2 February 2016

Military Ethics and Moral Injury: experts on dilemmas of war

MIRIAM COSIC

JANUARY 30, 2016

Innovations in warfare keep adding to the philosophical conundrums surrounding battlefield conduct.

Sane people resist killing, whether from physical repulsion or moral scruple. In times of war, they must be primed to do it — with flags, drums, bagpipes, trumpets, battle cries, propaganda, exhortations to patriotism and honour, the berserkers’ frenzy. Even so, soldiers’ compunction causes them to desert, to shoot to miss, to drop bombs wide.

And yet, once the blood is raised the opposite also happens. Fighting goes out of control, to the death and on to mutilation. Rape of unarmed non-combatants is a timeless instrument of war, and the razing of houses, towns and crops the final act of total war.

The ancient world privileged what it thought of as the “necessities” of power, honour and revenge. “Laws are silent amid the clash of arms,” Cicero wrote. In the Christian era, leaving aside the Crusades and the colonial wars of conquest for a moment, the idea was planted that restraint was morally required.


Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century was the first to go beyond vague admonitions and lay down a framework. Two centuries later, Spanish and Portuguese theologians of the School of Salamanca developed it to a point of sophistication and liberality that would surprise us today. Francisco Suarez, for example, argued against the wars of colonial occupation that made the Iberian Peninsula rich, in terms that presaged contemporary human rights theory. Hugo Grotius, the great Dutch philosopher of international law, and others added to the body of work. Just war theory was born. It came to cover in detail the morality of going to war (jus ad bellum), conduct in waging it (jus in bello), and the settlements that end it.

It didn’t prevent the horrors. In the aftermath of World War II, however, and despite the futility of World War I settlements, the Geneva Conventions were written into international law. The brutality of war has continued, of course: from Agent Orange in Vietnam to Sarin gas in Syria, to barrel bombs and expanding bullets, to the targeting of those emblematic non-combatants, medics and reporters, since the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and the deliberate terror targeting of civilians in today’s “asymmetric” wars.

Even as technology magnifies the depravity of war, work on just war theory continues. Why bother, you say? Because the moral quandaries are shape-shifting all the time. Our ethical values change. Weaponry develops. A totally new field, for example, is the ethics of drone warfare. When a soldier can sit comfortably in an office in Virginia, where several drone bases are located, and bomb a suburb in Syria 9000km away, the moral questions are clearly distant from those of hand-to-hand combat.

Another new field is that of “moral injury”: the symptomless emotional wounds left by having seen the horrors of war, which upends one’s whole moral and interpersonal framework.

Two new books deal with these subjects. Key Concepts in Military Ethics, edited by philosopher Deane-Peter Baker, a former military officer, is a collection of essays written by academics and based on a MOOC (massive open online course) designed for military personnel as well as non-specialists.

Its 38 chapters cover topics as diverse as the various schools of moral philosophy, conscription, responsibility to protect, necessity and proportionality, pacifism, the doctrine of double effect, terrorism and cyber warfare. Each section is concise and sharp.

Something more than curiosity should lead a general reader to this book. War and terrorism dominate the news and the sheer ubiquity of horrifying images prevents us from looking away, morally speaking.

The damage done to the American war in Vietnam by the dissemination of the famous picture of the little girl, napalmed, running down the road in pain was the beginning of the end of secrecy in war. And although the American military — or the politicians who ultimately command it — responded by insisting reporters be “embedded” in later wars, the rise of smartphones and social media gives civilians in Homs or Raqqa the power to disseminate images of the destruction witnessed in their neighbourhoods.

We, like many Western nations, have had troops deployed in the Middle East, under American leadership, for 13 years. As citizens, we are responsible for them. A more educated and nuanced response than a simple “Oh my god!”, or kneejerk bellicosity or pacifism, is required from all of us to news from there.

Moral Injury: Unseen Wounds in an Age of Barbarism is something different, though a few contributors have written for both collections. These essays are by psychologists, military historians and, most importantly, by chaplains and ex-soldiers who have served in combat arenas, and are intended for a wider audience. The editor, Tom Frame, has written widely on military history and ethics. After serving in the navy for 15 years, he became an Anglican minister and was bishop to the Australian Defence Force for five years, from just before 9/11 and through the ADF’s deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq.

In his introduction, Frame explains that the concept of moral injury arose as US researchers realised that something other than post-traumatic stress disorder was troubling returned veterans. “Initially,” he writes, “moral injury was seen as a subset of PTSD that manifested itself principally in a disordered personal values system.”

It was damage done by serving where norms of civil society had collapsed and people displayed little regard for the basic decencies, let alone the formalities of international humanitarian law. As a result, people strug­gle to identify right and wrong, good and bad, in their everyday lives even after they return home.

It was quickly realised that moral injury exists apart from PTSD. What’s more, moral injury tends to remain silent, hidden from view, to an even greater extent than the symptoms of PTSD. Veterans were on their own, grappling with what Frame calls “the health of a person’s soul and state of their moral being”.

Frame outlines “the age of barbarism” that unfolded after the uneasy balance of the Cold War. Other essays cover world affairs, the Australian experience, and philosophical and religious contexts. Several of the essays are written by ministers and St John’s Anglican Church in Gordon, a suburb of Sydney, helped fund publication.

Mark Evans, a retired ADF lieutenant general explains the pressure put on soldiers by modern “three-block” warfare and “hybrid” war. In the former, soldiers may have to wage full-scale war, conduct peacekeeping operations and deliver humanitarian aid, all at once, within the space of three city blocks. In the latter, soldiers may be dealing with conventional war, irregular operations and cyber attacks. That’s a lot of missions to be juggling, without beginning to consider the moral as well as operational dissonances that inevitably arise between them.

Evans believes three scenarios may cause soldiers moral injury: a government’s decision to involve its military forces in unjust wars; ill-prepared and ill-equipped deployment to “a mission that is ambiguous, with a mandate that is vague”; loss of discipline and indifference to rule of law within the force.

Matthew Beard’s contribution is an elegantly written exploration of the moral concepts involved. Differentiating between therapeutic and philosophical approaches to his subject, he describes his working definition of moral injury as involving the “difficulties an individual faces when forced to integrate the wrongdoing of a moral authority into their broader conception of the world as a morally reliable place”.

Beard quotes a civilian interrogator instructed to used “enhanced techniques” on a detainee at Fallujah: “His memory harasses me as I once harassed him ... I failed to disobey a meritless order, I failed to protect a prisoner in my custody, and I failed to uphold the standards of human decency.”

Further on, Baird quotes another soldier who followed protocol by shooting at a car that failed to stop. A 14-year-old passenger died. “The army says I did the right thing, so why do I feel so guilty?” that man said. “How can I say I’m a good soldier and a good man when I killed an innocent boy?”

Michael Walzer’s brilliant Just and Unjust Wars has been the authority on the subject since it was published in 1977. A new preface in 2006 updated the issues for a post-9/11 world, taking in terrorism and asymmetric war and the military aim of regime change, though it was too early for drone warfare and Islamic State’s effective social media weapons. It remains the book I would most highly recommend as essential reading for anyone interested in military ethics, international relations or human rights, but these two new books are useful primers.

Miriam Cosic is a writer and critic.

Moral Injury: Unseen Wounds in an Age of Barbarism

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