purpose of the war. In the case of Syria, the United States identified a security threat and an instrument to destroy that threat at minimum risk to American forces. What this approach lacked morally was the formulation of a common good among partners that is rooted in a basic respect for human political communities enlisted to achieve the ends of another state. The poverty of this system comes to the fore in the sense of betrayal that American soldiers experienced during the 2019 withdrawal.
Augustine’s third point brings this home. The soldiers tasked with executing the war do so not for the monarch, but “in behalf of the peace and safety of the community.”[24] The common good of the community, specifically in terms of peace and safety, is the organizing principle of security institutions and war. This seemingly simple thought does two things. First, it points out that the center of gravity in defense is foremost the people defended, not relative power positions. Power balances may be important in strategic thinking, but alone they fail to account for the moral reality of war. The just war tradition has long understood common good as central not from naivety but from the deliberate attempt to limit the violent phenomenon of war. It is a question of ultimate purposes and assumptions about the role of human persons and groups of persons in war. The purpose of war is to return to the “tranquility of order” so that members of political communities may live flourishing human lives.[25] Or, as theorists such as Orend contend, to ensure the security of human rights.
Syrian Kurds protesting outside a U.S.-led international coalition base near the Turkish border in Syria. (Delil Souleiman/AFP)
But what community do states defend? Historically the community is that group to which an agent belongs. Contemporary global interconnectivity challenges this idea. It is often stated that war between China and the United States is inadmissible because of the inevitable damage to the global economy. Community means something broader today. America’s wars in the 21st century have been framed as being for the good of the global community against universal threats from terrorism. Intervention doctrines like the right to protect rest on the broadest conception of a global community. As community comes to be increasingly inclusive globally, it is right for the strategist to both define the community of a partnership as both distinct from other communities (global or otherwise) but based on more than shared tasks. This latter comes from the increasing understanding of the universal dignity of man regardless of political affiliation or state citizenship. Security partners, at some level, engage in war to both defend against threat and to protect a common good.
The temptation will be to reduce the common good to the defeat of the enemy when dealing with non-state partner forces. As a counterexample, NATO members conceive of the alliance as having both political and military dimensions. The political dimension “promotes democratic values and enables members to consult and cooperate on defense and security-related issues to solve problems, build trust and, in the long run, prevent conflict.”[26] The political dimension of NATO exemplifies two important ideas of allied common good. First, it identifies positively the shared values rooted in the democratic tradition that form the common enterprise. Second, it illustrates the importance of a trust-based cooperation that is necessary between states to respect sovereignty. The centrality of values and relational method fortify the alliance as an effort of the common good. Here strategists can also consider analogies of interpersonal relations. The member states are like persons recognizing their respective and equal dignity. The members are ends in themselves.
Given the premises from Kant and human rights, it must be that unequal, non-state partners also demand moral obligations. How to recognize this dignity does not have the clarity that inter-state legal structures provide, but this is all the more reason for strategists to conceive strategy morally. The gravity of war and its effects on persons demands it. In security partnerships with non-state actors, a morally informed strategy will begin with recognizing the dignity of the non-state political community by virtue of their being an association of human persons and as such having inherent human dignity. They can never be used merely as a means. Beginning from this principled start point, strategists then consider the character of the potential partners. This is the process of determining if a common good is possible. What this may look like is as varied as the contingencies of history, but it should be related to shared political values that form the moral basis for a shared vision to build trust and to envision post-war justice. The withdrawal from Syria illustrates this dilemma. Not only was the United States unprepared to recognize the sacrifice of a people employed on behalf of the United States, but it resulted in the moral injury of what many called betrayal.
