War And The Politics Of Ethics 0198807996, 9780198807995

Table of contents :
1: Introduction2: The Paradox of Ethical War and the Politics of Ethics3: Targeting: Precision Bombing and the Production of Ethics4: Culture: Knowledge of the People as Technology of Ethics5: Ethics Education: Ethics as Ethos and the Impossibly Good Soldier6: The Politics of War at the Limits of Ethics

Citation preview

War and the Politics of Ethics

War and the Politics of Ethics Maja Zehfuss

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Maja Zehfuss 2018 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2017947630 ISBN 978–0–19–880799–5 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Für Horst Zehfuß

Preface and Acknowledgements

War is destructive and deadly. The recent streams of refugees, especially from Syria, and the risks some of them take to leave the region and enter Europe, attest to the desperate measures people will take in search of peace, in search of security for their families. The First World War is often thought to have shown that war is futile, that it is no longer good for anything. Things developed differently altogether, however. The Second World War, although even more spectacularly horrible and deadly, lent itself to being represented as a—or indeed The—Good War, the war in which good triumphed over evil, freedom and democracy over genocidal racism and totalitarianism. This apparent success in making the world a better place through war has since provided not only a trope through which war can be justified but—more than that—a moral imaginary that powerfully suggests the appropriateness or even need to wage war for the Good. This has been visible in contemporary Western war. From Kosovo to Iraq, the West has seen itself as delivering a better world to populations suffering from oppression, genocide, and other serious human rights abuses, while protecting freedom and democracy at home. Yet such war wreaks enormous destruction. Helping those in need, especially if we apparently have the capacity to do so, appears the right thing to do. We are trapped in a dilemma, however, if what we do risks killing those we ostensibly seek to protect. This book is inspired by the urgent need to think through why the apparent willingness to use force for other-regarding purposes has not helped ameliorate this situation and has, on the contrary, exacerbated it. The commitment to ethics counter intuitively legitimates and even enhances the violence of war. This book therefore provides a critical examination of Western war as a practice of ethics. Although we appear to be entering a phase in global politics where Western political leaders seem preoccupied by what happens inside the borders of their own states, the imaginary of Western war as good and capable of delivering positive change to the world is not easily disrupted; it continues to underpin a whole apparatus of warfare. Understanding the ways in which this imaginary works and fails to work is as urgent as ever. This book has taken a long time to write. It tackles big questions, and life, fortunately, has a way of interfering with research plans. I am enormously

Preface and Acknowledgements

grateful to Alison Howell and Nisha Shah who read and commented on numerous drafts and shared their insights, expertise, and ideas with exemplary generosity; their enthusiasm for the project was instrumental in enabling me to get it done. Andreja Zevnik helped me clarify my argument not just with comments on several chapters, but with wide-ranging conversations about the larger ideas involved in the project. My thanks are also, again, to Jenny Edkins and Steve Smith, whose friendship, advice, and intellectual input have been as crucial as ever. For illuminating comments on particular aspects of the project I am grateful to Tarak Barkawi, Joanna Bourke, Dan Bulley, Martin Coward, Stuart Elden, John Emery, Derek Gregory, Vivienne Jabri, Peter Lawler, Patricia Owens, James Pattison, Véronique Pin-Fat, Hillel Steiner, John Stone, and Angie Wilson. I would also like to thank my PhD students for sharing their ideas and alerting me to new avenues to investigate and questions to think through, especially Jamie Johnson and Ronan O’Callaghan, whose work relates very closely to mine. Particular thanks are due to Clare Copley and Aggie Hirst, who provided research assistance and insight in respect of chapters 3 and 4 respectively. I am grateful to Madeleine Fagan and two further anonymous reviewers for Oxford University Press for their insightful, generous, and challenging comments; their commitment to intellectual exchange was impressive. My thanks are also to Dominic Byatt for his enthusiasm and support. The University of Manchester provided me with study leave early on in the project which enabled me to conduct initial research. A significant part of this book was, however, written while serving as Associate Dean for Postgraduate Research in the Faculty of Humanities. This was possible only because the Dean, Keith Brown, supported me in creating the space to write while fulfilling a senior management role. Of course, I was only able to actually do so by relying on my excellent colleagues in the Faculty PGR team, in particular Judith Aldridge, Niqui Ellis, and Jo Kaiserman, who worked very hard to enable me to finish the book. I am very grateful to all of them. An earlier version of Chapter 3 was published as Maja Zehfuss, ‘Targeting: Precision and the Production of Ethics’, European Journal of International Relations 17:3 (2011), pp. 543–56, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/ 1354066110373559. Chapter 4 reuses some material from Maja Zehfuss, ‘Culturally Sensitive War? The Human Terrain System and the Seduction of Ethics’, Security Dialogue 43:2 (2012), pp. 175–90, http://journals.sagepub.com/ doi/10.1177/0967010612438431. Chapter 1 reproduces material that has previously served to introduce the issues in Maja Zehfuss, ‘Contemporary Western War and the Problem of Humanity’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30:5 (2012), pp. 861–76, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/ abs/10.1068/d20710. I am grateful to Sage Publishing for being able to use viii

Preface and Acknowledgements

these materials here. An earlier version of part of Chapter 4 appeared as Maja Zehfuss, ‘Staging War as Cultural Encounter’, in: Jenny Edkins and Adrian Kear (eds.), International Politics and Performance: Critical Aesthetics and Creative Practice (Abingdon: Routledge 2013), pp. 221–33. This material is reproduced with permission from Taylor & Francis. Finally, I could not write without the people who are always there, whether to help me with my books or to help me forget them, at least for a while. I am deeply grateful to Edith, Horst, Janik, Mika, and Ulrich Zehfuß and Sandra Reinfeld, Susi Rieder, and Tina Waldvogel. I am fortunate to be of a generation of Germans who have not experienced war, at least not in their own country. While it would be difficult to overlook the ways in which the Second World War and its aftermath impacted on political communities, what is perhaps less visible is how this war affected ordinary people and indeed continues to do so, if in less direct ways. My previous book started from a sense of wonder at how Germans had been able to persuade themselves in the aftermath of the Cold War that war might actually be a good thing. Clearly, this vexes me still. Yet perhaps it is the continuing but changing effect of war on people that makes me write about it. Perhaps it is why every one of my books has related to war differently. When I started writing about war, I did not know much about my father’s experience as a young child when Germany was at war and was the site of war. My academic interest generated conversations with him that I might not otherwise have had, in turn shaping my understanding of war as a lived experience. This book is dedicated to him.

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Contents

List of Abbreviations

1. Introduction 1.1 The Rise of Ethical War 1.2 Plan of the Book

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2. The Paradox of Ethical War and the Politics of Ethics 2.1 The Paradox of Ethical War 2.2 Negotiating the Paradox: Just War Thinking 2.3 The Legitimation of War 2.4 The Tragedy of Death and the Aporia of Responsibility 2.5 War and the Politics of Ethics 2.6 Conclusion

15 16 21 30 36 46 53

3. Targeting: Precision Bombing and the Production of Ethics 3.1 In Praise of Precision 3.2 Precision in Practice 3.3 Precision and Protection 3.4 Precision and the Production of Ethics 3.5 Drone Warfare and the Promise of Precision 3.6 Conclusion

56 57 62 66 73 81 87

4. Culture: Knowledge of the People as Technology of Ethics 4.1 The Rise of Culture: Towards a Battle for the People 4.2 Culture in Practice: The Counterinsurgency Manual 4.3 Social Scientists into War: The Human Terrain System 4.4 The People as the Battlefield 4.5 Social Science: Objective Knowledge as Technology of Ethics 4.6 Conclusion

91 93 100 107 112

5. Ethics Education: Ethics as Ethos and the Impossibly Good Soldier 5.1 Forces for Good 5.2 Making Good Soldiers

120 129 135 137 143

Contents

5.3 Good Soldiers, Good War? 5.4 Virtue Ethics and the Impossibly Good Soldier 5.5 Conclusion

154 165 174

6. The Politics of War at the Limits of Ethics 6.1 The Seduction of Ethics 6.2 Responding within Ethics 6.3 Responding at the Limits of Ethics 6.4 Conclusion

179 180 186 195 205

References

209 225

Index

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List of Abbreviations

AAA

American Anthropological Association

AWOL

Absent Without Leave

BCT

Basic Combat Training

CAOCL

Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning

CAPE

Center for the Army Profession and Ethic

CEAUSSIC

Commission on Anthropology’s Engagement with the Security and Intelligence Communities

CENTCOM

(US) Central Command

CEP

Circular Error Probable

CIA

Central Intelligence Agency

COIN

Counterinsurgency

CSF2

Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness

DOD

US Department of Defence

FDSP

(Yugoslav) Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement

GPS

Global Positioning System

HTA

Human Terrain Analyst

HTS

Human Terrain System

HTT

Human Terrain Team

HUMINT

Human Intelligence

ICISS

International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty

IED

Improvised Explosive Device

IRB

Institutional Review Board

ISAF

International Security Assistance Force

ISIS

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

IT

Information Technology

IVAW

Iraq Veterans Against the War

JDAMs

Joint Direct Attack Munitions

NATO

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NGO

Non-Governmental Organization

List of Abbreviations OCS

Officer Candidates School

PGMs

Precision-Guided Munitions

PTSD

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

R2P

Responsibility to Protect

RMA

Revolution in Military Affairs

ROE

Rules of Engagement

TBI

Traumatic Brain Injury

TRADOC

(US Army) Training and Doctrine Command

UAV

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

UK

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

UN

United Nations

US

United States of America

USAF

United States Air Force

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1 Introduction

In 2009, US President Barack Obama was controversially awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The irony of the Commander in Chief of a country waging several wars at the very moment of being selected for the prize that Alfred Nobel had intended to go to ‘the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses’1 was not lost on Obama himself. In his acceptance speech he made reference to this issue and acknowledged that he was ‘responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land’. Far from considering that this might make the award inappropriate, he instead presented himself as particularly attuned to the ‘costs of armed conflict’, ‘filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other’.2 Notwithstanding Obama’s spirited appropriation of the parameters of the Nobel Peace Prize, this award to the serving Commander in Chief of a state at war is remarkable; it starkly illustrates that war had been reframed since the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years earlier. In 1990, then President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev received the same prize. Reflecting on what peace means, Gorbachev explored various definitions and concluded that today ‘peace means the ascent from simple coexistence to cooperation and common creativity among countries and nations.’ He presented peace as indivisible and ideally involving the ‘absence of violence’. Peace, he said, is ‘an ethical value’. His ‘policy of new thinking’, which he believed was the basis of the award made to him, was ‘based on the conviction that at the end of the twentieth century force and arms will have to give way as a major instrument 1 Excerpt from the will of Alfred Nobel, published on the official website of the Nobel Prize, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/ (accessed 15 January 2017). 2 Barack Obama, ‘A Just and Lasting Peace’, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/ laureates/2009/obama-lecture_en.html (accessed 20 November 2011). Quotations used in this book often use the term ‘American’ when they mean ‘US’; this is obviously problematic.

War and the Politics of Ethics

in world politics’.3 Gorbachev’s speech reflects the mood of that time: the aspiration and indeed concrete hope that new forms of politics would replace military force. Francis Fukuyama famously declared the ‘end of history’4 and then US President George H.W. Bush spoke of the opportunity for a new world order: ‘a new era—freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace.’5 Today, this hopeful mood across the North and especially across what is often called the West seems difficult to even recall. Fear of violent disruptions to life now seems widespread in Western societies, or at least politicians and the media claim it is. Indeed, instead of moving towards forms of politics that would make arms redundant, we now seem to be embroiled in what has been called ‘unending war’.6 Although we may think of terrorism having precipitated this shift, Western countries involved their militaries in numerous operations immediately following the Cold War.7 These interventions were justified on the basis of claims about peace and stability but also, crucially, claims about the right thing to do in our relations with others. The importance of protecting human rights and freedom and, vice versa, of ending oppression and ethnic cleansing were prominent. Such claims highlight the envisaged benefits to people living where the wars take place: Western war is presented as making the world a better place for others, as what I will call ‘ethical war’. This produces an obvious dilemma, even a paradox. Such interventions aim to protect the lives—physically and politically—of those who are at the same time being put at risk of death, injury, and deprivation through the use of military force. There is therefore an acute tension between claims made on behalf of Western operations and their effects. The risk to those who are ostensibly to be liberated is not hypothetical: Western war has been killing many thousands.8 One obvious critique of post-Cold War Western war therefore appears to be to highlight the gap between the rhetoric and what is called reality, between the other-regarding justifications and the destructive effects. Such a critique is important but does not challenge the logic of ethical war itself. That is, it allows us to think that if only the destruction could be reduced or ideally eliminated, war would be just fine. This book therefore engages with 3 Mikhail Gorbachev, Nobel Lecture, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/ 1990/gorbachev-lecture.html (accessed 21 November 2011). 4 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books 1992). 5 George H.W. Bush, Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the Persian Gulf Crisis and the Federal Budget Deficit, 11 September 1990. 6 Mark Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples (Cambridge: Polity 2007). 7 There were, of course, also such military operations during the Cold War. These are, however, not the subject of this book. 8 See section 2.1. That other wars may have been killing even more people does not make this less true or indeed insignificant.

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Introduction

the problem of ethical war in a different way. How the West enacts its wars depends on what is available conceptually. Put differently, war does not exist independently of the way we think about it. Ethics has been central to the way Western war has been envisaged and practised. War is made through ethics. Therefore, this book interrogates the logic of ethical war, seeking to understand how the commitment to ethics shapes practice and indeed how practices come, in turn, to shape what is considered ethical in war. The book traces how the West envisages ethical war and how it seeks to ensure that its practices of warfare support the articulated ethical aims. What comes to be visible through this approach is that the problem is not one of insufficient implementation of ethically motivated constraints; rather the practices of ethical war both produce and undermine the asserted aims. While one might expect that ethical considerations would act as a constraint, what emerges from my analysis is that instead, the commitment to ethics enables war and indeed enhances its violence.

1.1 The Rise of Ethical War Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, we seem to have found ourselves in apparently unending and supposedly inevitable war.9 While it is now difficult even to remember the hopeful mood that existed across Europe and North America just two decades earlier, peace had been meant to break out after the end of the Cold War. How could the environment change so profoundly that retrospectively it appears as though we could only ever end up here? For some it is straightforward: everything changed on 11 September 2001. This day marked the shift from the end of history to the age of (the war on) terror. The idea of September 11 as a turning point relies on the assumption that, following the end of the Cold War, the former superpowers and their allies— the part of the globe often referred to as the West—were on the road not merely to an absence of violent conflict but to practising genuine peace. On this basis, contemporary conflict represents a rupture that appears to have been triggered by the events of September 11 and maintained by often religiously expressed fanaticism. This means that Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, ISIS, and others create violence that affects the West in various ways—through direct or potential terrorist attacks, producing streams of refugees, or indeed

9 ‘Unending war’ is Duffield’s term. Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War. The US Army talks about ‘persistent conflict’. See George W. Casey Jr, ‘Comprehensive Soldier Fitness: A Vision for Psychological Resilience in the U.S. Army’, American Psychologist 66:1 (2011), p. 1 and Paul T. Berghaus and Nathan L. Cartagena, ‘Developing Good Soldiers: The Problem of Fragmentation Within the Army’, Journal of Military Ethics 12:4 (2013), p. 291.

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War and the Politics of Ethics

rattling our conscience as we witness the violence which ordinary people within their reach are being subjected to. In other words, war arrives from what is imagined as the outside. While September 11 is presented as a sharp rupture—as violence arriving in the heartland of the United States out of the blue—the West construed violent conflicts as taking place elsewhere but calling on its capabilities and responsibilities long before this supposed turning point. Violence did not somehow arrive on the sunny morning of 11 September 2001. The United States and thirty-three allies were at war within months of the momentous events signalling the end of the Cold War, such as the disbanding of the Warsaw Pact and the unification of Germany. The 1991 Gulf War—supported by rhetoric that suggested Saddam Hussein was a new Adolf Hitler—was short and led to an overwhelming military victory for the United States and its allies. The comparatively low death toll on the side of the coalition—327 Western military personnel were killed10—combined with the spectacular images shown on Western television celebrating hightechnology warfare, supported a popular perception that thanks to its superior weaponry the West was able to lead wars with little damage either to itself or to others. This belief in the efficacy of the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) has always been hotly contested, but there can be little doubt that the display of ‘smart weapons’ in the Gulf War affected the perception of war. ‘Bloodless’ war appeared to have become (more) possible, and this in turn meant that using force seemed less costly. It now appeared possible to protect lives while at war, certainly those of Western combatants but also increasingly those of civilians in the warzone. This profound change in the West’s relation to its own wars was vividly captured in the idea that, for the West, war had become akin to a spectator sport.11 At the same time, what Anne Orford calls a ‘new interventionism, or willingness to use force in the name of humanitarian values’ shaped international politics.12 Because death and damage could apparently be limited, resorting to war to resolve conflicts and to help others had become a serious option. The 1992 US intervention in Somalia demonstrated this potential. As Nicholas J. Wheeler puts it, it ‘seemed that an era might be dawning in which Western governments [ . . . ] would use their armies to save strangers in places far away from home’.13 This impression was underlined when the UN Security Council 10 Martin Shaw, The New Western Way of War: Risk-Transfer War and its Crisis in Iraq (Cambridge: Polity Press 2005), p. 10. 11 Colin McInnes, Spectator-Sport War: The West and Contemporary Conflict (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers 2002). 12 Anne Orford, Reading Humanitarian Intervention: Human Rights and the Use of Force in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003), p. 2. 13 Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000), p. 172.

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Introduction

for the first time authorized an intervention without the consent of the government of the target state for openly humanitarian reasons.14 Wheeler also notes as ‘ground-breaking’ that several members expressed the view that the Security Council had ‘a moral responsibility to save the victims of famine and civil strife’.15 While the Somalia intervention is now perhaps most remembered for the United States’ inglorious withdrawal following the ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident, the trend towards humanitarian intervention continued. Saving strangers and thus protecting their lives appeared to have become a real possibility. Debate about the possibility and merits of humanitarian intervention was a significant feature of public and academic discourse in the 1990s, especially around the issue of what came to be called ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia. Operation Allied Force, NATO’s 1999 intervention in respect of Kosovo, came to be seen as a turning point. Then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, a vocal supporter of this intervention, asserted that Bismarck famously said the Balkans were not worth the bones of one Pomeranian Grenadier. Anyone who has seen the tear stained faces of the hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming across the border, heard their heart-rending tales of cruelty or contemplated the unknown fates of those left behind, knows that Bismarck was wrong.16

Elsewhere in this speech Blair highlighted national interests as important, but his argument that the Kosovo intervention was ‘justified’ was based on the asserted compassion for the fate of Kosovar Albanians. This operation remains significant because it was seen to break new ground in that ‘a group of states explicitly justified their use of force against another state on humanitarian grounds in a context where there was no explicit Security Council authorization’.17 It was also regarded as the culmination of a wider trend towards humanitarian war. Western countries and their alliances increasingly claimed to fight for humanitarian reasons, in defence of human rights.18 The Kosovo operation itself was justified as legitimate (due to

14

15 Wheeler, Saving Strangers, p. 172. Wheeler, Saving Strangers, p. 185. Tony Blair, Speech at the Chicago Economic Club, 22 April 1999. 17 Wheeler, Saving Strangers, p. 242; see also Costas Douzinas, ‘Humanity, Military Humanism and the New Moral Order’, Economy and Society 32:2 (2003), p. 171. 18 On this, see, for example, Orford, Reading Humanitarian Intervention; Christopher Coker, Humane Warfare (London: Routledge 2001); Adam Roberts, ‘Humanitarian War: Military Intervention and Human Rights’, International Affairs 69:3 (1993), pp. 429–49; Danilo Zolo, Invoking Humanity: War, Law and Global Order, trans. Federico and Gordon Poole (London: Continuum 2002); Vivienne Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2007); Costas Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish 2007); and Maja Zehfuss, ‘Contemporary Western War and the Problem of Humanity’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30:5 (2012), pp. 861–76. 16

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being humanitarian) despite being illegal.19 That is, it was defended in explicitly ethical terms. In contrast to the line of argument that paints violence as having returned to Western politics on 11 September 2001 and in its aftermath, it is clear that Western states deployed military force throughout the post-Cold War period. Indeed, this was seen as the right thing to do.20 Ostensibly, justifications for the uses of force by the West shifted after the events of September 11, however. Suddenly, using force appeared to be all about responding to terror: protection, pre-emption, and punishment rather than saving strangers in distress. This shift was significant in generating reasons to fight and therefore deployments. Yet in an important sense it was superficial. The ethical overtones—particularly around the protection of those unable to protect themselves—that had become significant in the immediate post-Cold War period lost none of their power. Indeed, the so-called war on terror is itself, as Christopher Coker puts it, ‘an inherently ethical struggle’.21 The military operation that was, prima facie, a response to the events of September 11 and the first step in the fight against terror—Operation Enduring Freedom—was initially named Operation Infinite Justice. While this name was withdrawn due to protests from Muslim groups, it highlights the role that ethical claims play in arguments for contemporary military operations. What was meant was arguably justice and freedom for those killed on September 11 and the US population more broadly, but these tropes provided the scope for incorporating claims about the benefits of these operations to those whose countries were being attacked. Operations in Afghanistan, for example, were promoted on the basis that women had to be liberated from the oppressive Taliban regime.22 Similarly, the invasion of Iraq was justified not merely by the need to find and disable weapons of mass destruction but by the idea that Iraqis needed to be freed from Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship. Supporting the United States in this context was, in Blair’s view, ‘right morally and strategically’.23 The conclusion of Colonel Tim Collins’ impromptu address to troops of the 1st Battalion of the British Army’s Royal Irish Regiment as they were readying to invade Iraq succinctly captured the idea that the West can make a positive difference through war without too much of a cost: ‘let’s bring everyone home and leave Iraq a better place for us having been there.’24 19

See Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire; Wheeler, Saving Strangers. For more on this and a discussion of the problems with the humanitarian justification, see Zehfuss, ‘Contemporary Western War’. 21 Christopher Coker, Ethics and War in the 21st Century (Abingdon: Routledge 2008), p. 4. 22 See Keally McBride and Annick T.R. Wibben, ‘The Gendering of Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan’, Humanity (summer 2012), pp. 199–215. 23 Tony Blair, A Journey (London: Arrow Books 2011), p. 424. 24 Tim Collins, ‘Colonel Tim Collins’ Speech’, https://journal.dajobe.org/journal/2003/03/ collins/ (accessed 28 May 2015). 20

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Introduction

In sum, there was no momentous shift in the conceptualization and use of military force in response to the events of September 11. The sense that defenceless others needed protecting survived into the twenty-first century; it came to be expressed not least in the idea of a ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P). The 1994 Rwandan genocide and the 1995 Srebrenica massacre had not been averted despite the interventionist humanitarian spirit prevailing in the 1990s. The norm of state sovereignty was seen to be in tension with attempts to protect populations within other states. In 2000, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan published a report entitled We the Peoples in which he asked: ‘if humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica—to gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?’25 Later that same year the Canadian government established the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) to respond to this question. It was the ICISS’s report that framed the issue as one of ‘responsibility to protect’,26 a term which has since generated a great deal of debate and gained enormous currency. R2P, as it came to be known, was adopted well after 11 September 2001, at the 2005 World Summit of the then 191 UN member states.27 It now applies to cases of genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity,28 although the ICISS report had identified a broader range of ‘conscience-shocking’ situations, including mass starvation and significant environmental catastrophes.29 R2P envisages prevention and post-conflict support, making it much wider than military intervention. Nevertheless, the possibility of using force is a significant part of the concept. Two points are worth drawing out. First, there have been numerous military operations involving Western countries since the end of the Cold War. Contrary to the hope when the political landscape shifted in the late 1980s, peace did not break out. This was not because somehow conflict appeared on the West’s doorstep, although the geographical proximity of the Balkan Wars heightened the sense that something had to be done. Rather, the West pursued a proactive intervention strategy, formulating and enacting the view that it had the ability and responsibility to help make the world a better place for others. This development was neither started by nor limited to the conflicts in 25 United Nations General Assembly, We The Peoples, Report of the Secretary General, 54th session, 27 March 2000, A/54/2000*, C217. 26 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), The Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre 2001). 27 United Nations General Assembly, 2005 World Summit Outcome, 60th session,15 September 2005, A/60/L.1, pp. 138–40. 28 United Nations General Assembly, Implementing the Responsibility to Protect, Report by the Secretary General, 63rd session, 12 January 2009, A/63/677, 10b. 29 ICISS, Responsibility to Protect, 4.20.

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War and the Politics of Ethics

the former Yugoslavia. This interventionist disposition has been reflected not least in how Western militaries represent themselves. The UK Defence Vision has been to be a ‘force for good in the world’,30 for example, while until 2015 the US Navy used the strapline ‘A Global Force for Good’.31 Western countries increasingly engaged in war on a regular basis because doing so was seen as an appropriate solution to perceived ethical problems. This ‘Good War revival’32 significantly invokes a moral order. Western war is presented and justified as bringing benefits to those on the receiving end. While the ‘inner compulsion’ of the ‘liberal conscience’ and its role in justifying war are not exactly new,33 its post-Cold War articulation merged commitment and capacity in a particular way. The emerging ability to wield ‘discriminate’ force from a distance— first visible to the public in the 1991 Gulf War—was crucial in producing ethical war as the solution to the predicament of serious human rights abuses. The point is not that the West’s wars are humanitarian in the sense of fulfilling a set of criteria for other-regarding interventions; rather, the boundary between apparently altruistic and apparently self-interested operations is no longer recognized in the production of Western war as good.34 Second, this production of war as an instrument of ethics has affected its practice. The commitment to changing the world merges visions of what should be done and beliefs of what can be done. In respect of the ‘liberal interventions’ of the 1990s Michael Ignatieff pointed out that ‘[v]ery often [ . . . ] the moral reflex—“something must be done”—was sustained by the unexamined assumption that we had the power to do anything.’35 This fusion also found expression in the attitude of the ‘United States in the age of [George W.] Bush’, which according to Andrew J. Bacevich highlighted ‘an extreme certainty in the righteousness of American actions married to an extraordinary confidence in the efficacy of American arms’.36 This is a sentiment shared by Chris Hedges: We believe that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to wage war. We embrace the dangerous self-delusion that we are on a providential mission to save the rest of the world from itself, to implant our virtues—which we see as superior to all other virtues—on others, and that we have a right to do this by force.37

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Ministry of Defence, Defence Plan 2010–2014 (2010), p. 4. For more on this see section 5.1. 32 Helen Dexter, ‘New War, Good War and the War on Terror: Explaining, Excusing and Creating Western Neo-interventionism’, Development and Change 38:6 (2007), p. 1069. 33 Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience: The George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures, 1977 (London: Temple Smith 1978), p. 11. 34 For the detail of this argument, see Zehfuss, ‘Contemporary Western War’. 35 Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (London: Chatto & Windus 1998), p. 96. 36 Andrew J. Bacevich, ‘Trigger Man: In Paul Wolfowitz, Messianic Vision Meets Faith in the Efficacy of Force’, The American Conservative, 6 June 2005. 37 Chris Hedges, ‘Foreword’, in: Dahr Jamail, The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books 2010), p. ix. 31

8

Introduction

Although the sense of ‘providential mission’ is particular to the United States, these observations highlight the way in which moral considerations and assessments of feasibility are mutually constitutive. The upshot is that, from the perspective of the West, war appears geographically distant but morally required and therefore unending.38 The Cold War was followed not by increasingly universal peace but instead by a ‘partial moral rehabilitation of armed force (including the widespread acceptance of its use as an instrument of justice in an emerging “new world order”)’.39 Put differently, ‘humanitarian ideals’ became ‘a key component in the justification of contemporary violence’.40 While the moral legitimation authorizes and therefore potentially increases the frequency of war, it also affects how war may be conducted. That is, ethical war is not just a solution to perceived problems, therefore determining when we might rightly engage in it, it is also a practice that is shaped by the vision that drives it. This is crucial. Lord General Richard Dannatt even argues that ethical and moral issues are now more important in contemporary conflicts than physical ones.41 This apparent enthusiasm for ethics is often uncritically and incorrectly taken to mean that contemporary Western war is constrained by ethics and therefore somehow less violent, more benign. A critical engagement with the phenomenon of ethical war as a practice is therefore overdue.

1.2 Plan of the Book This book takes its cue from the way in which post-Cold War Western war has been positioned as ethical war and argues that far from constraining the violence, this commitment to and invocation of ethics has served to legitimize war and even to enhance its violence. It will argue that ethics can serve this (political) purpose because it is (impossibly) construed as distinct from politics. This is what I call the politics of ethics. Before the plan for making this argument can be set out, it is necessary to pause over how I have configured the issue. First, this book examines post-Cold War Western war. Thus, I am asserting, at least implicitly, that such war might be identified as an object of analysis, that is, as somehow distinct from non-Western war. ‘The West’ is of course a 38 At the same time, violence appears to increasingly penetrate Western societies. Although one might therefore argue that war is no longer distant, the discourse of war by and large avoids this problem by conceiving this as terrorism rather than war. 39 A.J. Coates, The Ethics of War, 2nd edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2016), p. 186. 40 Ronan O’Callaghan, Walzer, Just War and Iraq: Ethics as Response (Abingdon: Routledge 2016), p. 3. 41 General Lord Dannatt, The Battle for Hearts and Minds: Morality and Warfare Today, Annual Lecture 2011 (London: Theos 2013), p. 25. General Lord Dannatt was Chief of the General Staff in the United Kingdom between 2006 and 2009.

9

War and the Politics of Ethics

problematic overgeneralization. Nevertheless, ‘Western war’ is used advisedly;42 the discourse produces ‘Western war’ as something that can be identified, analysed, praised, and criticized.43 While the West is not coherent, homogenous, or clearly demarcated, the idea of war for the good of others— what I am calling ‘ethical war’—is not only discursively attached to ‘the West’ but is articulated in support of war across Western countries.44 Equally, while there may be debate about when the Cold War ended, or indeed about whether it ever did, the events leading to the unification of Germany and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact provide a temporal marker. The book does not claim that everything changed around 1990. Indeed, if anything, post-Cold War Western war is an iteration of earlier versions of Western war; these are, however, not the concern of this book. Second, I use the phrase ‘ethical war’ to sum up the idea that war is pursued in the name of the good. More specifically, ‘ethical war’ involves the claim that it is at least partly fought for the benefit of people other than the populations of the Western countries at war. Although contemporary Western war is typically represented as a response to an external problem or threat, it is produced as necessary and legitimate through arguments calling on ethics. In other words, Western war is now always in some sense produced as otherregarding, even if defence or national interests are referenced; elsewhere I have called this ‘war for humanity’.45 The term I have chosen here—‘ethical war’— draws attention to the significance of ethics. This is not unproblematic. Madeleine Fagan argues that ‘ethical’ should not be used as ‘a label’, signifying ‘good’ or ‘right’; rather ethical—just like political—is a description of ‘the context within which we find ourselves’.46 While this is an important point, in practice ‘ethical’ is often used in just the way that Fagan objects to. As Kimberley Hutchings notes, in ‘everyday language, the word ethical is sometimes used as the equivalent of “morally good”, implying that an ethical

42 Others have used the term ‘liberal war’, which avoids the problem of the West. I do not follow this practice. The discourse associates such war with the West, whatever that may be. In addition, it is not clear that such terminological dissociation from the West is any less problematic than referring to the category. Whatever the conceptual issues, countries commonly identified as Western dominate this form of war. Indeed, the idea of the West itself is constituted through war. Patrick Porter, Military Orientalism: Eastern War through Western Eyes (London: Hurst & Company 2009), p. 4. 43 Doing so does not imply that it shares nothing in common with non-Western war. For an analysis of Eastern war and its relationship with the West, see Porter, Military Orientalism. 44 Germany often follows distinct practices in military matters, but the trope of taking responsibility for others through war is crucial even to German discourse. See Maja Zehfuss, Constructivism in International Relations: The Politics of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002) and Maja Zehfuss, Wounds of Memory: The Politics of War in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007). 45 Zehfuss, ‘Contemporary Western War’. 46 Madeleine Fagan, Ethics and Politics after Poststructuralism: Levinas, Derrida and Nancy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2013), p. 8.

10

Introduction

person is someone who does the morally right thing’.47 This is the case in the discourse examined here. In order to make an intervention it is necessary to take the discourse at its word. Therefore, no attempt is made to avoid using ‘ethical’ in the sense of ‘morally good’. It is, however, important to be mindful of Fagan’s point: the ambiguity of ‘ethical’ as able to signify ‘good’ as well as ‘pertaining to ideas about how we ought to act towards others’ is significant, and both are at play in the production of the world examined in the book. I do not suggest that Western war is good or other-regarding, nor do I even investigate whether it is; rather, I analyse the impact of its branding as ethical.48 The point is to closely examine and interrogate the practice of what is presented as ethical war. There is an extensive and important body of literature that critiques postCold War Western war, revealing its colonial or imperial dimension and the necessarily violent character of liberalism.49 The arguments in this book resonate with these claims, in particular with the way in which this literature draws attention to the politics of the contemporary practice of war. This book focuses specifically on the (political) role conceptualizations of ethics play in enabling and enhancing such war. Engaging with ethics directly is necessary because ethical claims play a significant role in enabling Western uses of military force. In particular, the question of what we ought to do in response to humanitarian crises persists, and responses remain, as we will see, influenced by one approach, just war thinking, either explicitly or implicitly. This is unsatisfactory not least because just war thinking is unable to elucidate how claims to ethics inform and produce political challenges and indeed political space. With this in mind, Chapter 2 sets out the context for thinking through the problem of ethical war. It outlines how ethical war produces a paradox: it risks killing those it seeks to protect. In order to understand how the dilemma has been negotiated—both in the sense of thought through and responded to in practice—it is necessary to acknowledge the impact of just war thinking. The chapter therefore briefly introduces its key claims and role in the discourse. While modern just war thinkers draw on the tradition in order to try to limit war, the chapter proceeds to show that this was not its initial purpose. This

47

Kimberley Hutchings, Global Ethics: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press 2010), p. 5. Thanks to Nisha Shah for suggesting this phrase. See, for example, David Campbell, Politics Without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics, and the Narratives of the Gulf War (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers 1993); Anthony Burke, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War against the Other (London: Routledge 2007); Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford: Blackwell 2004); Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics; Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso 2009); James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 2001); Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (London: Routledge 2009). 48 49

11

War and the Politics of Ethics

section of the chapter highlights how just war thinking has legitimized war and the killing it entails. Yet, while the killing is justified, the dying remains problematic. Both academic and public discussions of war often represent deaths in war as tragic. The invocation of tragedy shows that the paradox at the heart of ethical war remains. The chapter introduces Jacques Derrida’s thinking about ethics, politics, and responsibility in the context of the aporia as a way to rethink the problematic. The final section of the chapter highlights the problem of ethics conceived as separate from politics which, as the rest of the book will show, enables and enhances war while obscuring that this is the case. This is what I refer to as the politics of ethics. It might be worth highlighting three aspects of how Western militaries conduct war is influenced by the way these wars are conceptualized in relation to understandings of ethics. First, ethical war is imagined as fought on behalf of others, that is, to protect or liberate people subjected to oppression and human rights abuses, and this is so even when making people in the West more secure is part of the purpose of war. Crucially, this gives rise to the paradox that the supposed beneficiaries are put into harm’s way and indeed often killed. Second, this paradox must be negotiated. Because civilians in the areas of deployment are to be protected, war has to be fought in a particular way. The potential harm to non-combatants has to be of central concern. Therefore the vision of ethical war has to be translated into a practice of ethical war: fighting ethically is crucial. This has led to the production of a whole apparatus of ethical war. Third, the imaginary of ethical war has increasingly become self-reinforcing. The West has to go to war to do good, that is, to save people; because Western war supposedly saves people, it is good. In order to elucidate this, Chapters 3–5 examine aspects of the ways in which ethical war is practised. There does not seem to be much of a literature on how ethical war is operationalized, although some work that seeks to make normative arguments touches upon or even expands on these empirical aspects. Unlike a lot of the literature on the ethics of war, this book does not particularly take its cue from or focus on atrocities. This is not to dismiss the seriousness of death and destruction but rather to more firmly conceptualize them as part of the logic of war. The problem with ethical war does not arrive when things go wrong; rather, it is important to look at the vision itself, at how things are envisaged to work and how they always already fail to work, even when they go as planned. The issue is not how what is called reality fails to live up to visions of ethics and how it must therefore be improved, but rather how the visions themselves come apart around the problematic of ethics. Put differently, in this book, ethics is considered not an abstract set of ideas to be developed, sharpened, and applied but an inextricable part of the practice of war. Ethics in this sense is always already political. The production of ethics as supposedly separate and pure—that is, 12

Introduction

the obfuscation of its relationship with politics—enables a problematic politics of ethics. Chapter 3 begins to look at how militaries translate ethical aims and what these efforts produce. The chapter sets out claims that increasing precision in aerial warfare complemented by greater efforts to avoid collateral damage through targeting processes has made warfare more ethical. It explores the meaning of ‘precision’ and questions to what extent ‘precision’ actually entails protection for non-combatants. The chapter shows how the praise for precision not only produces Western warfare as ethical but also both relies upon and reproduces a particular kind of ethics, based on the idea of noncombatant protection. Finally, it examines drone warfare, which seems to push us to a new level in terms of achieving the ideal of precision. The chapter notes the wider implications of celebrating precision. While precision bombing is an impressive capacity, the wars the West conducted in the new century made this ability less compelling. Chapter 4 examines how people—ordinary Iraqis, for example—came to be recognized as central to what the West calls counterinsurgency wars and how this meant that the acquisition of cultural knowledge came to be seen as the solution to the failure to achieve meaningful victory in Iraq. Using cultural knowledge was seen to enable the US military to help and protect the population, and indeed to reduce violence, in line with the vision of ethical war. Exploring the use of social science to determine the right course of action, the chapter questions whether people were quite as important to the military’s actions as was made out. The chapter argues that cultural knowledge was deployed as a technology of ethics, that is, as an attempt to calculate the right answers and to bypass the dilemmas of using violence against people in the name of their protection. Chapter 5 turns to the soldiers50 who have to implement the mission of ethical war and explores how they are trained and enabled to act ethically. Western militaries have presented themselves as ‘forces for good’. A significant part of this is an explicit commitment to clearly articulated values. In this context the chapter returns to the problem of killing and highlights the challenge it poses for military training and practice. It shows how militaries have sought to promote virtue ethics, not least through the production of a warrior ethos based on distinct sets of values, endorsing the assumption that good soldiers make good war. The chapter examines how soldiers who have been trained in this way have fared in recent wars. Finally, it highlights the impossibility of being a good soldier in the way envisaged and the problems this poses for those required to live up to the vision. 50 This book uses the term ‘soldier’ to include airmen, sailors, and marines. Although not strictly correct, there does not seem to be a more appropriate generic term in the English language.

13

War and the Politics of Ethics

Chapter 6 returns more explicitly to the larger questions that drive this book by drawing out key themes that have been examined in relation to specific practices in the preceding chapters. It briefly reflects on how ethical war comes to be seductive and how its practices enhance violence. Having thus summarized the problem of the ethics of war in contemporary Western warfare, the chapter asks whether the problem lies in a faulty conceptualization of ethics that might be overcome, arguing that this is not possible. The chapter therefore reflects on the need for a response at the limit of ethics, returning to the issue of the politics of ethics. Across the themes explored in this book, it is clear that making war ethical is a serious concern. Western militaries’ determined efforts to reduce physical violence in war reflect the way in which using (lethal) force is an embarrassment to liberal values. The problem is that we are unable to think about how to appropriately use military force without at the same time legitimizing what we seek to limit or constrain. This much would appear to be uncontroversial, at least to academic audiences cognizant of the ways in which our world is produced. The predicament is serious: we are aware of it without knowing how to respond to it. What is perhaps less obvious is that it is not merely war that is produced, but ethics as well. This failure to understand ethics as made and therefore political is significant. It allows for the invocation of ethics as separate and pure, presenting aspirations for a better world that appear not to be tainted by politics. Ethics is seductive. This matters because ethics plays a role not just in enabling and enhancing the West’s use of force but also in the West’s inability to recognize it as violent. What the analysis in this book brings to the fore is that this failure is based on, and inescapable because of, the way in which we draw a line between ethics and politics, allowing the powerful and dangerous illusion that ethics can tame politics (and by implication war).

