President Putin made three foundational assumptions in launching his war against Ukraine that should have been correct but were not. First, Putin assumed the invasion of Ukraine would be a quick and easy fight. Second, he assumed the world would denounce the invasion but tacitly allow it. Third, Putin assumed the war would deter NATO expansion.
One hundred-and-fifty-five years after the end of the Civil War, as the growing movement to remove memorials and monuments to Confederacy suggest, it appears Lee was right in his opposition. Moreover, whatever one believes about Lee’s decision to fight for the Confederacy, it is well past time to take his advice.
Membership in the profession of arms is a tightrope walk. Just warriors manage a delicate balance between respecting human life and taking it. This is no new phenomenon, but instead has been a fact about war from the beginning. We judge Achilles, but not for killing Hector; that was his soldierly duty. There was a hope, though, that even in death, Achilles might honor Hector’s life. This was not to be. In defiling Hector’s body, Achilles dehumanized his enemy and fell to one side of the tightrope.
The concern here, however, is not that death by robot represents a more horrible outcome than when a human pulls the trigger. Rather it has to do with the nature of morality itself and the central role respect for persons, understood in the Kantian sense as something moral agents owe each other, plays in forming our moral judgments.
Even a casual viewer of the recent Burns and Novack film, The Vietnam War, comes away an understanding of the central theme of moral injury and the difficulty of the moral impacts of war on the individuals who fought and the society that sent them. While Jonathan Shay coined the term ‘moral injury’ in his seminal 1994 book Achilles in Vietnam, this issue has more recently become a prominent part of the public discourse. Concerns about PTSD, moral injury, and the return of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan from the ‘Forever War,’ as well as an increasing awareness of the so-called military/civilian culture gap. Tim O’Brien’s reading from The Things They Carried at the end of the film is especially evocative because of the public moment we find ourselves inhabiting.
Thomas Aquinas devotes a small section of his magnum opus, the Summa Theologica, to the question of whether military command is a form of moral prudence, concluding it is. Military command may resemble art, and it requires fortitude, but the exercise of command calls for prudence, which is unique among the Aristotelian virtues as cataloged by Aquinas in that it is both moral and intellectual. For the soldier, moral prudence involves a balancing act of ends and means, a golden mean of victory and its cost.
Officers need not be saints, but they must be people who are willing to confront the unavoidable ethical questions that are running through the decisions they make and the example that they set. An officer’s education and practical experience give her an instinct for prudence, but like other virtues that may be partly innate or existing it should be cultivated. Military officers should also teach prudence to those they instruct, lead, and advise. This is even more critical in times like these, when brinkmanship and imprudence amounting to impudence seem to be the orders of the day.
In the wake of nearly every scandal and moral lapse in the military, we hear the same response, “This is a leadership issue.” This view is problematic as it seems to assume all ethical matters are reducible to leadership issues or these scandals are a product of the personal morality of the leader in question. Responses like these ought to push us to ask, What is the connection and overlap between ethics and leadership in the military?
What level of moral agency, judgment, and responsibility do individual members of the military bear in war? In 2006 Lt Ehren Wahtada tried to selectively conscientiously object to deploying to Iraq, while in 2013 service members appeared on social media to proclaim they would not fight in a war in Syria[1] . These are only two examples that illustrate the way in which this debate is live and permeates military culture. On the academic side, Michael Walzer and Jeff McMahan (and their proxies) have been engaged in this debate for quite some time, pitting individualist accounts against the conventional view that soldiers are instruments of the State. I want to examine this debate and put forward an alternative view to those typically espoused, expanding and advancing the ethical discussion in the process.
For those who are involved in war—whether fighting it at the tactical level, waging it at the strategic level, or living it somewhere in between—understanding war’s moral dimension is vital. Morality and war cannot be separated, for at its very essence, war is about using, risking, damaging, taking, or protecting life itself.
Too often, strategy discussions are seen as dominated by pragmatism, while discussions about ethics are considered more abstract or theoretical. What is often missed by people who approach the Just War Tradition as an abstract theory, rather than as a true tradition, is that as part of this evolution, it has incorporated prudential calculations that acknowledge the crucial importance of context when determining a correct course of action.
A variety of media sources have reported a practice in Afghanistan called bacha bazi. Bacha bazi consists of taking young boys from their families and forcing them to entertain men, a process that often includes their molestation. Some...claim that the kidnapping and rape of Afghan boys by the United States’ Afghan allies is insignificant compared to the accomplishment of national security goals, implying that stopping bacha bazi will interfere with the accomplishment of our mission. But failing to prevent our allies from recreationally kidnapping and raping Afghan boys will hinder the United States’ efforts in Afghanistan.