Further, a partnership based on shared values and trust morally validates those who actually participate in the war. It shields soldiers from the moral injury that results from abandoning intimate relationships formed in the trenches. Here the logic of camaraderie is important to consider. While the limitations of the comrade experience prevent it from becoming the guiding strategic principle, the experience is definitive for those who participate in war. States have an obligation to the well being of soldiers. Chief among these obligations is the justness of the war. As Augustine points out, soldiers are fighting for the community, not the monarch. In a security partnership, this community includes all of those fighting together in the trench and those strategists engaged in building the architecture of security that has led to the trench. Lawrence was ashamed of his operations in Arabia. Special Operations Forces were ashamed of abandoning the Kurds in Syria. Shame is a real indicator of moral privation in war and it must be taken seriously by strategists who conceive of war holistically as emanating from the community and returning to the community in the personal experience of veterans.
Warfare in the 21st century will be formed by its global context. This means alliances and partnerships will continue to be central to how states fight wars. Western democracies have grappled with the concept of non-state enemy actors over the last two decades but have thought little about non-state partners and moral obligations owed to those partners. A realist calculus of transactional security fails to take account of the moral reality of war. It results in unjust war and moral injury to those who engage in war. It tarnishes the state’s way of war by reducing groups of persons into means rather than recognizing their proper dignity as ends in themselves. Strategists working today must formulate the common good among those political communities that agree to partnership in war. At a minimum, this must include the analogy of political communities as persons who retain inherent human dignity as ends in themselves. It must also include the deliberate effort to formulate a positive good that is not narrowly the destruction of an enemy but is a basis of trust leading to a mutual, better peace.
Joshua O. Lehman is a U.S. Army Special Forces officer studying philosophy at Boston College in preparation for service with West Point’s Department of English and Philosophy. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect the position of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
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Header Image: St. Augustine of Hippo, progenitor of Just War Theory (YouTube)
Notes:
[1] Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1993), 39.
[2] UN General Assembly, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” 217 (III) A (Paris, 1948), https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/index.html.
[3] Eric Schmitt et al. “Pullback Leaves Green Berets Feeling ‘Ashamed,’ and Kurdish Allies Describing ‘Betrayal’.” New York Times, October 13, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/13/world/middleeast/kurds-syria-turkey-trump.html.
[4] Schmitt, “Pullback.”
[5] T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 283.
[6] Eric Schmitt and Barnes, “Trump Orders Withdrawal of U.S. Troops from Northern Syria,” New York Times, October 13, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/13/us/politics/mark-esper-syria-kurds-turkey.html.
[7] Donald Trump, “Remarks by President Trump on the Situation in Northern Syria,” The White House, October 23, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-situation-northern-syria/.
[8] Joseph Votel and Elizabeth Dent, “The Danger of Abandoning Our Partners,” The Atlantic, October 8, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/10/danger-abandoning-our-partners/599632/.
[9] Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 603.
[10] Doug Bandow and Christopher Preble, “Lost in the Furor over Syria: Alliances are a Means, not an End,” War on the Rocks, October 23, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/10/lost-in-the-furor-over-syria-alliances-are-a-means-not-an-end/.
[11] Bandow, “Lost.”
[12] Clausewitz, On War, 87.
[13] Thucydides, The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, ed. Robert B. Strassler (New York: Free Press, 1996), 352.
[14] Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 14.
[15] Walzer, Wars, 14.
[16] Walzer, Wars, 14.
[17] Walzer, Wars, 15.
[18] Walzer, Wars, 15.
[19] Walzer, Wars, 15.
[20] Karl Marlantes, What It Is Like to Go to War (New York: Grove Press, 2011).
[21] Augustine, “Reply to Faustus the Manichean,” in War and Christian Ethics: Classic and Contemporary Readings on the Morality of War, ed. Arthur F. Holmes (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005), 65.
[22] Orend, The Morality of War (Toronto: Broadview Press 2013), 35.
[23] James M. Dubik, Just War Reconsidered: Strategy, Ethics, and Theory (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2016), 13.
[24] Augustine, “Reply to Faustus the Manichean,” in War and Christian Ethics: Classic and Contemporary Readings on the Morality of War, ed. Arthur F. Holmes (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005), 65.
[25] Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), 690.
[26] “What is NATO?,” NATO, accessed May 28, 2020, https://www.nato.int/nato-welcome/index.html.