14

2 The Paradox of Ethical War and the Politics of Ethics

The West has been imagining itself as a ‘force for good’ through war. That is, war is not only thought of in explicitly ethical terms but is presented as a good thing, ethically acceptable and indeed sometimes positively required. Yet war nevertheless continues to be a problematic part of our ethico-political imaginary. As Michael Walzer concisely observes, ‘[w]ar kills, and that is why the argument about war is so intense’.1 Killing is not, of course, the only problem with war; it also destroys infrastructure and cultural artefacts, for example, and those who survive may have life-changing injuries, both physical and mental. Yet it is the killing that intuitively concerns many people the most. As a result, many of us are, in Richard Norman’s words, ‘morally torn’ in relation to war.2 War, intriguingly, is both an everyday occurrence—part of the accepted reality of international politics—and ‘one of the most deeply divisive of moral problems’.3 Unlike other human activities that cause death—such as driving cars, for instance—war involves the ‘deliberate taking of life’.4 This sits uneasily within a culture that takes ‘thou shalt not kill’ as one of its core norms. Indeed, liberal societies arguably dislike war or at any rate its violence. It is the intentionality of killing in particular that renders war problematic in ethical terms, making justification imperative. It is precisely because of the injunction against killing that war must be justified in moral terms. These issues have not suddenly arisen because contemporary Western war is produced as ethical war, but the branding accentuates this need for justification. 1

Michael Walzer, Arguing about War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2004), p. ix. Richard Norman, Ethics, Killing and War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995), p. 1. 3 Norman, Ethics, Killing and War, p. 1. 4 Norman, Ethics, Killing and War, p. 1 (italics added); see also p. 37. Significant numbers of deaths in war may be construed as not deliberate, not least those often subsumed under the term collateral damage. This is a significant point that I will return to in section 2.1 as well as in section 3.4. On this problem see also Neta C. Crawford, Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America’s Post 9/11 Wars (New York: Oxford University Press 2013). 2

War and the Politics of Ethics

If war is to benefit the people of the countries it is waged against, then the destruction of their infrastructure and the risk to their life poses a particularly serious problem. Put differently, all war faces the dilemma of killing, but it becomes a paradox when war is pursued on behalf of those at risk of being killed. After all, the dead cannot enjoy any benefits that such war may seek to deliver to them. The issues of killing and, vice versa, of the protection of life are therefore central to the discourse of ethical war. The official story of Western military intervention since the end of the Cold War has been one of the ‘forces for good’ helping others in distress as well as protecting civilians back home from the threat of terrorism. Prima facie, these are good causes. Yet they also deliver us straight into the paradox. Before examining how concrete practices of warfare do so, it is important to engage with the thinking that generates and shapes them. Rather than using existing approaches to war and ethics in order to think through the ethical dilemmas raised by war or critiquing their capacity to do so, this book reads these ways of thinking (as well as practices of war) as expressions of our ethico-political imagination. Political arguments, including those about war, are framed by ethics, even when this might not be immediately obvious. The key is to draw attention to the implications of the assumed separation between ethics and politics in respect of Western war since the end of the Cold War. This chapter begins by setting out the paradox that confounds many of us in relation to ethical war. It then shows how just war thinking—the dominant approach to thinking the ethics of war—proposes to negotiate the dilemma. Two problems with this approach are identified. First, despite the thrust of constraining war and its violence, just war thinking works to legitimize war. Second, just war thinking ultimately fails to provide a persuasive rationale for deaths in war; this is visible in their representation as ‘tragic’. The final section provides the intellectual rationale for the approach this book takes, setting out what I mean by the politics of ethics.

2.1 The Paradox of Ethical War Since the end of the Cold War, Western war—or intervention, as it is generally termed at least initially, making the activity sound less destructive—has been produced as what I call ethical war. This kind of war is presented as engaged in righting a wrong, typically the oppression and killing of particular groups of people; it is construed in relation to humanitarian ideals, even if defence and security of the West are prominent in the rationale. Put crudely, in this imaginary, all Western wars are always also produced as wars for the other; there is no longer a distinction between humanitarian and defensive war, or indeed any other kind of war. War is presented as a solution to ethical 16

The Paradox of Ethical War and the Politics of Ethics

problems such as to what came to be called ethnic cleansing in Kosovo or brutal dictatorship in Iraq. Such war is always war for freedom, human rights, and equality. Morality thus precipitates rather than prevents war, as Karl Otto Hondrich points out. He refers to this phenomenon as ‘moral expansion’, which he claims has replaced territorial expansion.5 There is, of course, nevertheless a widespread sentiment that it would be preferable to avoid war altogether. The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) therefore asserts and indeed privileges a duty to prevent, embracing a range of types of intervention addressing political, economic, and legal issues.6 Nevertheless, it asserts that ‘[i]f a State fails to protect its population or is in fact the perpetrator of crimes, the international community must be prepared to take stronger measures, including the collective use of force through the UN Security Council.’7 That is, in certain cases intervention is considered necessary for humanitarian reasons, to fulfil the responsibility to protect ordinary people whose state fails to secure their human rights. The idea of ethical war is, at first sight, persuasive. If the West has the means to save people at the risk of serious harm, then it would seem wrong not to use them, especially if other avenues have already proved fruitless. Not to ‘save strangers’, to recall Wheeler’s phrase, would be in tension with the West’s selfperception as promoting freedom and human rights. Put differently, the value of what is apparently intended appears to be obvious.8 Every use of force is, however, liable to maim or kill people or destroy the infrastructure their lives depend on. Thus, the notion of pursuing the intended good—the protection of lives and human rights—through war risks undermining itself. The possibility of war on behalf of others—for humanity—is therefore something of an intellectual conundrum: can others’ humanity be protected by using force on their behalf that also risks killing them?9 At the same time, ethical war is already a practical task for Western militaries. They are engaged in it and have to respond to the challenges it presents them with. That is, they have to develop practices to realize ethical war. For example, as Chapter 3 explores, high-technology weapons are employed in ways that seek to reduce the risk of civilian deaths. Yet, whatever technological advances have been made, war is highly destructive. Using lethal force in the name of protecting ordinary people and their human rights continues to mean (risking) killing people in the name of protecting their freedom. The striking contradiction between the stated aims of 5

Karl Otto Hondrich, Wieder Krieg (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 2002), p. 25. See ICISS, Responsibility to Protect. http://www.responsibilitytoprotect.org/index.php/about-rtop (accessed 16 August 2017, bold in original). 8 This appearance is, of course, part of the problem. 9 See Zehfuss, ‘Contemporary Western War’. 6 7

17

War and the Politics of Ethics

Western military operations and the impact of warfare therefore remains. Over time, the configuration of destruction wreaked by warfare has changed. The extent to which civilians become victims of war attracts particular concern. Civilians have always been at risk of being subjected to violence, even when war was ostensibly being fought on an identifiable battlefield between mutually recognized combatants. Laying siege to cities, for example, targets ordinary citizens. However, civilians have become even more clearly exposed to the impact of war from the twentieth century because, also as a result of technological development, the fighting has increasingly penetrated their living space.10 In the Second World War, bombers were able to go well into enemy territory, while today drone warfare has arguably eroded the boundary between war and peace altogether. Therefore, the heightened risk to civilians in contemporary warfare has been noted, and developments in international law— notably the Geneva Conventions—have responded to the exposure of civilians, seeking to better protect them. Ethical war ostensibly mitigates the trend towards making civilians objects of warfare. Western militaries seek to guard against killing non-combatants by taking care not to target civilians.11 Indeed, not targeting civilians is produced as a constitutive difference between the West and those it fights, who today more often than not are referred to as terrorists. Yet even if Western militaries work hard to limit the destruction they wreak, people—including civilians— still do get killed. The Costs of War Project at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, which details the cost in human, economic, social, and political terms,12 claims that between 2001 and 2015 around 350,000 people were killed as a direct result of war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan; a large number of them were civilians.13 Counting the dead always becomes a political issue in contemporary war. How to reliably but comprehensively access information about deaths is subject to considerable debate, as is which deaths are to be accounted for in the first place. For example, inasmuch as militaries count deaths at all, they count those they cause directly and immediately. Other counts may include all deaths attributable to the war, for example, those inflicted by the West’s

10 See, for example, Alexander B. Downes, Targeting Civilians in War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2008), Ward Thomas, The Ethics of Destruction: Norms and Force in International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2001) and section 3.1. Steven Pinker argues that ‘violence has declined’. How this could be measured is contentious, however. More importantly, Pinker’s argument has no bearing on what is claimed in this book, as the point here is about the spatial and social distribution of violence, not about total levels of violence. See Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes (London: Allen Lane 2011), p. xxi. 11 12 See Chapter 3. http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/ (accessed 15 January 2017). 13 http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/figures/2015/SUMMARY%20CHART% 20-%20Direct%20War%20Death%20Toll%20to%20April%202015.pdf (accessed 15 January 2017).

18

The Paradox of Ethical War and the Politics of Ethics

opponents or precipitated by infrastructural damage.14 This makes a significant difference because, as Hugo Slim points out, ‘most people die from war rather than in battle.’15 The issue of the civilian death toll has become accentuated as the West claims its wars are conducted for ordinary people living in the war zone. What is more, counting is insufficient: it fails to capture the humanity of those who have been killed, instead turning them into a statistic. The human cost has therefore also been highlighted in different ways, for example through exhibitions such as ‘Eyes Wide Open: The Human Cost of War’, which showed boots representing each of the US military personnel killed as well as shoes representing the estimated civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan,16 and ‘The Sensory War 1914–2014’ shown at the Manchester Art Gallery.17 Attempts to account for and represent the cost of war reflect the value attributed to human life. There is widespread agreement—ethically, politically, and legally—that prohibiting the intentional killing of non-combatants is particularly crucial.18 At the same time, nobody disputes that people not involved in the fighting do in fact get killed, even if accidentally or incidentally. In analysing the ‘war on terror’, Judith Butler engages the larger question of the worth we attribute to human lives. She argues that despite our apparent commitment to humanity, lives have been differentially valued, and not in the way we might expect. Based on key claims of the ethics of war and statements by political and military leaders, we might expect civilians to receive the highest level of care and protection in contemporary Western warfare. Yet, as Martin Shaw points out graphically, war today means ‘blowing people up’.19 Indeed, he argues that, in contemporary Western war, risk is transferred away from combatants towards people living in the war zone. Thus, instead of protecting those on whose behalf war is ostensibly fought, such war actually endangers them so as to protect Western forces, making Western claims that their militaries are ‘forces for good’ hypocritical. Butler tackles the issue as one of the ways in which our thinking frames violence and therefore of how we react to particular forms of violence. That is,

14 See 3.3 and Maja Zehfuss, ‘Subjectivity and Vulnerability: On the War with Iraq’, International Politics 44:1 (2007), pp. 64–7. 15 Hugo Slim, Killing Civilians: Method, Madness, and Morality in War (New York: Columbia University Press 2008), p. 91. 16 American Friends Service Committee, ‘Eyes Wide Open’, https://afsc.org/campaign/eyeswide-open (accessed 15 January 2017). 17 Manchester Art Gallery, ‘The Sensory War 1914–2014’, http://manchesterartgallery. org/exhibitions-and-events/exhibition/the-sensory-war/ (accessed 15 January 2017). 18 See Maja Zehfuss, ‘Killing Civilians: Thinking the Practice of War’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 14:3 (2012), pp. 423–40. The idea that non-combatants have a special claim to protection in war has been under pressure in recent philosophical debate. This has not so far noticeably impacted the practice of ethical war but will be considered in section 6.2. 19 Shaw, The New Western Way of War, p. 1.

19

War and the Politics of Ethics

she seeks to show how ‘affective and ethical dispositions’ are regulated ‘through a selective and differential framing of violence’.20 In other words, how we feel about certain deaths and whether we judge them to be acceptable depends upon how the violence is contextualized within our ethico-political imaginary. This builds on her earlier argument that certain lives are rendered expendable. Whereas Western lives are produced as what she calls grievable, Butler argues, those in the non-West are not. Within Western discourse, non-Western lives are not mourned in the same way as Western lives, which are marked through obituaries and press reports. Butler uses the reaction to the killing of Wall Street Journal journalist Danny Pearl as an illustration of this point. Pearl is ‘familiar’ to her, easily ‘humanized’. He could be her brother or cousin. Mourning Pearl is easy.21 This matters because she argues that ‘grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters.’22 Lives not understood as living in the first place cannot be grasped as injured or lost.23 In sum, Butler suggests that, for the West, Western lives matter and nonWestern lives do not. This is a powerful argument, although it is not entirely persuasive; rather, as I have shown elsewhere, the situation is complicated by the way in which Western war risks the lives of Western soldiers, meaning that some Western lives matter less than others, despite being grieved.24 In addition, especially where a young life is cut short, such death is often represented as ‘tragic’ in statements by politicians and the military or in media accounts,25 suggesting that these deaths register as such within the Western imagination. This sentiment also appears throughout the literature on the ethics of war,26 an issue I will return to later. Given that civilian deaths caused by Western forces today are typically non-Western, it is worth noting that, even if not grieved in the same way as Western deaths, such deaths are acknowledged as disturbing; they trouble the notion of war for the good. The reference to tragedy makes these deaths appear not only horrific but unplanned: we did not want them. After all, the West claims that its wars are able to protect the very people who end up dying. Western militaries pursue a range of strategies to minimize such deaths, not merely by using smart weapons but also, for example, by trying to understand the culture of the country

20

Butler, Frames of War, p. 1. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso 2004), pp. 37–8. 22 23 Butler, Frames of War, p. 14. Butler, Frames of War, p. 1. 24 See Maja Zehfuss, ‘Hierarchies of Grief and the Possibility of War: Remembering UK Fatalities in Iraq’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38:2 (2009), pp. 419–40. 25 This is certainly the case in official obituaries. See Zehfuss, ‘Hierarchies of Grief ’. See also US Army, Civilian Casualty Mitigation, Army Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures, No. 3-37.31, 18 July 2012, 1–3. 26 See section 2.4. 21

20

The Paradox of Ethical War and the Politics of Ethics

they are fighting in and by training soldiers in military ethics. Throughout this book I will show the lengths to which militaries go to implement ethical war, that is, to engage in practices of warfare that are in sync with the articulated aspirations of this type of warfare. However, despite all efforts, non-combatants continue to die as a result of Western military action and this continues to leave us dissatisfied, even upset. In sum, Western war—perversely, given the stated intentions—puts the lives of ordinary people living in the war zones at risk. This suggests that these lives are not valued as much as Western lives. Against Butler’s thrust, however, they do not appear to be dismissed altogether, entirely ungrievable. Rather they actually continue to matter in some way; for when people get killed, especially in the pursuit of their protection, this upsets us. We represent it as tragic. Yet despite this strongly negative reaction to civilian deaths in particular, and despite our inability to resolve the paradox at the heart of ethical war, ethical war continues to be promoted and enacted. In order to understand how this becomes and remains possible, it is necessary to engage with how ethics is thought and practised in relation to war.

2.2 Negotiating the Paradox: Just War Thinking Whenever war is debated, there is not just a question of whether it is likely to be successful, sensible, or prudent but one of whether it is the right thing to do: should we engage in a practice that kills in the given case? This book does not seek to provide an answer to this question, either in general terms or in respect of specific wars, but rather to understand how existing responses to this question affect the vision and practice of war. Ideas of humanitarian intervention and R2P provide a rationale for why we might want to take the risk. The gravity of human rights abuses amounting to genocide or ethnic cleansing, for example, might compel us to try to protect those about to be killed. This general sentiment, however, raises more questions than it answers. In particular, in itself it does not tell us when we should intervene, and when we should not. The question of when to use military force has generated an enormous amount of debate since the end of the Cold War. Despite the burgeoning critical literature on the problem of liberal war, much of the argument about the ethics of particular wars has been conceptualized through the prism of just war thinking, either explicitly or implicitly. Part of the explanation for this dominance might be found in the vocal participation of just war thinkers in debates about contemporary wars. In 2002, for example, sixty US intellectuals, including just war thinkers Jean Bethke Elshtain and Walzer, published an open letter, ‘What We’re Fighting For’, justifying the use of force in the fight 21

War and the Politics of Ethics

against terrorism—which at that time meant the war in Afghanistan—from a just war perspective.27 In addition, just war thinkers published books responding to contemporary wars that were aimed at the non-academic market.28 Such thinking was therefore highly visible in public debate through vocal arguments for or against particular wars. This high profile is reflected in Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech, which acknowledges the killing entailed by war and the difficult questions this raises. In setting out his thinking, Obama presents a history of warfare. At ‘the dawn of history’, whenever that may have been, war ‘was simply a fact, like drought or disease’. Yet over time there were efforts to control the violence and the ‘concept of “just war” emerged’. Obama outlines his understanding of the challenges of violent conflict today and argues that meeting them ‘will require us to think in new ways about the notions of just war and the imperatives of just peace’. His ‘new thinking’ starts by acknowledging that violent conflict will continue because ‘nations—acting individually or in concert—will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.’29 That the president of the most powerful country presents war as a question of ethics, and not just as one of interest or power, is significant. Yet Obama’s is not a creative intervention into conceptualizing war as an ethical problem; he fully embraces the dominant way of thinking. Obama presupposes from the beginning that war will always be considered morally justified, that there is, in other words, no prospect of a world without war. Having therefore ruled out pacifism before even getting started, just war thinking becomes the default and indeed only position when it comes to considering the rights and wrongs of war. In the picture he paints there is no regulation of the destructiveness of war or consideration of its violence in moral terms before or outside of just war thinking. It is remarkable that the only framework considered worth mentioning—the definitive way of thinking war’s relationship with ethics—is an approach derived from an interpretation of Christian beliefs that dates back numerous centuries. Broadly speaking, Obama’s presentation of just war thinking as the one and only approach to thinking about war and ethics reflects its dominance in public and scholarly debate. We are apparently compelled to think about what should be done with and in war through just war thinking. Nicholas Rengger suggests that thinking on war and its relation to ethics is ‘essentially

27 ‘What We’re Fighting For: A Letter from America’, February 2002, http://americanvalues.org/ catalog/pdfs/what-are-we-fighting-for.pdf (accessed 16 August 2017). 28 For example Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books 2003); Nicholas Fotion, War and Ethics: A New Just War Theory (London: Continuum 2007); Charles Guthrie and Michael Quinlan, The Just War Tradition: Ethics in Modern Warfare (London: Bloomsbury 2007); Walzer, Arguing about War. 29 Obama, ‘A Just and Lasting Peace’.

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constructed around three “ideal” positions: that war is never legitimate; that in war anything goes; and, finally, that in war some sorts of restraint, both on what we can legitimately fight for and how we may legitimately fight, are morally required’.30 This very common threefold classification highlights different relationships between war and ethics. On one end of the spectrum is pacifism, which starts from ethics and comes to the conclusion that war is impermissible. On the other end is realism, which, it is claimed, argues that ethics is irrelevant to the problem of war. Crucially, neither is seen to be able to elucidate the nexus of war and ethics; pacifism in particular is marred by its inability to say much about particular wars.31 Therefore, the upshot of this classification is that there is one, and only one, way of thinking about war and ethics: the just war tradition. This categorization is vastly oversimplified; it fails to acknowledge varieties of both realism and pacifism that do not easily fit, as well as any other approach.32 What is important, however, is what this classification does. Two aspects are worth noting. First, it starts by separating and objectifying ‘war’ and ‘ethics’, which are then put in a relation to each other. This makes it impossible to think about how our conceptualization of ethics shapes war in the first place. It misses the productive power of thinking ethics. Second, whether or not it is accurate, this classification is influential; it is its effect that is of interest. It makes it appear as though one simply cannot speak of war as a problem of ethics without making reference to or even becoming part of the just war tradition. This dominance of just war thinking is widely acknowledged. A.J. Coates observes that the ‘fact is that this tradition has monopolised the moral debate about war, at least in the Western world’.33 Even critics of the just war tradition, such as Norman, acknowledge that it informs a great deal of public debate about the rights and wrongs of wars. Political leaders who seek to give moral legitimacy to acts of war will typically appeal to principles and concepts derived from the ‘just war’ tradition, and their critics often employ the same moral vocabulary.34

30 Nicholas Rengger, ‘On the Just War Tradition in the Twenty-First Century’, International Affairs 78:2 (2002), p. 354. 31 Scholars in International Relations by and large ignore pacifism, while philosophers see a significant challenge to just war thinking from pacifism and in contrast find realism unpersuasive. Seth Lazar, ‘War’, in: Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2016), https://plato. stanford.edu/entries/war (accessed 14 July 2016), p. 1. 32 Walzer recognizes that some pacifists and some realists do have things to say on the topic, but he locates just war thinking in opposition to (and between) these two. Walzer, Arguing about War, p. ix. 33 Coates, Ethics of War, p. 20. Note that Coates actually acknowledges a fourth tradition in this area, Militarism; see his Chapter 2. 34 Norman, Ethics, Killing and War, p. 117.

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This does not mean that everyone is a just war thinker but rather that moral argument about war is ‘more often than not conducted in just war terms, so that even opponents of the tradition remain in its debt, developing their own moral response to war largely in contention with just war thinking’.35 The allencompassing sweep of this argument is worth noting: anyone talking about war and ethics comes to be subsumed, in one way or another, into the remit of just war thinking, even if they make no specific reference to the claims of the tradition. This representation is widespread, and, despite the long-standing influence of pacifist thinking and recent critical scholarship tackling the question of contemporary Western war in different ways, it is difficult to resist. In Anthony Burke’s words, just war thinking ‘has colonised the space of moral discourse in relation to war and strategy’.36 Just war thinking therefore impacts the practice of war; it shapes the imaginary within which war is produced. It is taught in military colleges.37 More fundamentally, just war thinking has influenced the creation and development of international law in this area. It is also clearly visible in how the R2P was configured by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). Its 2001 report sought to clarify when military intervention would be justified. In setting out guidelines, it notes that ‘there is no universally accepted single list’ but that ‘in the Commission’s judgement all the relevant decision making criteria can be succinctly summarized under the following six headings: right authority, just cause, right intention, last resort, proportional means and reasonable prospects.’38 These criteria have not been invented by the commission but rather reflect the long-standing thinking of the just war tradition, as we will see in a moment. In trying to understand the rise and politics of ethical war, it is therefore necessary to briefly explore just war ideas which have framed thinking on the ethics of war. Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars is considered one of the key texts— if not the key text—in the modern revival of just war thinking. Rengger calls it ‘unambiguously the most influential reconsideration of the tradition in recent times’,39 while Bellamy even suggests it remains ‘the definitive work on the ethics of war’.40 It is worth noting that debates on these issues in Philosophy and International Relations appear to have been running on parallel tracks

35 Coates, Ethics of War, p. 20. For an examination of the use of just war language in US Presidential debates, see Daniel R. Brunstetter, ‘Trends in Just War Thinking during the US Presidential Debates 2000–12: Genocide Prevention and the Renewed Salience of Last Resort’, Review of International Studies 40 (2014), pp. 77–99. 36 37 Burke, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence, p. 151. See section 5.2. 38 ICISS, Responsibility to Protect, 4.16. 39 Rengger, ‘On the Just War Tradition’, p. 355. 40 Alex J. Bellamy, Just Wars: From Cicero to Iraq (Cambridge: Polity 2006), p. ix. See also Lazar, ‘War’, p. 2.

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with few points of connection. Perhaps this is, to recall the tension identified by Norman, because Philosophy is concerned with war as a moral problem, whereas International Relations might, at least traditionally, be seen to engage with it as an everyday occurrence. Walzer’s work stands out: it is recognized as highly significant, although vigorously debated, in both fields and indeed beyond, in public discourse. That his book is often referred to as exemplifying just war thinking is perhaps ironic as it does not really take account of the tradition. What the book seems to do instead is to present just war thinking as a practical guide to limiting the excesses of war. At a time when people are concerned about the apparently increasing or indeed persistent involvement of their militaries in war, this is compelling. Just war thinking appears relevant and practical: it offers rules and principles for assessing the legitimacy of going to war and of particular practices within war. In contemporary work, just war thinking is often presented as a settled set of criteria and rules. These can be summarized fairly briefly. Just war thinking makes a distinction between the legitimacy of going to war (ius ad bellum) and the legitimacy of conduct within war (ius in bello); these two areas of legitimacy are assessed separately.41 In Walzer’s words, war ‘is always judged twice, first with reference to the reasons states have for fighting, secondly with reference to the means they adopt’.42 This is crucial because even a war that is resorted to unjustly is subject to assessment in relation to in bello criteria. Thus, just war thinking provides us with an ethics of war and an ethics in war, both of which can be articulated through principles or rules that are then applied to any war. The precise criteria against which the justice of resorting to war in the first place is assessed, especially the weighting given to each of them, differs to an extent between different articulations of just war thinking.43 Roughly speaking, though, war must only be waged by entities with legitimate authority for a just cause and as a last resort when it can be seen as a proportional response.44 The idea of right intention is also central to any analysis.45 In

41 This was not always so in the just war tradition, as Bellamy reminds us, though he acknowledges that this separation has been the consensus since the beginning of the twentieth century. Bellamy, Just Wars, p. 128. This distinction has also come under challenge from the ‘revisionist’ version of just war thinking. See Lazar, ‘War’ and section 6.2. 42 Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations, 2nd edition (New York: Basic Books 1992), p. 21. 43 This book explores the practice of ethical war since the end of the Cold War which is situated within an imaginary influenced by just war thinking. Differences between different articulations of just war thinking have not made an appreciable impact on this wider practice, although the distinction between Protestant and Catholic thinking attracts attention in scholarly assessments. For an overview of the tradition see James Turner Johnson, Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1981). 44 For a discussion of these concepts see Coates, Ethics of War, Chapters 5–8. 45 Coates, Ethics of War, p. 22.

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relation to contemporary Western war this means that such war can only be ethical if fought by the right entity for the right reasons in respect of a problem sufficiently grave so as to justify a military response and if all other avenues for conflict resolution have been exhausted. These requirements are inscribed in R2P, as we have seen. Once the war has started, the conduct of each side—whether it has resorted to war justly or unjustly—is assessed according to two main criteria, namely proportionality (using only as much force a necessary) and non-combatant immunity (not targeting noncombatants).46 Both of these appear to limit violence, its intensity on the one hand and its targets on the other. The principle of non-combatant immunity (which is also called discrimination) encapsulates concerns about protecting life and is central to just war thinking.47 As Bellamy says, ‘[a]ny act of war that intends to kill non-combatants or that uses non-combatants as means to an end is unjust.’48 The significance of this principle to the just war tradition would be difficult to overstate.49 Non-combatant immunity is also inscribed in international law through the Geneva Conventions and resonates strongly with the asserted aims of contemporary Western uses of military force and the idea of ethical war. The effect of this principle is that different lives attract different levels of protection. While enemy soldiers may generally be killed unless they are hors de combat, civilians must not be killed intentionally. This is in keeping with public attitudes. Soldiers’ deaths are mourned, but those of civilians tend to give rise to concern and even outrage. Crucially, embracing the principle does not, however, guarantee that civilian lives are safeguarded. Obviously, non-combatants do get killed in war, even by Western forces who ostensibly observe it. Following just war thinking, such killing is acceptable so long as it is not intentional. This argument is based on the doctrine of double effect, that is, the idea that unintended outcomes may be permitted as side effects of actions taken to achieve permissible intended outcomes.50 This plays a significant role in contemporary (de)legitimation of violence. What is termed terrorism is often seen as marked out by the targeting of civilians and delegitimized on this basis, despite the fact that more accepted practices of warfare produce far more deaths. The distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence turns on the intention, not

46

For a discussion of these concepts see Coates, Ethics of War, Chapters 9–10. Bellamy, Just Wars, p. 117 and James Turner Johnson, Ethics and the Use of Force: Just War in Historical Perspective (Farnham: Ashgate 2011), p. 142. See also Seth Lazar, Sparing Civilians (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015), p. 2. For a critique, see Zehfuss, ‘Killing Civilians’. 48 Bellamy, Just Wars, p. 138 (italics added). 49 Revisionist Jeff McMahan challenges this principle head-on; see section 6.2. 50 Bellamy, Just Wars, pp. 124–5; Norman, Ethics, Killing and War, pp. 83–93. For a critique see O’Callaghan, Walzer, Just War and Iraq, pp. 125–49. 47

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the effect in terms of the death toll.51 In line with this, the intention not to harm civilians and actions taken to follow through on it are often highlighted in statements by political and military leaders. In 2002, for example, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed that the US could ‘take pride in the fact that coalition forces have gone to extraordinary lengths not only to avoid civilian deaths but to save civilian lives’.52 In 2003 then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard B. Myers similarly argued that using force ‘has never been done with more care about bringing innocents into the line of fire’.53 Yet, as we will see in Chapter 3, by permitting what is construed as unintended killing of non-combatants, now encapsulated in the idea of the permissibility of limited collateral damage, this principle ends up legitimizing incidental killing, that is, killing that is fully foreseeable and hence cannot properly be described as accidental. Even if we grant for the moment that great efforts are being made to reduce the violence non-combatants are exposed to, the problematic of killing therefore remains one of the key challenges of war(fare). The question of who may be killed and for what reason continues to pose an urgent problem, even if this is obscured by the efforts being made to avoid civilian casualties. Militaries necessarily make decisions about who may be killed under what circumstances. This becomes an even more pressing concern in war in the name of the good, given that those at risk of being killed are the very people who are supposedly to be protected. This is not just a dilemma for scholars and members of the public presenting arguments about the ethics of war or for politicians and military leaders developing policy and guidelines for warfare; it is a practical problem for armed forces at war. The point here is not to determine the right argument about killing in warfare, philosophically speaking. Just war thinking matters to the concerns of this book to the extent that it has a part in, and indeed dominates, shaping the moral imaginary within which the discourse of war is produced. Therefore, this brief introduction has focused on core claims and concepts. Readers knowledgeable in the latest developments in just war thinking will detect and perhaps object to a shorthand I am using in this chapter and throughout the book: what I refer to as just war thinking is now sometimes called ‘traditional’ just war thinking, in distinction to a newer approach labelled ‘revisionist’ just war thinking.54

51 See Alex Bellamy, ‘Supreme Emergencies and the Protection of Non-Combatants in War’, International Affairs 80:5 (2004), p. 847. For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see Zehfuss, ‘Killing Civilians’. 52 Quoted in Crawford, Accountability for Killing, p. 465. 53 Maggie Farley, ‘Report Notes Toll of Cluster Bombs, Strikes in Iraq’, Los Angeles Times, 12 December 2003. See Chapter 5, however. 54 For a useful overview, see Lazar, ‘War’.

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Revisionist just war thinking, championed by analytical philosophers, has generated considerable debate about fundamental questions regarding whom and under what circumstances it is right to kill in war and what sorts of wars are permissible in the first place. For example, David Rodin’s War and Self-Defense argues that national self-defence cannot ultimately be justified on the basis of individual claims to self-defence.55 While undoubtedly important in the philosophical debate about the permissibility of war, this argument does not elucidate the issue of other-regarding justifications for war. Jeff McMahan’s Killing in War,56 on the other hand, resonates with key aspects of the discourse of ethical war because it challenges the central idea of non-combatant immunity. Chapter 6 therefore engages with McMahan in particular, so as to explore whether this new thinking might overcome the challenges for thinking and practising ethical war that are identified in this book. Until then, ‘just war thinking’ will refer to the more traditional version, as revisionist work has not had any discernible impact on the practice of ethical war, although such work is taught and discussed within the military. The aim of the book is to interrogate how the commitment to ethics has shaped the practice of war, thereby demonstrating how the practice of ethical war undermines itself. Although this necessarily involves highlighting limitations of current thinking on the ethics of war, I do not seek to engage with, disprove, and replace this type of scholarship, at least not on its own terms. Instead, the most important aspect of my argument is bringing out the problematic implications of configuring ethics as a realm separate from politics. Ethical war is debated, legitimized, and enacted within a space which, in the absence of other credible approaches to the ethics of war, is shaped not least by just war thinking, although we will see that militaries also draw significantly on virtue ethics to conceive ethics education. This space problematically demarcates ethics from politics. What becomes visible through examining what might be called the empirical reality of ethical claims enacted in practices of warfare—that is, the practice of ethics—is that within the practice of ethical war the risk of killing those who are to be protected produces a dilemma, indeed a paradox, that soldiers confront in practice. They have no choice but to negotiate the situation in some way. In contemporary operations the issue arises, for example, when decisions have to be made about whether to engage a target where civilians might be present. In such situations, proportionality and the permissibility of limited collateral damage play a role. Clearly, civilians must never be

55 56

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David Rodin, War and Self-Defense (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002). Jeff McMahan, Killing in War (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009).

The Paradox of Ethical War and the Politics of Ethics

the main target, for non-combatant immunity serves to demarcate the boundary between permissible warfare and illegitimate violence.57 At the same time, in praising civilian protection (such as it is), consideration of why the destruction of war is wreaked in the first place is put to one side. In order to think through what actions are permissible in war, just war thinking often constructs ethical dilemmas that, although derived from real situations, are treated as thought experiments around which to test and flesh out ethical arguments. These might involve questions about whether a target can be engaged despite the presence of civilians or whether a soldier who is currently doing something unrelated to the fight, such as taking a bath, constitutes a legitimate target.58 Such thinking zooms into the situation and abstracts from the detail and specificities of context. Walzer clearly states that he does not engage with actually existing war, past or present, preferring instead to declare the cases he discusses to be ‘hypothetical’. As he puts it, readers ‘might usefully treat the cases as if they were hypothetical—invented rather than researched—though it is important to [his] own sense of [his] enterprise that [he is] reporting on experiences that men and women have really had and on arguments that they have really made’.59 The upshot is that empirical observations are made—and authorized—without providing the evidence necessary to support them. This leads to a lack of engagement with what war actually is and does, closing down a range of possible avenues for reflection and critique from the beginning. James Turner Johnson interestingly highlights history as significant in Walzer’s argument, indeed, as adding ‘a quite creative dimension’.60 Although this seems to run counter to my argument, Johnson also points out that in Walzer’s work the ‘values that justify and restrain war’, despite arising ‘in historical experience’, actually turn out to be ‘universal values’.61 In effect, Johnson, too, considers Walzer’s claims about war to be ahistorical. What is crucial to the argument here is that the ethical guidelines of the just war tradition are developed in separation from the realities of war and are to be applied to war from the outside, so as to limit the excesses of the practice. Just war thinking therefore appears timeless. The centrality of non-combatant protection—a principle concerned with protecting (certain) lives—perhaps amplifies this as the prohibition against killing appears to be widely embraced, For more on this, see Zehfuss, ‘Killing Civilians’. See Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, Chapter 9. 59 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. xxx. It is worth noting that such use of hypothetical examples also occurs in revisionist work. See section 6.2. 60 Johnson, Ethics and the Use of Force, p. 5. Indeed, this seems to reflect a more general view within philosophy, where Walzer is considered to work with ‘empirically-informed examples’ as opposed to relying on artificial cases. Lazar, ‘War’, p. 3. This further illustrates the distance between Philosophy and International Relations. 61 Johnson, Just War Tradition, pp. 20 and 38. 57 58

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without much variation across time and space. Nevertheless, this starting point is problematic for as Charles Jones puts it starkly, modern just war thinking ‘settles the nature of war before argument begins. War is to be regarded as an instrument of justice, narrowly defined. Everything follows from this.’62 However, the apparently timeless principles of just war thinking were in fact generated in response to particular historical circumstances and served to legitimate participation in war.

2.3 The Legitimation of War Today, just war thinking is presented as reflecting common sense. It is about identifying and limiting when war is a legitimate activity and what sorts of actions are legitimate within it. Just war thinking is in sync with the concern that ethical war should not kill those it aims to protect, although its principles are of course intended to be applicable to any war. The principles of just conduct apply even where a war is pursued for the wrong reasons. Just war thinking provides guidelines for constraining the destructiveness of war and hence the hope of making war (more) ethical. Yet this was not its original purpose. This section briefly sets out how just war thinking came about. The point is to suggest that what comes to be presented as ethical is always already political, responding to the circumstances of the time.63 In order to critically engage with the ethics of ethical war it is necessary to understand how the norms and rules guiding such judgements have been generated. In addition, this detour into the history of just war thinking provides some context to how the intention not to kill, as opposed to the fact of killing, became so important in justifications of war(fare). The just war tradition dates back to the fourth and fifth centuries.64 Saint Augustine is widely considered to be the ‘father’ of modern just war thinking.65 Capturing the privileged place the just war tradition occupies in thinking war and ethics, Holmes notes that ‘[p]robably no single historical figure has been of greater importance in giving direction to moral thinking about war in 62 Charles A. Jones, More Than Just War: Narratives of the Just War Tradition and Military Life (Abingdon: Routledge 2013), p. 18. 63 This is also visible in the way in which just war thinking during the Cold War was very much concerned with nuclear war. See, for example, James Turner Johnson, Can Modern War Be Just? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1984); Paul Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience: How Shall Modern War Be Conducted Justly? (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1961); and Paul Ramsey, The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield 1983). 64 Paul Christopher, The Ethics of War and Peace: An Introduction to Legal and Moral Issues (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall 1994), p. 7. Some, like Bellamy, include thinkers from Ancient Greece and Rome in their history of the just war tradition. See Bellamy, Just Wars, Chapter 1. 65 Christopher, Ethics of War and Peace, p. 30.

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the Western world.’66 Augustine was responding to a particular situation: in 380 AD Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Early Christians tended to be pacifists, however. In this context, Augustine was concerned with ‘how to reconcile traditional Christian teaching against the use of violence with the need to defend the Roman Empire’.67 Holmes suggests that early Christians understood the thrust of Jesus’s teachings to be opposed to violence, even if there was no explicit prohibition against war in the New Testament.68 Such pacifism can therefore be seen as not directly mandated by the Bible but nevertheless a ‘consistent deduction from the new foundation laid by Christ’.69 On the other hand, it might have been more motivated by Christians’ preference for keeping separate from what today would be called the state.70 Either way, critics of Christianity were able to blame the religion for military defeats and the associated hardships. While the shift towards actual participation by Christians in the military started as early 177 AD,71 Augustine provided justification for Christians to fully contribute to the political community. That is, he aimed to ‘reconcile Christianity with the existence of the state and the individual’s responsibilities toward it’.72 Demonstrating that Christians could justifiably participate in war was part of this. Thus, Augustine responded to a contemporary political problem;73 his resolution legitimized Christians’ participation in warfare, affecting future practice. Augustine faced a significant problem, namely how to reconcile his justification with Jesus’s determinedly non-violent teachings. He suggested that the command to turn the other cheek in response to evil was asking not for an action but an ‘inward disposition’.74 Hence, the right attitude is central. In Holmes’s words, the ‘effect was to turn Christianity inward, emphasizing not so much outward action as purity of heart and motivation’. The upshot for participation in war is that Christians ‘may even kill provided they do so in the right spirit’.75 To modern eyes this might appear like blanket permission, but the ‘right spirit’ in the Augustinian sense is not an easy test. In order to achieve the required purity of heart, soldiers had to be free from feelings of cruelty, enmity, or love. Crucially, this splits outward behaviour and inward disposition, possibly the most significant aspect of Augustine’s argument. As the 66 Robert L. Holmes, On War and Morality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1989), pp. 115–16. 67 Johnson, Can Modern War Be Just?, p. 1. 68 Holmes, On War and Morality, p. 116; Bellamy, Just Wars, p. 21. 69 Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience, p. xvi. 70 Johnson, Just War Tradition, pp. xxvii–xxviii. Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience, p. xv. 71 Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience, p. xvi. See also Bellamy, Just Wars, p. 25, who cites the year of 173 AD, however. 72 Holmes, On War and Morality, p. 117. 73 Johnson, Just War Tradition, p. xxv; Bellamy, Just Wars, p. 9. 74 Contra Faustum 22.76 cited in Holmes, On War and Morality, p. 118. 75 Holmes, On War and Morality, p. 118.

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question of the justness of fighting hinges on matters of the soul, outward behaviour is not decisive for moral assessment; indeed, because of this, we cannot ever know for certain that a soldier’s participation in war is permissible.76 Put differently, the problem with thinking about the morality of war along Augustinian lines, as Holmes points out, ‘lies with its attempt to found ethics upon motivation’.77 The problem is this: ‘If what is of ultimate importance is that one act from a good motive, nothing that one does, whatever its consequences for good or ill or its bearing upon others, will be right absent that motive. Nor will anything be wrong, given that motive.’78 Despite its secularization, this continues to have an important effect on modern just war thinking and hence on how we think the ethics of war today. This primacy of motive is expressed in ideas such as right intention, double effect, and proportionality.79 Double effect most clearly weighs motivation against outcome with the effect of legitimizing killing—including killing civilians—in certain circumstances. While just war thinking permeates contemporary justifications for war, Augustine makes for an awkward source of legitimation for contemporary Western operations. As we have seen, these are typically justified not least with reference to the benefits for others or, put differently, with the need to protect these others from harm. This sits uneasily with Augustine’s thinking, as he does not support killing in defence of oneself or others. One should not love earthly life to this extent.80 Bellamy explains that ‘it was not the act of killing in self-defence that was itself sinful but the inward disposition that drove the act—the love of earthly spiritual things’,81 highlighting again the significance of the crucial distinction between inner attitude and outward action. For Augustine, war could only be justified on the basis of punishing wrongdoing.82 This idea of punishment through warfare was visible in the first justifications of military action against Afghanistan immediately after the events of September 11 and in particular in Elshtain’s arguments for the ‘war on terror’.83 Yet the shift towards articulating the aim of liberating women from the Taliban regime clearly showed that protecting the ‘innocent’ appeals more strongly to the modern liberal conscience than does punishing wrongdoers. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas provided an account of just war that was, in Bellamy’s words, ‘much more “earthly” than Augustine’s’,84 more indebted to rational argument than to a particular version of faith. Aquinas argued that war could be justifiable, but because of the killing involved, it would never be entirely just. He offered the doctrine of double effect and 76 78 80 81 83

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77 Holmes, On War and Morality, p. 133. Holmes, On War and Morality, p. 140. 79 Holmes, On War and Morality, p. 141. Bellamy, Just Wars, p. 24. Holmes, On War and Morality, p. 120; see also p. 127 and Bellamy, Just Wars, p. 26. 82 Bellamy, Just Wars, p. 26. Holmes, On War and Morality, p. 132. 84 See Elshtain, Just War against Terror. Bellamy, Just Wars, p. 37.

The Paradox of Ethical War and the Politics of Ethics

the principle of proportionality in support of his argument. In contrast to Augustine, Aquinas considered self-defence to be natural. Killing an aggressor, in his view, could be seen as an unintentional side effect of the intended protection of one’s own life, and as such permissible, if not out of proportion to this end.85 This association of just war with self-defence is common to modern interpretations of the just war. This creates an issue, however. As Bellamy acknowledges, Aquinas’s formulation of the doctrine ‘leaves it open to the charge that the difference between intending harm and merely foreseeing it—which is integral to the doctrine—is a facile one that does not in practice afford protection to non-combatants’.86 What is of interest here is not the just war tradition’s scholarly defensibility87 but rather how this thinking has permeated debate about war and impacted practices of warfare. In this context, it is significant that while current defenders seek to construe just war thinking as limiting war,88 the tradition also works to justify (participation in) war in the first place. Walzer acknowledges that the ‘theory of just war began in the service of the powers’. In fact, he says, from the point of view of early Christians, ‘this account of just war was simply an excuse, a way of making war morally and religiously possible. And that was indeed the function of the theory.’89 Just war thinkers concede this point when they represent the tradition as having the dual role of justification and limitation.90 At the same time, defenders of just war thinking often dismiss as no more than an abuse or misapplication of the approach the idea that it legitimizes war and practices of warfare. They acknowledge the role such arguments have played in enabling war while still defending the peaceful credentials of the theory. Lieutenant Colonel J.D. Gray, for instance, points out that ‘states and their armies have long needed to believe that their cause was a just one—so as to rationalise their actions’ and that this can be ‘an all too subjective process’. He reminds us that the Wehrmacht had ‘ “God with US” inscribed on their belt buckles’, but argues that in ‘seeking to remove this subjectivity, the Just War doctrine—correctly applied—aims to objectively enunciate and influence a moral approach to war’.91 The realization that just war arguments have served to legitimize war does not stop Gray from concluding that the ‘presumption of Just War doctrine, at

85

Bellamy, Just Wars, p. 38. Bellamy, ‘Supreme Emergencies’, p. 832 (italics in original). See also Johnson, Ethics and the Use of Force, p. 97. 87 For a powerful critique of just war thinking drawing on Derrida’s thought, see O’Callaghan, Walzer, Just War and Iraq. 88 89 Bellamy, Just Wars, p. viii. Walzer, Arguing about War, p. 3. 90 Jean Bethke Elshtain, ‘Introduction’, in: Jean Bethke Elshtain (ed.), Just War Theory (New York: New York University Press 1992), p. 1; Johnson, Just War Tradition, p. xxi. 91 Lieutenant Colonel J.D. Gray, ‘Just War Doctrine After September 11?’, The British Army Review, 131 (Spring 2003), p. 45 (italics added). 86

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least in its modern form, is always against war’.92 Coates’s reflection on this issue is also instructive: In its popular and all too ‘political’ form the concept of a ‘just war’ is often stripped of its essential moral complexity and ambiguity, with the result that the idiom is made to serve an ideological or propagandist, that is, war-enhancing purpose. Transformed into a moral crusade, its critical and constraining function is lost and it becomes a prime catalyst of war.93

According to Coates, the war-enhancing effect involves a bastardization of the theory; for in ‘its authentic form [ . . . ] the aim of just war thinking is not justification (and certainly not glorification of war), but containment’.94 Yet, as we have seen, just war thinking was not generated by a desire for containment. Thus, to claim that this is its ‘authentic’ aim is disingenuous. Although just war thinking has a profound effect on how the problem of ethics is conceptualized in relation to war, it does not provide a clear overall assessment on the permissibility of war. Reflecting on debates about the justice or otherwise of the Iraq war, Timothy L. Challans observes that ‘[p]eople can get anything out of just war thinking that they put into it.’95 It is therefore unsurprising that there is disagreement over whether this type of thinking can constrain war, as its supporters claim, or whether it simply serves to legitimate war. Walzer acknowledges the criticism that ‘those of us who defend and apply the theory are moralizing war, and by doing that we are making it easier to fight.’ He points out that ‘just is a term of art here; it means justifiable, defensible, even morally necessary (given the alternatives)—and that is all it means.’96 That is, the reference to justice does not mean that one should rush towards war. Johnson even calls the term just war ‘misleading, suggesting as it does that at some point in time there has been or may be a conflict in which one side is morally perfect’.97 Yet while Coates similarly rejects ‘moral enthusiasm’,98 Walzer says that a ‘just war is one that it is morally urgent to win’.99 Therefore, Johnson’s observation notwithstanding, just war thinking may seduce us into war by generating the sense that it is morally worthwhile and even required. It can support promoting what I have been calling ‘ethical war’. In this vein, Paul Christopher suggests that ‘[b]eginning with Augustine, war [ . . . ] became more than just a legal remedy for injustice; it became a moral imperative—and even more significant, it could be fought for the benefit of

93 Gray, ‘Just War Doctrine’, p. 46. Coates, Ethics of War, p. 21 (italics in original). Coates, Ethics of War, p. 22 (italics in original). 95 Timothy L. Challans, Awakening Warrior: Revolution in the Ethics of Warfare (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press 2007), p. 152. 96 97 Walzer, Arguing about War, p. x. Johnson, Just War Tradition, p. xxxiii. 98 99 Coates, Ethics of War, p. 123. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 110 (italics added). 92 94

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the vanquished.’100 Even if Augustine did not support anything of the kind, the just war tradition has come to be understood as justifying war on behalf of the other, which is what all Western war is represented as being. Humanitarian intervention and R2P, in particular, resonate with its ideas. Because at least since the end of the Cold War, war has been made through claims about ethics, a critical examination of the phenomenon of ethical war is urgent. David Campbell drew attention to the legitimizing function of the ‘moral certitude’ expressed in debates leading to the 1991 Gulf War.101 This way of thinking not only led to a whole series of apparently ethically motivated interventions, it also continues to affect the way we think about and shape the military. James Der Derian’s work in particular has demonstrated how an entire industry to produce and support war-fighting capabilities is developed and maintained, generating—and generated by—what he calls ‘virtuous war’.102 That is, the humanitarian or ethical framing has produced the conditions of possibility for Western war and continues to do so, even beyond September 11,103 when some argue rationales for going to war shifted. Vivienne Jabri recognizes this when she draws attention to the ‘distinct moral imperative’ as a ‘driving force’ within the contemporary transformation of global politics through war.104 Ethical war thus reinforces itself by shaping an imaginary within which the practice is supported and sustained. This observation resonates with Butler’s argument that how we frame violence enables particular forms of it. What Butler presses us to think about is ‘why and how it becomes easier, or more difficult, to wage’ war.105 In this vein, this section has set out how just war thinking—although considered to constrain war—plays a crucial role in setting up key ways of conceptualizing the problem which make it possible to believe that we are doing the right thing because we follow our best intentions. As we saw earlier, Butler argues that despite the West’s apparent commitment to humanity, non-Western lives are produced as expendable, leading to what she calls the ‘differential allocation of precarity’106 and enabling war. Thus, supporters of humanitarian intervention and R2P contribute to the condition of ‘unending war’ by promoting Western war as bringing freedom and equality to the rest of the world. Nevertheless, this story is not as clean as Butler’s argument might suggest: while such thinking excuses deaths in the 100

Christopher, Ethics of War and Peace, p. 41. 102 Campbell, Politics Without Principle, p. 21. Der Derian, Virtuous War. 103 See, for example, Dan Bulley, ‘The Politics of Ethical Foreign Policy: A Responsibility to Protect Whom?’ European Journal of International Relations 16:3 (2010), p. 443; Douzinas, ‘Humanity’, p. 161; Julian Reid, The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity, and the Defence of Logistical Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2006), p. 54: and Zehfuss, ‘Contemporary Western War’. 104 Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics, p. 127. 105 106 Butler, Frames of War, p. 2. Butler, Frames of War, p. 3. 101

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pursuit of ethical war, building on the idea of the ‘right intention’, this actually fails. The killing continues to be perceived as problematic, even unjustified.

2.4 The Tragedy of Death and the Aporia of Responsibility Just war thinking has been enormously influential in setting out the terrain of ethical argument in relation to war. It develops arguments about what war(fare) needs to be like in order to be good. This starting point already grants that such a thing is possible. Western war has indeed increasingly come to be construed as ethical (meaning good); it is presented as a solution to what are perceived to be ethical problems, chiefly serious human rights abuses of various kinds. The obvious problem is that war—even war intended to protect people—kills. This creates the paradox of ethical war. Just war thinking proposes a set of principles designed to help us negotiate this dilemma by establishing when killing may be considered permissible, justified, or even just. Nevertheless, even when a strong argument in favour of the permissibility of a particular killing is offered, the issue does not go away. It is not resolved. There is always something that cannot be explained or justified. Even in view of the most beautifully persuasive rationales offered for the justness of war or particular actions within war, we—including soldiers who have to do the killing107—remain troubled by deaths. Accordingly, such deaths are often represented as tragic. This is visible in many scholarly discussions of the ethics of war. According to Norman, ‘deaths in war, even enemy deaths, are normally acknowledged as a tragic loss.’108 Elshtain notes that ‘every civilian death is a tragedy’,109 while Johnson refers to the ‘tragedy of the moral dilemma’ that was involved in bombing German cities in the Second World War.110 For Bellamy, more generally, ‘whilst there are some things worth fighting for, worth killing for, war is always a tragedy.’111 This invocation of tragedy shows that, even when a case is made that war is justified, we remain dissatisfied, even disturbed, that people get killed: the supposed justness of these deaths as part of the war fails to respond to the entirety of our sense of obligation or affective disposition. We still think and feel that people’s lives ought not to be taken. Our sense of what is right therefore exceeds the rationale offered. Within the tradition of thought that inspires this book, this is often called the excess or the remainder.112 107

108 See Chapter 5. Norman, Ethics, Killing and War, p. 1. 110 Elshtain, Just War Against Terror, p. 4. Johnson, Just War Tradition, p. 27. 111 Bellamy, Just Wars, p. viii. 112 Derrida uses the more technical but perhaps less vivid term ‘trace’, referring to what cannot be systematically captured. The trace cannot be represented and nevertheless affects how meaning 109

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Put differently, the moral urgency of choosing a course of action that involves killing poses a problem inasmuch as despite all justification the deaths do not appear right. This is reconciled through the notion of tragedy. Coates sees the sense of tragedy as setting just war thinkers apart from realists, for ‘where the realist recognizes only pragmatic necessity, the just war theorist contemplates a moral tragedy.’113 Coates’s claim is problematic. For one thing, it is by no means clear that realists do not have tragic sensibilities.114 More importantly, while he cites such sensibility as somehow positive in moral terms, the idea of tragedy serves to obfuscate the problematic role intention plays in just war thinking. Ultimately, the invocation of tragedy serves to condone what is apparently condemned.115 As I have argued elsewhere, the reference to tragedy to express what cannot sufficiently be accounted for works to place these deaths apparently beyond our intention, thereby legitimizing them.116 The deaths are not positively embraced, but having caused them is not blameworthy because they were unintended. Significantly, claiming these deaths to be unintended produces them as accidental rather than incidental, placing any question of the larger context beyond consideration. The deaths appear to have arrived as a surprise, due to circumstances beyond our control. This is deeply problematic, given that they are the result of an activity that all are agreed inevitably causes (civilian) deaths. Killing is a structural possibility of warfare. Yet the representation of deaths as tragic obscures this and instead builds on what just war thinking calls the right attitude. Augustine’s concern with the purity of the soul has been reinterpreted for our times and now often simply seems to construe being well-intentioned as exculpatory.117 It is intriguing that the term tragedy is invoked to label these deaths. A tragedy does not happen out of the blue. Instead, the tragic outcome often happens despite the hero’s best efforts to avoid it. Oedipus, for example, ends up killing his father despite all measures taken by him and others to prevent this very outcome, perhaps indeed because of these efforts. Deaths in war continue to be inevitable, no matter what efforts are made to avoid them, and remain upsetting, whatever justification is offered. We also remain responsible for them, even if—through the idea of tragedy—they are placed beyond intention. The tragedy of deaths in war is, as I have put it elsewhere, is constituted. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 1982). 113

Coates, Ethics of War, p. 116. See Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests, and Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003). See also Bellamy, Just Wars, p. 105. 115 I am grateful to Nisha Shah for this formulation. 116 Maja Zehfuss, ‘The Tragedy of Violent Justice: The Danger of Elshtain’s Just War Against Terror’, International Relations 21:4 (2007), p. 498. 117 For more on this, see Zehfuss, ‘Killing Civilians’. 114

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‘that we are responsible even for that which we have not willed’.118 In addition, as Terry Eagleton points out, in tragedy, ‘the injurious remains injurious; it is not magically transmuted into good by its instrumental value.’119 This is obscured by the type of thinking on ethics of war that relies on ethics to provide justification and calls on tragedy to name what breaks out of this frame. My purpose in highlighting this is to suggest that the invocation of tragedy illustrates that there is no clear right thing to do, that we remain unpersuaded that killing in the name of protecting people is good. The label of tragedy becomes necessary because what it is attached to is beyond intelligibility within the prevailing ethical framework. Our troubled reaction to the deaths disrupts the justification for war. This suggests that the ethical framework undermines itself from within. In other words, ethics as produced through just war thinking does not provide a satisfactory resolution to the dilemma; these deaths are not necessarily wrong, but neither are they good, nor does presenting them as ‘excusable’ get beyond this issue. They have happened but defy classification within the frame of ethics. It is not just that the rightness or wrongness of an action might be contested, but that it is neither; or rather it is simultaneously both. Tragedy thus occupies the position of a supplement to the ethics of war; it is added to what is supposedly already complete. Such a supplement is never just an addition; it always threatens to replace what it is meant to enrich.120 The need to introduce the notion of tragedy, which reaches beyond the framework of intelligibility provided by the ethics of war, points to its failure. There is therefore a fundamental problem in the way in which ethics is produced in debates about war. Just war thinking fails to give us a way to think through the paradox at the heart of ethical war: people get killed, including some of those who are to be protected through the war in the first place. The need to represent these deaths as tragic—and therefore as beyond explanation within the system of thought—shows that just war thinking fails to provide us with a way to respond to the central dilemma of war. Crucially, the argument here is that the problem is one of the conception of ethics as separate from politics, rather than one of the particular substantive claims advanced, that is,

Zehfuss, ‘Tragedy of Violent Justice’, p. 499. Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 39. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected edition (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 1998), pp. 144–5. A supplement is something that is added to complement something that already exists, such as a supplementary volume to an encyclopaedia. However, the information in the supplement replaces what is in the original volumes. For a fuller explanation of the logic of the supplement, and more generally an introduction to Derrida’s thinking, see Maja Zehfuss, ‘Jacques Derrida’, in: Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams (eds.), Critical Theorists and International Relations (London: Routledge 2009), pp. 137–49. 118 119 120

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say, about whether non-combatant protection is the right ethical principle. Offering guidance for (or a check on) how we act in the world through just war thinking relies on producing ethics as an independent standard that can be brought to bear on war. It stipulates, discusses, and refines principles that are then applied to the world. However, by providing us with an ideal of an ethically legitimate war and guidelines about how to reach it, just war thinking also legitimates the practice it is thought to constrain. Indeed, this legitimation does not reflect a misapplication or abuse of such thinking but has been written into it from its inception. In other words, this kind of ethics does not work, leaving us in need of a fundamentally different way to respond to the challenge of ethical war. Along with other thinkers in the Continental tradition,121 Jacques Derrida is critical of ethics as traditionally conceived. While ethics has been represented as distinct and therefore conceptually pure, he points out three aspects that are shared by ethics and politics. First, both ‘command an action’. Put differently, they respond to the question: what should I do? In addition, they ‘demand that the answer to this question be as thoughtful as possible, thus preceded by a questioning that constitutes an essential part to any ethical and political act’. Finally, however, despite the necessity of thinking deeply about any reaction, it is not possible to delay. That is, the responsible decision must be ‘made with the utmost urgency’.122 These elements of the predicament are clearly visible in relation to ethical war which responds to the powerful need to act that we experience when we believe our communities to be threatened or when we witness grave human rights abuses. Ideally, we would analyse the situation, acquire as much information as possible, and think through every contingency before committing to a response, in particular if any deployment of military force is at issue. After all, these are issues of life and death. Yet these situations also create time pressure: people are being killed, the situation may be deteriorating. We cannot take forever to make a decision. Indeed, any delay is already a decision and implicates us in its effects. Derrida provides us with a way to approach this problem that is very different from what thinking based on or influenced by just war thinking allows. For those not familiar with Derrida’s thought, it might be worth briefly highlighting aspects that are particularly germane to the arguments pursued here. Derrida is most well known for having developed deconstruction. Deconstruction draws out the different things a text simultaneously says— its multiple significations—and the contradictions this entails,123 the way in 121

Fagan, Ethics and Politics, provides useful examinations of a number of these thinkers. Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2001, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 2002), p. 296 (italics in original). 123 See Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (London: Athlone Press 1987), pp. 41–2 for a brief accessible summary. 122

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which arguments rely on assumptions that at the same time undermine them. In other words, deconstruction subverts the logic of a text by taking it seriously. What deconstruction does not do is provide or pursue an external referent, a truth beyond the text. As Derrida famously pointed out, ‘There is nothing outside of the text [there is no outside-text; il n’y a pas de hors-texte].’124 This does not mean that he proposes to ignore the so-called ‘real world’. Instead, what Derrida calls text ‘implies all the structures called “real”, “economic”, “historical”, “socio-institutional”, in short: all possible referents’.125 That there is nothing outside of the text means that all reality is structured by differences, just as texts are, and that we have no way of referring to this ‘real’ except through representation and interpretations.126 Our arguments therefore cannot be authorized through foundational claims about what is ultimately true or right. In relation to the concerns of this book, the point is consequently not to find the correct ethics of war, but to understand how the ‘text’ of ethics is simultaneously made and undermined. Deconstruction works through analysing the oppositions on which arguments necessarily rely, often implicitly rather than explicitly. Derrida’s work shows that the dichotomies that structure Western thinking, such as most crucially presence/absence, do not function as they appear to.127 The opposition of ethics to politics could be understood to reflect such a dichotomy. Both are different frameworks, with one privileging others and the other the self; one revolves around seeking the good, the other focuses on what is actually possible. Significantly, the terms of a dichotomy always constitute a hierarchy. Thus, ethics—or the good—might be seen as the pure ideal that we aspire to, whereas politics—or the possible—reflects the grubby reality of what is. Crucially, however, while the terms that make up a dichotomy are meant to be mutually exclusive, Derrida shows that they are contaminated by each other; clear distinction is impossible. This is not to say that they are the same but rather that they can only be thought in relation to each other and indeed permeate each other. Thus, ethics is constituted by its relationship to politics (which, however, is not separate in the first place); what is seen as good is always already impacted by what is considered possible, even if this is not acknowledged. Hence, in Derrida’s conceptualization, ethics and politics are not two distinct spheres; rather we encounter ethico-political questions. Instead of looking to ethics or ethical theory to resolve problems we face, Derrida argues that ethics is only ever at issue when this is not possible. As he puts it, ‘ethics, politics, and responsibility, if there are any, will only ever have

124 125 126 127

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Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 158 (italics in original). Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 1988), p. 148. Derrida, Limited Inc, p. 148; Zehfuss, Constructivism, p. 239. Derrida, Of Grammatology.

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begun with the experience and experiment of aporia.’128 Such an aporia—a situation where there is no right way forward, where the way forward is blocked129—is clearly in evidence in relation to ethical war. The West may wish to protect people from oppression and extermination, but in attempting to do so it will itself oppress and kill. Just war thinking seeks to resolve the dilemma and provide guidance on the right way forward. Yet even though ethics is produced as offering guidance, the problem of the irresolvability of the dilemma which Derrida highlights as the hallmark of questions of ethics is visible within the text of ethical war, through the remainder expressed in ‘tragic’ deaths. Put differently, the ethics of war as conceived in just war thinking and similar approaches ultimately fails in helping us to think through and respond to the challenges that exercise us most. Killing—not only but especially of civilians—turns out to be beyond the rationalization of ethics, unintelligible, and upsetting. Derrida’s reflections on ethics directly engage these challenges, presenting them as closely connected to the question of response and thus responsibility. For Derrida, responsibility or ethics are only ever possible—are only ever even at issue—when we have to make a decision. A decision has to step beyond the normative order—beyond reason—in some way. If this is not the case, if the rules determine the outcome, if really what we are doing is correctly applying the rules, then there is no possibility of ethics. We are instead in the realm of the application of a programme. For example, if the rule is that civilians should not be killed and we have to consider whether to bomb a school without a discernible larger benefit, this is not really an ethical problem. The answer is evident; it can be calculated by simply applying the rules. If, however, some positive good may be achieved by killing civilians— perhaps the protection of other civilians—then we have a genuine ethicopolitical problem and our response requires a decision. It is not an issue of developing ever more clever schemes for determining what, in any given situation, is the right thing to do. Even the most sophisticated such schemes cannot take away the need for a decision. The appearance of providing authoritative rules and guidelines merely gives us permission to ‘switch off our thinking’.130 Yet the way forward requires stepping beyond the normative order. Decisions cannot be ethical; they necessarily reach beyond ethics. Conceiving of ethics in this way has a number of implications. Most crucially, rules or protocols cannot tell us how to act. Thus, to look to an independent ethics for guidance to plot out the way forward is a mistake. 128 Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press 1992), p. 41. 129 Jacques Derrida, Engaged: The Sydney Seminars, ed. Paul Patton and Terry Smith (Sydney: Power Publications 2001), p. 63. 130 O’Callaghan, Walzer, Just War and Iraq, p. 150.

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Derrida illustrates the impossibility of relying on ethics to resolve the challenges of responsibility through the biblical story of God’s demand that Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac. While this story takes us away from the problem of ethical war, considering it in some detail is useful in clarifying the problem of ethics. The so-called temptation of Abraham starts with God’s command: ‘Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.’131 This is a terrible command. According to the Old Testament, God had entered a covenant with Abraham to ‘multiply’ Abraham ‘exceedingly’ in return for Abraham’s faith in God. Thus, despite their age, Sarah and Abraham conceived a son. It is this late and only son132 whom Abraham is told to sacrifice. No explanation is given and none is asked for. Abraham confronts an aporia: neither resisting God’s command nor killing his own son could be regarded as the right way forward. Without telling Isaac or anyone else of God’s command, Abraham travels to Moriah with him to perform the sacrifice. The story comes to a dramatic head when Abraham binds Isaac, places him on the altar and is ready to kill him. It is only when Abraham has already raised his knife to slaughter his son that an angel interrupts the sacrifice. Abraham’s fear of God—his faith in God—has been established unambiguously: he has not spared his only son. A ram suddenly appears and is sacrificed in Isaac’s place. This is a pretty strange story, even in the context of the Old Testament. Abraham apparently passes the test set for him. Yet the test itself and the idea of a father being prepared to kill his only son—and to do so without even demanding an explanation—is disturbing. Therefore, Derrida’s assertion that ‘ “the sacrifice of Isaac” illustrates [ . . . ] the most common and everyday experience of responsibility’133 is counterintuitive, even outrageous. In order to understand this claim it is necessary to examine the story in detail. God, Derrida notes, does not explain his command. He ‘decides, without revealing his reasons, to demand of Abraham that most cruel, impossible, and untenable gesture: to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice’.134 Equally, Abraham does not discuss the command to sacrifice his son with his family. This silence seems to add to the horror: there is not even a purpose or justification we might begin to understand for the proposed killing. Derrida’s reading of Søren Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the biblical story highlights,

131

Genesis 22: 2 (all quotations from the Bible are from the King James Version). Ismael, Abraham’s son with Sarah’s slave Hagar, is not counted. Genesis 16: 15. 133 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 1995), p. 67. 134 Derrida, Gift of Death, 58. 132

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as does Kierkegaard, ‘Abraham’s strange reply to Isaac’.135 When Isaac asks why they have not brought an animal for the sacrifice, his father responds that ‘God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering.’136 Although Abraham replies to the question, he keeps his secret. As Derrida points out, he ‘doesn’t keep silent and he doesn’t lie. He doesn’t speak nontruth.’ Yet by not speaking to Isaac or Sarah about God’s command, Abraham ‘transgresses the ethical order’.137 In Kierkegaard’s view, the highest expression of the ethical lies in what binds us to our community. Through his silence, his failure to communicate, ‘Abraham betrays ethics.’138 Although Abraham says something, something which, moreover, will turn out to be true, he does not speak about what matters. Instead of criticizing this failure, Derrida suggests that to ‘the extent that, in not saying the essential thing, namely the secret between God and him, Abraham doesn’t speak, he assumes the responsibility that consists in always being alone, entrenched in one’s own singularity at the moment of decision’.139 It is Abraham who has to make a decision. Ultimately, no one else can respond to the predicament he finds himself in. Derrida therefore insists that just ‘as no one can die in my place, no one can make a decision, what we call “a decision”, in my place’.140 This understanding of decision and responsibility is crucial to Derrida’s thinking. It is because of the way in which, at the moment of decision, we cannot pass on the problem that ‘ “the sacrifice of Isaac” illustrates [ . . . ] the most common and everyday experience of responsibility.’141 We experience our singularity at the moment of decision, at the moment in which we may neither be replaced nor even helped by anyone else.142 Yet at the same time, we are not entirely in control of the decision.143 Derrida maintains that Abraham teaches us that ‘far from ensuring responsibility, the generality of ethics incites irresponsibility.’144 For responsibility to be possible, the tension which marks the aporia of the decision does, and must, remain: ‘Abraham must assume absolute responsibility for sacrificing his son by sacrificing ethics, but in order for there to be a sacrifice, the ethical must retain all its value; the love for his son must remain intact, and the order of human duty must continue to insist on its rights.’145 Responsibility happens within this tension, at this limit.146 This analysis of responsibility in the face of aporia can help us rethink the problem of war and ethics.

135 Derrida, Gift of Death, p. 58. See Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: Dialectic Lyric by Johannes De Silentio, translated with an introduction by Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin Books 1985). 136 137 Genesis 22: 8. Derrida, Gift of Death, p. 59. 138 139 Derrida, Gift of Death, p. 59. Derrida, Gift of Death, pp. 59–60. 140 141 Derrida, Gift of Death, p. 60. Derrida, Gift of Death, p. 67. 142 143 Derrida, Gift of Death, p. 60. See section 2.5. 144 145 Derrida, Gift of Death, p. 61. Derrida, Gift of Death, p. 66. 146 On the significance of the limit, also see Fagan, Ethics and Politics, p. 8.

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Of course, other ways of thinking the ethics of war also recognize the aporia created by killing in war, even if the issue might be expressed in different terms. Just war thinking is so attractive precisely because it provides us with apparently practical ways of negotiating this dilemma. Paul Ramsey and James Turner Johnson, for example, seem to engage directly with the need for judgement and the issue of responsibility. Ramsey is concerned with demonstrating the compatibility of just war thinking with Christian love and showing how such love can establish appropriate limitations to war, especially in the face of nuclear armament.147 This argument proceeds from establishing what ethics requires, seeking to articulate ‘a theory of responsible action’,148 which can then be applied to the world. Similarly, Johnson points out that ‘human moral decisions inevitably contain something of tragedy: for every gain there is loss.’149 Johnson’s work explores the history and development of the tradition, and therefore—perhaps more than others—appreciates the way in which it has been shaped by political circumstances over time. The thrust of his argument, however, is again that the concepts of the just war tradition are ‘applicable guides to the justification and restraint of war today’.150 Put differently, the challenge is ‘how to make the morally preferable also politically possible’.151 The good is primary and separate from the possible. Thus, both seek to address the dilemma of war by applying a predetermined ethics to the world. Section 2.5 sets out how this constitutes a politics of ethics and how thinking inspired by Derrida helps us to challenge this way of approaching the issue. Before turning to this argument it is important to note that Walzer himself also appears to tackle the aporia. He highlights what he sees as the limitations of the logic of his own approach in what he calls the ‘supreme emergency’ or, more broadly, ‘emergency ethics’.152 The problem for Walzer is that in a supreme emergency—which is symbolized in the radical and imminent threat of the Third Reich to the United Kingdom in the period between 1940 and 1942153—the rules deliver an unsatisfactory outcome: the absolute requirement to protect civilians gets in the way of securing the future of the political community. Walzer suggests that in such exceptional cases—that is, when the community faces an imminent and grave threat—‘one might well be required to override the rights of innocent people.’154 Such situations are ‘a time for

147

148 Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience. Ramsey, Just War, p. viii. 150 Johnson, Just War Tradition, p. xxxiv. Johnson, Just War Tradition, p. xxxiii. 151 Johnson, Just War Tradition, p. 366. 152 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, Chapter 16 and Walzer, Arguing about War, Chapter 3. 153 Once the United States and the Soviet Union were participating in the fight against the Third Reich, there was no longer a supreme emergency as Walzer understands it. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 261. 154 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 259. 149

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heroic decision’.155 The constraints imposed by the rules do not cease to have a claim, but leaders can nevertheless ‘do whatever [is] required to meet the danger’.156 Thus, that the UK bombed German cities was justifiable while the conditions of supreme emergency held, despite the implications for civilians. This argument seems to share some elements with Derrida’s account of ethico-political challenges as requiring a responsible decision. This superficial similarity, however, merely serves to underline how just war thinking unravels from within. While Derrida highlights that the aporetic structure of facing a question of responsibility is the ‘most common’ experience,157 situations of supreme emergency in Walzer’s sense are exceptional cases where the rules of just war thinking cease to work properly. They do not fit Walzer’s thinking, leading him to argue that we ‘must seek an escape’ from them.158 Walzer’s argument is based on his commitment to communitarianism. In order to preserve the survival of the community, leaders may go beyond the rules, indeed might be ‘required’ to do whatever is necessary. Walzer thus provides a rationale for breaking the rules he generally endorses under specific, exceptional circumstances. Put differently, when he is confronted with the limits of his ethics, Walzer invokes a different kind of principle so as to authorize the action which he considers right based on his communitarianism; he thereby overturns the outcome his actual argument delivers.159 He proposes emergency ethics as a fix or, in other words, a supplement. This supplement supersedes, and therefore replaces, the normal rules. Communitarianism trumps just war considerations. In Derrida’s argument, in contrast, the rules continue to apply, indeed are recognized as a constitutive part of the problem. This is why a decision that cannot be authorized through knowledge, rules, or argument is necessary. In sum, just war thinkers seek to work out an ethics which then serves to guide and constrain what should happen in the world. Drawing on Derrida’s thinking allows us instead to problematize the impossible separation of ethics and politics that such arguments rely on. This is why this book does not provide a new answer to the questions just war thinking is already asking. Put differently, it does not respond to just war thinking as a scholarly activity and aim to replace it with a new version of ethics. Rather, it starts in a different place so as to enable us to see the problematic way in which just war thinking has permeated a wider discourse which gives rise to and maintains a practice of ethical war.

155

156 Walzer, Arguing about War, p. 33. Walzer, Arguing about War, p. 34. 158 Derrida, Gift of Death, p. 67. Walzer, Arguing about War, p. 48. 159 Walzer acknowledges that emergency ethics negotiates between an absolutism of rights and utilitarianism. Walzer, Arguing about War, p. 35. 157

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War and the Politics of Ethics

2.5 War and the Politics of Ethics As we saw earlier, just war thinking operates on ethics being a distinct area of thought. It seeks to deliver principles, often by reflecting and sharpening hypothetical scenarios to clarify the ethical stakes, which then determine the right action. That is, ethics is, or should be, separate from politics: interest, power, and indeed practicalities should not interfere with determining the ethical course of action. Derrida points out the impossibility of this entire scheme, the impossibility of ever finding an ethics that would provide us with clarity as to the right thing to do. Rethinking ethics in this vein means to acknowledge that claims about what is the right thing to do are precarious, but also that they cannot be pure, that we confront challenges that are simultaneously ethical and political, with no possibility of clearly separating them as they constitute, and blend into, each other. The appeal to an ethics as though it was distinct and pure is therefore political. For Derrida, questions of ethics arise when we encounter an aporia, that is, when there is no right way forward. There is no right action that would enable us to satisfy all rules, principles, and obligations at the same time. In this type of situation, we are caught in a genuine dilemma, for example because all possible courses of action are likely to result in people getting hurt. We may wish to save people from genocide, but in engaging in war to do so we end up risking killing (some of) them ourselves. Soldiers may have to decide whether to risk killing some non-combatants at a roadblock in order to protect other civilians in the area of operations. These predicaments cannot be resolved or transcended. The question of ethics arises precisely when we do not (and indeed cannot) know what to do, when we feel drawn into competing obligations that we are not able to fulfil all at the same time. Much like Abraham, we have to decide, and so do the soldiers: the rules and principles of ethics fail to provide an answer. Abraham decides to obey God’s command and even though he does not have to kill his son in the end, he has failed in his responsibility to him and his wife. Yet, had he refused the sacrifice, he would have broken the covenant. He would have failed them in a different way and failed in his responsibility to God. The story thus illustrates how assuming responsibility in response to the demand from another unavoidably entails a betrayal of other others. The problem is that it is not possible to do right by everyone. As Derrida points out, ‘I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing the other other, the other others.’160 For this reason it is impossible to justify the responsible act. Choosing to fulfil one

160

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Derrida, The Gift of Death, p. 68.

The Paradox of Ethical War and the Politics of Ethics

obligation—to God, to the people whose human rights are being abused, or perhaps to people at a roadblock—we have to sacrifice the obligation to others because I can respond only to the one (or to the One), that is, to the other, by sacrificing the other to that one. I am responsible to any one (that is to say to any other) only by failing in my responsibility to all the others, to the ethical or political generality. And I can never justify this sacrifice, I must always hold my peace about it.161

As a result, Abraham’s decision is at the same time absolutely responsible and irresponsible.162 This tension is necessary to the experience of responsibility. If it were possible to identify only one relation of responsibility and to dismiss all others, then there would not be a question of responsibility at all. When we confront the question of whether to pursue ethical war in response to significant human rights violations, we confront this type of predicament. We must make a decision, and this decision will not be authorized by or explicable within the rules of ethics. Even if we reason out the best course of action, at the end we have to decide and our decision will sacrifice some of the obligations we recognize. Thus, the paradox at the heart of ethical war is a genuine dilemma. It is not that we have failed to find a smooth resolution but that there is none, given the structure of the ethico-political challenge. While it is important to acquire as much information as possible about situations that might call for an intervention and to carefully consider different routes of action, ultimately, knowledge cannot provide the answer, not because it is often necessary to act swiftly and we will not have time to find out enough, but rather because, as Derrida puts it, ‘between one’s knowledge and the decision, the chain of consequence must be interrupted.’163 The constraint is structural rather than merely practical. It would not be possible to determine the right way forward through knowledge, even if we could take the time to acquire as much of it as we wanted.164 The idea of capturing in a document what the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ involves, for example, is anathema to Derrida’s understanding of responsibility. The ICISS report sets out a protocol of conditions—inspired by just war criteria—that have to be met for the Responsibility to Protect to become relevant and what sorts of measures should then be taken. Following Derrida’s reasoning, this cannot work. Indeed, the reduction to the signifier R2P seems to underline the way in which responsibility and ethics have in this scheme (impossibly) come to be a programme for application. Ultimately, the document can anyway only provide a broad framework. The decision of whether to

161 163

Derrida, The Gift of Death, p. 70. Derrida, Negotiations, p. 298.

162 164

Derrida, The Gift of Death, p. 77. Derrida, Negotiations, p. 231.

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intervene, and how, still has to be made. No document could guarantee that by following its terms we will have acted responsibly. Our contradictory obligations under different rules—say, protecting life and respecting sovereignty—or towards different people—say, towards Iraqi civilians and Western soldiers—cannot be avoided. While this predicament is a structural feature of situations that call for a responsible decision, the dilemma is particularly powerful in war when issues of life and death are confronted. As Dan Bulley puts it, ‘the responsibility to protect humans is always also a responsibility to attack them.’165 Many soldiers report the terror of the experience of having to decide whether to open fire on a vehicle at a roadblock, making the decision about whether to potentially kill uninvolved civilians or letting through armed insurgents who might kill them and their comrades. In the introduction to the academic edition of the US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual, Sarah Sewall observes that at such checkpoints ‘a young man must make a decision that may haunt or end his life’ within ‘just seconds’.166 Sewall highlights the tension between force protection and protecting civilians, concluding that ‘no rules can eliminate the underlying conflict.’167 Referring to the rules and principles of just war thinking does not help in these situations, not just because the soldiers might not have the time or because they might lack full information, for example about whether they are confronting civilians or combatants, but because the tension between the competing demands is irresolvable. It is, as we have seen, precisely this structure of the situation that makes it an ethical challenge. Ethical questions arise only if there is not a rational way forward that can be plotted out in reference to a theory. In a situation where ‘the path is clear and given, when a certain knowledge opens up the way in advance, the decision is already made, it might as well be said that there is none to make: irresponsibly, and in good conscience, one simply applies or implements a program’.168 An ethico-political challenge, in contrast, takes us beyond knowledge; it requires a decision that can never take account of the totality of knowledge or the entirety of the normative order. It has to go beyond that order in some way. It requires ‘an act of faith’.169 The decision 165 Bulley, ‘The Politics of Ethical Foreign Policy’, p. 452; see also Dan Bulley, Ethics as Foreign Policy: Britain, the EU and the Other (Abingdon: Routledge 2009), p. 48. 166 Sarah Sewall, ‘Introduction to the University of Chicago Press Edition: A Radical Field Manual’, in: US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 2007), p. xxviii. For a detailed analysis of the manual, see section 4.2. 167 Sewall, ‘Introduction’, xxviii. For a Derridean analysis of the issue, see O’Callaghan, Walzer, Just War and Iraq, pp. 117–19; see also Chapter 5. 168 Derrida, The Other Heading, p. 41. 169 Jacques Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides—A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, in: Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 2003), p. 118.

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invariably moves towards something that cannot be known: ‘Even if one knows everything, the decision, if there is one, must advance towards a future that is not known, that cannot be anticipated.’170 When we make a decision, we cannot know exactly what will happen. Derrida calls this the issue of a ‘perhaps’, which ‘deprives us of all assurance and leaves the future to the future’.171 This is crucial: we cannot govern the outcomes of our decisions. Because we are never separate from the world, we are not even entirely in control of the decisions we make. Derrida calls this ‘the Other’s decision in me, or through me’.172 Vexingly, therefore, ethical action may always become other than intended. We may intend to bring freedom to the oppressed and yet impede their freedom in a different way or even kill them. Perhaps this is precisely why even secularized just war thinking focuses so strongly on the right intention. It is not about the need to have a pure soul, but about what we can be expected to achieve. Whether or not intention matters is, of course, a significant debate within thinking on ethics; utilitarians instead privilege outcomes. Yet in just war thinking, intention is clearly critical,173 and this is reflected in regulations governing armed conflict which allow for certain types of damage and killing construed as unintended or as part of a larger benign intention. The point is not to debate the extent to which or how intention should matter for ethical judgements. Because of problems with the concept of intention itself, such an approach is defective. Intentionality can never be straightforward, undivided.174 Derrida analyses this in relation to communication. He sets out how communication is always already divided in itself because reception impacts meaning.175 We may mean to say one thing, but whomever we address will bring their own interpretation to the encounter, ensuring that what is heard is never quite identical to what has been said. This is part of the structure of communication rather than a sign of not communicating properly. Derrida explains this through the phenomenon of iterability, the way in which acts of communication may be repeated and recognized despite always already being changed in the process. It is simply not possible to repeat something exactly, nor is it necessary for communication to occur. Iterability, as Derrida points out, ‘alters, contaminating parasitically what it identifies and enables to repeat “itself”; it leaves us no choice but to mean (to say) something that is (always, already, also) other than what we mean (to say), to say something other than what we say and would have wanted to say’.176 Intention therefore cannot be pure: we have no choice 170 172 173 174 176

171 Derrida, Negotiations, p. 231. Derrida, Negotiations, p. 344. Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged, p. 103. This is challenged by the revisionists; see section 6.2. 175 Derrida, Limited Inc, p. 105. Derrida, Limited Inc. Derrida, Limited Inc, p. 62 (italics in original).

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but to also intend the apparently unintentional side effects of our intended acts. Put differently, whatever we do will have consequences we do not want. There is, in sum, a fundamental problem with the way ethics is conceptualized in arguments about the ethics of war. Just war thinkers—but also those more obviously motivated by human rights thinking, such as defenders of R2P—construe ethics as a resource to draw on to think about and guide behaviour in the world. Just war thinking accepts that there will be war and that war is deadly; this is the ‘reality’ we confront.177 It seeks to offer guidelines for negotiating the performative contradiction that arises from the risk of killing those we seek to protect. However, because ethics cannot tell us what to do, it cannot ensure that we do the right thing or indeed give us the warm glow of satisfaction at having done the right thing. Derrida thus urges us to ‘stop talking with authority about moral or political responsibility.’178 He objects to the ‘knights of good conscience’179 who insist that we must all return to Immanuel Kant and, first and foremost, think about ethics. Rules, even ethical ones, will not settle how to take responsibility. Derrida considers an approach that would turn to ethics to determine what we should do not just futile but irresponsible. Turning to rules will also not make the experience of responsibility any less fraught and painful. The rules of ethics, while significant to the predicament, cannot determine behaviour at the very point when it matters. When ethics is at issue, we face an aporia and that means ‘moments in which the decision between just and unjust is never insured by a rule’.180 The issue is, in Derrida’s terms, undecidable,181 made necessary by contradictory imperatives that cannot be resolved. By offering principles and guidelines intended to show us how to negotiate the dilemma, just war thinking obscures this problem. It obscures the precariousness of our ethical claims. This works because these arguments are rooted in a distinction between the good and the possible: ethics on the one hand and politics on the other. While both ethics and politics reference the fact that as humans we are not alone in the world but rather have to live with one another, one is considered to be about what we ought to do or ‘how we ought to live’182 whereas the other is conceptualized as determined by interest and power. One is concerned with potential altruism, while the other takes selfishness as a fact of life. Each is the constitutive outside of the other. 177

On the problematic of starting with an accepted reality, see Zehfuss, Constructivism. Derrida, The Other Heading, p. 41. 179 Derrida, The Gift of Death, p. 67. 180 Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority” ’, trans. Mary Quaintance, in: David Gray Carlson, Drucilla Cornell, and Michel Rosenfeld (eds.) Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York: Routledge: 1992), p. 16. 181 Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, p. 24. 182 Peter Singer, ‘Introduction’, in: Peter Singer (ed.), Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1994), p. 4. 178

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Just war thinking builds on this distinction: it seeks to establish ideal principles, supporting ethical practices, which are then to be applied to an imperfect world. Crucially, therefore, in just war thinking,183 and hence in thinking about the ethics of war, ethics is considered in some way prior to—or at least separate from—politics, untouched by the grubby realities of the world.184 The supposed clarity of this distinction is reflected not just in arguments about war but also, unsurprisingly, in practices of warfare, which are invariably expressions of what is understood to be practicable and acceptable. In this vein, protecting non-combatants is considered obviously good. This supports, for example, a practice of precision targeting while placing to one side questions about access to technology, the lethal radius of smart bombs, or the rationale for bombing in the first place.185 More broadly, the principles for just conduct in war—protection of non-combatants and requirement of proportionality—are produced as technical requirements that are indifferent to their (political) context. These issues are explicitly construed as separate from the question of whether it is just to go to war. Even the consideration of ius ad bellum leaves out broader political questions about how we got to be here in the first place, about who gets to define right authority or just cause. As a result, the wider political context of contemporary war—‘the colonial present’186 to use Derek Gregory’s term—is placed beyond the remit of just war thinking. This continues to impact the discourse of contemporary war despite the significant work that has already been done to highlight and analyse the politics of contemporary war. The apparently timeless principles of just war thinking, which are also inscribed to an extent into international and military law, provide a basis for conceptualizing and calculating ethical war(fare), thereby authorizing the rise of ethical war. The production of ethics as separate from politics is crucial to this problematic conceptualization. In political argument, ethics and politics are often separated out. That political arguments ‘rest explicitly or otherwise, on a conception of the good or right’ is, Fagan says, ‘a remarkably enduring and seductive way of organising political thought, in which ethics provides the foundation on which arguments are built, as well as the limits to the scope of what is available for argument’. That is, they demarcate the space within which political argument is permissible. This means that theories of ethics are incredibly important; they ‘do a great deal of work in contemporary political life, in terms of

183

This applies to both revisionist and traditional just war thinking. Hutchings highlights throughout her Global Ethics that this is not the case for virtue, feminist, or postmodernist ethics. This may be so—although I am less convinced than she is in relation to both virtue and feminist ethics—but it has not had an appreciable impact on this particular discourse. Militaries in fact draw on virtue ethics, but without abandoning the separation; see Chapter 5. 185 186 See Chapter 3. Gregory, The Colonial Present. 184

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offering, arguing for and justifying a variety of better ways to proceed’.187 Put differently, ethical theories are used as a ‘foundation from which to launch particular political moves or strategies’.188 There is a difference, however, between ethical theories and the ways in which we talk in the everyday about the political challenges we confront. Fagan points out that in everyday life ethical theories are by no means used consistently, suggesting that they do not actually deliver what we need in order to orient ourselves in the world. Neta C. Crawford similarly observes that the ‘trouble is that sometimes, and in the case of war, more often than not, different systems of moral reasoning may be simultaneously in use’.189 This messiness may be vexing to those who seek to provide a coherent, logical framework; for my argument it is simply an empirical aspect of the world it engages with. The flexibility in argumentation where different ethical forms of reasoning are deployed, sometimes mixed with pragmatic political arguments, confirms that while ethical claims are often invoked as foundational, ethical arguments cannot actually deliver in terms of providing clear answers to the predicaments we confront in life. Often something does not quite add up. I have already noted that, despite careful reasoning about why certain wars are good, there is typically a strong and negative reaction to deaths. Somehow we are not quite prepared to accept that it is good for people to die, especially if they are civilians. Intriguingly, we continue to resort to ethics as a foundation despite the evident impossibility of securing claims about right and wrong in this way. This problematically obscures the predicament we find ourselves in. As Fagan rightly observes, the issue is not so much with the precariousness of ethical claims per se, but with the way in which, rather than acknowledge the precariousness, an attempt may be made to cover it over and instead employ the category of ethics to shift an issue outside of the realm of contestation and debate.190

In other words, resorting to ethical claims has the effect of removing the issue from the realm of politics in a way of thinking that opposes these two spheres to each other. If the conceptualization of ethics as separate and foundational does not actually work, however, if ethics instead requires a decision which goes beyond the normative order but which nevertheless remains caught within it,191 then the production of ethics as an extra-political ground in relation to which political acts and practices can be judged and guided must be understood as a politics of ethics. Ethics of war inspired by just war thinking is

187 189 191

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188 Fagan, Ethics and Politics, p. 1. Fagan, Ethics and Politics, p. 2. 190 Crawford, Accountability for Killing, p. 62. Fagan, Ethics and Politics, p. 3. It must remain caught because there is no outside. See Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 158.

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unable to elucidate this issue because the demarcation between politics and ethics is taken as given. This kind of thinking obscures how claims to ethics inform and produce political challenges and indeed political space. Ethics and politics are indeed always already intertwined. In Derrida’s words, ‘[e]thical problems are already taken up in the so-called space of the political, of calculation, of negotiation, of deliberation.’192 Put very simply, ethics ‘in one way or another, always involves politics’.193 Fagan calls this the ‘interpenetration’ of ethics and politics.194 You cannot look at an ethical demand in terms of ethics only; the situation is already shaped by what we call politics. This makes it impossible for ethics to function as extra-political guidance; it cannot provide us with secure answers in response to our questions about how we ought to live. Fagan’s diagnosis of the problem is persuasive and strongly resonates with the concerns of this book. However, despite her concern with practical politics, she only examines theoretical arguments. In contrast, this book treats the theoretical problematic empirically. In other words, this book traces the practical production of the world of war and shows how it both operates and comes apart in relation to the distinction it effects between ethics on the one hand and politics on the other. It is interested in the work that ethics does in the discourse on war and, relatedly, in the way in which, in the discourse on war, claims to ethics have become a ‘well-concealed political violence’.195 This politics of ethics will be shown in relation to a range of practices of warfare.

2.6 Conclusion With the rise of ethical war, the question of how to ensure that war is decided on—and crucially—conducted ethically, has become especially pressing. There is a paradox at the heart of ethical war: it threatens the lives of those it claims to protect. The most common and established way of conceptualizing these issues is found in just war thinking, which engages with the ethical challenges raised by war in a considered and careful manner. Nevertheless, I have argued that just war thinking with its rules and principles cannot adequately address, much less resolve, the paradox. The problem is not actually that we are stuck and do not quite know what to do. Rather, just war thinking invests us with confidence that the ethical issues are being addressed through, for example, supporting non-combatant immunity. This obscures the impossibility of getting it right, the precariousness of ethical claims. The contemporary discourse of war, which is permeated 192 194

Derrida, Negotiations, p. 302. Fagan, Ethics and Politics, p. 71.

193

Hutchings, Global Ethics, p. 8. Derrida, Negotiations, p. 307.

195

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by just war thinking, provides a frame of intelligibility; ethics is an essential part of this. The rise of ethical war is made possible by and relies on claims about the ethics of war derived from just war thinking. Just war thinking develops principles and rules that are intended to establish how ethics might be used to evaluate wars and conduct in war. This can then serve the purpose of determining how war might be made to conform more to the demands of ethics. If politicians and soldiers observe the relevant principles, then unjust wars and unjust actions in war could be prevented. This is how it is meant to work. This clearly presumes that ethics provides a useful resource for guiding and taming the violence of war. Obama points out, for example, that to ‘say that a military tactic is legal, or even effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance’,196 implying that ethical considerations will provide more stringent limitations. We will see throughout this book that ethical constraints are seen to go beyond the question of legality. For example, in the 1991 Gulf War concerns were raised over the (perfectly legal) killing of defenceless Iraqi combatants by the vastly superior Western forces.197 The aim of just war thinking is to determine what are the right wars to get involved in and how they should be fought. While the practice of ethical war is of course not a faithful translation of just war thinking and indeed involves a multiplicity of arguments that may even be intellectually incompatible,198 this framework nevertheless plays a role in that it makes it possible to conceive of war as ethical. That is, while just war thinking is presented as limiting or indeed critiquing the violence of war, it at the same time legitimizes and thereby enables war in the first place. There are a number of interrelated points to note. First, just war thinking’s configuration of the problem already predetermines the solution. The upshot is that, at this moment in time, this type of thinking and—given its (alleged) dominance—thinking of war in relation to ethics more generally is not able to constrain war or produce a critique. Instead, ideas of ethics have come to enable and enhance war. We might therefore propose to critique just war thinking to show why an ethics based on rules and principles is problematic and ends up justifying what it seeks to prevent. Second, the flexibility of ethical argumentation means that it is necessary to examine practices of warfare in considerable detail so as to understand their impact and the extent to which they are shaped by key uncontested principles, such as non-combatant immunity. Third, the dominance of just war thinking crucially obscures the range of issues that are excluded from political debate and decision because they are considered

196 Barack Obama, Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on the End of Combat Operations in Iraq, 31 August 2010. 197 See section 5.1. 198 Chapter 5 shows the significance of virtue ethics to military ethics education.

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matters of ethics rather than politics. That is, the problem does not lie in the substantive claims of the approach or even its expression through principles, but rather in the configuration of the space for politics in distinction to ethics, configuration which is key to producing ethical war. At the moment, there appears to be no other way to discuss the ethics of war(fare).199 Blithely ignoring much critical work in this area, Walzer even suggests that ‘imperial warfare’ can be criticized only in just war terms because there is no ‘other language’, no ‘other theory’ for such a critique.200 Walzer’s assessment shows that critiques of the politics of contemporary Western war have not penetrated the arguments about the ethics of war. This leaves us in a problematic position. What is claimed to be the only way to conceptualize and deeply engage with the problem of ethics in relation to war has been shown to be inadequate from the beginning. What is more, it supports ethical war, reinforcing the practice. This book does not propose to utilize or develop a new conceptualization of ethics in order to improve or prevent war. Instead, it starts from a different place: it takes the discourse—or rather text—of war and ethics as an empirical problem to be investigated. It examines how the text of ethical war works and fails to work—indeed undermines itself—so as to elucidate its effects. Thus, it develops a necessary new way to critique ethical war. The book now turns to specific aspects of the practice of ethical war before returning to wider questions about ethics and politics in the concluding chapter.

199 Recent interventions in philosophy that depart from some of the conventional wisdom of just war thinking have swiftly been subsumed into just war thinking by grouping them as a ‘revisionist’ just war account. Lazar, ‘War’. 200 Walzer, Arguing about War, p. xi. On this issue also see section 2.2.

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3 Targeting: Precision Bombing and the Production of Ethics

War necessarily involves destruction. Buildings are blown up, essential infrastructure is destroyed, lives are ended. Some of this damage is very much intended: the destruction of a designated target is, after all, a success in military terms. Other damage, or so we are told, is accidental, or rather—in the phrase that causes so much offence—‘collateral’.1 It is therefore fortunate that developments in weapon technology appear to have made it possible to produce the first kind of damage with increasing efficiency and to reduce the second kind of damage. Put differently, ‘smart’ bombs or precision-guided munitions (PGMs) seem to enable Western militaries to reliably hit ever smaller targets. This has given rise to the expectation that fighting with such weapons reduces the extent of destruction and, crucially, that it is therefore becoming increasingly possible to protect non-combatants during war. ‘Smart’ bombs, in other words, have for some time enjoyed a positive reputation, not least because of their alleged ability to reduce the level of unintended non-combatant casualties. There seems to be something appealing about this development. If, using our technological ingenuity, we can reduce the destructive effects of warfare— reduce them to the kind of destruction that is an efficient part of warfare in that it delivers the war’s objectives—then war is no longer quite the hell it was once seen as. It has therefore been suggested that the increase in precision has ethical significance. Wheeler claims that the development of precision weapons has ‘ameliorated the awful moral choices that faced American and British decision-makers during World War II’.2 Ward Thomas similarly argues that evolving technology since the Second World War has made it ‘easier to be 1 Whether it is significant that collateral damage may be incidental rather than accidental raises complex questions that are addressed in section 3.4. 2 Nicholas J. Wheeler, ‘Dying for Enduring Freedom: Accepting Responsibility for Civilian Casualties in the War Against Terrorism’, International Relations 16:2 (2002), p. 216.

Precision Bombing and the Production of Ethics

good’3 whilst Theo Farrell represents precision bombing as a ‘humane’ means of warfare.4 Such claims are significant not least because, according to Coker, ‘Western societies can now only fight wars which minimise human suffering’, including on the side of the enemy.5 That is, war is acceptable only if it is seen as ethical in the sense of causing a very limited amount of death and suffering. Precision bombing is therefore a significant practice of ethical war. Yet, despite the compelling story of increasing precision and the related reduction in civilian casualties, it might not be as simple as that. This chapter examines the idea that precision bombing has made war more ethical. The argument proceeds in five stages. First, it traces claims that increasing precision in aerial warfare complemented by greater efforts to avoid collateral damage through targeting processes has made warfare more acceptable in an ethical sense. Second, the chapter examines what is meant by ‘precision’; precision is not merely a technical feature of high-tech weaponry but involves wider targeting practices. Destroying a target ‘with precision’ involves not only the technological capacity to hit the designated aimpoint, it also involves the ability to identify the target and determine its location in the first place. Third, the chapter asks how far ‘precision’ actually entails protection for noncombatants. Fourth, it shows how the praise for precision not only produces Western warfare as ethical but also both relies upon and reproduces a particular kind of ethics, based on the idea of non-combatant protection. Finally, it examines drone warfare, which appears to push us to a new level in terms of achieving the ideal of precision. The point of this analysis is not to argue the reverse of the claims that are being examined, namely that war has become less ethical due to precision bombing. Rather, what is at issue is to make apparent some of the problems with the implicit assumptions as well as at times explicit claims about the benign effects of precision bombing, its capacity to produce ethical war. The conclusion notes the implications of this argument for how we think about war, as, arguably, the idea of high-tech weapons enabling ethical war has the scope to make possible a problematic moral—and indeed political—rehabilitation of warfare.

3.1 In Praise of Precision The 1991 Gulf War made advances in weapon technology visible to the public. According to Thomas W. Smith, the ‘war’s branded image’ was ‘the 3

Thomas, Ethics of Destruction, p. 172. Theo Farrell, The Norms of War: Cultural Beliefs and Modern Conflict (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner 2005), p. 161. 5 Coker, Humane Warfare, p. 2. 4

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video-arcade footage of a laser-guided missile entering the chimney of an Iraqi Air Force building and flattening the place’.6 It is hard not to be in awe at the sheer technical sophistication that was required to achieve this. Unsurprisingly, the pervasive imagery of such technological accomplishments raised expectations regarding the precision of bombing in contemporary war. Michael Ignatieff claimed that since the moment ‘when reporters saw cruise missiles “turning left at the traffic lights” to strike the bunkers of the Iraqi regime, the Western public ha[d] come to think of war like laser surgery.’7 In other words, the Gulf War—or rather its visualization on Western television screens—suggested that Western militaries were increasingly in control of the devastation caused in war. More precisely, it seemed to have become possible to destroy specific targets. This is impressive not least compared to the early days of aerial bombing when, given the crudeness of the technology used for navigation and weapon delivery, cities were bombed because they were big enough to be hit. As Thomas explains, in the First World War, targets were ‘chosen to maximize the chances of hitting something of value, and this meant dropping bombs on cities’.8 The available technology did not permit the precision required to hit other, smaller targets—such as specific parts of the enemy’s infrastructure— that might have had more military significance and the destruction of which might have made a greater contribution to the overall outcome of the war. The Second World War brought home the implications of this imperfect bombing technology. Cities—on all sides of the conflict and located in different theatres of war—became battlefields or, perhaps more accurately, sites of destruction. In the case of German cities, the devastation has often, despite its scale, been represented not as the result of deliberate targeting of residential areas in order to affect German morale but as a side effect of the insufficiently precise bombing of factories and other ‘strategic’ targets nearby.9 The technology used to deliver the bombs was so imprecise that it appears impossible to establish—retrospectively, based on what was hit—what the targets were of the sustained bombing campaign against Germany. Mission performance was, Mike Davis notes, ‘measured simply by urban acreage destroyed’,10

6 Thomas W. Smith, ‘The New Law of War: Legitimizing Hi-Tech and Infrastructural Violence’, International Studies Quarterly 46:3 (2002), p. 363. 7 Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (London: Chatto & Windus 2000), p. 92. 8 Thomas, Ethics of Destruction, p. 105. 9 The issue is complicated. Conventional wisdom has it that the US pursued ‘countereconomy’ targeting, whilst the UK was engaged in ‘countercity’ targeting, but strategies changed over time and were never that coherent. See Farrell, Norms of War, p. 115; A.C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: Is the Targeting of Civilians in War Ever Justified? (London: Bloomsbury 2007), Chapter 2; Stephen A. Garrett, Ethics and Airpower in World War II: The British Bombing of German Cities (New York: St Martin’s Press 1993). 10 Mike Davis, Dead Cities (New York: The New Press 2002), p. 73.

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and Germany’s industrial capacity—if that was the intended target—was not successfully reduced.11 That cities became battlefields was, of course, not new. Laying siege to cities, for example, is one of the oldest techniques of warfare.12 Nevertheless, cities and those who lived in them had become more exposed, for aircraft could go far behind enemy lines. The combination of the possibility of delivering bombs from the air with the crudeness of targeting technologies led to largescale destruction. Cities were targeted because it was possible to do so and, crucially, because more militarily significant targets could not be hit reliably. What was targeted was in part a consequence of the available technology.13 In his Ethics of Destruction Thomas relates technological progress to the question of normative constraint. More specifically, he examines what he calls the ‘bombing norm’—that is, the prohibition against bombing civilians—and its strength or weakness over time. According to the conventional view, in the Second World War the ‘death of the norm was sealed by technological limitations that left belligerents with little choice but to hit the largest and most accessible targets available: enemy civilians’.14 Put differently, because bombs were available but not sufficiently precise they were used in indiscriminate ways, and enemy civilians were, as a result, not protected. Thus, in Thomas’s account, aerial warfare in the Second World War was marked by an ethical failure which was directly related to the state of technology. Thomas’s aim is, however, to show that the bombing norm, which encapsulates non-combatant immunity in respect of bombing, has been revived since. He suggests that the view that legitimate warfare had to avoid large numbers of civilian casualties became increasingly widespread, and underlines this with claims about the improved care taken to avoid non-combatant casualties in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. In the latter, a complex ‘target list review process’ involving military commanders and civilians was introduced.15 This development continued in the post-Cold War period. Thomas draws attention to the coalition air campaign ‘joint no-fire target list’ in the 1991 Gulf War, which excluded numerous potential targets, for example because they were considered to be culturally or religiously sensitive.16 Targets were reviewed in order to identify whether there were any schools, hospitals,

11

Garrett, Ethics and Airpower, pp. 161–2. Stephen Graham, ‘Postmortem City: Towards an Urban Geopolitics’, City 8:2 (2004), p. 166; see also section 2.1. 13 The complex relationship between technology and targeting strategy, and the particular role the idea of accuracy plays in this, has been examined in detail in relation to nuclear weapons. Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge: MIT Press 1990); see also Kostas Tsipis, Understanding Nuclear Weapons (London: Wildwood House 1985). 14 15 Thomas, Ethics of Destruction, p. 89. Thomas, Ethics of Destruction, pp. 151–5. 16 Thomas, Ethics of Destruction, p. 158. 12

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or mosques within a six-mile radius. Planning with respect to such targets was to involve ‘extreme care’, and Thomas claims that where the probability of collateral damage—that is, ‘[u]nintentional or incidental injury or damage to persons or objects that would not be lawful military targets in the circumstances ruling at the time’17—was assessed as too high they were not attacked. Other measures were also taken to protect civilians, such as selecting particular times, axes of attack, and types of weaponry which were believed to reduce the likely number of casualties.18 Thus, improvements in technology—both in navigation and in weapon delivery—have made it increasingly possible to destroy particular, militarily relevant targets with increasing precision. Put differently, technology increasingly provided the opportunity to better protect non-combatants. The upshot of Thomas’s account of the history of aerial bombing is that this possibility was embraced: the available technology was deployed in a manner that maximized non-combatant protection. Wheeler makes similar claims about the 1999 NATO operation in relation to Kosovo. He suggests that ‘compared to past conflicts, Kosovo was a very clean war in terms of the deaths of noncombatants.’19 After the operation, US Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Henry H. Shelton claimed that it had been ‘the most precise and lowest-collateral damage air campaign in history’.20 This was, Wheeler argues, because of two factors: the close involvement of military lawyers in the targeting process and, crucially, the use of PGMs which had increased to 35 per cent from 8 per cent in the 1991 Gulf War. He claims that ‘the unprecedented accuracy of these weapons significantly reduced collateral damage.’21 According to these accounts, there has been not just a change in technology but one in approach.22 Avoiding ‘collateral damage’ has become more central to the target selection and review process, with increasing involvement not only of senior military commanders but also of military lawyers and civilians.23 Put differently, a great deal of effort was put into developing targeting practices that 17 Department of Defense, ‘Collateral Damage’, in: DOD Dictionary of Military Terms, 8 November 2010. 18 Thomas, Ethics of Destruction, p. 158. 19 Nicholas J. Wheeler, ‘The Kosovo Bombing Campaign’, in: Christian Reus-Smit (ed.), The Politics of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004), p. 197. 20 William S. Cohen and Henry H. Shelton, Joint Statement on ‘Kosovo After-Action Review’, Hearings of Senate Armed Services Committee, 14/10/99, 1 quoted in Wheeler, ‘The Kosovo Bombing Campaign’, p. 197. 21 Wheeler, ‘The Kosovo Bombing Campaign’, p. 197. 22 See also Colin H. Kahl, ‘In the Crossfire or the Crosshairs? Norms, Civilian Casualties, and U.S. Conduct in Iraq’, International Security 32:1 (2007), p. 14. 23 On the targeting process in the US military, see also Ted Westhusing, ‘Targeting Terror: Killing Al Qaeda the Right Way’, Journal of Military Ethics 1:2 (2002), p. 129; Michael N. Schmitt, ‘Law, Policy, Ethics and the Warfighter’s Dilemma’, Journal of Military Ethics 1:2 (2002), pp. 113–24; USAF Intelligence Targeting Guide, Air Force Pamphlet 14–210 Intelligence, 1 February 1998,

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would maximize non-combatant protection. Thomas claims that ‘attitudes concerning the appropriate conduct of war have changed.’24 These changes, which are in tune with a zeitgeist that requires the reduction of human risk, have arguably been enabled or at least made easier by the technological improvements in weapon precision.25 This is because technological progress appears to make it possible to achieve what is ethically desired based on an ethics of war shaped by just war thinking—non-combatant protection— without compromising military effectiveness. Martin L. Cook notes that the development of smart weapons has allowed the US military to return to greater compliance with international law: ‘The moral need to do so [ . . . ] was part of the reason; but so, of course, was the fact that munitions that hit what they are aimed at with consistency and regularity are more militarily effective.’26 The attractiveness of precision-guided weapons lies therefore not least in apparently making less pronounced the trade-off between achieving military aims and endangering non-combatants. According to Wheeler, the ‘development of precision-guided weapons in the last decade has opened up new possibilities for reducing the risks of civilian casualties without sacrificing military effectiveness’,27 thereby making less stark the difficult moral choices decision-makers have to make in warfare.28 Technological change has not only enabled a more serious focus on collateral damage avoidance; it may be seen to have demanded it. For once precision is possible, it becomes politically imperative.29 Levels of collateral damage that may have been acceptable in the past, no longer are when high-tech weapons are available. Bacevich points out that ‘[a]s precision increases, so do expectations, constantly “raising the bar” of acceptable performance.’30 Technology and the change in attitudes that requires greater non-combatant protection thus go hand in hand. In Thomas’s words, technology has ‘created pressure to be good by removing a possible excuse for being bad’.31 This seems to be a thoroughly positive development and indeed a happy coincidence. It is good to be able to protect non-combatants (whilst still fighting wars), and sophisticated technology not only makes it possible to do just that, its existence arguably exerts pressure to improve civilians’ protection. Militaries cannot just use the fancy high-tech weapons but have to develop practices to support

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/usaf/afpam14-210/part00.htm (accessed 6 January 2008); Kahl, ‘In the Crossfire’, pp. 16–18. 24

25 Thomas, Ethics of Destruction, p. 170. Coker, Humane Warfare. Martin L. Cook, The Moral Warrior: Ethics and Service in the U.S. Military (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press 2004), p. 34. 27 Wheeler, ‘Dying for Enduring Freedom’, p. 210. 28 Wheeler, ‘Dying for Enduring Freedom’, p. 216. 29 Shaw, New Western Way of War, p. 35. 30 Andrew J. Bacevich, ‘Morality and High Technology’, The National Interest 45 (1996). 31 Thomas, Ethics of Destruction, p. 172. 26

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reducing the risk of harm to civilians, promoting a practice of ethical war. In Farrell’s view, we are even witnessing a fortuitous coming together of technology and morality, as enshrined in international law:32 For the most part, Western militaries do go to considerable lengths to avoid causing collateral damage even though the inadvertent killing of civilians is permitted under international law. In part, this is a happy marriage of hardware and software; that is to say, Western technological prowess and Western-derived norms of international law.33

This view is seductive. Much like the appeal of driving a car that consumes less fuel in order to ‘protect the environment’ instead of changing behaviour and cutting down on journeys by car, high-technology weapons seem to offer a technical fix for an ethico-political predicament. We don’t much like the idea of killing people, and these weapons seem to allow us to have wars whilst still doing our bit with respect to the protection of non-combatants. The notion that technological progress may help us to be more ethical is not only appealing, it is also, on the surface, persuasive. After all, more precision is better. Or is it?

3.2 Precision in Practice In the story about the improving precision of weaponry, the military appears increasingly in control of the devastation it causes. At the same time, claims made about the West’s contemporary military operations underline the measures taken to avoid civilian casualties. The United States allegedly relies more and more on legal advice.34 More broadly, US Department of Defense spokesperson Victoria Clarke claimed at the time that, in Operation Enduring Freedom, US forces took ‘great care in [their] targeting process to avoid civilian casualties’.35 In a 2003 briefing on ‘Targeting and Collateral Damage’ in Iraq, US Central Command outlined the processes in place to ensure that collateral damage would be limited. The briefing started with quotations by President George W. Bush, such as: ‘We will try in every way we can to spare innocent life. The people of Iraq are not enemies.’36 Whilst the briefing acknowledged 32 Farrell, Norms of War, pp. 135–6 and 163, argues that international (humanitarian) law constitutes moral codes. 33 Farrell, Norms of War, p. 179. 34 Wheeler, ‘Dying for Enduring Freedom’, p. 211; Kahl, ‘In the Crossfire’, pp. 16–18 and 40–1. 35 ‘Fact Sheet: US Military Efforts to Avoid Civilian Casualties’, US Department of State, 25 October 2001, quoted in Wheeler, ‘Dying for Enduring Freedom’, p. 210 (italics added by Wheeler). 36 US Central Command, ‘Targeting and Collateral Damage’, 5 March 2003, http://www. defenselink.mil/dodcmsshare/briefingslide/90/030305-D-9085M-010.pdf (accessed 7 January 2006), slide 2.

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that ‘[c]ollateral damage and unintended casualties occur also as a result of weapon system malfunction, human error, and the fog of war’,37 it was designed to outline how US forces go about preventing such eventualities.38 The briefing underlined the legitimacy of strikes on, for example, dual-use facilities, but noted the aim of minimizing non-combatant casualties, even where they might be permissible under international law. The gist of these claims is, then, that the United States is making the most of the considerable precision of its weapons in order to ensure the protection of non-combatants. ‘Precision’ weapons are, however, inherently imprecise. A certain level of imprecision is indeed part of the definition of precision. As Carl Conetta explains, the ‘precision of weapon delivery systems is typically expressed in terms of Circular Error Probable (CEP), which is the radius of a circle centered on an aimpoint within which some percentage—usually 50 percent—of weapons fired at the aimpoint will fall’.39 Thus, the precision claimed for a weapon is, even under test conditions, normally only achieved every other time. So, for example, if a weapon is said to have a CEP of ten metres, then every other time it is fired in a test the weapon will land within a ten-metre radius of the designated target. In the other 50 per cent of cases, it will land somewhere else, more than ten metres away from the target. These 50 per cent are ignored in determining the precision claimed for the weapon. PGMs involve a guidance system that allows for the weapon to be steered towards the target. They can be either laser-guided or satellite-guided. Laser-guided systems rely on the target being marked or ‘painted’ by a target designator whereas satellite-guided systems rely on GPS (Global Positioning System). Laser-guided weapons require ‘a clear line of sight between the bomb’s laser seeker and the laser spot-beam designating the target, which is not possible under adverse weather conditions [rain, clouds, dust, etc]’;40 GPS-guided weapons may be used in any weather conditions. Whilst both systems make these weapons far more precise than unguided bombs, GPS-guided weapons are less accurate than laser-guided weapons. What concerns Conetta is the extent to which GPS-guided weapons remain inaccurate. In his report on Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, he highlights that the operation

US Central Command, ‘Targeting and Collateral Damage’, slide 3. See also Carl Conetta, ‘Disappearing the Dead: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Idea of a “New Warfare” ’, Project on Defense Alternatives, Research Monograph No. 9, 18 February 2004, http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/0402rm9.pdf (accessed 5 September 2007), p. 18. 39 Conetta, ‘Disappearing the Dead’, p. 22. 40 GlobalSecurity.org, ‘What’s New with Smart Weapons’, 2007, http://www.globalsecurity.org/ military/systems/munitions/intro-smart.htm (accessed 9 September 2007); John Stone, ‘Technology and the Problem of Civilian Casualties in War’, in: Brian Rappert (ed.), Technology and Security: Governing Threats in the New Millennium (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2007), pp. 139–40. 37 38

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Conetta suggests that one of the factors contributing to this outcome, aside from the mission objectives and tactical and operational features of the campaign, were the weapons used and their technical characteristics. He points to the increasing use of the less accurate GPS-guided weapons as a problem: Under test conditions, JDAMs [Joint Direct Attack Munitions] have been able to reliably achieve a Circular Error Probable (CEP) of approximately 10–13 meters— meaning that fifty percent of the JDAMs dropped will hit within 32–42 feet of their programmed coordinates. By comparison, laser-guided bombs routinely achieve CEPs of 3–8 meters. Even a difference as small as an 8-meter versus a 10-meter CEP equates to being able to put 50 percent of expended weapons within a 2100 square foot circle versus being able to put them in a circle of 3300 square feet. Should an intended target sit among a cluster of buildings, the difference between these two circular areas is significant. And, of course, in either case 50 percent of the weapons fall outside the circles.42

Thus, GPS-guided weapons are significantly less precise than laser-guided weapons. It is important to consider what all this means when these weapons are being used to attack actual targets. In some contexts, such as desert warfare, a lack of precision may mean simply a wasteful expenditure of weapons; in urban contexts, and this has been relevant in contemporary operations such as the war in Iraq, it almost invariably means collateral damage, particularly non-combatant casualties. The margin of error of ten to thirteen metres is fairly imprecise in an urban area;43 adjacent buildings as well as publicly accessible spaces—such as quite simply the street—will invariably be within the target area unless the size of the target itself exceeds the thirteen-metre radius and the two can be made to overlap completely. Crucially, half of the bombs that are fired are not even expected to land within that circle. Moreover, the margin of error is often much greater. CEP normally already takes into account sources of error inherent to the systems. Beyond these, Conetta notes four factors that may add to errors: intelligence errors; mechanical 41 Carl Conetta, ‘Operation Enduring Freedom: Why a Higher Rate of Civilian Bombing Casualties’, Project on Defense Alternatives, Briefing Report No. 13, 24 January 2002, http:// www.comw.org/pda/0201oef.html (accessed 5 September 2007). 42 Conetta, ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, section 3; see also GlobalSecurity.org, ‘Joint Direct Attack Munition ( JDAM)’, 2007, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/ jdam.htm (accessed 9 September 2007). 43 See also Conetta, ‘Disappearing the Dead’, p. 24.

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or electronic malfunctions; human error by pilots or ground controllers; and certain atmospheric conditions.44 The thirteen-metre radius is measured from the designated aimpoint. It does not, however, account for any potential discrepancy between the identified aimpoint and the location of the actual target. An example is useful to illustrate what is at stake. The GPS used to locate so-called leadership targets in Iraq was that of their satellite phones. That is, the phone was the target: no information was usually available on who was carrying it. But even assuming that the correct person was carrying the phone, the margin of error of these strikes was much larger than the CEP of the weapons employed suggests. The GPS information provided by the satellite phone system was only accurate within a radius of 100 metres (328 feet).45 In other words, there was a one in two chance that the weapon would land within ten to thirteen metres of the target coordinates used, but the location of the satellite phone was not actually known with anything like that level of accuracy: it could have been anywhere inside a circle with a radius of 100 meters. Thus, despite the accuracy of the weapon, there was no way of telling whether the phone would be hit, much less whether the actual target—the Iraqi leader—would be.46 Many of the spectacular ‘mistakes’ in contemporary wars have indeed not been due to weapon failure but—or so it was claimed—to intelligence failure. In the 1991 Gulf War, the Al Firdos bunker was bombed and destroyed because it had been identified as an Iraqi command-and-control centre. However, it had also served as a shelter for civilians, and over two hundred were killed. This was seen as a public relations disaster, even though those ordering the destruction had been unaware of the civilians’ presence.47 The infamous bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was a result not of weapon imprecision but of faulty information gleaned from outdated maps. J. Marshall Beier points out that ‘although the bombs fell squarely on the building at which they were “aimed,” that building turned out not to be the FDSP [the Yugoslav Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement] but the Chinese embassy.’48 In Afghanistan, finally, warlords apparently called in strikes on their rivals, identifying them as Taliban; there is evidence that ‘rival factions deliberately provided false intelligence to the US in order to bring down air strikes against their enemies.’49 Inaccurate information clearly poses Conetta, ‘Disappearing the Dead’, p. 23. Human Rights Watch, Off Target: The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq, April 2003, http://hrw.org/reports/2003/usa1203/usa1203.pdf (accessed 15 January 2017), p. 24. 46 Human Rights Watch, Off Target, p. 25. 47 Thomas, Ethics of Destruction, pp. 87–9. 48 J. Marshall Beier, ‘Outsmarting Technologies: Rhetoric, Revolutions in Military Affairs, and the Social Depth of Warfare’, International Politics 43:2 (2006), p. 267; see also Conetta, ‘Disappearing the Dead’, p. 23. 49 Wheeler, ‘Dying for Enduring Freedom’, p. 214; see also Patricia Owens, ‘Accidents Don’t Just Happen: The Liberal Politics of High-Technology “Humanitarian” War’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 32:3 (2003), p. 611 and Conetta, ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, section 6. 44 45

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a problem as a bomb taking out the wrong target with precision is not the desired result. Correct targeting information is of course vital for the successful operation of any weapon, but particular issues may result from the great distances from which PGMs may be used. Thus, when Colin McInnes claims that ‘[p]recision guidance coupled to high-quality intelligence gathering enables individual buildings or even sections of buildings to be targeted with high confidence’,50 we need to be mindful that ‘high confidence’ is far from a guarantee of success. Despite the spectacular imagery of precision-guided weapons zooming in on the correct target, their use does not automatically mean either that the target is hit or that there will be no collateral damage. Even smart weapons are inherently imprecise. They may also malfunction. Nor do they take the human—and therefore human fallibility—out of the equation. Human input remains significant not least because the weapon has to be instructed as to its target. Information is needed about what, or rather where, the target is. However precise the weapon may be, non-combatant protection will only ever be at best as good as the information used by those operating it.51 Non-combatants may, of course, also be killed when everything works exactly as planned: civilian casualties may be incidental, rather than accidental, and this is, under certain conditions, perfectly legal.52

3.3 Precision and Protection Bombing has undoubtedly become vastly more precise. During the Second World War, the CEP of bombs would have been around 1,000 metres, whereas by the time of the Iraq war it was more in the region of ten metres. This means that the area at risk around the target has been reduced by a factor of 10,000.53 Moreover, even critics acknowledge that increasing attention is paid to the issue of collateral damage. Martin Shaw admits that ‘although there was much hyperbole’, bombing in the 2003 Iraq War ‘was more discriminating than in earlier campaigns’.54 Farrell observes a convergence of norms of international law with precision military technology that has permitted Western militaries to ‘limit civilian deaths during combat because they have unprecedented capability to create discriminate destruction’.55 Precision, in this view, is a 50

McInnes, Spectator-Sport War, p. 81. The alleged Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), of which high-tech weaponry is a part, depends on the availability of real-time information, the so-called ‘transparent battlefield’. See, for example, Bacevich, ‘Morality and High Technology’ and McInnes, Spectator-Sport War, Chapter 6. 52 Department of Defense, ‘Collateral Damage’. 53 Stone, ‘Technology and the Problem of Civilian Casualties’, p. 140. 54 55 Shaw, New Western Way of War, p. 15. Farrell, Norms of War, p. 179. 51

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good thing: it not only translates non-combatant protection into a concrete practice but reduces the number of civilian deaths in combat. This seems to mean that a fortunate coming together of legal and ethical considerations with technological capability has delivered us from the hell of warfare. Yet on a closer look, matters appear less clear-cut. ‘Precision’ in terms of effectively hitting the target is not the same as ‘precision’ in terms of not hitting anything else. In relation to the 2003 war in Iraq, Shaw observes that ‘[f]ew doubted that bombing was very precise by historical standards, but the huge quantities of explosives inevitably caused many civilian deaths.’56 Part of the problem is, crudely put, that ‘smart’ bombs are also often large bombs.57 And large bombs cause a lot of damage: ‘most guided weapons in the 500- to 2000-pound range are sufficiently powerful to routinely cause some degree of collateral damage.’58 This is because ‘[m]ost everything will be severely damaged, injured, destroyed, or killed within 20 meters of a 500-pound bomb blast and 35 meters of a 2000 lb. blast.’59 The distance from such blasts at which one would be safe is difficult to determine. The question of the ‘safe distance’ is different from that of the potential imprecision of the weapon captured in CEP. It is a complex issue involving the need to know the environment within which the bomb explodes: are there, for example, structures within the radius of the blast that might absorb some of its power? Where possible, computer simulations are employed to give a realistic assessment of the likely blast pattern.60 Traditionally, though, the military has used the notion of concentric circles around the point of impact in determining the safe distance, both for its own troops and non-combatants.61 When computer simulations are not available, rough notions of safe distances are still used. For 500- and 2,000pound bombs these are typically set at about 500 and 1,000 metres respectively for unprotected troops.62 Thus, these weapons may well hit within a range of ten to thirteen metres of their aimpoint, but that does not mean that someone standing fourteen metres away will be ‘safe’. They would still be within the ‘lethal radius’ and they would certainly not be at the ‘safe distance’ set by the military for its own troops.63 In other words, the ability to destroy precise targets with efficiency and from a great distance does not equate to the

57 Shaw, New Western Way of War, p. 110. See Kahl, ‘In the Crossfire’, p. 22. 59 Conetta, ‘Disappearing the Dead’, p. 24. Conetta, ‘Disappearing the Dead’, p. 25. 60 Bradley Graham, ‘Military Turns to Software to Cut Civilian Casualties’, The Washington Post, 21 February 2003, p. A18. 61 Israel David, ‘Safe Distances’, Naval Research Logistics 48 (2001), pp. 259–69. 62 Conetta, ‘Disappearing the Dead’, p. 25. 63 For an illustration of this point, see the table in Marc W. Herold, ‘US Bombing and Afghan Civilian Deaths: The Official Neglect of “Unworthy” Bodies’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26:3 (2002), p. 630. 56 58

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ability not to destroy, or even protect, the surrounding area. The danger zone is much larger than the margin of error indicated by CEP. This is particularly pertinent in the context of the ‘precision gap’ noted earlier between laser-guided weapons and the now increasingly employed satellite-guided weapons. From a military point of view, imprecision means inefficiency. It means not only a wasteful expenditure of weapons but also necessitates putting troops in harm’s way more frequently. There is, however, one obvious way to counter the effect of a bomb landing, potentially at least, at a greater distance from the designated target, and that is to increase the destructive force of the bomb, its ‘lethal radius’. As Conetta notes, ‘the terminal effects of big bombs serve to close the precision gap; they compensate for the lesser precision offered by GPS guidance.’64 Crucially, if the ‘precision gap’ between laser-guided and GPS-guided munitions has been addressed in the way in which Conetta alleges—by increasing the weapons’ explosive force—then increased precision in terms of taking out the target is achieved at the expense of precision in terms of not hitting anything else.65 In other words, the limits of precision indicated by CEP and noted in critical analysis by Wheeler, for example, are one thing, the destructive potential of such weapons is quite another. Conetta reminds us that the ‘brute destructive power of these weapons is not ancillary to the recent success of precision attack, but central to it.’66 Not least as a result of that, ‘there is an obvious difference between hitting one’s intended target and not causing unintended casualties in the process.’67 This is crucial: the question of whether the designated target is successfully destroyed is not identical with the question of whether unintended casualties are caused. Collateral damage is a problem in political terms, and this issue is increasingly considered to be relevant to the success of military operations. McInnes claims that ‘the precision available to modern airpower allows collateral damage to be minimized and even casualties to the enemy’s armed forces to be reduced. Such care is often seen as vital in ensuring domestic and international support for a campaign.’68 Non-combatant deaths are the most emotive aspect of collateral damage; such deaths disrupt the vision of ethical war. Their reduction through the stunning improvements in precision is crucial to claims about increasingly humane and ethical high-tech warfare. Because of increased precision, fewer bombs are needed to take out a target

Conetta, ‘Disappearing the Dead’, p. 25. The problem with achieving ‘precision’ in this way was acknowledged in June 2007 when NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) changed tactics so as to reduce noncombatant casualties. This involved, among other things, using smaller bombs. Crawford, Accountability for Killing, p. 99. 66 67 Conetta, ‘Disappearing the Dead’, p. 25. Conetta, ‘Disappearing the Dead’, p. 19. 68 McInnes, Spectator-Sport Warfare, p. 90; see also Farrell, Norms of War, p. 179. 64 65

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and these are likely to fall very close to it. As a result, ‘the level of collateral damage associated with any given attack will be very low by historical standards.’69 For example, whilst the number of deaths caused by the bombing of German cities during the Second World War was in the region of 300,000 to 600,000, the total number of civilians killed directly by the West in the Kosovo operation was about 500.70 Yet such comparisons are fraught with difficulty. If the argument is that PGMs reduce the level of non-combatant casualties, one may legitimately ask what the comparative standard is. Is this a reduction per war, or per bomb, or per pound of TNT, or perhaps per time period? What precisely does it mean to say that collateral damage is lower in contemporary wars than it has been hitherto?71 Whilst various precise statistical analyses are available, those who make claims about improved non-combatant protection unfortunately often remain vague about the comparative standard.72 It is not the purpose of the argument here to provide such a standard, but rather to point out that the comparative claims about casualty levels would need one, yet usually fail to provide it, and for good reason: it is not at all simple to determine what would constitute comparability in this context. Two issues that raise difficult questions for such comparisons are, firstly, whether the availability of PGMs enables practices that increase rather than decrease collateral damage in particular contexts and, secondly, which deaths should be counted in any comparison. The discussion about the low collateral damage caused by ‘smart’ bombs sometimes seems to implicitly assume that the same targets are now being struck more effectively. Crudely put, where in the Second World War it was necessary to strike at cities as such, it is now possible to strike at particular military targets within cities, avoiding the kind of damage done to residential areas in the World War. What this way of looking at the issue does not seem to consider is that this new technology is also used to strike at different targets— or rather structures and indeed people that would not previously have been considered targets for aerial warfare—and what the consequences are of doing so.73 This problem has been further highlighted by the rise in drone warfare, discussed in the penultimate section of this chapter (3.5). For the moment, it is Stone, ‘Technology and the Problem of Civilian Casualties’, p. 140. Shaw, New Western Way of War, p. 10. 71 Sometimes what seems to be alleged is a reduction per war, but this raises precisely the question of how to compare. Of course there were fewer civilian casualties in the Kosovo operation than in the Second World War, but we are not told how precisely we are to compare a bombing campaign of less than four months with one of more than four years. See Farrell, Norms of War, pp. 181–2. 72 Kahl, ‘In the Crossfire’, p. 15 and Downes, Targeting Civilians, offer clearly specified comparisons. 73 Note the argument in the context of nuclear weapons that what can be targeted depends on accuracy. MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy; Tsipis, Understanding Nuclear Weapons, p. 102. 69 70

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important to note that the capabilities of ‘smart bombs’ have made it possible to take on targets that would previously have been considered impossible to bomb from the air. This may increase the likelihood of collateral damage. Put differently, technological advances may enhance the violence of war and lead to an increasing—or at least different—exposure of civilians, as did the possibility of aerial warfare in the first place. Leaders hiding in residential areas, for example, have become targets for aerial warfare, not least due to the rise of drone warfare. It is possible to strike small targets from a distance, and real-time information on the leaders’ location is at times available. Ariel Colonomos argues that such ‘targeted killings’ fit within a wider discourse about the reduction of ‘unnecessary suffering’.74 Put differently, such killings are framed ethically. They are about reducing non-combatants’ deaths. Yet, according to Conetta, targeting leadership figures hiding in residential areas through the use of PGMs contributed to a higher rate of casualties in Afghanistan.75 Similarly, in Iraq, ‘[m]any of the civilian casualties from the air war occurred during U.S. attacks targeting senior Iraqi leaders.’76 This was not merely because residential areas are populated, but also because these targets were so-called ‘emerging targets’ or ‘targets of opportunity’.77 They had to be struck quickly, if they were to be struck at all, and apparently, ‘CENTCOM [US Central Command] did not perform adequate collateral damage estimates for all of the leadership strikes due to perceived time constraints.’78 Moreover, ‘[r]apid engagement may also preclude air crews taking time to derive and input GPS coordinates or laser-designate a target—thus compelling a trade of accuracy for time.’79 Thus, the faith in precision may encourage engaging targets in more problematic environments.80 These targets could have been taken out by different means, means that might have reduced the number of non-combatant deaths. As Sebastian Kaempf shows in relation to Afghanistan, various reports have argued that a greater use of ground troops and special forces in particular could have reduced the risks for civilians.81

74 Ariel Colonomos, ‘Precision in Uncertain Times: Targeting as a Mode of Justification for the Use of Force’, in: David Chandler and Volker Heins (eds.), Rethinking Ethical Foreign Policy: Pitfalls, Possibilities and Paradoxes (London: Routledge 2007), pp. 206–23. Most recently, targeted killings using drones have become the centre of heated debate. For an argument in favour, see Kenneth Anderson, ‘Targeted Killing and Drone Warfare: How We Came to Debate Whether There Is a “Legal Geography” of Warfare’, Washington College of Law Research Paper No. 2011–16 (2011). 75 Conetta, ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, sections 2 and 6. 76 Human Rights Watch, Off Target, p. 20. 77 See Samuel Weber, Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking (New York: Fordham University Press 2005). 78 Human Rights Watch, Off Target, p. 20. 79 Conetta, ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, section 7. 80 See also Sebastian Kaempf, Wrestling under Conditions of Asymmetry: US Warfare and the TradeOff between Casualty-Aversion and Civilian Protection (Aberystwyth: University of Wales, PhD thesis 2006), pp. 301–2; McInnes, Spectator-Sport War, pp. 137–8. 81 Kaempf, Wrestling, Chapter 5.

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This makes assessing the impact of precision weapons on non-combatant casualty levels tricky. Smith claims that ‘[a]erial bombardment of civilian centers is almost inevitable in modern warfare.’82 This is not least because ‘hi-tech tactics have had striking success in minimizing casualties, actually heightening the appeal of aerial bombing.’83 Precision weapons may well cause fewer deaths per strike, but what does that mean if it is a strike that would not have been carried out in this way but for the smart bombs? In Farrell’s assessment, ‘the US military could probably have done better’ in terms of avoiding civilian deaths in Afghanistan.84 In Iraq, according to Crawford, the ‘use of airpower continued to be the main cause of coalitioncaused civilian death—65 percent of coalition collateral damage over the first five years’.85 A great deal of debate has anyway been generated around the question of just how high or low the actual number of civilian deaths caused by coalition troops has been in contemporary conflicts.86 No official count of the civilian casualties caused by coalition forces in Afghanistan or Iraq was available at least in the early years of these wars.87 A number of groups produced their own count, using various methodologies. Yet no agreement has been reached over the actual non-combatant death toll, leaving any argument about the reduction of such deaths due to precision bombing on insecure ground. This brings us to the second problem in establishing that PGMs reduce noncombatant casualties, namely the problem of counting itself. Iraq Body Count and Conetta’s study ‘Wages of War’ are two well-known attempts to provide casualty figures.88 As Shaw correctly points out, they pursue vastly different strategies.89 Whilst Iraq Body Count aims to make every death count, Conetta argues that the precise figure is of little concern and that what is significant is a ballpark number.90 There are obvious practical difficulties associated with counting deaths in war, and these are addressed and resolved in different ways by different studies. Yet what is significant is not just how to count the deaths, but which deaths to count in the first place. The idea that precision

83 Smith, ‘New Law of War’, p. 359. Smith, ‘New Law of War’, p. 361. 85 Farrell, Norms of War, p. 183. Crawford, Accountability for Killing, p. 143. 86 L. Roberts et al., ‘Mortality Before and After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: Cluster Sample Survey’, The Lancet 364 (2004), pp. 1857–64; Conetta, ‘Disappearing the Dead’; Kahl, ‘In the Crossfire’, pp. 11–13; Zehfuss, ‘Subjectivity and Vulnerability’. 87 On General Tommy Franks’s claim that ‘We don’t do body counts’ and its context, see Shaw, New Western Way of War, p. 115. See also Crawford, Accountability for Killing, p. 323. For a discussion of more recent issues with body counts, see Micah Zenko, ‘Checking the Maths on the Pentagon’s ISIS Body Counts’, Foreign Policy (16 August 2016). 88 www.iraqbodycount.net (accessed 15 January 2017); Carl Conetta, ‘The Wages of War: Iraqi Combatant and Noncombatant Casualties in the 2003 Conflict’, Project on Defense Alternatives, Research Monograph No. 8, 20 October 2003, http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/0310rm8.pdf (accessed 5 September 2007). 89 90 Shaw, New Western Way of War, pp. 115–23. Conetta, ‘Wages of War’, p. 3. 82 84

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bombing produces a low death toll has some merit if the count is limited to immediate violent deaths. But this limitation is worth questioning. Whilst we may spontaneously think that there is a large difference between the deliberate incineration of Dresden in 1945 and the ‘disabling’ of particular aspects of the infrastructure in Baghdad in 1991, the consequences in terms of noncombatant deaths are not so straightforwardly different if long-term deaths are considered. As Stephen Graham points out, ‘strategies of deliberately attacking the systems and places that support civilian urban life have only become more sophisticated since the Second World War.’91 A large number of civilians, about 100,000, are thought to have died as a result of the destruction of water purification and electricity plants in the 1991 Gulf War,92 a phenomenon which has been termed ‘bomb now, die later’.93 More generally, as Crawford points out, ‘[a]lthough it is difficult to estimate, indirect deaths tend to outnumber direct deaths.’94 This issue may be further illustrated in relation to the war in Iraq. Alexander B. Downes elucidates and compares the methodology of Iraq Body Count, which is based on counting only deaths that can be verified by multiple news reports, and a study published in The Lancet, which is a cluster sample survey.95 The former produces a reliable figure that is, however, necessarily an undercount. The latter, in contrast, estimates excess deaths as a result of the conflict through comparison with an estimated death rate prior to the hostilities. The figures arrived at are vastly different. Different things are counted. Whilst Iraq Body Count accounts for non-combatants deaths as a direct result of military action, The Lancet study is not limited to non-combatants and indeed to immediate military violence as cause of death. Neither, of course, assesses deaths caused by PGMs specifically. Yet the estimate arrived at by the Lancet study is important because it is one thing to say that PGMs cause less collateral damage; it would be entirely different to assert that they reduce the level of non-combatant deaths. It is crucial to keep in mind this difference because, even if Farrell is right to say ‘Western militaries can limit civilian deaths during combat’,96 this does not necessarily mean that fewer civilians die of the effects of war. Collateral damage assessments take into account only immediate damage at the point of impact. Smith notes that it is ‘striking’, how ‘civilian protection has been limited to immediate effects, not those that

Graham, ‘Postmortem city’, p. 167. Graham, ‘Postmortem city’, p. 179; Downes, Targeting Civilians, pp. 211, 226–7. 93 Smith, ‘New Law of War’, p. 363 referring to Peter Kandela, ‘Iraq: Bomb Now, Die Later’, The Lancet 337: 8747 (1991), p. 967; also Farrell, Norms of War, p. 162. 94 Crawford, Accountability for Killing, p. 151; see also section 2.1. 95 Downes, Targeting Civilians, pp. 234–6. The study in The Lancet is Roberts et al., ‘Mortality’. 96 Farrell, Norms of War, p. 179 (italics added). 91 92

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follow from infrastructural damage or from lingering results of war.’97 Deaths caused later on by unexploded bomblets, for example, and, more importantly perhaps, the effects of the destruction of essential infrastructure, are not taken into account, nor are deaths caused by the disintegration of the civil order precipitated by the impact of high-tech warfare. Yet precision bombing may be seen to lead to these longer-term deaths, raising further doubts about the non-combatant protection—and levels of ethicality—allegedly made possible by precision bombing.

3.4 Precision and the Production of Ethics Smart bombs make it possible to hit targets precisely. Ideally, this should make it possible to keep non-combatants increasingly out of harm’s way. The relatively low number of civilians killed directly by Western military action in contemporary operations indicates that this is working, at least to an extent. This has led a number of scholars to assert that precision weapons have in some way improved the ethicality or humaneness of warfare. Precision bombing indeed fits neatly with the idea that significance attaches to the protection of non-combatants. As outlined in Chapter 2, based on the just war tradition, one of the key principles according to which the ethicality of conduct in war is assessed is non-combatant immunity or discrimination,98 that is, the idea that civilians must not be targeted. This principle is not only pivotal in much thinking about the ethics of war and indeed enshrined in international law by the Geneva Conventions, it also has some intuitive appeal. It is worth noting, however, that there is debate both about whether99 and, if so, about precisely why it is unjust or unethical to target civilians.100 One of the explanations of why it is permissible to target combatants relies on the idea that they are engaged in the business of harming the soldiers doing the targeting, unlike civilians, who are not.101 In other words, combatants may harm those who harm them—and those who may harm them are enemy combatants. If this is the case, then ethical problems arise from the very hightech warfare that is being judged so favourably, however. In the context of the Kosovo operation, Ignatieff argued that what he calls the ‘tacit contract of 97 Smith, ‘New Law of War’, p. 361. Although the US Army’s 2012 Civilian Casualty Mitigation manual mentions indirect effects, ‘the delayed and persistent effects of weapons have not so far been factored into most collateral damage scenarios.’ Crawford, Accountability for Killing, p. 368 and US Army, Civilian Casualty Mitigation, 1–19. 98 See also Rengger, ‘On the Just War Tradition’, p. 358 and Elshtain, Just War Against Terror, p. 65. 99 See Holmes, On War and Morality, pp. 185–6; Norman, Ethics, Killing and War, p. 159; and McMahan, On Killing. 100 For a radical critique, see Zehfuss, ‘Killing Civilians’. 101 Norman, Ethics, Killing and War, p. 168; Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 43.

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combat throughout the ages has always assumed a basic equality of moral risk: kill or be killed’, but that in operations such as the NATO Kosovo campaign this did not hold because the combatants on one side were unable to hurt those on the other.102 NATO’s pilots were flying at an altitude where they could not be attacked with the sorts of weapons available to the military of the former Yugoslavia. In a similar vein, Walzer argues that ‘You can’t kill unless you are prepared to die.’103 When one side fights with PGMs, putting their combatants out of range of the other side’s combatants, this principle no longer applies. It is worth noting, perhaps, that fighting from a distance has, historically, been seen as unethical.104 There is certainly a risk, as Der Derian notes, that in high-tech warfare ‘one learns how to kill but not to take responsibility for it’.105 My point is, however, more limited: the use of weapons that put combatants out of their enemies’ range invalidates one of the most common arguments for the permissibility of targeting enemy combatants, namely that they are in the business of harming the combatants doing the targeting. It is, in other words, not clear why protecting non-combatants should be a priority, ethically speaking, if enemy combatants are equally unable to inflict harm. From a traditional just war perspective, however, this is not a question that can be asked: non-combatant immunity is constitutive for the tradition.106 Pursuing a different line of argument, some critics suggest that noncombatant protection is in competition with, and loses out to, the so-called force protection imperative: when it comes to the crunch, instead of protecting non-combatants the US military in particular prefers to protect its own troops. This argument is again often made in relation to the Kosovo operation.107 Shaw claims that ‘NATO risked civilian lives through high-altitude targeting errors in order to keep its aircrews safe.’108 It stands to reason that highly trained troops are valuable and that their protection is central to military practices. The state, moreover, may be seen to have a duty of care towards those who serve it. Yet the ‘nub of the matter’, in Shaw’s view, is that ‘the care taken for civilians was not only much less than the care taken for Western soldiers; it was undermined by a policy adopted to keep the latter safe.’109 More generally, Shaw decries Western war as what he calls 102 Ignatieff, Virtual War, p. 161; see also Herfried Münkler, Über den Krieg: Stationen der Kriegsgeschichte im Spiegel ihrer theoretischen Reflexion (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft 2002), p. 241. 103 Walzer, Arguing about War, p. 101. 104 Kaempf, Wrestling, p. 117, notes that Greek warriors despised Persian archers and javelin throwers because they killed from a distance. 105 Der Derian, Virtuous War, p. xvi. 106 See section 6.2 for the revisionist challenge to the principle, however. 107 The force protection imperative was seen as central to the Kosovo operation. See Wheeler, ‘The Kosovo Bombing Campaign’, p. 215. 108 Shaw, New Western Way of War, p. 22; see also p. 86. 109 Shaw, New Western Way of War, p. 135 (italics in original).

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‘risk-transfer war’, that is, a form of war that transfers risks not least from its own military personnel to non-combatants.110 Put differently, Shaw’s charge is that the deciding ethical standard is force protection rather than non-combatant immunity and that the former actively undermines the latter. Kaempf, however, points out that these arguments assert and assume that force protection meant greater dangers for noncombatants; they do not actually show that this is the case.111 It is not clear, for example, that flying lower in the Kosovo operation would have reduced the collateral damage incurred. As Kaempf observes, where GPS-guided bombs are used, their accuracy would not have been affected by the aircraft’s altitude.112 Nevertheless, NATO officials acknowledged that ‘an aircrew flying at 15,000 feet would be able only to identify whether the objective was the intended one according to the planning preparations, but would be unable to tell whether, for example, civilians had moved within its vicinity.’113 In relation to the more recent Operation Enduring Freedom, Kaempf himself argues, nevertheless, that non-combatant protection could have been improved, not least by making more use of special forces.114 What is more, the ‘Shock and Awe’ strategy deployed in the invasion of Iraq involved practices that were clearly not driven by civilian protection.115 Thus, noncombatant protection was not the central—or certainly not the only—ethical standard in play, despite the way in which precision is produced as central to the alleged ethicality of precision bombing. In fact, Bellamy argues quite the opposite, namely that ‘a pattern has emerged whereby the protection of US combatants takes precedence over the protection of non-combatants.’116 Nevertheless, collateral damage avoidance is seen as crucial in political terms. Of course, even precision warfare (still) causes deaths, and this is readily acknowledged. As Wheeler notes, ‘it is impossible—even with the most advanced precision weapons—to avoid the unintentional killing of the innocent.’117 It would be naïve to assume that either politicians and military leaders promoting the benefits of precision bombing or indeed scholars painting these developments in a positive light are not aware of the limits of precision. Some level of deaths in war is inevitable, and all sides acknowledge this. The point, for those who praise precision, is that we are getting better at

110

Shaw, New Western Way of War, pp. 94–5. 112 Kaempf, Wrestling, Chapter 5. Kaempf, Wrestling, p. 305. Amnesty International, ‘Collateral Damage’ or Unlawful Killings: Violations of the Laws of War by NATO during Operation Allied Force, 5 June 2000, p. 17. 114 Kaempf, Wrestling, Chapter 5. 115 See section 5.3 and, in more detail, Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin 2006) and Evan Wright, Generation Kill: Living Dangerously on the Road to Baghdad with the Ultraviolent Marines of Bravo Company (London: Corgi Books 2005). 116 Alex J. Bellamy, ‘Is the War on Terror Just?’, International Relations 19:3 (2005), p. 289. 117 Wheeler, ‘Dying for Enduring Freedom’, p. 207. 111 113

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avoiding them, that we do our best to avoid them. Precision bombing is as ethical as it gets for the moment. Yet we have to be mindful of the assumptions and implications of such a claim. Shaw notes wryly that of course Western political leaders and thinkers ‘do not intend to blow up civilians or non-combatants. That, if it happens, is by definition “accidental”.’118 It is certainly how such deaths are presented to the public. This is also evident in Farrell’s observation about Kosovo: ‘Mistakes were made, and NATO bombs did kill innocent civilians.’119 Kahl similarly notes that ‘[a]ccidents (both human and technological) will happen.’120 Given the ‘great care’ taken, such ‘accidents’ can only be marginal to the practice. Yet Wheeler argues that construing non-combatant casualties simply as mistakes has problematic implications: By framing the deaths of innocents as mistakes, the US sought to avoid the deeper moral and legal questions as to whether it was attacking legitimate military targets; whether such actions satisfied the proportionality rule; and whether its air and ground forces were placing themselves at sufficient risk in order to mitigate the horrors of war for innocent Afghans.121

One might add further questions, not least about the appropriateness of marshalling the idea of ‘mistake’ or ‘accident’ to explain away deaths caused by dropping extremely powerful bombs on residential areas. There seem to be two issues here. Firstly, framing civilian deaths as mistakes may turn incidental killings into accidental deaths. Whilst even the former are legal under certain conditions, an ethical assessment may need to differentiate between deaths that are foreseen and accepted as an element of a perfectly executed strike and those that occur because things have not gone according to plan. Secondly, one may ask whether even accidents of the latter sort are quite as accidental as they appear. Patricia Owens offers a sophisticated critique of how the notion of accident has been deployed. Non-combatant deaths caused by Western militaries can only ever be ‘accidents’ because they do not target civilians. Owens notes the problem that ‘[b]ecause specific non-combatant deaths were not wilfully intended as unique events, they should be classed as “accidents”; the United States and its allies cannot be held responsible (or even criticised).’122 Owens is concerned ‘that civilian deaths are made permissible, not impermissible, when constructed as “accidents”’.123 In other words, she examines how civilian

118 119 120 122 123

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Shaw, New Western Way of War, p. 1 (italics added). Farrell, Norms of War, p. 160. McInnes, Spectator-Sport War, p. 67 also uses the term ‘mistake’. 121 Kahl, ‘In the Crosshairs’, p. 11. Wheeler, ‘Dying for Enduring Freedom’, p. 212. Owens, ‘Accidents Don’t Just Happen’, p. 596. Owens, ‘Accidents Don’t Just Happen’, p. 597.

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deaths are ‘legitimated’ through the notion of accident and raises the question of where this leaves us in terms of assigning responsibility.124 Owens does not dispute the West’s desire to avoid civilian casualties. Indeed, she acknowledges that ‘a strong case can be made that adherence to standards higher than international law is increasingly the norm.’125 Her aim is not to expose a tension between the standards claimed and actual targeting techniques, as do those who claim that force protection often overrules noncombatant protection. Rather, what she is interested in is ‘to raise questions about the very idea that some acts are “beyond intention” and what that allows’.126 She points out that we ‘tend to view accidents as destructive, as unthought, random, events that occur against our best intentions’.127 This is particularly problematic as civilian casualties, though unintended, are nevertheless often foreseeable.128 If such casualties are knowingly accepted as part of a particular strike, they are more properly seen as incidental, rather than accidental. But Owens significantly pushes the argument further and demonstrates the significance of acknowledging the extent to which even ‘real’ accidents are part of the practice itself. She suggests that a more profitable way of thinking through the issue would be for us to see ‘accidents as integral dimensions of events themselves’.129 That is, Owens dispenses with the distinction between accident and inherent imprecision (or indeed accident and foreseen incidental killings). In other words, in relation to what is being examined here, it is not possible to have precision bombing without collateral damage. If you choose to bomb, even with precision weapons, you always already choose to kill ‘innocents’. Indeterminacy is even built into the system because the ‘precision’ as expressed in CEP, for example, is only ever expected to be reached every other time. The killing of innocents is a structural possibility; it is not an aberration, something that happens when things go wrong.130 As Beier points out, there is ‘indeterminacy inherent in the use of precisionguided munitions (PGMs), even when the weapons themselves perform as intended’.131 This is not something that our attention is drawn to. Misses that remain a part even of ‘precision’ warfare are edited out of the story. Unless they lead to a spectacular ‘mistake’ and ‘accidental’ deaths, they are completely disregarded: the 50 per cent of bombs that fall outside the radius of precision are not

Owens, ‘Accidents Don’t Just Happen’, p. 600. Owens, ‘Accidents Don’t Just Happen’, p. 606 (italics in original). Owens, ‘Accidents Don’t Just Happen’, p. 606. 127 Owens, ‘Accidents Don’t Just Happen’, p. 597 (italics added). 128 Kaempf, Wrestling, p. 303; Crawford, Accountability for Killing. 129 Owens, ‘Accidents Don’t Just Happen’, p. 597. 130 This phenomenon parallels what Derrida points out in relation to communication and the structural possibility of received meaning being different from intended meaning; see section 2.5. For Derrida’s reflections on the implications of the possibility of ‘a perhaps’, see section 2.5. 131 Beier, ‘Outsmarting Technologies’, p. 267 (italics added). 124 125 126

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acknowledged in determining the precision of the weapon nor are they pursued. They simply vanish. From a military point of view, this focus on whether or not the target is hit—rather than on what else might be hit in the process— makes some sense. Whilst concern with collateral damage exists, a bomb that misses its target is, above all, a failure. The point is not so much what it has destroyed instead, but that it has failed to destroy what it was meant to.132 Referring to Sankaran Krishna,133 Beier notes, however, that bombs that miss their target still have ‘to “arrive” somewhere’.134 So the point is not that they miss, or that we must focus more on the misses instead of the hits. The point rather is that every miss is also a hit. It just hits something or someone that was not meant to be destroyed. At this point in time the something or someone ‘accidentally’ destroyed will be outside the Western world135 and this is not without its own implications for an ethical assessment. Butler has highlighted the way in which some deaths—those of Westerners—are counted very differently from others—those of non-Westerners.136 This disregard for some lives—the lives of the non-combatants who are supposedly increasingly protected—betrays an attitude that does not seem compatible with the asserted understandings of ethics.137 Bacevich points out, moreover, that to those outside the United States it may appear that Americans are asserting a double standard, denouncing as reprehensible the bomb placed in a parking garage (to which the United States may be particularly vulnerable), while deeming the disabling of an urban electrical grid by remote missile attack (which the United States is uniquely equipped to launch) to be altogether acceptable.138

More civilians are likely to be affected by the latter, and arguably many civilians indeed died as a result of the ‘disabling’ of infrastructure in the 1991 Gulf War. So the claim that, due to precision bombing, contemporary Western warfare produces fewer non-combatant deaths is problematic, but what is at issue is rather the suggestion that the changes in warfare occasioned by the use of

132 Note Tsipis’s definition of the ‘accuracy’ of a nuclear weapon: ‘By “accurate” we mean a weapon that has a high probability of destroying its target.’ Tsipis, Understanding Nuclear Weapons, p. 139. 133 Sankaran Krishna, ‘The Importance of Being Ironic: A Postcolonial View of Critical International Relations Theory’, Alternatives 18:3 (1993), pp. 385–417. 134 Beier, ‘Outsmarting Technologies’, p. 271. 135 See Gregory, Colonial Present; Derek Gregory, ‘ “In Another Time-Zone, the Bombs Fall Unsafely . . . ”: Targets, Civilians and Late-Modern War’, The Arab World Geographer 9:2 (2006), pp. 88–111. 136 Butler, Precarious Lives. For an exploration and critique of Butler’s argument see Zehfuss, ‘Hierarchies of Grief ’. See also 2.1. 137 See also Zehfuss, ‘Contemporary Western War’. 138 Bacevich, ‘Morality and High Technology’.

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precision weapons have ethical significance. In determining the validity of such a view, we might need to assess current ‘performance’ not in comparison to earlier times or indeed to dumb bombs, but with respect to what would be possible given the available technology. After all, ethics—whichever way it may be conceptualized in detail—is not least about how we behave towards others. If claims are being made about the moral significance of precision bombing, for the moment taking as given the centrality of non-combatant protection to our understanding of ethics in war, we need to ask whether these weapons are being used in such a way as to limit the death toll as much as possible. More importantly, any such comparison might misconstrue the issue. Counting the dead raises fundamental issues. Shaw provides a good discussion of the problems associated with using statistics to critique war, although he does not engage with the significance of Iraq Body Count actually doing more than simply count.139 There is, at any rate, a danger that accounting for the damage caused actually ends up justifying it. Counting the bodies in the pursuit of a critique of war seems not least to suggest that the level of non-combatant casualties is too high and therefore unacceptable, but this implicitly grants that there is a level that would be all right. Counting thus opens the door to the comparative argument that says that we are doing much better than in previous conflicts: we are on the right track, doing our best. Put differently, acknowledging the death toll of our contemporary wars is undoubtedly important, but it does raise the question of how much is too much. One may have doubts over how productive it is to enter a line of argument that, implicitly at least, involves us in setting a threshold of acceptability for the (civilian) death toll of wars. We may think that the question of the permissibility of wars is actually too important to be settled by arithmetic. In assessing our ethical performance, we might need to do more than count bodies. Significantly, what is at stake in the claim that precision bombing is particularly ethical is not least the production of contemporary Western warfare as particularly ethical, the production of Western war as ethical war. Beier notes that the Gulf War created a ‘broad social expectation that noncombatants should be preserved from harm even when it might be necessary to destroy legitimate military targets located in populated areas’.140 Yet only a few countries have the military capabilities necessary to live up to that expectation. In Beier’s words, ‘the idea of reliably accurate PGMs has affected the discursive base of what count in the popular imaginary as legitimate warfare

139 Shaw, New Western Way of War, pp. 115–23; Zehfuss, ‘Subjectivity and Vulnerability’, pp. 64–7. 140 J. Marshall Beier, ‘Discriminating Tastes: “Smart” Bombs, Non-Combatants, and Notions of Legitimacy in Warfare’, Security Dialogue 34:4 (2003), pp. 420–1.

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practices, such that only the most technologically advanced militaries can manage any pretense to meeting the standard.’141 Even if this standard could be met by using precision weapons, it has to be remembered that they only make up part of the arsenal even of Western militaries. As noted earlier, the 1991 Gulf War created the misleading impression that all Western warfare today is ‘precision’ warfare.142 Even though this war is often seen as symbolizing the technological revolution in warfare, we saw earlier that the percentage of such weapons used was then only 8 per cent. The percentage of precision-guided weapons has since increased, but only in the more recent conflicts have they accounted for the majority of weapons expended. In Operation Enduring Freedom the percentage had risen to 60 per cent.143 Nearly two-thirds of the bombs dropped by the United States and the United Kingdom in the 2003 Iraq war were PGMs.144 Conetta, however, alleges that the increase in so-called precision weapons has in part relied on redefining what qualifies for that label. He notes that ‘GPS-directed weapons are not routinely called “precision” weapons at all, but “accurate” or “near precision” ones’.145 Indeed, Conetta argues that ‘precision’ used to be more precise: ‘just a few years [earlier] military professionals would not have described most of the guided weapons used in the Iraq war as “precision” instruments, reserving this adjective instead for systems with a CEP of 3 meters or less.’146 It is anyway important to note the use of various types of more conventional weapons. Two points that have raised concern are the continuing significance and imprecision of artillery147 and the use of cluster bombs, which are, not least, liable to leave unexploded ordnance. Even though the delivery of cluster bombs ‘may be guided, they remain distinctly imprecise in the time dimension: five to 10 percent of their constituent bomblets fail to detonate, thus inadvertently (but predictably) becoming land mines that lie in wait for future victims’.148 Despite this, the US Central Command briefing in Iraq noted earlier mentioned only ‘Precision Guided Weapons’, as though no other weaponry was being used. In sum, the attention given to smart bombs and their supposed capabilities may obscure aspects of contemporary warfare that remain imprecise and highly destructive.

142 Beier, ‘Discriminating Tastes’, p. 412–13. Thomas, Ethics of Destruction, p. 160. Wheeler, ‘Dying for Enduring Freedom’, p. 212; see also Human Rights Watch, Off Target, p. 16 and Conetta, ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, section 2. 144 Human Rights Watch, Off Target, p. 16. 145 Conetta, ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, section 3. 146 Conetta, ‘Disappearing the Dead’, p. 26. 147 See Conetta, ‘Wages of War’, p. 25; Wright, Generation Kill, pp. 152–3; and Kahl, ‘In the Crosshairs’, p. 20. 148 Conetta, ‘Wages of War’, p. 24; see also Shaw, New Western Way of War, p. 112 and Kaempf, Wrestling, pp. 299–300. 141 143

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The focus on precision weapons is crucial to the representation of Western warfare as ethical and superior. Farrell describes precision bombing as ‘humane’ without offering any argument or qualification.149 Although he acknowledges that civilian targets were bombed by NATO in the Kosovo operation, he notes how slow and reluctant NATO was to do so150 and crucially dismisses the implications of this move in one sentence: ‘In the context of a long and careful air campaign, such isolated desperate measures were excusable and excused.’151 Farrell does not clarify quite why these measures were excusable. This successive inclusion of increasingly ‘more civilian targets’ to achieve the objectives of the campaign in Kosovo152 might, in contrast, be seen to raise doubts about whether such bombing is ethical or, at least, about whether the protection of non-combatants is really as central to military practices as is being claimed. It certainly seems to be problematic to suggest, as Kahl does, that the United States is increasingly relying on ‘expensive weapons systems designed to limit civilian casualties’.153 It seems more likely that these weapons are designed to efficiently take out targets.154 And this is not without consequences. As John Stone points out, improvements in accuracy have made war a more viable option, not least because ‘the application of IT to warfare is understood to be producing a technical fix to the problem of civilian casualties’.155 Conetta similarly notes the danger that the promise of new warfare capabilities may serve ‘as a rationale to wage more wars’.156 He claims that ‘the notion that US precision attack capabilities make it possible to wage war with a minimum of civilian casualties has figured centrally in public consideration of America’s recent wars’.157 Inasmuch as the idea that Western militaries are able to protect civilians is an illusion, this is deeply problematic. The fundamental concern therefore is what (faith in) precision enables. In precision warfare civilians’ deaths are regrettable accidents, and, according to Owens, ‘describing civilian casualties as “accidents” forms an integral part of the project of justifying war.’158

3.5 Drone Warfare and the Promise of Precision The increasing use of drones seems to take the reliance on high technology as well as the associated belief that doing so minimizes civilian casualties one 149 151 153 154 155 156 158

150 Farrell, Norms of War, p. 161. Farrell, Norms of War, pp. 156–7 and 162. 152 Farrell, Norms of War, p. 162. Wheeler, ‘The Kosovo Bombing Campaign’, p. 189. Kahl, ‘In the Crosshairs’, p. 42 (italics added). See also Challans, Awakening Warrior, p. 131. Stone, ‘Technology and the Problem of Civilian Casualties’, p. 134. 157 Conetta, ‘Wages of War’, p. 43. Conetta, ‘Wages of War’, p. 15. Owens, ‘Accidents Don’t Just Happen’, p. 616.

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step further and could therefore be seen as an additional achievement in creating ethical war-fighting practices enabling ever better non-combatant protection. What is popularly known as a drone is an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), where ‘unmanned’ in practice currently means remotely operated. At first, drones were used for reconnaissance, and this function continues to be significant. However, it is armed drones that generate a lot of excitement, both from supporters and critics. Such drones can be operated from within the mainland United States while killing people halfway around the globe in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, for example. Much criticism has focused on the CIA’s ‘covert’, though well known, drone campaign in the border region in the northwest of Pakistan, which was started by George W. Bush in 2004 and intensified by Barack Obama after he took office. This controversy is based not least on the fact that the United States is not at war with Pakistan, casting doubt on the legal permissibility of what critics refer to as ‘extra-judicial killings’.159 As Gregory points out, however, this critique by and large assumes ‘that the use of UAVs by the United States Air Force (USAF) and its military allies in Afghanistan—including Britain and Canada—is unproblematic’. This matters because this assumption reinforces ‘the claim that these new technologies enable advanced militaries to conduct “virtuous war”’.160 That is, drones are part of an ‘imaginative geography’ which produces ‘the rhetorical distinction between “our” wars—wars conducted by advanced militaries that are supposed to be surgical, sensitive and scrupulous— and “their” wars’.161 That is, drones appear to amplify the ethical promise of precision bombing as a means of warfare, while in fact undermining it. Armed drones seem to be the apotheosis of precision weaponry. Some of the debate over their use and its political implications therefore revolves around the same issues as that in relation to ‘smart’ bombs delivered in more conventional ways. Drones remove the need for fighter pilots to risk their lives, making them a compelling option in terms of increasing force protection. Their supporters, however, argue that drones also and crucially improve discrimination, thereby reducing civilian casualties. Crawford suggests that it is the interplay between the two that matters: drones ‘are considered an ideal weapon because they can ostensibly be targeted on insurgents, keep civilian risk low, without increasing immediate risk to US forces’.162 Supporters construe drones as progressive in ethical terms. In testimony submitted to Congress, law professor Kenneth Anderson argued that drones

159 Derek Gregory, ‘From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War’, Theory, Culture and Society, 28:7–8 (2011), pp. 189–90. 160 Gregory, ‘From a View to a Kill’, p. 190. 161 Derek Gregory, ‘The Everywhere War’, The Geographical Journal 177:3 (2011), p. 239. 162 Crawford, Accountability for Killing, p. 78.

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are ‘a major step forward toward much more discriminating uses of violence in war and self-defense—a step forward in humanitarian weapons technology’.163 Drones clearly reduce the risk to US military personnel. While they may be launched from air bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, they are usually controlled from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada via satellite link.164 Drone operators thus do not even have to deploy to the war zone. While the implications for force protection are surely important, the claim that drones ‘would potentially be more ethical’ is not least based on the idea that they ‘would cause less “collateral damage” than other weapons’.165 In June 2011 Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, referring to the drone campaign, even claimed that for almost a year, ‘there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.’166 In his award-winning Drone Theory, Grégoire Chamayou questions and rejects the ‘official “truth,” that the drone’s increased precision turns it into an ethical weapon because it is better able to discriminate between civilians and combatants’.167 Chamayou claims that supporters declare the drone ‘to be the most ethical weapon ever known to humankind’.168 In his critique, he highlights that three related but distinct ideas ‘are blithely confused under the term “precision”: the accuracy of the firing, the extent of its impact, and the adequacy of the identification of the target’.169 Chamayou’s critical examination of the drone and its impact on warfare therefore resonates, in key respects, with what has already been argued here in relation to precision bombing more generally. The issues of accuracy, impact, and target identification are the same as they are for conventionally delivered PGMs, or at least very similar. Accuracy in terms of CEP and lethal radius are anyway properties of the missile or warhead rather than of the drone which may be used to deliver it. Despite claims to their ‘surgical’ effects, drones create devastation that is commensurate with the specification of the warheads they carry. Chamayou highlights the absurdity of claiming that drones are especially precise: the AGM-114 Hellfire carried by the Predator drone has a kill zone of fifteen metres,170 whereas ‘the lethal radius of a grenade is 3 meters (not to mention the even smaller lethal radius of a classic weapon such as a rifle).’171 Drones are capable of delivering

163 Kenneth Anderson, Written Testimony submitted to US House of Representatives, ‘Rise of the Drones: Unmanned Systems and the Future of War’, Hearing Before the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, 23 March 2010, para. 34. 164 Gregory, ‘From a View to a Kill’, pp. 191–2. 165 Grégoire Chamayou, Drone Theory, trans. Janet Lloyd (London: Penguin Books 2015), p. 139. 166 Quoted in Scott Shane, ‘C.I.A. Is Disputed on Civilian Death Toll in Drone Strikes’, The New York Times, 11 August 2011. 167 168 Chamayou, Drone Theory, p. 143. Chamayou, Drone Theory, p. 17. 169 170 Chamayou, Drone Theory, p. 141. Chamayou, Drone Theory, p. 141. 171 Chamayou, Drone Theory, p. 142.

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even larger bombs than the ones Chamayou refers to and also multiple warheads, increasing the likely devastation. As Gregory notes, the ‘Predator carries two Hellfire missiles, and the Reaper can carry 14 Hellfire missiles or two 500 lb JDAM bombs and four Hellfire missiles’.172 The lethal radius of a 500 lb bomb, as noted earlier, is in the region of twenty metres. Thus, there is again ‘a crucial difference between hitting the target and hitting only the target’. Moreover, as Chamayou points out, to ‘evaluate it properly, the drone should be set alongside weapons currently available for the same tactical function.’173 Thus, while contemporary smart bombs are vastly more precise than aerial bombing was at one time, Chamayou alerts us again to the fact that a different way of employing lethal force, using troops on the ground, would have potential benefits in terms of reducing the kill zone. In addition to accuracy and lethal radius, correct target identification and assessment play a crucial role in determining the amount of collateral damage. This includes the need to be aware of the presence of any non-combatants. Supporters of drone warfare see this technology as providing a significant advance in this area. Reflecting the US administration’s position, a 2009 editorial in the Wall Street Journal claimed that ‘[n]ever before in the history of air warfare have we been able to distinguish as well between combatants and civilians as we can with drones.’ It is for this reason that ‘[s]marter weapons like the Predator make for a more moral campaign.’174 In the same vein, Anderson forcefully argues that ‘technology is making weaponry in conflict genuinely more discriminating.’175 For Anderson, this is self-evident: ‘of course drones are more discriminating—whoever thought they weren’t?’176 This claim that drones offer improved ability to distinguish the target is based not least on the pattern analysis made possible by lengthy surveillance. In this sense, drones offer the opportunity to better implement non-combatant immunity, the centrepiece of dominant understandings of the ethics of war. However, the continuous and arguably terror-inducing hovering of drones is considered problematic and unethical by critics. Ian G.R. Shaw talks of the United States as a ‘Predator Empire’, marked by ‘the extensive digitising, coding, and eliminating of life in “real time” ’ and stresses the ‘wholesale psychological damage that is being wrought upon thousands of people’.177 In addition, it is not clear that the claim that drones make for morally superior fighting based on their alleged ability to support discrimination is borne out by the facts. Estimates of non-combatant casualties differ ‘wildly’ but ‘suggest

173 Gregory, ‘From a View to a Kill’, p. 196. Chamayou, Drone Theory, p. 141. ‘The Drone Wars’, Wall Street Journal, 9 January 2009. 175 176 Anderson, ‘Targeted Killing’, p. 2. Anderson, ‘Targeted Killing’, p. 16. 177 See, for example, Ian G.R. Shaw, ‘Predator Empire: The Geopolitics of US Drone Warfare’, Geopolitics 18:3 (2013), pp. 540 and 554. 172 174

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that the hastily fielded technology is less discriminate and proportionate than was hoped’.178 In respect of Afghanistan, Crawford points out that drone strikes were increasingly used and that in 2012 sixteen civilians died as a result.179 In respect of Pakistan, David Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald Exum note that, based on press reports, ‘over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent—hardly “precision”. ’180 While these figures are not recognized by the United States, Kilcullen and Exum stress the negative impact of these killings: ‘every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as dronestrikes have increased.’181 These deaths disrupt the smooth vision of ethical warfare enacted through discriminate targeting. If it is necessary to win ‘hearts and minds’ in order to win the war—an issue that will be explored in Chapter 4—deploying drones is likely to be counterproductive. Based on the discrepancy in non-combatant casualty counts, critics indeed raise doubts over whether the United States classifies those not directly identifiable as involved in hostilities correctly. While both international law and US guidance require the classification of ‘non-combatant’ where there is any doubt,182 it is arguably the ‘Obama administration’s designation of military-aged men killed by drone strikes as militants’ that allows for the claim that only a very limited number of non-combatants have been killed in drone strikes.183 Thus, the apparent precision appears to be an outcome of questionable— indeed illegal—categorization, rather than an indication that the death toll has been limited. Non-combatant immunity fundamentally relies on correctly identifying combatants, something that is arguably hindered by the failure of insurgents to clearly identify themselves and the associated phenomenon of people shifting in and out of combatant status. As noted above, supporters believe that by observing individuals over a longer time span, drones provide information that makes it possible to reliably identify combatants. Chamayou 178 Frank Sauer and Niklas Schörnig, ‘Killer Drones: The “Silver Bullet” of Democratic Warfare?’, Security Dialogue 43:4 (2012), pp. 372–3. 179 Crawford, Accountability for Killing, p. 114. 180 David Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald Exum, ‘Death from Above, Outrage from Below’, The New York Times, 17 May 2009. 181 Kilcullen and Exum, ‘Death from Above’. 182 Diplomatic Conference of Geneva, ‘Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol 1)’, 8 June 1977, https://www.icrc.org/ihl/WebART/470-750064?OpenDocument (accessed 15 January 2017), Art. 50.1; US Army, Civilian Casualty Mitigation, 1–2. 183 Lauren Wilcox, ‘Drone Warfare and the Making of Bodies Out of Place’, Critical Studies on Security 3:1 (2015), p. 129.

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argues, in contrast, that drones have actually made discrimination impossible. As he points out, ‘the armed drone goes to the very limit: for whoever uses such a weapon, it becomes a priori impossible to die as one kills.’184 For some, this is cause for celebration. After all, using drones means ‘human soldiers can be given the best possible force protection—namely, not being exposed to the enemy in the first place.’185 Yet, at the same time, as discussed earlier (section 3.4) in relation to precision bombs more broadly, this complete removal of risk is of concern to those who perceive the ethics of warfare to involve what is often called the ‘tacit contract of combat’, that is mutual physical vulnerability.186 Chamayou thinks this issue to its logical conclusion and points out that the implication of using drones is that ‘[w]arfare, from being possibly asymmetrical, becomes absolutely unilateral. What could still claim to be combat is converted into a campaign of what is, quite simply, slaughter.’187 The important point here is that the drone appears to undermine the very capability it is praised for: ‘The paradox is that the drone, so highly praised for its great ability to make out the difference between combatants and noncombatants, in practice abolishes the very condition for that differentiation, namely combat.’188 By apparently amplifying the promise of precision bombing, drones also epitomize the absurdity of precision. They may increase the likelihood of hitting the identified target but, in doing so, remove the context within which hitting targets appears to make sense, namely combat, thus removing any putative right to kill. Whether or not we follow Chamayou in his claim that drones essentially abolish the condition of combat, it is clear that they produce not just a shift of the burden of risk away from Western soldiers as Shaw expresses it in his notion of ‘risk-transfer war’ but, in the last analysis, for the moment at least, the complete abolition of risk for one side. This sounds revolutionary but is perhaps not as novel as it seems. New weapons have always tended to remove those who had them from the reach of those who did not. Significantly, this has always generated a response, a quest to exploit other vulnerabilities. In contemporary wars, Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) have clearly been designed to hurt high-tech militaries where they are on the ground. The broader danger, recognized by the United States at least in other contexts, is that the enemy will attempt to strike at the less or least protected or aim to undermine the legitimacy of occupation forces by provoking civilian casualties.189 The Counterinsurgency Manual, analysed in detail in Chapter 4, 185 Chamayou, Drone Theory, p. 13. Sauer and Schörnig, ‘Killer Drones’, p. 364. See John Williams, ‘Distant Intimacy: Space, Drones and Just War’, Ethics & International Affairs 29:1 (2015), pp. 93–110. 187 188 Chamayou, Drone Theory, p. 13. Chamayou, Drone Theory, p. 144. 189 US Army, Civilian Casualty Mitigation, 1–22. 184 186

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starts with the observation that its enemies have been pushed to fight the United States unconventionally, because of its ‘overwhelming conventional military superiority’.190 Meanwhile, the sense of invulnerability created through the availability of something as apparently risk-free as armed drones may make it easier to resort to violence in the first place. Chamayou makes this point forcefully in claiming that ‘[b]ecause the threshold of recourse to violence is drastically lowered, violence tends to be seen as the default option for foreign policy.’191 Whether or not it goes quite so far, drones enable different types of strikes, thus potentially multiplying and widening military operations, that is, enhancing the violence of war. That is, the rise of drones appears to lead to an increased use of force in situations not acknowledged as full-scale war, to what Gregory calls the ‘everywhere war’.192 In discussing the illusion that people do not or should not get killed in contemporary wars, Coker observes that ‘the Western world seems intent on re-marketing or revaluing’ war.193 Precision bombing and drone warfare are part of this trend. The danger of ‘precision’ bombing is therefore not least that it produces a particular kind of warfare as ethical and thereby legitimates and arguably even encourages war. This is problematic because of the issues raised about what precision actually amounts to, but also because it relies on a prior assumption about the ethicality of discriminate destruction and killing.

3.6 Conclusion This chapter started out by observing the increasing precision of aerial bombing, which appears to be in keeping with the vision of ethical war, but then proceeded to demonstrate the complexity of the implications of these developments in terms of protecting non-combatants, let alone any notions of ethical warfare. Conetta argues that ‘the two standards upon which expectations about the new warfare are based—weapon precision and care in targeting—do not reflect actual casualty and damage outcomes on the battlefield.’194 According to Conetta, particular targeting practices, especially those involving the use of GPS and targeting political leaders with precision bombs, have increased rather than decreased non-combatant casualties. Crucially, greater efficiency in hitting what you want to hit is not the same as being able not to hit what you do not want to hit. Conetta therefore questions ‘any facile correlation of precision weapon

190 US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 2007), p. li. 191 192 Chamayou, Drone Theory, p. 188. Gregory, ‘The Everywhere War’. 193 Coker, Humane Warfare, p. 3. 194 Conetta, ‘Disappearing the Dead’, p. 19 (italics in original).

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use and minimum possible casualties’. In his words, ‘[m]ore of the one does not necessarily mean less of the other.’195 Yet, despite the doubts over the precise impact of developments in weapon technology on casualty figures and about what may be counted and compared, one might still think that the name of the game is improving precision: if only we could bomb entirely precisely, war would be just fine. But would absolute precision, if it were possible, be the answer to the dilemmas posed by war? Both for Martin Shaw and for Owens this is the wrong question: the point is that absolute precision is, precisely, impossible. Shaw argues forcefully that it ‘is time to face the truth that war and civilian safety are not generally compatible’196 and therefore to seek alternatives to war.197 Life always interferes. And whilst we strive for perfect precision, assuaging our consciences by reminding ourselves that we mean well and that we do our best, we continue to kill. Put differently, the production of us as ethical because we bomb precisely relies on a curious fusion of intent and outcome, a fantasy of control. Whilst the idea of an ethics based on non-combatant immunity relies on intention— the claim that ‘we’ don’t target civilians198—and excuses non-combatant deaths by conceiving them as beyond intention, this blurs into the expectation of a particular outcome, a low death toll among non-combatants. Intent seems to translate almost directly into outcome—barring accidents— as we see ourselves as increasingly in control of the damage caused on the battlefield. Samuel Weber points out, however, that ‘whereas targeting tends to generalize momentary control of a situation qua opportunity and project it indefinitely upon the future, it can wind up exposing itself all the more destructively to the unforeseen.’199 In other words, inasmuch as targeting projects itself towards the future, we are dealing with the unforeseen, with what we are unable to control. This, to recall Derrida’s reflections, is precisely why targeting is an ethico-political issue in the first place.200 Discussions of targeting with their focus on what we intend to hit and on collateral damage estimates seem to obscure a crucial aspect of targeting: at some point the weapon will be out of control. It will be beyond our intentions, in the realm of the future. We tend not to focus on this. In the faith in the technological possibility of precise targeting, intentionality comes to be fused somehow with the expectation of success. This illusion is challenged but not shattered by incidences of ‘collateral damage’, which are explained away as accidental, marginal, excusable.

195 197 198 199

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196 Conetta, ‘Disappearing the Dead’, p. 28. Shaw, New Western Way of War, p. 137. Shaw, New Western Way of War, p. 141. This claim is itself problematic, but that is not at issue here. 200 Weber, Targets of Opportunity, p. 18. See Chapter 2.

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The faith in precision bombing as making war more ethical seems curious in a number of respects. It seems to require an under-examination of the actual practicalities and implications of precision bombing and the ways in which ‘precision’ has been defined and redefined.201 Of course, it is apparent that ‘precision’ does not mean war without non-combatant casualties. Even if total precision was possible, civilians could still find themselves in the line of fire, as they might be at the aimpoint, working at an electricity plant, for example. What is more significant, however, is the underlying assumption that increases in precision can only be a good thing, that they somehow make war more ethical. This is problematic not least if such increases encourage more war or riskier targeting strategies within war. Drone warfare has been considered particularly problematic in this sense, as drones so radically reduce the likely cost in lives of military personnel to the side that deploys them.202 While precision is meant to focus violence and hence support its ethicality by reducing the likelihood of killing ‘innocents’, deploying drones could be seen to amount to the abolition of combat, undermining its very rationale. As Gregory asks, ‘if it is wrong to torture suspects, how can it be right to assassinate them?’203 In this sense, through the supposedly more ethical (because discriminate) drones, the violence of warfare has been enhanced. More fundamentally, the celebration of precision also reveals a worrying failure to engage the ethico-political issues at stake. Although militaries clearly make efforts to control and limit the impact of these highly destructive weapons, put bluntly, the idea that increased precision means increased ethicality implies that ethics is if we only kill whom we mean to kill. The idea of noncombatant immunity and its significance are taken as given. The celebration of precision warfare as ethical appears to pass over crucial questions, indeed seems to treat them as already answered. Why is it right for us to kill whom we mean to kill? And what does it mean to ‘mean to’ anyway? War necessarily involves killing and some believe politics necessarily involves war. Deaths caused by Western forces, in particular those of civilians, disrupt the vision of ethical war. The problem of ethics cannot be reduced to justifying war and the killing within it. The idea that we do not ‘mean to’ kill those whom we know to be inevitably within range of the enormously destructive weapons we deploy ‘with precision’ can assuage our conscience only at the price of not acknowledging the difficulty of the ethico-political

201 This is again parallel to the problem of nuclear weapon accuracy where a ‘counterforce’ targeting strategy prevailed even though it was doubtful that missiles were accurate enough to make this strategy work. See Alexander Cockburn and Andrew Cockburn, ‘The Myth of Missile Accuracy’, The New York Review of Books 27 (1980) and the fascinating MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy. 202 203 See Sauer and Schörnig, ‘Killer Drones’. Gregory, ‘The Everywhere War’, p. 241.

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issues involved.204 What is excluded from consideration entirely is the way in which treating the ethics of war as distinct from its politics leads to the exclusion of vital questions about who has been able to shape what counts as ethical in war in the first place and about the implications of the way in which the violence of war remains always beyond control. The problem of ethics is precisely that of confronting a question that does not have the sort of appealing answer that resolving the dilemmas of warfare through the technical fix of high-tech weaponry would provide. Presenting the advances in military technology and the changes in associated practices as ethical gains enacts a separation between ethics and politics that obscures this issue. The claims that precision is good and that therefore smart bombs and drones make war better relies on decontextualizing the assessment in a number of ways. Questions about how we have arrived at the moment of making a decision about bombing targets, about what the killing is to achieve, and about what we might do other than bomb are all excluded, leaving those involved to make a disembodied calculation. While in some of the discussion regarding drones such calculation is lauded for its rationality, we have seen in Chapter 2 that Derrida sees such a process as excluding the very possibility of ethics. The distancing of the (drone) pilots, the possibility of following complicated decision-making protocols involving high-ranking soldiers as well as legal advisers, and the calculations based on lengthy observation and pattern analysis all seem to evacuate or at least reduce the human element of warfare. Chamayou observes that this is seen as beneficial by some of the supporters of drone warfare because it takes out fear, anger, and revenge as a potential basis for unethical behaviour. Yet he rightly points out that there is a simultaneous loss of the ‘critical conscience’ of the agents of armed violence.205 Chapter 5 will examine how militaries seek to ensure that soldiers behave ethically and, in doing so, will engage with the question of the role that soldiers—as opposed to rules and calculations—play in what is imagined to be ethical warfare. First, however, it is necessary to ask to what extent developments in warfare towards counterinsurgency may have led to overcoming the problems of high-tech warfare.

204 This seems to be what Crawford objects to as well. As she rightly points out: ‘A much more common way for noncombatants to die is as collateral damage. These thousands of deaths and injuries were considered ordinary and inevitable.’ Her book therefore ‘underscores how a significant problem can persist with little notice, and even grow, if it is seen by at least some as natural and inevitable’. Crawford, Accountability for Killing, p. 4. 205 Chamayou, Drone Theory, pp. 208 and 218.

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4 Culture: Knowledge of the People as Technology of Ethics

The previous chapter showed how increases in precision were seen to contribute to the larger project of apparently easing the moral dilemmas of war, thus making war acceptable to liberal sensibilities. Although I demonstrated the problems with this argument, the ability to conduct precise strikes with smart bombs and, increasingly, drones is an important and—for some—a celebrated part of Western warfare, supporting the vision of ethical war. Yet the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq involved a kind of warfare that makes different demands on forces fighting them. Efficiently bombing the correct targets was no longer enough. Two reasons are immediately apparent. First of all, Western troops, enemy fighters, and civilians were not spatially separated and therefore blowing up stuff became a more difficult and indeed less attractive proposition. When war takes place among the people,1 the idea of precision in targeting as delivering clean warfare is beset with problems; combatants ‘merge’ with the population, and not just spatially, making the inherently problematic distinction between civilians and combatants increasingly impractical.2 What is more, the reliable destruction of military targets was insufficient to secure a meaningful victory in Afghanistan and Iraq; that is, it was not an efficient or effective way of achieving the wars’ objectives. Put differently, the very people who some of the cruder commentators suggested would only understand force proved unwilling to do just that. People had to be persuaded to put down arms and accept the new political order. Counterinsurgency has to understand enemy combatants and the local population as human beings with plans, hopes, and fears, for ‘[w]inning the hearts and minds, or establishing

1

Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (London: Penguin 2005). On the problem with the distinction, see Zehfuss, ‘Killing Civilians’. On the difficulties this creates for soldiers, see Chapter 5. 2

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trust and confidence, requires understanding the Iraqis’3 or, more generally speaking, ‘understanding local culture’.4 Thus, the human element of conflict—what the military calls the ‘human terrain’—came to be recognized as crucial. Soldiers needed to think well beyond the application of force; they needed to have cultural knowledge. As The Economist put it: ‘After smart weapons, smart soldiers’.5 This chapter examines sophisticated practices that are not easily framed through traditional concepts of the ethics of war. These practices indeed produce war as increasingly something else, such as conflict resolution or even social work. Nevertheless, the efforts to deploy cultural knowledge were seen not just as an effective war-fighting strategy but also as having ethical significance. While ethics and morality appear not quite as easily visible in these debates as in the ones around bombing and targeting, the chapter traces how using cultural knowledge was seen to protect people and to reduce the violence of war, that is, to promote a novel practice in support of the idea of ethical war. Recourse to cultural knowledge was to make war gentler or—in the terminology of this book—more ethical. In Colonel H.R. McMaster’s words, ‘[c]ultural expertise contributes to the ethical conduct of war by helping soldiers and units understand their environment and identify opportunities to resolve conflict short of using force.’6 Indeed, while culturally sensitive war resonates with established principles of the ethics of war, such as noncombatant protection and proportionality, it at the same time apparently makes the violence of war disappear altogether. Accomplishing this relies again on dividing ethical and political considerations, such that it becomes possible to think of reducing the use of physical violence as ethical while excluding consideration of the political imposition of control effected through this strategy. While a number of militaries have introduced cultural knowledge into military training and planning,7 the focus in this chapter is on the United States, where the practice has generated considerable controversy. This 3 Julian E. Barnes, ‘The Army is Rethinking How to Fight the Next War—and Win the Current One’, US News & World Report, 17 March 2006, http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/ 060317/17military_print.htm (accessed 9 June 2011). 4 Montgomery McFate, ‘Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relationship’, Military Review (March–April 2005), p. 25. 5 ‘After Smart Weapons, Smart Soldiers’, The Economist, 25 October 2007. 6 H. R. McMaster, ‘Preserving Soldiers’ Moral Character in Counter-insurgency Operations’, in: Dan Carrick, James Connelly, and Paul Robinson (eds.), Ethics Education for Irregular Warfare (Aldershot: Ashgate 2009), p. 23 (italics added). 7 The UK created a Defence Cultural Specialist Unit in 2010 and Canada has had White Situational Awareness Teams since 2008. See Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, 84–5. The German Bundeswehr uses so-called Interkulturelle Einsatzberater (IEB), that is Intercultural Deployment Advisors. See http://www.streitkraeftebasis.de/portal/a/streitkraeftebasis/!ut/p/c4/ 04_SB8K8xLLM9MSSzPy8xBz9CP3I5EyrpHK94uyk-ILMKr3SnNTM4hK9zNQk_YJsR0UAEMVL1g!!/ (accessed 15 January 2017).

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chapter considers first how cultural knowledge came to be seen as central to war-fighting. It then examines the US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual as setting out how, in practice, culture matters and how it can be made useful to operations. Cultural knowledge had to be made available to the military, and the so-called Human Terrain System (HTS), which the chapter explores next, became the mechanism for doing so. The chapter explores the notion that ‘the people’ were being made central and addresses the question of why social science research came to be seen as the right resource for militaries on deployment. It sets out in particular how the social sciences are seen to be able to deliver answers to questions of ethics, providing what I call a technology of ethics.

4.1 The Rise of Culture: Towards a Battle for the People Something did not go quite as planned with the invasion of Iraq by the United States and its allies. ‘Shock and Awe’ was meant to deliver a quick victory but spectacularly failed to do so. It was a ‘fiasco’,8 a ‘catastrophic failure of American policy and strategy’.9 By the end of 2006, ‘more than three thousand Iraqis were dying violently every month.’10 In addition, more and more coalition troops were getting killed. The increasing death toll prompted questions about the purpose, feasibility, and conduct of the mission. In other words, the deaths disrupted the vision of Western war as ethical. The ‘fiasco’ was arguably enabled by an incompetent assessment both of the threat posed by Iraq and of the difficulties of occupying the country;11 it was also part of a larger failure, on the part of the military, to prepare for the most likely operational environments. That is, the problem of the ill-advised and illprepared invasion was compounded, Thomas E. Ricks argues, by the military leadership’s failure to prepare the forces for the sort of operation they would be engaged in.12 There was a ‘disconnect’ between the sort of war imagined on the basis of the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) and the reality of fighting protracted counterinsurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq.13 In counterinsurgencies, soldiers find themselves close to the population and often unable to exploit their technological advantage. The challenge of war thus poses itself very differently from what was discussed in Chapter 3. 8

Ricks, Fiasco. Peter R. Mansoor, Surge: My Journey with General David Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2013), p. 7. 10 11 Mansoor, Surge, p. 5. Ricks, Fiasco, pp. 3–4. 12 Ricks, Fiasco, p. 4; see also Mansoor, Surge, p. 13. 13 On this see also David H. Ucko, The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the U.S. Military for Modern Wars (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press 2009), p. 1. 9

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The problem was not just an overreliance on technological superiority but a failure to grasp the significance of the population to the war. Ricks illustrates the US military’s initial conceptualization of the war in Iraq by examining what is now known as the Haditha massacre of 19 November 2005. According to reports by eyewitnesses and local officials, the civilians who died that day were not killed by a roadside bomb, as had been initially claimed by the Marine Corps, ‘but by the Marines themselves, who went on a rampage in the village’ after an IED attack had left one Marine dead. They killed ‘15 unarmed Iraqis in their homes, including seven women and three children’.14 When a full review was eventually conducted, most of the Marines involved were cleared or had the charges against them dismissed. Nevertheless, as Ricks points out, ‘there is no getting around the fact that 24 Iraqis were killed and some of them were women and children.’15 Marine Lance Corporal Justin Sharratt, who was part of the squad involved in the killings, stated: ‘Personally, I think I did everything perfectly that day [ . . . ]. Because of me, no one else died.’16 As Ricks points out, by this ‘he meant only, no other Marines.’17 Thus, the Haditha massacre illustrates a mindset that fails to consider the lives of ordinary Iraqis as valuable or grievable, to recall Butler’s term. Ricks portrays the massacre as the logical culmination of the US military’s approach between 2003 and 2006, which he summarizes as follows: ‘Protect yourself at all costs, focus on attacking the enemy, and treat Iraqi civilians as the playing field on which the contest occurs.’18 Army Major General Eldon Bargewell, who was later tasked with investigating the incident, similarly concluded that comments from senior Marines indicated that to them the deaths of Iraqi civilians were ‘just the cost of doing business’.19 Thus while the political and military establishments claimed that great care was taken to implement non-combatant immunity and protect civilians, and therefore to promote what would be widely recognized as ethical conduct in war, the war-fighting strategies in operation communicated the opposite both to US soldiers and, crucially, to the Iraqi population. This created a serious practical problem as a successful outcome of the war depended on winning the support of the people. In 2004 Captain Oscar Estrada, an Army Reserve civil affairs officer then stationed in Baqubah, controversially published an opinion piece in the Washington Post. In it he reflects on whether what the US troops are doing and his own contribution in particular serve to win hearts and minds. He vividly describes the gap between the help offered based on good intentions and the Iraqis’ experience in receiving it. His account Tim McGirk, ‘Collateral Damage or Civilian Massacre in Haditha?’, Time, 19 March 2006. Thomas E. Ricks, The Gamble: General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin 2010), p. 5. 16 17 18 Sharratt in Ricks, Gamble, p. 5. Ricks, Gamble, p. 5. Ricks, Gamble, p. 5. 19 Bargewell’s June 2006 report cited in Ricks, Gamble, p. 7. 14 15

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juxtaposes an evocative account of how US soldiers, including himself, can end up shooting at nothing in particular in the heat of the moment and his inability to explain the violence when challenged by individual Iraqis. At the end of the article, he powerfully summarizes how US soldiers’ use of violence makes sense to them because they feel threatened but finishes with the disconcerting question of how he would react in the Iraqis’ place if he was treated so violently and with such casual disregard for his family. A rhetorical question that concludes the piece suggests that he would not be convinced— rationally or emotionally—to support the US forces.20 The implication is clear: the sorts of actions undertaken by the US military made it unlikely that the support of the population would be won. By now it seems too obvious to even state that in counterinsurgency warfare the ‘battle is for the people’.21 At the time, however, US forces were poorly equipped to respond to this challenge, although they were beginning to recognize it. Clearly, the deteriorating security situation—the fiasco—had to be addressed. Additional forces were deployed in a move that came to be known as ‘the surge’.22 General David Petraeus, who was to rise to prominence for redirecting the armed forces’ entire outlook, claims that the most important surge was what I termed ‘the surge of ideas’—the changes in our overall strategy and operational plans. The most significant of these was the shift from trying to hand security tasks to Iraqi forces to focusing on the security of the Iraqi people. The biggest of the ‘big ideas’ that guided the strategy during the surge was explicit recognition that the most important terrain in the campaign in Iraq was the human terrain—the people—and our most important mission was to improve their security.23

It was not just about security, however. The upshot of the idea that the battle is for the people is that military forces have to pay attention to civilians beyond trying to make sure that they are not targeted illegally or killed in other ways that cause embarrassment.24 Iraqi civilians eventually came to be conceptualized as at the heart of the operation rather than merely as a backdrop to it: people suddenly mattered. After all, the population had to be persuaded to agree to the order US forces had come to impose.

20 Oscar Estrada, ‘The Military: Losing Hearts and Minds?’, Washington Post, 6 June 2004, p. B01. Estrada’s piece is powerful and merits reading, especially the final paragraph which can be found at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17426-2004Jun5_2.html (accessed 18 June 2017). Unfortunately, it cannot be reproduced here. 21 Lieutenant Colonel Holshek, civil affairs officer, cited in Ricks, Fiasco, p. 250. 22 See Mansoor, The Surge. 23 David Petraeus, ‘Foreword’, in: Peter R. Mansoor, Surge: My Journey with General David Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2013), p. x. 24 In this context the US Army’s Civilian Casualty Mitigation manual is instructive. US Army, Civilian Casualty Mitigation, Army Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures, No. 3–37.31, 18 July 2012.

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The implication of this shift for the military is profound. It is not just the difference between considering people potential targets and considering them necessary participants in whatever would constitute victory; it is also the difference between an assumption of superiority (based on technological advantage) and inferiority (based on a lack of knowledge about the things that actually matter). Victory could not be achieved through firepower alone. In Ricks’ words, After years of talking about its information superiority, the Army suddenly was in an inferior position. It didn’t speak the language, it didn’t understand the culture, it didn’t know much about its enemy, and it seemed all too often the last to know what was going on.25

Major General Bailey similarly suggested that the ‘working assumption’ should be ‘one of our own information inferiority’.26 With the population being recognised as central to the struggle, local insurgents were more likely to have the right kind of knowledge. The forces of the United States and its allies therefore needed to close an information gap. The prevailing profound ignorance among US soldiers of anything to do with the local population had encouraged the view that ‘the only thing the Iraqis understand is “force” ’,27 with predictable results. Part of the problem was that soldiers on patrol could not speak with the local population without an interpreter. Yet only one interpreter was assigned to a patrol of about thirty soldiers.28 The basic inability to communicate could have deadly consequences. At roadblocks the differences in hand gestures had to be taken into account: ‘The American gesture for stop (arm straight, palm out) means welcome in Iraq, while the gesture for go means stop to Iraqis (arm straight, palm down).’29 Joshua Key, who served as an Army combat engineer in Iraq in 2003, tells the story of a father and his son getting shot at a roadblock because they failed to stop, killing at least the father. The soldiers found no weapons in the car or any other reason to explain why the man had not stopped. Key says: ‘That hit us all hard, because it’s just a language barrier. They don’t know what the hell we’re saying. [ . . . ] They just don’t understand.’ He links this directly with the impossibility of resolving the conflict through force alone: ‘You can’t kill everybody. And that’s the problem now, you know.’30 In addition, according to Key, violent house raids, which involved everyone yelling at each other without understanding anything, were traumatic for both sides.31 The upshot 25

26 27 Ricks, Fiasco, p. 302. Ricks, Fiasco, p. 302. Ricks, Fiasco, p. 272. Estrada, ‘Losing Hearts and Minds?’, p. B01. 29 Montgomery McFate, ‘The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture’, Joint Forces Quarterly 38 (July 2005), p. 44. 30 Quoted in Peter Laufer, The Soldiers Who Say No: True Stories of Soldiers Who Refuse to Serve in Iraq (London: John Blake 2007), p. 11. 31 Laufer, Soldiers, pp. 7–8. Key later deserted from the military: see section 6.3. 28

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of such stories is that the inability to communicate appropriately— linguistically as well as culturally—not only makes it impossible to win over the population but leads to unnecessary loss of life and heightened tension. It was problematic for the practice of ethical war, which after all is presented as promoting benefits to the people in the warzones. Marine Major General James Mattis was one of the first to respond to the difficulties encountered in Iraq by preparing his troops to act differently. He wanted his Marines to be ‘culturally sensitive’. This involved some fairly trivial changes: the troops would refrain from wearing sunglasses when talking to Iraqis, they would learn some Arabic, and they ‘would even grow mustaches so they would look more like the locals’. Conversely, they would not read too much into the strong rhetoric deployed in Friday prayers and would seek to make their operations ‘comprehensible to Iraqis’.32 Mattis was also keen to implement more substantive changes. He planned for each battalion to ‘have one platoon that was given a thirty-day course in Arab customs and language, and that unit in turn could help teach its company, and then the company would affect the entire battalion’.33 For Mattis, this was not just about treating the Iraqis better as such. He was also sensitive to the ways in which troops were profoundly affected by the difficulties of operating within a dangerous and demanding environment. He ‘“wanted to talk about morality on the battlefield, how to go through an ambush one day and have your buddy blown up, and then face Iraqis the next day.” The message: Iraqis aren’t your enemy, don’t let the insurgents make you think that. The people are the prize.’34 By around 2006, when units deployed increasingly included veterans of previous tours, incremental changes began to happen across the US military. Individual soldiers learnt from their first tours and sought to pass on their cultural knowledge. For example, for its second tour, the 4th Infantry Division ‘had its own cultural adviser, who wrote a kind of advice column on Islamic and Iraqi mores in the Ivy Leaf, the division newspaper’.35 In addition, interpreters were sent out routinely with patrols, significantly improving communication with the population.36 ‘Cultural awareness’ training was provided which ranged from reading, films, and lectures to the Army’s 2004 The Iraq Training Programme—a CD intended for independent learning tailored to different ranks—and video games. Some units also selected soldiers to undergo immersion language training and take undergraduate degrees in history, anthropology, or regional studies. This was believed to have a wider effect as soldiers are expected to share their skills within their team.37 32

33 Ricks, Fiasco, p. 314. Ricks, Fiasco, p. 319. Ricks, Fiasco, p. 318 (italics in original), quoting Col. Clarke Lethin. 35 36 Ricks, Fiasco, p. 415. Ricks, Fiasco, p. 415. 37 McMaster, ‘Preserving Soldiers’ Moral Character’, pp. 21–3; see also Christopher J. Lamb, James Douglas Orton, Michael C. Davies, and Theodore T. Pikulsky, Human Terrain Teams: An 34

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Some of the cultural information soldiers were initially provided with was, however, simplistic. The guidance included things like: don’t speak to women, never show the soles of your shoes, and the ‘thumbs-up’ gesture is rude.38 Advice on do’s and don’ts was handed out on so-called smart cards that also gave basic sociocultural information about the country of deployment, such as the size of different faith groups. These smart cards were laminated and could be folded up like a map, making it easy for soldiers to carry them around in a pocket.39 In the dismissive words of one soldier, the ‘cultural competency training’ could ‘best be summed up in a sentence. “Don’t touch the people of Iraq’s left hand. They wipe their ass with it” ’.40 Yet, according to Keith Brown, the efforts of the US military should not be dismissed out of hand. He argues that the rhetoric on culture was matched by investment in infrastructure for related pre-deployment training, of which he highlights three elements: simulated ‘Arabic’ villages, computer games to teach language and negotiation skills, and the establishment of military centres focusing on cultural issues.41 Brown distinguishes different ways of engaging with culture. While at the simplistic end soldiers were issued with trait-lists, there were also more sophisticated approaches. He argues that the view of culture as static is ‘under continuous challenge from a competing sense of cultural process as dynamic, interactive, and emergent’.42 For example, before the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment returned to Iraq for a second tour of duty in 2005, they trained in a novel way. At Fort Carson a mock Iraqi village was set up.43 Colonel McMaster established cultural understanding as ‘a major part of [his] regiment’s training’ before deployment to Iraq.44 He started to promote the following message to all soldiers under his command: ‘Every time you treat an Iraqi disrespectfully, you are working for the enemy.’45 He was keen to

Organizational Innovation for Sociocultural Knowledge in Irregular Warfare (Washington, DC: The Institute of World Politics Press 2013), p. 206. 38 See, for example, Colby Buzzell, My War: Killing Time in Iraq (London: Corgi Books 2006), p. 79. 39 See, for example, David Finkel, The Good Soldiers (London: Atlantic Books 2010), p. 37. For more detailed descriptions of smart cards and their impact, see Derek Gregory, ‘ “The Rush to the Intimate”: Counterinsurgency and the Cultural Turn’, Radical Philosophy 150 (July/August 2008), p. 11 and Tarak Barkawi and Josef Teboho Ansorge, ‘Utile Forms: Power and Knowledge in Small Wars’, Review of International Studies 40:1 (2014), pp. 18–20. 40 Michael Totten in Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and Aaron Glantz, Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books 2008), p. 64. 41 Keith Brown, ‘ “All They Understand Is Force”: Debating Culture in Operation Iraqi Freedom’, American Anthropologist 110:4 (2008), p. 444; see also Gregory, ‘Rush to the Intimate’, pp. 15–16. 42 Brown, ‘All They Understand is Force’, p. 444. 43 Wilbur J. Scott, David R. McCone, and George R. Mastroianni, ‘The Deployment Experiences of Ft. Carson’s Soldiers in Iraq: Thinking about and Training for Full-Spectrum Warfare’, Armed Forces and Society 35:3 (2009), p. 466. 44 45 Ricks, Fiasco, p. 420. Ricks, Fiasco, p. 420.

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convey that not all Iraqis were enemies; many were indeed waiting to see how things develop. A ‘fundamental theme therefore was “do not do the enemy’s work ” that is, soldiers were expected to work from a combat script that led them to treat Iraqi citizens with respect, so as not to push fence-sitters into the insurgent group.’46 Increasingly, the cultural dimension was included into the wider training instead of being an add-on soldiers might see as superfluous. The focus at all military training centres is ‘on interactive realism’; within this ‘the cultural turn has transformed the terms of engagement.’47 The idea of the mock villages is to recreate the situation that soldiers face on deployment.48 They prepare soldiers for the need to operate in a context where civilians are wandering around, doing everyday things.49 In sum, there is no longer any pretence that a smart card can provide sufficient guidance. A whole new training infrastructure was being created. In late 2005, General Casey created a counterinsurgency academy and required new Army commanders to attend.50 The US Army Culture Center at TRADOC (Training and Doctrine Command), established in 2004, ‘seeks to enhance Soldiers’ abilities to understand and leverage cultural factors’.51 Similarly, after returning from Iraq, Mattis established a new centre for cultural learning for the Marine Corps.52 According to its website, the mission of the Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning (CAOCL) is to ensure that Marines ‘are regionally focused, globally prepared, and effective at navigating and influencing the culturally complex 21st Century operating environment’.53 This creation of training structures was important because, as Major Ben Connable points out, the lessons of previous irregular war situations had not been sufficiently institutionalized to prevent ‘troops from making thousands of grievous cultural errors’.54 The response to the cultural knowledge gap thus increasingly went beyond individual initiative and sought to institutionalize cultural awareness. In sum, the ‘fiasco’ of the increasing death toll disrupted the notion of Western war as ethical. Helping people in the warzones is a significant part of the vision. Hence, the idea that Western war precipitates their deaths, Scott, McCone, and Mastroianni, ‘Deployment Experiences’, p. 466. Gregory, ‘Rush to the Intimate’, p. 15. On the realism of training, see also section 5.2. 48 This can be seen in David Udris, James Der Derian, and Michael Udris, Human Terrain (Providence, RI: Udris Film, Oxyopia Productions & Global Media Project 2010). 49 Gregory, ‘Rush to the Intimate’, p. 16. 50 Ricks, Fiasco, p. 418. 51 Remi Hajjar, ‘The Army’s New TRADOC Culture Center’, Military Review (November–December 2006), p. 89. 52 Ben Connable, ‘Culture Warriors: Marine Corps Organizational Culture and Adaptation to Cultural Terrain’, Small Wars Journal (2008), http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/ docs-temp/4-connable.pdf (accessed 19 October 2012), p. 10. 53 Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning (CAOCL), https://www. marinecorpsconceptsandprograms.com/programs/investing-education-and-training-our-marines/ center-advanced-operational-culture-and (accessed 16 January 2017). 54 Connable, ‘Culture Warriors’, p. 2. 46 47

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directly or indirectly, undermines it. The interrelated explanations that were offered for the ever higher death counts of both civilians and combatants all drive towards the same overall argument, namely that the people had to be taken account of, that they were ‘the prize’ and that therefore the problem was the US armed forces’ lack of cultural knowledge. This meant that additional efforts were necessary in respect of civilians: merely seeking to avoid killing them was no longer enough. Cultural knowledge thus came to be presented as the solution to the fiasco. The significance of and problem with this fix can be shown more clearly by examining the underlying shift in strategy towards counterinsurgency in more detail.

4.2 Culture in Practice: The Counterinsurgency Manual The increasingly violent situation in Iraq had led to furious debate within the military and political establishments about how to fix the problem. With hindsight the shift in strategy is often presented as inevitable and indeed as simply a ‘lessons learnt’ story: the US military got it wrong initially but eventually worked towards a better way of conducting the war, namely one that was in tune with the tenets of counterinsurgency thinking and therefore cognizant of the need for cultural knowledge. While there are a number of ways of telling this story, its heroes are General David Petraeus and a handful of others who recognized the problem, identified the correct solution, and implemented it against an initially hostile environment created by the military leadership and the White House.55 This is of course an oversimplification, not least because criticism of the prevailing strategy had come from a range of directions.56 What is of interest here is, however, not the precise plot of this story (which presents the US leadership as initially misguided but willing and able to learn) or the heroes (whose individual contributions one may assess in different ways). What matters is rather how the purported solution to the predicament—embracing cultural knowledge as necessary to warfare—again enacts a politics of ethics. In order to understand this, it is necessary to examine this development in detail. Crudely put, acquiring the right kind of knowledge is to ensure that only the right people are targeted and indeed that physical force is used only as a last resort within the larger effort. This right kind of knowledge is sophisticated, requiring the input of social scientists as experts, but is nevertheless determined without consideration of how it is shaped by the politics of the war in the first place. 55

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See Ricks, The Gamble.

56

For examples, see Ricks, Fiasco, pp. 308 and 367.

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The production and implementation of the 2006 US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual was central to the reorientation of US military strategy towards counterinsurgency. The manual ‘establishes doctrine (fundamental principles) for military operations in a counterinsurgency (COIN) environment’.57 It was designed to ‘provide the doctrinal foundation for education, training, and operations’58 and indeed to ‘fill a doctrinal gap’.59 Neither service had produced a manual dealing with counterinsurgency within the previous twenty years. Due to the recognition that forces were fighting just such conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, new guidance was necessary. The manual is replete with references to the significance of cultural knowledge. According to Patrick Porter, it ‘mentions “culture” 88 times and “cultural” 90 times in 282 pages’.60 The Counterinsurgency Manual declares cultural knowledge to be ‘essential to waging a successful counterinsurgency’.61 It envisages much more than an ability to communicate and grasp some general insights about cultural specifics. Rather ‘[c]ommanders and planners require insight into cultures, perceptions, values, beliefs, interests and decision-making processes of individuals and groups.’62 The manual also provides strategies for acquiring such insight. It proposes that in order ‘to evaluate the people [ . . . ] six sociocultural factors should be analyzed’, namely society, social structure, culture, language, power and authority, and interests.63 Each of these is defined, making Chapter 3 of the manual sound more like oversimplified guidance for a basic social science project than a military manual. For example, a ‘society can be defined as a population whose members are subject to the same political authority, occupy a common territory, have a common culture, and share a sense of identity.’64 The definitions appear rather crude; they lack the sense of complexity and ambiguity one would see in scholarly literature on such topics. After all, where are we to find a society with one common culture and shared identity? Nevertheless the explanation of these sociocultural factors is reasonably detailed and includes illustrative examples. Users of the manual are asked to ‘thoroughly’ map out the culture. Once this has been accomplished,

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US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, p. xlvii. McMaster, ‘Preserving Soldiers’ Moral Character’, p. 16. 59 David H. Petraeus and James F. Amos, ‘Foreword’, in: The US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 2007), p. xlv. For an assessment of how much or indeed how little US strategy has actually shifted towards counterinsurgency, see Ucko, New Counterinsurgency Era. 60 Patrick Porter, ‘Good Anthropology, Bad History: The Cultural Turn in Studying War’, Parameters (Summer 2007), p. 48. 61 US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 1-80. 62 US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 3-2. 63 US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 3-19. 64 US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 3-20 (italics in original). 58

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All this is presented as though secure knowledge about the culture can be obtained, even if this may be a complex process, and as though this knowledge will then provide significant access to the ‘hearts and minds’ of the population. The manual provides a table of ‘comprehensive insurgency analysis tasks’ which lists among others the requirement to ‘[d]etermine how culture, interests, and history inform insurgent and host-nation decision making.’66 In order to achieve the required insight into the culture, social network analysis, explained in appendix B to the manual, is presented as providing the right tool. While much is oversimplified, the manual admits quite openly that the question of culture is rather more complicated than the average soldier might like things to be. This can be seen in the explanation of ‘culture’. Since cultural knowledge is so central to counterinsurgency warfare, it is particularly important to know what is meant by the term. The manual invites us to think of culture as ‘being the muscle on the bones’ of social structure.67 It is a ‘ “web of meaning” shared by members of a particular society or group within a society’.68 As such, it involves a ‘system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that members of a society use to cope with their world and with one another’; it is learnt, must be shared by several people, involves patterns, and may change over time. So far, so good: culture seems to be presented like a foreign language that we can learn, or perhaps like an opponent’s strategic behaviour that may be different but follows some internal logic that we may seek to grasp. This is certainly part of what is at stake. The reason why culture is of such interest to counterinsurgent forces is that it ‘might also be described as an “operational code” that is valid for an entire group of people’. That is, culture ‘conditions the individual’s range of action and ideas, including what to do and not to do, how to do or not to do it, and whom to do it with or not to do it with’.69 But the manual also departs from the idea that these rules can simply be learnt, for, crucially, while culture establishes the rules, it also affects when these may be treated flexibly or might even shift.

65 66 67 68 69

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US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 3-36. US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, Table 3.9. US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 3-36. US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 3-37. US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 3-38.

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Interestingly, at times the manual seems to push beyond the sort of understanding of culture that might have been common in the 1950s that implied that it would be possible to come up with a sort of grammar book70 that would sum up the rules of a culture—and once you knew those rules, you were competent to operate in the culture. While the thrust of the manual suggests that commanders should acquire cultural knowledge in order to then competently act within the culture, the manual simultaneously undermines this thrust by acknowledging that there may be some flexibility as to whether the rules apply or not or when categories may be adjusted so as to allow for rule-conformity in cases that are ostensibly against the rules. We learn that in ‘a certain Amazonian Indian tribe’ people may not marry their cousins. This seems intelligible enough. Yet the manual then informs us that the ‘definition of cousin is often changed to make people eligible for marriage’.71 This suggests that knowing the rule is rather less important than knowing when definitions might be treated flexibly—the latter acting here as a supplement to the former.72 No guidance is provided on this matter. As a result, the other culture remains profoundly foreign and ungraspable, despite the attempted explanation. While in the example above, talk of Amazonian Indian tribes seems to underline the foreignness of culture, on occasion the manual draws on examples from the United States, suggesting that US practices amount to culture, too. The manual explains, for example, that the shared belief systems within a culture find their expression in cultural forms.73 The ‘most important cultural form for counterinsurgents to understand is the narrative’. This idea of narrative as significant seems to draw on more recent developments in social theory than the idea of culture as a set of rules. More specifically, a ‘cultural narrative is a story recounted in the form of a causally linked set of events that explains an event in a group’s history and expresses values, character, or self-identity of the group’.74 Intriguingly, the example of the Boston Tea Party is used to illustrate what a cultural narrative is and how it tells a group about who they are and what they value. This is interesting not merely because the example draws on how US soldiers themselves are part of a culture, but because the manual also points out that it shows that ‘narratives may not conform to historical facts or they may drastically simplify facts to more clearly express cultural values.’75 That is, narratives are significant for counterinsurgents not because they reflect an underlying truth but because 70 71 72 73 74 75

Hugh Gusterson in Udris, Der Derian, and Udris, Human Terrain. US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 3-38. On the logic of the supplement, see section 2.4. US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 3-49. US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 3-50. US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 3-5.

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they give clues as to a society’s core values and may also be used by insurgents to ‘mobilize the population’.76 What is intriguing is that the manual admits to US culture not being reliant on underlying truths either. Soldiers and Marines are further warned that culture is ‘arbitrary’ in the sense that they ‘should make no assumptions regarding what a society considers right and wrong, good and bad’ and ‘internalized’, meaning that it is ‘habitual, taken for granted, and perceived as “natural” by people within the society’.77 Interestingly, all this talk of other cultures as different, but following logics of their own, stages war as a cultural encounter, and this has implications. Before becoming an academic I used to prepare students who were going to live with a host family in a different country for a year for the challenges of intercultural communication.78 Some of the manual could easily be used for students going abroad: observe and try to work out what the rules are. Remember that people might not know why they are doing something one way rather than another, and that this is quite all right. Don’t assume that your view of the world is the only possible one or indeed superior. Remember that others may feel strongly about their values, even if you don’t share them. But of course the Counterinsurgency Manual is a manual for war, and this seems to disappear from view in the lengthy exposition of how societies work. There is some talk in the manual of respecting the ‘host’ nation population and quite a lot of how understanding culture can help reduce violent conflict. In order to mount a successful counterinsurgency, the manual argues, the source of grievances has to be understood. It explains that ‘political stakes are often rooted in culture, ideology, societal tensions, and injustice.’79 Therefore the advice to soldiers and Marines is: ‘Develop cultural intelligence [ . . . ]. Make every effort to learn as much about the environment as possible. Human dynamics tend to matter the most.’80 The manual also exhorts its readers to consider ‘the role of women in the society and how this cultural factor may influence these activities’.81 This sounds benign: the idea of US forces striving to understand the culture of the country they are operating in is certainly a world away from ‘Shock and Awe’.

76

US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 3-50. US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 3-37. 78 The Deutsches Youth For Understanding Komitee e.V. (www.yfu.de) was founded in 1957 by young Germans who had participated in an exchange scheme allowing them to spend a year in the United States. This was organized by the High Commission of Occupied Germany and was part of Reeducation. When I was an exchange student Reeducation was, of course, no longer the concern, though I benefited from a scholarship by the Bundestag under the Parlamentarisches PatenschaftsProgramm, founded in 1983 to support transatlantic youth exchange. YFU in Germany remains a non-profit organization based to a significant extent on the work of volunteers who are alumni of its exchange schemes that now span the globe. 79 US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 5-1. 80 US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, Table 5.2. 81 US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, Table 5.4. 77

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The manual is less than coy, however, about the ultimate purpose of ‘learning’ the culture. It instructs its readers to analyse the operation of power: ‘Once they have mapped the social structure and understand the culture, staffs must determine how power is apportioned and used within a society.’ Power is defined as ‘the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his or her own will despite resistance’. This dimension is significant, I presume, because, as is pointed out, ‘power is the key to manipulating the interests of groups within a society.’82 Thus, while the manual in places notes the significance of understanding culture so as not to increase conflict, here it becomes clear that the aim of such understanding is to extend control. Cultural ignorance gets in the way of mission accomplishment because it may create tension as well as leave Western forces unable to impose their will. The willingness to be culturally attuned is hence always limited by the needs of the mission. Ricks reports that ‘ “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet” was one of the rules to live by that Maj. Gen. James Mattis gave his Marines.’83 Or, as Mattis recounts himself having said to Iraqi military leaders after the invasion: ‘I come in peace. [ . . . ] I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.’84 While there was initially much praise for these developments, which move away from the overwhelming violence of ‘Shock and Awe’, the acquisition of cultural knowledge for the purpose of controlling others was considered highly problematic by many anthropologists.85 The recognition of culture as affecting or even determining people’s behaviour is very much a double-edged sword in this context. On the one hand, concern for people living where military operations take place is welcome; ethically it seems an improvement on the use of enormously destructive high-tech weapons from a distance. Indeed, it seems to go beyond mere attempts not to deliberately kill civilians through improved targeting practices. The protection of the population seems to have become more central and more achievable, given attempts to understand their societies rather than to bomb them. On the other hand, this apparent concern obscures the larger political context. The manual points out that American ideas of what is ‘normal’ or ‘rational’ are not universal. To the contrary, members of other societies often have different notions of rationality, appropriate behaviour, level of religious devotion, and norms concerning gender. Thus what may appear to be abnormal or strange to an external observer may appear as

82

83 US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 3-55. Ricks, Fiasco, p. 313. Mattis quoted in Ricks, Fiasco, p. 314. 85 See, for example, Network of Concerned Anthropologists, The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press 2009). 84

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This, as Gregory points out, ‘was an extraordinary injunction, given the conduct of American foreign policy, the pursuit of accumulation by dispossession, and the violence of military occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq’.87 When Mattis expects Iraqi leaders to accept that he has come in peace, merely because he has for the moment parked his military hardware after a highly destructive invasion of their country, ‘extraordinary’ does not even quite sum up the situation. It is telling that the following exhortation, which resonates with Estrada’s controversial reflections highlighted earlier, has been deleted from David Kilcullen’s ‘Twenty-Eight Articles’, an analysis of counterinsurgency first circulated by email and then published in the Military Review,88 in its incorporation into the Counterinsurgency Manual: ‘See it through the eyes of a civilian who knows nothing about the military. How would you react if foreigners came into your neighbourhood and conducted the operations you planned? What if they came into your mother’s house?’89 While those who support the shift towards embracing cultural knowledge imply that it is possible to think from the others’ perspective and thereby treat them more benignly, others fundamentally dispute that such a thing is possible at all, given the context of invasion and occupation. The trope of entering ordinary people’s houses plays a role in this conceptualization. Through highlighting the benign interactions with the population—the apparently ethical conduct—the politics of the war comes to be obscured. Whatever the method, the point is to win the war. In a counterinsurgency operation, military success is not enough in itself; rather, ‘[a]rguably, the decisive battle is for the people’s minds.’90 This is why some way to connect with people is required. In Kilcullen’s words, counterinsurgency is ‘a competition with the insurgent for the right and the ability to win the hearts, minds and acquiescence of the population’.91 An ability to understand and communicate with the population in the area of operations is therefore pivotal. While the Counterinsurgency Manual forcefully asserts the need for cultural knowledge, it does not resolve the issue of how to acquire it. Although training regimes were being changed in response to the failure of the initial warfighting strategies, the case that cultural expertise, rather than sensitivity or

86 US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 1-80 (italics added). Note the lack of cultural sensitivity in referring to these ideas as ‘American’ when what is presumably meant is ‘US’. 87 Gregory, ‘Rush to the Intimate’, pp. 8–9. 88 David Kilcullen, ‘ “Twenty-Eight Articles”: Fundamentals of Company-level Counterinsurgency’, Military Review (May–June 2006), pp. 103–8. 89 Kilcullen, ‘Twenty-Eight Articles’, p. 104. 90 US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 1-153. 91 Kilcullen, ‘Twenty-Eight Articles’, p. 103.

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knowledge, was necessary had at the same time been made by those who propose that social science has insights to offer in this context.

4.3 Social Scientists into War: The Human Terrain System While cultural knowledge is portrayed as essential to counterinsurgency, the point is, unsurprisingly, not to understand others in order to empathize and make changes to the US military’s courses of action so as to allow these others to live as they wish. It is rather to make operations go smoothly, to improve ‘mission accomplishment’.92 According to Mattis ‘our soldiers and Marines must learn to navigate the human (cultural) terrain with as much facility as they use maps to navigate the geographical terrain.’93 The snag is that culture—even if reduced to a set of rules one might learn—is complicated. The Counterinsurgency Manual starts by asserting that the ‘United States possesses overwhelming conventional military superiority’94 and observes that because of this opponents generally aim to fight the United States differently. However, the manual only identifies the centrality of cultural knowledge for counterinsurgency warfare; it does not establish a mechanism for providing the armed forces with such knowledge. It tasks commanders with conducting detailed analyses without setting out the processes or providing the resources needed to do so. One of the central arguments of the manual is that in ‘COIN, the side that learns faster and adapts more rapidly—the better learning organization—usually wins’.95 This learning cannot just begin on operation but includes preparation beforehand. As we have seen, training regimes were changed to reflect the new belief in the significance of culture. In the spirit of the manual, it is useful for soldiers to acquire cultural awareness or even competence, as such training may help to ensure that troops do not unwittingly cause offence and heighten tension. It is not enough, however. In fact, one might even argue that a superficial grasp of another culture may do more harm than good.96 For example, it is possible that military forces who insufficiently understand tribal politics might ‘inadvertently worsen the situation by supporting one tribal group versus another’.97 In this vein, McMaster points out the importance of

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For the centrality of mission accomplishment to Army doctrine, see Chapter 5. George R. Lucas Jr, Anthropologists in Arms: The Ethics of Military Anthropology (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press 2009), p. 6. 94 US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, p. li. 95 US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, p. lii. 96 McFate, ‘Anthropology and Counterinsurgency’, p. 24. 97 Paula Loyd quoted in Vanessa M. Gezari, The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (New York: Simon & Schuster 2013), p. 66. 93

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commanders having ‘access to cultural expertise’.98 The techniques set out in the Counterinsurgency Manual certainly require advanced knowledge of the local culture and society: ‘In-depth knowledge and understanding of national, regional, and local cultures, norms, moralities, and taboos are needed to understand the operational environment and reactions of the insurgents and populace.’99 Or, as Appendix A, adapted from Kilcullen’s ‘Twenty-Eight Articles’, puts it, understanding the people in the way necessary to successful counterinsurgency operations ‘requires knowing the real enemy, not a cardboard cutout’.100 Even before the Counterinsurgency Manual had been conceived and adopted, the need to bring in cultural expertise from outside the military had been identified both from within the military and from outside.101 Ultimately, one significant driver in establishing the significance of cultural knowledge to warfare had been the recognition that the increasing threat from IEDs could not be resolved through deploying high-tech equipment. Numerous gadgets had been developed and tested, but none had provided effective protection from roadside bombs. In 2004 the Joint Improvised Explosives Device Defeat Task Force instead ‘emphasized the importance of countering the “bomb maker” and not just the bomb itself’.102 Therefore, in order to be able to understand the sociocultural context of making or failing to report bombs, a programme called Cultural Preparation of the Environment was set up.103 As a result, input from social scientists was needed. Also in 2004, anthropologist Montgomery McFate had been involved in organizing the first big Department of Defense conference on the social sciences since 1962, entitled ‘Adversary Cultural Knowledge and National Security Conference’.104 She believed that her discipline could—and should—help resolve the problems of the military. She claimed that although knowing one’s enemy—which requires ‘understanding of their habits, intentions, beliefs, social organizations, and political symbols—in other words, their culture’105—is recognized as a central principle of warfare, military operations had not drawn on appropriate knowledge of other cultures.106 Put differently, McFate saw ‘anthropology as a “natural” practice for soldiers’ and ‘war itself as a kind of anthropology’.107 McMaster, ‘Preserving Soldiers’ Moral Character’, p. 23 (italics added). US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, B-22. 100 US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, A-7. 101 Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, pp. 26–7. 102 Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, p. 27. 103 Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, p. 27; see also Gezari, Tender Soldier, pp. 27–9. 104 McFate, ‘Anthropology and Counterinsurgency’, p. 24. See also ‘ONR Conference Makes Case for Study of Cultures’, OriginNatorR, December 2004, http://fellowships.aaas.org/PDFs/2004_ 1210_ORIGConf.pdf (accessed 10 June 2012). 105 106 McFate, ‘Military Utility’, p. 43. McFate, ‘Military Utility’, p. 42. 107 Gezari, Tender Soldier, p. 115. 98 99

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While prioritizing cultural knowledge had not historically been a strength of the military and indeed remained controversial within the armed forces, in McFate’s view the problem was squarely on the side of anthropology. McFate observed that because social science had not been systematically funded through the defence budget, ‘individual researchers have selected their own areas of study, often based on intellectual whims and the vagaries of philanthropic funding.’108 She considered this a problem to be overcome.109 Anthropology had to contribute to national security policy and operations ‘particularly because political policy and military operations based on partial and incomplete cultural knowledge are often worse than none at all’.110 In making this case, McFate described anthropology’s main task historically as having been ‘translating knowledge gained in the “field” back to the West’, something that she saw as obviously relevant to the national-security institutions.111 US anthropology had given up on this sort of engagement. According to McFate, the discipline should return to what she considers its promising beginnings as a ‘warfighting discipline’112 and to its original mission of supporting warfare. She highlights that anthropology is ‘a discipline invented to support warfighting in the tribal zone.’113 Needless to say, many anthropologists fiercely reject the suggestion that they ought to contribute to the war effort.114 Although this critique was presented as a matter of professional ethics, George R. Lucas Jr considers it to be dependent on just war thinking.115 What interests me here is, however, not the ethical debate among and with anthropologists but rather how—following not least McFate’s argument—the military attempted to make the knowledge of anthropologists and other social scientists useful to combat operations and the implications of doing so for the politics of ethics. The most determined or ‘ambitious’116 effort to make substantive expertise in cultural matters available to combat brigades was the design and implementation from summer 2005 by the US Army of the so-called Human Terrain System (HTS). While this was initially a ‘proof of concept’ pilot, by 2010 ‘HTS

108 Montgomery McFate and Andrea Jackson, ‘An Organizational Solution for DoD’s Cultural Knowledge Needs’, Military Review (July–August 2005), p. 19. 109 Other anthropologists argue the opposite, namely that independence from the defence budget is necessary to ensure the health of the discipline. See, for example, Gusterson quoted in Sharon Weinberger, ‘Military Research: The Pentagon’s Culture Wars’, Nature, 455 (2008), pp. 583–5. 110 McFate, ‘Anthropology and Counterinsurgency’, p. 24. 111 McFate, ‘Anthropology and Counterinsurgency’, p. 25. 112 McFate, ‘Anthropology and Counterinsurgency’, p. 24. 113 McFate, ‘Military Utility’, p. 43. 114 Network of Concerned Anthropologists, Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual. See also Maja Zehfuss, ‘Culturally Sensitive War? The Human Terrain System and the Seduction of Ethics’, Security Dialogue 43:2 (2012), pp. 175–90. 115 116 Lucas, Anthropologists in Arms, p. 123. Gezari, Tender Soldier, p. 2.

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employed more than 500 people ranging from career academics with PhDs to retired Special Forces personnel’ and the ‘program’s annual budget exploded to more than $150 million’.117 Although HTS had later been designated an ‘enduring capability’,118 it was closed down in September 2014.119 The programme’s vision—to deploy social scientists to support combat troops during their operations in Iraq and Afghanistan—nevertheless merits close examination. HTS was set up to address the military’s ‘cultural knowledge needs’120 or fill the forces’ ‘cultural knowledge gap’121 through the use of social sciences. It was ‘specifically designed to address cultural awareness shortcomings at the operational and tactical levels by giving brigade commanders an organic capability to help understand and deal with “human terrain”—the social, ethnographic, cultural, economic, and political elements of the people among whom a force is operating’.122 Although HTS involved a range of components, its core—and most controversial aspect—were five-member Human Terrain Teams (HTTs) which were meant to consist of ‘experienced cultural advisors’ to directly support brigade commanders. While the number of actual team members varied, the five planned roles were leader, cultural analyst, regional studies expert, human terrain research manager, and Human Terrain Analyst (HTA).123 The cultural analyst was intended to be an anthropologist or sociologist fluent in the local language while the regional studies analyst would have a similar background, without having a specified disciplinary social science background. Both analysts were meant to hold an MA or a PhD.124 Recruiting individuals with such expertise proved difficult, however. One observer indeed pointed out that few individuals with the totality of the required skill set were likely to exist.125 Later information on HTTs only highlights three roles, Team Leader, Social Scientist, and Research Manager,126 apparently de-emphasizing

Roberto J. González, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Human Terrain System’, Counterpunch, 29 June 2015. This is of course small in the context of the defence budget, although it is nevertheless ‘the largest single investment ever made by the DOD in applied social science’. Montgomery McFate and Janice H. Laurence, ‘Introduction: Unveiling the Human Terrain System’, in: Montgomery McFate and Janice H. Laurence (eds.), Social Science Goes to War: The Human Terrain System in Afghanistan and Iraq (London: Hurst 2015), p. 5. 118 http://humanterrainsystem.army.mil/htsFAQ.aspx. This website was accessed on 10 August 2012; it is now defunct. 119 González, ‘Rise and Fall’. See Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, Chapter 3, for a full historical overview of HTS. 120 McFate and Jackson, ‘An Organizational Solution’. 121 Nathan Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Human Terrain System 2008), p. 2. 122 Jacob Kipp et al., ‘The Human Terrain System: A CORDS for the 21st Century’, Military Review (September-October 2006), p. 9. 123 Kipp et al., ‘The Human Terrain System’, p. 12. 124 Kipp et al., ‘The Human Terrain System’, p. 13. 125 Lucas, Anthropologists in Arms, pp. 151–2. 126 See http://humanterrainsystem.army.mil/. This website was accessed on 10 August 2012; it is now defunct. 117

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the element of regional or cultural expertise. General Petraeus nevertheless explains that Human Terrain Teams were established ‘at each brigade headquarters to help our commanders understand in a more granular manner the composition, power structures, customs, and views of the Iraqi people in their area of responsibility’.127 The first HTT was deployed to Khost, Afghanistan in early 2007. At this stage, no detailed instructions existed as to what the team should actually do, and the team leader recalls being told to ‘make things happen’.128 Over time more teams deployed, especially to Iraq, with differing levels of success.129 There are some indications that HTTs were able to make a contribution along the lines envisaged for them. Apparently, one HTT member ‘learned how to read the signs the Taliban left on the side of the roads to warn local civilians about the presence of a bomb, and consequently could help direct military traffic away from the IED’.130 Another HTT was supposedly able to reframe ‘a commander’s understanding of local attitudes towards insurgents’.131 However, other teams were unsuccessful and even incurred the contempt of commanders.132 In addition, three social scientists—Michael Bhatia,133 Nicole Suveges, and Paula Loyd—were killed on deployment. Loyd was targeted directly. She was doused in petrol and set alight by an Afghan she was trying to interview; one of her teammates killed the Afghan in retaliation.134 The failure by some HTTs to provide useful insights to commanders, poor training and management, and especially the social scientists’ deaths on deployment are all cited as evidence that HTS was not working. While there were undoubtedly problems with the training and the personnel recruited, some of these criticisms fail to engage with the key issues. The implication is that if only the right people had been recruited and if only they had been trained correctly,135 HTS would have been a good thing. The programme would not only help determine effective strategies for winning but do so in ways that would help the people. Thus, cultural knowledge is good and more cultural knowledge is better. But is it?

128 Petraeus, ‘Foreword’ (2013), p. xviii. Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, p. 36. Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, p. 43. 130 Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, p. 58. Gezari also mentions this example. The ability to identify this marker was, however, based not on social scientific technique but on previous experience in Afghanistan, serving in the Red Army. See Gezari, Tender Soldier, pp. 89–90. 131 Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, p. 58. 132 Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, pp. 59–60. 133 On Bhatia see Udris et al. Human Terrain and Zehfuss, ‘Culturally Sensitive War?’, pp. 184–6. 134 Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, p. 56; see also Gezari, Tender Soldier and González, ‘Rise and Fall’. 135 While the series of HTT member deaths is often used to argue that training was poor, Loyd, for example, was well qualified, with years of experience of Afghanistan as well as having previously served in the Army. See Gezari, Tender Soldier, p. 7. 127 129

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4.4 The People as the Battlefield According to its supporters, the development and implementation of HTS is about putting the population centre stage. The unclassified Human Terrain Team Handbook is prefaced by a quotation from Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, the Commanding General of the Multi-National Corps in Iraq between 2006 and 2007: ‘Understanding the effect of operations as seen through the lens of the [local] culture and psyche is the foremost planning consideration for every operation.’136 It highlights the need to go beyond focusing on the traditional aspects of mission, enemy, terrain and weather, friendly troops, support available, and time, and stresses that the ‘local population in the area of conflict must be considered as a distinct and critical aspect of the Commander’s assessment of the situation’.137 Put differently, the ‘human dimension is the very essence of irregular warfare environments’.138 The idea that HTTs can help understand the population and therefore help the population seems to perfectly encapsulate the vision of ethical war. It certainly appealed to some of those who chose to take part in the programme.139 As AnnaMaria Cardinalli explains: I was inspired by the idea that the purpose of the work would be to help commanders on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan better understand the local culture, community-by-community, in order to avoid the unnecessary conflict that can arise out of cultural mistakes, and to offer aid better targeted to local needs.140

Others talk about the chance to have a positive impact and make a difference to the war.141 One HTT member describes her job as ‘researching local communities and helping the military make decisions more in harmony with the local culture’.142 These motivations are in sync with how HTS portrays the work of HTTs, namely as identifying the needs of the local population and helping address them: ‘The knowledge gap that HTTs encounter is population-focused and designed to assist the unit in preventing friction

136

Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 2. Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 2 (italics in original). 138 Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 3. 139 For the outcomes of a survey of former HTT members which had ten respondents, see Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban and George R. Lucas Jr, ‘Assessing the Human Terrain Teams: No White Hats or Black Hats, Please’, in: Montgomery McFate and Janice H. Laurence (eds.), Social Science Goes to War: The Human Terrain System in Afghanistan and Iraq (London: Hurst 2015), p. 251. 140 AnnaMaria Cardinalli, Crossing the Wire: One Woman’s Journey into the Hidden Dangers of the Afghan War (Havertown, PA: Casemate Publishers 2013), p. 73. 141 Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, p. 148. 142 Jennifer A. Clark, ‘Playing Spades in Al Anbar: A Female Social Scientist Among Marines and Special Forces’, in: Montgomery McFate and Janice H. Laurence (eds.), Social Science Goes to War: The Human Terrain System in Afghanistan and Iraq (London: Hurst 2015), p. 142. 137

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with members of the local population by identifying local dynamics, grievances, and motivations, assessing governmental effectiveness and making recommendations on how to address them.’143 Expressed in different terms: ‘A significant benefit the HTT provides beyond analysis and assessment of local attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors is analysis of how U.S. attitudes and behavior impact on the local populations’ willingness to work with Coalition Forces.’144 Or again: ‘One of the most important interactions between the HTT and the staff involves the assessment of the population’s needs.’145 This reflects the understanding offered in the appendix to the Counterinsurgency Manual adapted from Kilcullen’s article that ‘COIN operations can be characterized as armed social work’, that is, ‘attempts to redress basic social and political problems while being shot at’.146 HTS therefore puts into practice what is seen as the other-oriented dimension of counterinsurgency. The Human Terrain Team Handbook sets out how the social scientists were meant to work and contribute to the mission. The purpose of the HTT is specifically to compensate for troops’ lack of preparation for (and interest in) non-kinetic aspects of the operation (that is, those not involving the use of force).147 Teams of more than five and up to nine members were preferred so that the HTT would be able to both take part in planning and make members available to gather information among the population. What is more, the ‘optimum composition of the team’ would include at least one woman ‘to allow the team access to the 50% of the population frequently overlooked in military operations’.148 The Human Terrain Analyst’s interpretation of the data should focus on the human terrain, defined as ‘the entire spectrum of society and culture’; for, as the handbook puts it without, I presume, any sense of irony, in ‘non-kinetic roles, the population is the primary battlefield’.149 It is the Social Scientist’s job to create a ‘Common Operating Picture in relation to the human terrain’. This is to be achieved ‘by using pattern analysis to detect underlying cultural assumptions about the world and using cultural operational knowledge to keep units away from mistaken policy and practice and prevent the misapplication of force’.150 The Human Terrain Analyst is then to ‘determine how to win the support of the local population’.151 143

Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 26. Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 28. 145 Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 34. 146 US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, A-45. 147 Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 19. 148 Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 11. Access to the female population was, of course, also to be provided by so-called Female Engagement Teams. See McBride and Wibben, ‘Gendering of Counterinsurgency’. 149 Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 19. 150 Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 13. 151 Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 19. 144

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Two points are worth drawing out. First of all, through HTS the problem of counterinsurgency is again set up as one of a cultural encounter. What is at issue in this problematization are, by and large, matters of communication and miscommunication. By improving communication, cultural experts are thought to be able to help the military build more productive relationships with the host nation population. The expectation is that this will help overcome differences. HTS focuses on creating more positive relations with the people who live in what the military calls the area of operations. This is visible in an explanation of the programme by Christopher King, who was deployed to Iraq as a HTS staff social scientist between July 2008 and March 2009 and who later became HTS Social Science Directorate Director.152 King asserts that HTS is to ‘enable culturally astute decision-making’ and that this ‘allows commanders to consider the possible ramifications of their choices with consideration of local populations’ perceptions, needs and interests’.153 In this representation of the issues, the point clearly is to develop a better understanding of the people to facilitate getting along with and even helping them, in line with the vision of ethical war. Secondly, this is so important because the deployment of cultural expertise through HTS will lead to a reduction of violence from both sides, further supporting the vision and practice of ethical war. McMaster suggests that ‘cultural expertise can help units distinguish between reconcilable and irreconcilable groups through an analysis of each group’s fears and aspirations.’154 The implication is that so-called reconcilable groups will be engaged in processes of negotiation. The goal for HTTs is to ‘provide the unit the reasons why the population is doing what it is doing and thereby providing non-lethal options to the commander and his staff’.155 HTTs are portrayed as promoting reconciliation, especially with ‘actors previously viewed as irreconcilable’.156 This is also highlighted in a job description for a Social Scientist that explained: ‘Mission of the HTS program is to conduct field studies of cultures and work hand-in-hand with the Army to reduce violence and create peaceful relations with foreign countries.’157 In this way of looking at the issue, violence appears

152 See http://humanterrainsystem.army.mil/leadership.html. This website was accessed on 10 August 2012; it is now defunct. 153 Christopher King, ‘Managing Ethical Conflict on a Human Terrain Team’, Anthropology News 50:6 (2009), p. 16. 154 McMaster, ‘Preserving Soldiers’ Moral Character’, p. 23; see also McFate and Laurence, ‘Introduction’, p. 10. 155 Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 26. 156 Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 43. 157 Job description for Social Scientist, Position ID J0213-0483, at https://cgi.njoyn.com/cgi/ xweb/XWeb.asp?tbtoken=bVFRQVUSS21xE30FMVdJHCc6cnlddiIob11ZUVsRf2UrX0ppLEoaBmEGPApXVRVSSD5l&chk=dFlbQBJf&Page=JobDetails&Jobid=J0213-0483&BRID=237527& SBDID=20464 (accessed 10 March 2013; page now expired).

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to be merely a last resort within a larger activity called ‘counterinsurgency’. In other words, violence is being portrayed as merely incidental to war. Rolling back violence is considered significant, of course, because any use of violence brings with it the risk of death. While there may be a range of uses for cultural knowledge, ultimately the most important reason for pursuing it is that ‘cultural ignorance can kill’.158 HTTs are thought to achieve the reverse. They are seen to be able to make a positive impact because they ‘support the decision-making process by recommending options for the use of non-lethal effects to build trust, form partnerships and apply informed cultural knowledge to problem solving and building solutions’.159 Indeed, in the words of the Counterinsurgency Manual ‘[k]indness and compassion can often be as important as killing and capturing insurgents.’160 By identifying non-lethal options, HTTs are seen as able to reduce violence. This is why HTS resonates not just with instrumental questions about how to achieve victory in a counterinsurgency but with the idea of ethical war. The underlying idea is that increased understanding will reduce conflict. Indeed, there are claims that, in this way, HTTs save lives. And protecting lives—especially those of civilians— is crucial to the vision of ethical war. While McFate takes the positive assessment of a commander in Iraq to confirm her ‘original hunch’, namely that ‘social science research conducted on the ground in support of the military during a war was not only valuable to the mission, it had the potential to reduce the level of violence’,161 this positive impact and its extent have been controversial. In April 2008 Colonel Martin P. Schweitzer testified before the House Armed Services Committee. He described HTS as assisting commanders to ‘better understand the “human terrain” they are surrounded by and discern “soft power” means of achieving desired effects’. HTTs, he said, ‘assist Commanders at every level to maneuver formations within tribal communities in such a manner that reduces the threat to all involved parties’.162 In Schweitzer’s judgement, the improved understanding of the human terrain made it possible to reduce the number of kinetic operations. This meant that risks were lower not only for US military personnel but also for local populations.163 Schweitzer claimed, and it is worth citing this exactly, that ‘[w]ithout the HTT filter on course of action and the

159 McFate, ‘Military Utility’, p. 44. Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 13. US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 5-38. 161 Montgomery McFate, ‘Mind the Gap: Bridging the Military/Academic Divide’, in: Montgomery McFate and Janice H. Laurence (eds.), Social Science Goes to War: The Human Terrain System in Afghanistan and Iraq (London: Hurst 2015), p. 46. 162 Martin P. Schweitzer, Statement before the House Armed Services Committee, United States House of Representatives, 110th Congress, 2nd Session, 24 April 2008, http://science.house.gov/ sites/republicans.science.house.gov/files/documents/hearings/042408_schweitzer.pdf (accessed 22 July 2015), p. 2. 163 Schweitzer, Statement, p. 3. 158 160

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alternative maneuver tools they identified to create the exact same effect, we would have lost double the lives. Using HTT capabilities, we reduced kinetic operations by 60–70%.’ Although Schweitzer says in his testimony that he could ‘elaborate with more metrics and examples of HTT success’,164 he later acknowledged that his assessment of how many lives were saved reflects impressions by military commanders rather than an evaluation based on evidence.165 Crucially, establishing how many civilians are not killed because of HTS involves an inherently problematic comparison with a counterfactual. It is no doubt the hope of being able to save lives that persuaded some to join HTS. Cardinalli says she ‘wanted to feel as though [she] was contributing to the protection of innocent people’.166 In the absence of metrics, anecdotal evidence is often cited to support the idea that HTS was able to achieve this. One study says: ‘Although few commanders were willing to state that HTTs were directly responsible for a reduction in kinetic activity, some noted the correlation between HTT activities and reduced violence.’167 One example involved a HTT setting up a new shura between tribal elders ‘that led to the end of a tribal conflict’. In another case, a HTT correctly identified the ‘power players’ in the region, changing the commander’s perception and leading to a cessation of violence.168 McFate cites a Brigade commander of the 172nd Infantry Brigade in Iraq as saying that the HTT was ‘providing a tool that provides understanding that prevents us from killing people. Absolutely they’ve helped—it’s a component of the mission.’169 Descriptions of this type frequently end up contradicting themselves, however. Carol Burke, for instance, claims that HTTs provide ‘guidance that would avoid tactical errors with strategic consequences: not whom to hit and where to hide but what matters and how to help’. Yet by way of illustration she cites a commander explaining to a HTT that he needs to know whether to encounter village elders with a gesture of welcome or ready to wield force.170 The degree to which it is possible to distinguish between sociocultural analysis, intelligence, and targeting data is questionable.171 HTS was at pains

164

Schweitzer, Statement, p. 4. Weinberger, ‘Military Research’; Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC), Final Report on the Army’s Human Terrain System Proof of Concept Program, 14 October 2009, p. 55; David Price, ‘Soft Power, Hard Power, and the Anthropological “Leveraging” of Cultural “Assets”: Distilling the Politics and Ethics of Anthropological Counterinsurgency’, in: John D. Kelly et al. (eds.), Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 2010), pp. 249–50. 166 Cardinalli, Crossing the Wire, p. 34. 167 Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, p. 180. 168 169 Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, p. 180. McFate, ‘Mind the Gap’, p. 46. 170 Carol Burke, ‘Combat Ethnography’, in: Douglas Higbee (ed.), Military Culture and Education (Farnham: Ashgate 2010), p. 29. 171 Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, pp. 111–13; James Dorough-Lewis Jr, ‘Investing in Uncertainty: Applying Social Science to Military Operations’, in: Montgomery McFate and Janice 165

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to argue that the work of HTTs was strictly confined to matters other than the use of violence. Accordingly, research conducted by HTTs was presented as producing ‘non-target data’ and ‘performed in the same manner in which academic social scientists conduct their research and is similarly rooted in theory and complete with review boards’.172 ‘No Lethal Effects Targeting’173 was listed as one of the ‘best practices’ for HTTs and became part of its Guidelines for Professional Practice.174 In the same vein, Colonel Schweitzer firmly asserted that HTS was not ‘an intelligence-gathering tool which is used to “target” individuals’.175 The distinction is not straightforward, however. King describes an ethical dilemma, based on his understanding of his professional ethics, involving the handling of information from his HTS deployment: he was asked by a military intelligence officer to identify individuals who, in interviews, had indicated their willingness to work for the insurgents if they became unemployed.176 King recounts asking himself whether his primary responsibility was towards his research subjects or their potential victims should they contribute to the insurgency and how he might protect both. After discussions among his team, the decision was not to disclose individuals’ identities for three reasons: in order to keep the promise of anonymity; because they ‘wanted to maintain IRB [Institutional Review Board] standards of protection’; and because they ‘did not know the validity of their comments, which were statements of general attitudes about the hypothetical future, not statements of intent to harm’.177 This was accepted.178 Nevertheless, King’s report suggests that the information available to his team would have been valuable for targeting. What is more, King’s list of reasons implies that he might have taken a different decision had the threat posed by his research subjects been more concrete. There are other ways in which those who provide information to HTS researchers might come to be at risk. Insurgents might retaliate against people seen to cooperate with the occupying forces. This possibility is something that H. Laurence (eds.), Social Science Goes to War: The Human Terrain System in Afghanistan and Iraq (London: Hurst 2015), pp. 187–211. 172 Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 56. Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) are similar to ethics committees in the UK, though their legal status is different. For a history of IRB oversight for social science research involving human subjects, see Zachary M. Schrag, Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965–2009 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 2010). 173 Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 82. 174 Personal communication of January 2013 by Montgomery McFate cited in Fluehr-Lobban and Lucas, ‘Assessing the Human Terrain Teams’, p. 256. 175 Schweitzer, Statement, p. 3. 176 King, ‘Managing Ethical Conflict’, p. 16. 177 King, ‘Managing Ethical Conflict’, p. 16. The charge that the work of HTS social scientists is bound to put their research subjects at risk was at the heart of the controversy about the scheme within anthropology. See Zehfuss, ‘Culturally Sensitive War?’. 178 King, ‘Managing Ethical Conflict’, p. 16.

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militaries are familiar with as it also arises in standard intelligence work. The Counterinsurgency Manual points out: ‘Protecting sources is another important consideration when sharing intelligence. Organizations may sometimes choose not to share information because acting on intelligence can compromise its sources.’179 While King speaks to his ability to protect research subjects from being targeted by US forces, the wider danger that participation in HTS research poses cannot be controlled in the same way. In addition, in King’s case the HTT is aware of the significance of concrete pieces of information and able to prevent their circulation. What his considerations cannot address is the broader contribution of producing and sharing knowledge. A response by Lieutenant Colonel Gian P. Gentile to blog postings by HTT member Marcus Griffin illustrates this wider issue: ‘Don’t fool yourself. These Human Terrain Teams whether they want to acknowledge it or not, in a generalized and subtle way, do at some point contribute to the collective knowledge of a commander which allows him to target and kill the enemy.’180 Thus, the information and insight that might enable commanders to help and protect the population is also useful for identifying and capturing or killing insurgents, something the Counterinsurgency Manual recognizes as necessary. It could help improve targeting in this sense, apparently assisting the protection of civilians. At the same time, having ‘irreconcilables’ identified by a HTT, a commander would be bound to take action. Gregory puts his finger on the issue when he describes cultural knowledge as ‘not only a substitute for killing, but also a prerequisite for its refinement’.181 In this sense, it is disingenuous to pretend that the problem is that ‘too many commanders still believe the primary value of sociocultural knowledge is to find, fix and finish the enemy.’182 They are, after all, doing their job, and HTS helped to enhance the violence necessary to do so. Some HTTs were clearly involved in intelligence more than the assertions to the contrary on behalf of the programme would have permitted. One team leader had openly been involved in ‘HUMINT [Human Intelligence] collection and target analysis’ quite early on.183 Another HTS member observed that the Army had them ‘working on projects that would indirectly serve to provide lethal targeting information’.184 For Operation Maiwand, conducted in June 2007 by NATO and Afghan forces, a HTT developed a game plan that the brigade’s Fire Support Chief described as a ‘forward cultural prep of the battle

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US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 3-180. Roberto J. González, American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press 2009), p. 68. 181 182 Gregory, ‘Rush to the Intimate’, p. 9. Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, p. 207. 183 Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, p. 43 citing Human Terrain System Yearly Report 2007–2008, p. 236. 184 Quoted in Fluehr-Lobban and Lucas, ‘Assessing the Human Terrain Teams’, p. 257. 180

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space’.185 Indeed, over time, HTS practice shifted towards more of an intelligence analysis function,186 and this was eventually publicly acknowledged.187 The idea behind HTS was obviously not to understand culture for its own sake or even to win the support of the population as an aim in itself; rather it was to support the military’s operations. As the instructions for HTTs point out, the ‘HTA needs to bear in mind how their analysis and conclusions are relevant to the needs and success of their unit, and how their analysis and conclusions satisfy the tasking’.188 Or, in the rather more candid words of a commander explaining what he expects from his HTT in a training scenario that involved them meeting a group of village elders: ‘I need to know if I give them a handshake or a hand grenade.’189 As Christopher J. Lamb and his coauthors point out, ‘U.S. forces could not defeat their adversaries in Iraq and Afghanistan without the kinds of insights Human Terrain Teams were supposed to provide.’190 Hence, HTS was needed in order to win the war. More broadly, the need for cultural knowledge in order to prevail is at the core of the argument about what counterinsurgency requires, presented not least in the Counterinsurgency Manual. HTS therefore is to play a crucial role in mission accomplishment, while at the same time reducing the death toll. This underpins the claim that it has ethical significance. This relies on the expectation that kinetic operations will be reduced through cultural understanding in two ways. On the one hand, HTTs are to promote cultural understanding, and—in a significant non sequitur—it is assumed that this will increase support for institutions supported by the United States,191 reducing violent conflict. As Hugh Gusterson notes, in this thinking, resistance is framed as a matter of cultural miscommunication.192 That is, this assumes that Iraqis and Afghans participate in the insurgency because they lack a sufficient grasp of what coalition forces are trying to achieve rather than because they perceive their plans correctly and object to them. The Counterinsurgency Manual acknowledges this: ‘Insurgents are not necessarily misled or naive.’193 On the other hand, HTS supporters believe that ‘an educated and “culturally agile” military will kill fewer, rather than more, innocent civilians.’194 While this intuitively makes some sense, it cannot easily be shown to be the case. Indeed, danger and the significance of 185

Quoted in Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, p. 37. Burke, ‘Combat Ethnography’, p. 35; Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, p. 112. 187 Gezari cites the HTS website as describing the programme as a ‘sociocultural intelligence enabling capability’ in 2013. Gezari, Tender Soldier, p. 225. 188 Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 19. 189 190 Burke, ‘Combat Ethnography’, p. 29. Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, p. xiv. 191 Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 48. 192 Udris, Der Derian, and Udris, Human Terrain. 193 US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, A-7. 194 Felix Moos cited in Jon Marcus, ‘The Support Troops are Getting the Flak’, Times Higher Education 15 (January 2009), p. 40. 186

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knowledge are closely related in war. As the Counterinsurgency Manual points out, the ‘lives of people offering information on insurgents are often in danger’.195 There is, moreover, a question of what precisely is meant by ‘protecting’ the population in this context. Supporters of HTS seem to reduce this question to one of lives saved, whereas one might want to argue that home invasions, even if for the purpose of finding weapons and hence putatively protecting others, are not easily construed as protection. That is, the violence deployed could be seen not so much as reduced, but as more intrusive and enhanced, especially as even those traditionally protected as noncombatants could be ‘irreconcilable’. Counterinsurgency is supposedly a people-centred strategy. As Schweitzer puts it, ‘the people are the Center of Gravity’196 or, to recall the words of the HTT handbook, ‘the population is the primary battlefield’,197 implying that this is benign, that warfare using cultural knowledge is gentler, more ethical. The suggestion is that counterinsurgency—especially supported by HTS—is for the people, is what has problematically been called ‘armed social work’. Yet it is clear that what constitutes a successful outcome is defined not by the people of Iraq or Afghanistan but by the leadership of the United States. Although supporters of HTS assert that ‘HTTs represented the voice of the local community, and helped them communicate their needs more effectively to US and Coalition forces’,198 there is little evidence that the population was consulted on how to ‘redress basic social and political problems’.199 Any such contribution was anyway limited by the requirements of the Coalition’s mission. Once success in counterinsurgency had become established as a matter of ‘hearts and minds’, the population became an object of interest, concern, and analysis, but not a subject contributing to the necessary political resolution in its own right. The role that HTS as a social science ‘capability’ plays in this merits further exploration.

4.5 Social Science: Objective Knowledge as Technology of Ethics According to the vision for HTS, deploying brigades would be ‘culturally empowered’ through the programme.200 The so-called cultural knowledge 195

US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 3-132. 197 Schweitzer, Statement, p. 3. Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 19. 198 Janice H. Laurence, ‘The Human Terrain System: Some Lessons Learned and the Way Forward’, in: Montgomery McFate and Janice H. Laurence (eds.), Social Science Goes to War: The Human Terrain System in Afghanistan and Iraq (London: Hurst 2015), p. 305. 199 US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, A-45. 200 Kipp et al., ‘The Human Terrain System’, p. 15. 196

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needs of the military were to be addressed by employing—or rather deploying—social scientists. There is something peculiar about this. One might have hired anthropologists as consultants in order to, say, teach soldiers how to read cultural signs that might allow for the identification of insurgents or for advising on how to pursue a negotiation in a culturally acceptable way. One might also have brought these anthropologists along to the combat zone to act as experts in ‘the culture’. Instead, the military was employing social scientists to conduct research. Prima facie, it is difficult to see why the military should need academic researchers rather than cultural advisors, especially on deployment.201 Of course, the military has always made use of research. Developments in the sciences and technology inform and change how war is conducted. A 2009 RAND Corporation report, Social Science for Counterterrorism, observes that with the shift in US defence planning towards responding to irregular warfare, terrorism, and insurgency, a range of dimensions need to be addressed, most of which ‘deal with social-science phenomena, rather than, say, the physics of precision weapons or global navigation. They involve people, whether individuals, groups, organizations, interactions or processes.’202 This recognition of the centrality of people to the outcome of contemporary conflict has generated interest in the social sciences. Former Major General Robert H. Scales had already argued a number of years earlier that in order to win the contemporary set of conflicts—World War IV, as he puts it—‘the military must be culturally knowledgeable enough to thrive in an alien environment. Victory will be defined more in terms of capturing the psycho-cultural rather than the geographical high ground. Understanding and empathy will be important weapons of war.’203 World War IV, Scales concludes, is the ‘social scientists’ war’.204 HTS is thus part of a wider trend that construes the social sciences as holding the key to contemporary war. In order to understand its envisaged function for US warfare it is therefore necessary to examine the role social science plays in the process by which the programme was meant to provide support. Having a social scientist on the team was supposedly what made HTS ‘unique’.205

201 Some HTS critics have suggested exactly that some soldiers and officers were better placed to provide this type of knowledge and that it would be more promising to train military personnel to build up relevant capability. CEAUSSIC, Final Report, pp. 31 and 44 and Ben Connable, ‘All Our Eggs in a Broken Basket: How the Human Terrain System is Undermining Sustainable Military Cultural Competence’, Military Review (March–April 2009), pp. 57–64. 202 Paul K. Davis and Kim Cragin, ‘Introduction’, in: Paul K. Davis and Kim Cragin (eds.), Social Science for Counterterrorism: Putting the Pieces Together (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation 2009), p. 1 (italics in original). 203 Robert H. Scales, ‘Clausewitz and World War IV’, Armed Forces Journal (July 2006), http:// www.armedforcesjournal.com/clausewitz-and-world-war-iv/ (accessed 15 January 2017). 204 Scales, ‘Clausewitz and World War IV’. 205 Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 12. Note, however, that the German Bundeswehr also deploys Interkulturelle Einsatzberater; they are normally expected to hold a degree with a

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HTS ‘was doing something that had never been done before: sending mixed military civilian teams [ . . . ] into a war zone to conduct social science research in direct support of military units’.206 It was ‘the first attempt (to our knowledge) to incorporate the attempts of social science research into the military’s operational capability’.207 More generally, according to the Human Terrain Team Handbook, the mission of HTTs was to conduct ‘operationally-relevant, open-source social science research, and provide commanders and staffs [ . . . ] with an embedded knowledge capability, to establish a coherent, analytic cultural framework for operational planning, decision-making, and assessment’.208 The handbook identifies three key points within this mission, the first of which is ‘social science research’.209 The embedding of skilled field researchers is highlighted as a unique aspect of the programme. The ‘required human terrain information’ is to be acquired through the use of ‘classic anthropological and sociological research methods such as semi-structured and open-ended interviews, polling and surveys, text analysis, and participant observation’. Thus, both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies are relevant.210 The second key point is ‘making the gathered data operationally relevant’. For if the information is not ‘distributed and briefed in a relevant manner, it is worthless data’. It is the Team Leader’s job to ‘couch’ the information ‘in terms familiar to a military audience, making it not significantly time-consuming, and insure it is operationally-relevant to the unit’s operations and problem-set’.211 Put differently, the ‘research conducted by the HTTs was not research for its own sake, but either directly tasked by the unit or implicit in the unit’s lines of cooperation’.212 Finally, the HTT must create an ‘analytic cultural framework for operational planning, decision-making and assessment’,213 a ‘Common Operating Picture in relation to the human terrain’.214 What all this seems to mean is that HTTs are to gather information according to established social science methodologies, which they immediately reduce to relevant facts in briefings for the commanders and staffs they

regional emphasis. Unlike with HTS, their background is not necessarily to be in a social science. Instead, the Bundeswehr highlighted Middle Eastern Studies and Slavonic Studies alongside History and Political Science as desirable qualifications in a job description. See http://www.streitkraeftebasis. de/portal/a/streitkraeftebasis/!ut/p/c4/04_SB8K8xLLM9MSSzPy8xBz9CP3I5EyrpHK94uykILMKr3SnNTM4hK9zNQk_YJsR0UAEMVL1g!!/ (accessed 15 January 2017). 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214

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McFate and Laurence, ‘Introduction’, p. 12. McFate and Laurence, ‘Introduction’, p. 15 (italics in original). Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 4. Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 4 (italics in original). Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, pp. 4 and 49. Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 4 (italics in original). McFate and Laurence, ‘Introduction’, p. 14. Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 4 (italics in original). Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 13.

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support. As in the Counterinsurgency Manual, the social sciences are seen to provide particular expertise in analysing and indeed ‘providing valid and objective information’ on these issues.215 While the manual remains general, stating for example that ‘[a]cademic sources, such as journal articles and university professors, can also be of great benefit’,216 the handbook provides concrete guidance on how to conduct the required research. Apart from using their existing expertise and knowledge, HTTs were to acquire information by a range of means, such as conducting field research on the unit’s missions, perusing HUMINT reports, following the news media, reading reports by think tanks, NGOs, and other US government agencies, and even following the scholarly literature.217 While there was some degree of flexibility in terms of what methods HTTs wish to use, ‘[e]ngaging the locals and observing their customs and habits personally is indispensable to collecting accurate data.’218 Ethnography, or what the manual understands to be ethnography, thus plays a pivotal role. Indeed, ‘the activities of each Human Terrain Team will be guided by an Ethnographic Research Design.’219 This was also clear from the kind of training offered to those joining HTS, which involved a game called ‘Weston Resolve’. This revolved around the fictional secession of a section of territory ‘between the Dakotas and Missouri’ from the United States220 and was described as ‘a practicum in doing ethnography in any kind of village’.221 Ethnographic research was to form part of the wider social network analysis which Appendix B to the Counterinsurgency Manual sets out as the right approach to achieve the required deep analysis of the sociocultural context. The HTT handbook has rather less to say on this, although it mentions that a HTT ‘systematically conducts network analysis of power structures and spheres of influence within the area of operations to identify who the commanders should be interacting with and in what capacity’.222 Crucially, the work of HTTs was to live up to what are considered to be standards of good social science research: Like all well-planned research, these designs will be based on research problems phrased in terms of a thesis. The problems themselves will refer to a particular social theory. These problems are tested through hypotheses which enable the researcher to test their explanatory force. The data that result are used to validate or refute hypotheses, demonstrate the validity of the thesis statement, and by

215 216 217 218 219 221 222

Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 3. US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 3-11. Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, pp. 5–8. Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 5. 220 Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, pp. 55–6. Gezari, Tender Soldier, p. 164. HTS press handler Lieutenant George Mace quoted in Gezari, Tender Soldier, p. 163. Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 43.

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Furthermore, and perhaps surprisingly given the context of its contribution to war-fighting, HTTs’ ‘research is performed in the same manner in which academic social scientists conduct their research and is similarly rooted in theory and complete with ethical review boards’.224 These are lofty claims, and from the beginning the extent to which whatever HTTs were doing could sensibly be called research was challenged.225 The Commission on Anthropology’s Engagement with the Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC) set up by the American Anthropological Association (AAA) concluded that the sort of ‘ethnographic investigation’ involved in HTS work could not ‘be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology’.226 Some HTT members themselves were not convinced that what they were doing was respectable research. Loyd, for example, is said to have ‘harbored doubts about the validity of the data she and her teammates were gathering. Interviewing Afghans through an interpreter, surrounded by armed soldiers, was far from ideal, and she knew it’.227 Or in the more graphic words of Ted Callahan: ‘The reality was that we were doing a sort of drive-by “windshield ethnography,” hastily conducted under difficult, dangerous conditions and more akin to journalism than anthropology.’228 Indeed, he suggests that ‘HTS bears about as much resemblance to serious anthropology as passport pictures do to photography.’229 The question of whether the right environment of trust between the researcher and the research subject could be created while carrying arms, or being surrounded by soldiers carrying arms, was certainly controversial.230 For those who argued that HTS was not doing legitimate research and was indeed harming the possibility of such research being carried out by others, the central concern was that—given the contribution this work would make to warfare—researchers would not be able to ensure that no harm would come to their research subjects.231 The claim that HTS work follows Institutional Review Board (IRB) standards is, in this light, disingenuous. It is not necessary 223

Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, pp. 55–6. Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 56. 225 For a summary of the sorts of research methods and techniques HTTs deployed in practice and what areas they researched, see McFate and Laurence, ‘Introduction’, pp. 17–18. 226 CEAUSSIC, Final Report, p. 3. 227 Gezari, Tender Soldier, p. 89. 228 Ted Callahan, ‘An Anthropologist at War in Afghanistan’, in: Montgomery McFate and Janice H. Laurence (eds.), Social Science Goes to War: The Human Terrain System in Afghanistan and Iraq (London: Hurst 2015), p. 107. 229 Callahan, ‘An Anthropologist at War’, p. 117. 230 Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, pp. 61–2. 231 This was the central concern of the debate within anthropology. See Zehfuss, ‘Culturally Sensitive War?’. 224

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to delve into the intricacies of this debate, but the critics from within anthropology saw the ‘no harm’ principle, enshrined in the AAA professional code, to be violated by HTS. Roberto J. González argues that ‘HTS represents a perversion of social science because it puts at risk Afghans and Iraqis who share information about their lives with embedded social scientists.’232 This controversy arose in particular, though not only, around the issue of whether HTS work could insulate itself from intelligence and therefore (lethal) targeting. Critics firmly argued that any danger of research outcomes being ‘abused’ to the detriment of research subjects made it an enterprise that offends against anthropologists’ professional ethics. Earlier I noted King’s assertion that his team had not passed on information about some of their research subjects because they wanted to conduct their research in line with these sorts of standards.233 Yet while HTS was long represented as not participating in intelligence operations, this was not only disputed by observers and participants, but the original rationale for HTS had also suggested that failure to use cultural intelligence would be wasteful and likely lead to loss of life and ‘grave geopolitical consequences to the loser’.234 As one HTS member pointed out, it was simply naïve to think that the insights would be used in benign, non-lethal ways only; rather, the ‘military could use the information any way it wanted—for development projects or to find and destroy the enemy. People who didn’t get that had obviously never been to Iraq or Afghanistan and had no concept of what they’d signed up for.’235 Knowledge, including that produced by the social sciences, is always potentially dangerous. In fact, this is not least why IRBs, originally set up in relation to medical research, came to be extended to the social sciences.236 Much of the critique from academics, or certainly from anthropologists, focused on the ways in which HTS’s production of this knowledge departs from professional standards, both in terms of ethics and in terms of research methods. Tarak Barkawi and Josef Teboho Ansorge propose to think about the issue in a different way. They raise the question of the forms into which specialized knowledges are put in order ‘to make them available to, and useful for, civil and military bureaucracies’.237 They propose that there is a process of translation involved which reconstitutes the knowledge into what they call ‘utile forms’.238 In their view, the critique that what HTS does is not proper ethnography or proper research misses the point. They usefully illustrate the gap between the military and anthropologists that becomes visible around the 232 233 234 235 237 238

González, American Counterinsurgency, p. 3. King, ‘Managing Ethical Conflict’, p. 16. Kipp et al., ‘The Human Terrain System’, p. 8. 236 Gezari, Tender Soldier, pp. 166–7. Schrag, Ethical Imperialism. Barkawi and Ansorge, ‘Utile Forms’, p. 3. Barkawi and Ansorge, ‘Utile Forms’, pp. 3–4.

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criticism of the Counterinsurgency Manual, the culture smart cards, and the military-style PowerPoints for briefings: While the officers felt that they had distilled knowledge into its most useful components, the anthropologists were alienated by the degraded state of their knowledge as it appeared in the military’s utile forms and by the warlike purposes for which it was to be used. For the military, utile forms fostered the illusion that they had captured the necessary objective knowledge in a condensed, accessible form. For the anthropologists, the forms into which the military put anthropological knowledge seemed to corrupt that knowledge.239

Barkawi and Ansorge argue that we need to look at the work smart cards and similarly simplified versions of knowledge do, rather than getting sidetracked into debates over the validity of the knowledge (production).240 They point out that to ‘tell the military they are not proper anthropologists or social scientists due to flawed methodology or failure to follow human subject procedures misses the mark, because the military conceives itself to be fighting a war, not doing research’.241 In a similar vein, Gusterson points out that a critique based on anthropologists’ professional ethics can be ‘quarantined’.242 This is an important point. HTS certainly illustrates the distance, and therefore need for translation, between research and military practice. There is a delicious irony in the fact that the training for the people hired to help the military understand the culture in their area of operations ended up emphasizing ‘bridging the cultural gap between social scientists and the military’.243 Lamb and his co-authors observe that ‘several HTT members thought they should conduct Ph.D.-level social science research while the HTT’s commanders they served wanted basic descriptions of the human terrain.’244 This tension expressed itself not least in the different speeds at which the two professions work. The handbook refers to the time research can take and the problem of achieving this in a military environment: ‘Critical thinking is perhaps the most underrated aspect of analysis. Because it is difficult to look busy while thinking, those that do engage in this activity are seen as lazy or spacey.’245 Crucially, this reflects not so much a misunderstanding on either side as a structural tension. The instructions to HTT members clearly set out the ambition that high-level social science should be conducted. Indeed, Barkawi and Ansorge, ‘Utile Forms’, p. 7. Barkawi and Ansorge, ‘Utile Forms’, p. 19. Barkawi and Ansorge, ‘Utile Forms’, p. 24. 242 Hugh Gusterson, ‘Human Terrain Systems and the Militarization of the Anthropological Conscience: A Meditation of the Futility of Ethical Discourse’, paper presented at the 2011 International Studies Conference, Montreal. 243 Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, p. 49; see also Fluehr-Lobban and Lucas, ‘Assessing the Human Terrain Teams’, p. 252. 244 Lamb et al., Human Terrain Teams, p. 113; see also p. 193. 245 Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 19. 239 240 241

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Petraeus confirms that the ‘objective of the HTS program was to provide our Soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan with knowledge about the local communities in which they were operating based on social science concepts and extensive research rather than on anecdote, rumor, conjecture, or opinion’.246 The speed of operating is only a symptom of the underlying tension, which concerns the question of the purpose of HTS and therefore the issue of what the social sciences can—or do—do. The HTT handbook seems enthusiastic about the idea of collecting as much data as possible and points out that there is likely to be a wealth of information available; briefings must be ‘obviously based on full knowledge’ to be persuasive.247 In fact, this seems to be why social scientists are needed in the first place. As the Counterinsurgency Manual points out, ‘[w]hat makes intelligence analysis for COIN so distinct and so challenging is the amount of sociocultural information that must be gathered and understood.’ This is a big job, and someone is needed to ‘get at the root causes of the insurgency.’248 Social science holds out the promise of providing insight that could not otherwise be obtained. At the same time, the key to successful HTS work is then portrayed to lie in reducing this wealth to short briefings which are respectful of the commander’s busy schedule. This is the translation into the ‘utile form’. Here ‘conciseness, objectivity, and accuracy’ are key.249 What is highly prized is the objectivity that scientific methods are seen to be able to deliver. This is evident in the first few pages of the handbook when the reason for drawing on the social sciences is set out: ‘The expertise for conducting research and analysis to provide valid and objective information on these topics are highly specialized in the social sciences. Social science research of a host nation’s population produces a knowledge base that is referred to as the Human Terrain.’250 Although McMaster portrays ‘tolerance for ambiguity’ as part of flexibility in military leadership,251 the HTS handbook explicitly asserts the need to strip out irrelevant information and ambiguity and to communicate just objective facts that are mission-relevant. Social scientists are believed to be able to do this: to deliver usable objective knowledge out of the overwhelming amount of available and potentially relevant information. Therefore, it is the social scientists’ ‘methodological

246 David H. Petraeus, ‘Foreword’, in: Montgomery McFate and Janice H. Laurence (eds.), Social Science Goes to War: The Human Terrain System in Afghanistan and Iraq (London: Hurst 2015), p. ix (italics added). 247 Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 95. 248 US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 3-184. 249 Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 95. 250 251 Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 3. Ricks, Gamble, p. 132.

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expertise’, rather than any pre-existing cultural knowledge, that is important.252 Indeed, contrary to what seems to be so central in much of the rhetoric around the significance of culture in counterinsurgency, HTS did not and could not offer cultural expertise. As we saw earlier, the relevant role was dropped from the configuration of HTTs.253 Newsweek pointed out in 2008 that of ‘19 Human Terrain members operating in five teams in Iraq, fewer than a handful can be described loosely as Middle East experts, and only three speak Arabic. The rest are social scientists or former GIs who [ . . . ] are transposing research skills from their unrelated fields at home.’254 There were simply too few people in the United States with advanced sociocultural knowledge of Iraq and Afghanistan.255 The ‘knowledge gap’ HTS sought to overcome thus could not be addressed by reaching beyond the military. The criticism that HTT members did not come with the right kind of expertise is widespread. Vanessa M. Gezari puts it politely when she observes that ‘whatever information they would be providing did not seem to stem from any special knowledge of Iraqi or Afghan culture.’256 She notes as embarrassing that social scientists did not know the most basic things about the cultures they were supposedly advising on, such as that ‘mailboxes were all but obsolete in Afghanistan.’257 She reports a HTT member as identifying ‘the utter lack of specific cultural knowledge or expertise’ among HTT members as ‘[b]y far the most serious problem’ with HTS.258 Soldiers themselves were becoming increasingly knowledgeable about the countries they were operating in, making HTS look superfluous or even embarrassing. Increasingly, the military attempted to make its soldiers more conversant in culture,259 instead of relying on the input of social scientists. Yet the criticism that HTT members did not have the right kind of cultural expertise misunderstands their brief. What is at issue is not the expertise—the substantive knowledge—but the method. Both the Counterinsurgency Manual and HTS handbook make much of the capacity of social science methods to deliver objective information about the people and things they study.260 Ethnography and social network theory are mentioned time and again. Methodological expertise features prominently in descriptions of the function of HTS Social Scientists. The point is not what these experts know, substantively, but their skills as information gatherers.261 Processes of obtaining supposedly 252

253 Finney, Human Terrain Team Handbook, p. 16. See section 4.4. ‘A Gun in One Hand, a Pen in the Other’, Newsweek, 12 April 2008. 255 Gezari, Tender Soldier, 194; Callahan, ‘An Anthropologist at War’, p. 96. 256 257 Gezari, Tender Soldier, p. 165. Gezari, Tender Soldier, p. 187. 258 259 Gezari, Tender Soldier, p. 172. Gezari, Tender Soldier, pp. 188–9. 260 McFate also suggests that ‘the value of social science research methods’ was consistently mentioned by military personnel in relation to HTS. McFate, ‘Mind the Gap’, p. 78. 261 My phrasing reflects representations of HTS. Needless to say, information is produced rather than gathered. 254

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objective information are portrayed as techniques that can be learnt and then deployed to any context. This is why hiring experts on Latin America, on Native Americans, or indeed on the United States’ goth, punk, and rave subcultures is, contrary to critics’ suggestions, in line with the programme’s parameters.262 Crucially, the focus on research methods makes clear that HTS is not about what it claims to be about. It is not about respecting the other or even putting the human dimension centre stage (with or without any respect for the people). Instead it is about making sure that the military is in possession of the latest technology—the technology of social science methodology— that enables it to control whatever environment they may find themselves in. The point is for the military to be reassured that the world can be known and that, once it is known, operations can be executed smoothly and successfully. The social sciences are to provide the answer to the challenging questions about how best to protect civilians; they are, in other words, deployed as a technology of ethics.

4.6 Conclusion The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq apparently introduced new challenges for Western militaries. As Dannatt put it in respect of Afghanistan, it ‘is War Among the People [ . . . ]; it is War About the People—to win their hearts and minds [ . . . ]—and it is War For the People, not just of Afghanistan, Pakistan and the South Asia Region, but for the people of the West, and this country in particular’.263 The disastrous deterioration of the security situation in Iraq, which led to the deaths of numerous civilians and soldiers, disrupted the vision of Western war as ethical; it was blamed on an inadequate understanding of this operational environment and the consequently poor preparation. Things needed to change. Against this background General Stanley A. McChrystal’s order to all International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) personnel that they had to ‘show respect for local cultures and customs and intellectual curiosity about the people of Afghanistan’264 appears progressive. More was needed, however. Lieutenant General Chiarelli, Commanding General of the MultiNational Corps-Iraq, claimed: ‘I asked my Brigade Commanders what was the number one thing they would have liked to have had more of, and they all said cultural knowledge.’265 In this context, HTS appeared to offer a much needed resource. ‘A Gun in One Hand, a Pen in the Other’; see also Gusterson, ‘Human Terrain Teams’. 264 Dannatt, Battle for Hearts and Minds, p. 14. Quoted in Gezari, Tender Soldier, p. 177. 265 http://humanterrainsystem.army.mil/Default.aspx. This website was accessed on 10 August 2012; it is now defunct. 262 263

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At first sight, the military’s desire to understand culture appears benign; it holds out the hope of making war less violent, gentler. The new mode of warfare appears to focus on the population and their needs, to do more than just protect civilians from violent harm: warfare with non-combatant protection plus. Petraeus even claims that ‘outside approaches should not be imposed on a foreign society; rather, sustainable change has to emerge from the nation itself in line with the unique conditions of the local area.’266 This is in line with the aspiration of ethical war to liberate people in the warzone. Yet the phrase of the ‘human terrain’ used by HTS reduces people to an aspect of the environment to be controlled and manipulated; to that extent it dehumanizes them. In other words, actual people are no more visible than they are in the kind of high-tech warfare that reduces them to targets. Thus, while the military clearly expends a lot of energy on making war better, the use of cultural knowledge—much like more precise targeting—instead enhances the violence, making it highly intrusive. Indeed, the apparently benign interest in the population is a serious problem. War is presented as an activity within which violence can be reduced and ultimately perhaps even avoided altogether. As Gregory points out, what has been ‘made to disappear’ in the ‘carefully staged space of constructed visibility’ of contemporary war, ‘strangely, is the conduct of war’.267 War, as intelligible to those in the West, has become non-war, entirely in keeping with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the commander in chief of a nation at war. In this sense the turn towards culture services liberal sensibilities. As Gezari says, HTS ‘was a cosmic expression of the national zeitgeist, neatly encapsulating both a justification for war and the intoxicating belief that war could be less lethal, more anthropological’.268 González similarly highlights that HTS served to repackage and therefore legitimate war: The program also served a more insidious function: It became a propaganda tool for convincing the American public—especially those with liberal tendencies— that the US-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan were benevolent missions in which smart, fresh-faced young college graduates were playing a role. It appeared to demonstrate how US forces were engaged in a kinder, gentler form of occupation. Department of Defense photos portrayed HTS personnel sitting on rugs while drinking tea with Afghan elders, or distributing sweets to euphoric Iraqi children. Here was a war that Americans could feel good about fighting.269

It is therefore not just that HTS was never going to be able to do what it was advertised as being capable of, nor that it was run ineffectively. It is not, as an editorial in Nature argued in December 2008 that ‘[i]n theory’ HTS ‘is a good

266 268

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267 Petraeus, ‘Foreword’ (2015), p. viii. Gregory, ‘Rush to the Intimate’, p. 19. 269 Gezari, Tender Soldier, p. 198. González, ‘Rise and Fall’.

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idea. [ . . . ] In practice, however, it has been a disaster.’270 It is not the faulty implementation that is the problem; rather, what is wrong is the very idea that more cultural understanding will make war better. The military’s use of cultural knowledge leaves us with two interrelated illusions that support the expectation of ever more ethical war. First of all, war is being staged as a cultural encounter and hence has been reduced to a problem of communication. Of course, one could certainly make an argument that war is about communicating or indeed that there is nothing reductionist about communication. What I mean is that war is produced as a sort of neutral communication process in which US forces are trying to understand and accommodate the other as much as possible, obscuring the ultimate aim of the violent imposition of control as well as the centrality of killing and destruction to the practice of war.271 This makes possible illusion number two: the idea of a gentler war enabled by cultural sensitivity. This idea moves beyond the obvious performative contradiction that was at the heart of what is often called liberal war when precision bombing was seen as rendering war less destructive and hence more palatable. To recall a 1960s slogan, ‘bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity’,272 and this is so even if the bombs are now ‘smart’. There is, in contrast, no such obvious contradiction between aspiring to peace and aiming to understand the culture of those whose peace is to be ensured. The violence of the project is obscured: violence appears to be nothing more than incidental to counterinsurgency and thus to the practice of war. This becomes possible by focusing on the concrete interactions that are meant to be more ethical by virtue of being less violent, obscuring the larger political context—that is, through the politics of ethics. What is ethical is again determined without consideration of how it is shaped by politics. For the military, understanding culture is not an end in itself. The Counterinsurgency Manual asserts that ‘[s]oldiers and Marines should willingly accept many aspects of the local and national culture, including food (if sanitation standards permit). U.S. forces must make clear that they do not intend to undermine or change the local religion or traditions.’ However, this does not apply to what it calls ‘dysfunctional social practices that affect the ability to conduct effective security operations’.273 Thus, a political decision has already been made as to what is amenable to cultural sensitivity and what is subject to

‘Failure in the Field’, Nature 456 (2008), p. 676. As Jabri puts it in respect of the trend towards cultural awareness training in the military, that ‘a twenty-first century colonisation can be reduced to a matter of cross-cultural communication is itself testimony to the depoliticisation of war, invasion, and resistance to occupation’. Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics, p. 140. 272 I would like to thank Jamie Johnson for reminding me of this slogan. 273 US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 6-60. 270 271

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the imposition of control. The occupier’s ‘security’ mission trumps consideration of the people and their culture. Interfering with the local culture is not just permissible but required if completing the mission demands it. While a certain level of accommodation for other cultures is now expected from soldiers, ultimately the aim is to win the war. Petraeus makes clear that understanding culture is considered a tool for mission accomplishment: ‘Cultural awareness is a force multiplier.’274 In Scales’s even blunter words: ‘Empathy will become a weapon.’275 The idea of ‘armed social work’ insidiously suggests that the occupiers know the correct way of organizing the social world, that is, that we know what is good for them.276 The military’s appropriation of cultural knowledge is thus deeply problematic; it enhances the violence of war while appearing to reduce it. This is of course what is at stake in these wars: the imposition of a political system, that is, a much more profound victory than one that is merely military. The portrayal of others’ cultures as deeply foreign, beyond comprehension, and not amenable to whatever ‘counterinsurgents’ may view as normal authorizes a view that seems more in tune with Orientalism277 than with the sort of enlightened image the armed forces may wish to project. Indeed, aspects of exploiting what is presented as cultural knowledge have acquired notoriety in the popular imagination. That many soldiers read The Arab Mind was later seen to have influenced the particular humiliation strategies deployed in Abu Ghraib, for example.278 Social scientists were claimed to be uniquely positioned to address what had emerged as significant. RAND noted, as though this was a meaningful and perhaps quite recent discovery, that irregular warfare and terrorism ‘involve people’.279 In line with this insight, the ‘war on terror’ has been called the social scientists’ war. Therefore, attempts were made to make social scientific knowledge useful for warfare. There has been concern about the military appropriation and therefore perversion of the supposedly benign practice of social science, not least among anthropologists whose profession appeared the most affected. Yet producing and appropriating knowledge of other cultures is always a politically significant and potentially problematic practice.280

274 David H. Petraeus, ‘Learning Counterinsurgency: Observations from Soldiering in Iraq’, Military Review (January–February 2006), p. 8. 275 Scales, ‘Clausewitz and World War IV’. 276 For an argument about why this entire attitude that underlies the idea of Western war as war for humanity is problematic, see Zehfuss, ‘Contemporary Western War’. 277 Gregory, ‘Rush to the Intimate’, p. 17. 278 On this see McFate, ‘Anthropology and Counterinsurgency’, p. 37 and, critically, Porter, Military Orientalism, p. 60. 279 Davis and Cragin, ‘Introduction’, p. 1 (italics in original). 280 See, not least, Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin 1995).

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It does not become so only once the military gets involved. Knowledge is dangerous in the sense of being political, although perhaps never more so than in war. Gezari points out that Cultural understanding was a tool that could be used for saving and killing, like the knife that cuts one way in the hands of a surgeon and another in the grip of a murderer. The Human Terrain System wasn’t designed to tell the military who to kill. But a child could see that who to kill and who to save were questions that answered each other.281

This is exactly why many anthropologists suggested their profession should have nothing to do with the programme. Merely rejecting participation in HTS so as to avoid complicity is, however, as I have argued elsewhere, futile.282 Such reasoning fails to tackle the broader problem, namely that the social sciences are being called upon to deliver the right answer to an ethico-political question that is not even really being spelled out. The right kind of knowledge is seen to reduce violence and thereby save lives, but this means also that it is to establish who may be rightfully killed, closing down ethico-polical questions about how this problematic has been produced in the first place. To recall McMaster’s words, ‘[c]ultural expertise contributes to the ethical conduct of war by helping soldiers and units understand their environment and identify opportunities to resolve conflict short of using force.’283 That is, the right kind of knowledge is portrayed as the key to resolving a situation that is recognized as problematic; it provides a new technological fix to the question of ethics. Through the claim that the objective knowledge would be able to save lives, HTS became part of a technology of ethics. In the end the appropriation of cultural expertise is not all that different to precision bombing, which is also considered to ameliorate the ethical dilemmas of war. What is ethical is treated again as already obvious. According to such a logic, cultural knowledge can help reduce violence and thereby protect or even save lives. This is good, and more cultural knowledge is therefore better. The ethics of protecting lives and indeed of killing ‘real’ insurgents is construed as outside of politics. Again the question of why it is right to kill those who have been identified as the right targets—not through hightechnology but through an understanding of the cultural context—is not posed. Meanwhile, the appropriation of cultural knowledge contributes not only to an understanding of the world within which conflict could be attributed to cultural predispositions and misunderstandings, but to one

281 283

282 Gezari, Tender Soldier, p. 3. Zehfuss, ‘Culturally Sensitive War?’. McMaster, ‘Preserving Soldiers’ Moral Character’, p. 23 (italics added).

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where ‘people’ can be understood and objectively assessed, their behaviour predicted and our response calculated. In the terms set out in Chapter 2, this is the very definition of irresponsibility. The use of cultural knowledge legitimizes highly intrusive forms of intervention that ultimately aim to kill those judged to be ‘irreconcilable’: death for those who disagree. Ethical war undermines itself again.

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5 Ethics Education: Ethics as Ethos and the Impossibly Good Soldier

Western military forces find themselves in a challenging ethical space. They are confronted with high expectations of what they can achieve so as to make the world a better place or, at any rate, to resolve political problems around the globe. Yet liberal societies dislike their violent means. This tension is accentuated by the increasing use of technology to record events—by the military itself, by the media, and by individuals using smartphones and similar devices, making it possible to scrutinize and discuss soldiers’ actions on deployment, often in (near) real time. Debate frequently takes its cue from what is considered unacceptable behaviour, such as the abuses perpetrated at Abu Ghraib prison. The news of these abuses, which now can no longer be considered exceptional, first seriously challenged the West’s self-conception that casts their militaries as ‘forces for good’. Deviations from the expectation that Western soldiers would display high standards of behaviour are a significant concern for ethical war. When war is waged in the name of the good, it is necessary to ensure that it is waged well (whatever that may mean). The previous two chapters have examined strategies employed by Western militaries in the pursuit of ‘ethical war’ to provide armed forces with the tools and skills to achieve this vision. In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, much faith had been placed in technical means to enable a reduction of the negative impacts of warfare. As then Brigadier General McMaster observes: ‘We were seduced by technology.’ The RMA, he argues, ‘tried to simplify the problem of war to a targeting effort’.1 Chapter 3 demonstrated that ever-greater precision cannot produce ethical war. Although high-tech military hardware remains attractive, as is especially evident in the

1 Brigadier General H.R. McMaster, ‘Remaining True to Our Values: Reflections on Military Ethics Training in Trying Times’, Journal of Military Ethics 9:3 (2010), p. 185.

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rise of drone warfare, Chapter 4 showed how counterinsurgency warfare changed the game, making the population a central concern. Counterinsurgency doctrine did not, however, replace the faith in high-tech equipment and weaponry; rather, these trends work in sync, mutually reinforcing the illusion that any violence used by Western forces is necessary, limited, and controlled. Contemporary soldiers wield great destructive capacity. If ethical war is to have any meaning, they must do so in the right way. Given especially that at least lower ranking soldiers are typically very young people with limited education and experience,2 this is a bold aspiration. This chapter therefore focuses on how militaries seek to train soldiers to be good in line with the vision for ethical war. It is important not to just look at when things go wrong—the ‘accidents’ of Chapter 3 or the atrocities that often generate debate—but to examine how things are envisaged to go right. This chapter starts from the vision for the ‘forces for good’ and examines how it is meant to work. It then sets out the key challenge: soldiers must do something ordinarily prohibited—namely kill—but only under precisely defined circumstances. The chapter examines how ethics education is conceived as responding to this challenge, before considering how soldiers have fared on deployment. It then explores the tensions within the vision and the difficulties this creates for soldiers. Ethics training or education necessarily assumes that appropriate behaviour can be identified, which—if it were to be observed by all soldiers at all times— would ensure that war was being fought ethically. That is, it must construe excessive violence, abuse, and unlawful killings as the problem, as resulting from a malfunctioning within the system which can be constrained or even eradicated by the right education or training. This chapter will show, however, that even if the system worked as envisaged, it would not resolve the ethicopolitical challenges of warfare. The problem is not least that ethics is being

2 Overstretch created by multiple deployments has in addition forced militaries to lower entry requirements. For the United States, see Charles A. Henning, U.S. Military Stop Loss Program: Key Questions and Answers (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service 2009), p. 10 and Matthew Gutmann and Catherine Lutz, Breaking Ranks: Iraq Veterans Speak Out Against the War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 2010), pp. 201–2. The US Army notes the need to ‘enhance initial entry programs to close cognitive and physical gaps in the future recruiting pool’. US Army, The U.S. Army Concept for the Human Dimension in Full Spectrum Operations, 2015–2024, TRADOC Pamphlet 525-3-7 (2008), 2.8. Challans notes the problem of ‘slackened recruitment standards or criminal recruits who enlist with “moral waivers” ’, although he sees the causes of moral error deriving from an inadequate system of moral education. Challans, Awakening Warrior, p. 1. Steven Green, who was later found guilty of raping Abeer Qasim Hamza and killing her and her family, had entered the military on a so-called ‘moral waiver’. Gary Younge, ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’, The Guardian Weekend, 26 August 2006, p. 26. For the United Kingdom, the Ministry of Defence has stated that ‘it has to recruit personnel at whatever level of attainment is available’, leading to a high percentage of recruits with a low reading age. See Conclusion 4 in House of Commons Defence Committee, The Armed Forces Covenant in Action? Part 4: Education of Service Personnel, Defence Select Committee Report, 9 July 2013.

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produced as a technique that helps soldiers negotiate the terrain of war so as to ensure ethical outcomes. This serves to enhance war, rather than constrain it; it also sets soldiers up to fail.

5.1 Forces for Good In the 1991 Gulf War, on 26 February, US armed forces killed retreating and defenceless Iraqi troops from the air. This came to be known as the ‘turkeyshoot’.3 Western publics objected to what they regarded as the unnecessary and therefore immoral execution of enemy troops who were essentially out of action. Some military leaders were equally uncomfortable with meting out death in this way.4 Patrick Cordingley, the commander of the United Kingdom’s 7th Armoured Brigade, recalls that after easily overcoming weakly defended enemy positions in the first advance he met with his commanders to consider how they ‘could continue without killing so many Iraqi soldiers’.5 This is remarkable. After all, soldiers are supposed to kill the enemy. They must be prepared to ‘take the lives of others’.6 Indeed, as Joanna Bourke argues, killing is the ‘characteristic act of men at war’.7 Yet this particular killing did not seem right to Cordingley and his commanders. The training and equipment of NATO forces had been geared towards fighting the combined forces of the Warsaw Pact and had therefore envisaged the use of maximum force. Overwhelming superiority had not been part of the plan. Hence, they were confronted with an unexpected problem: ‘How could we suddenly change our approach to minimize the loss of enemy life without endangering our own troops?’ Cordingley explains that they ‘tried to be ethical’ and ‘took casualties as a result’.8 He suggests, in other words, that he and his commanders wanted not merely to win but to ‘be ethical’, and that this entailed risks. Cordingley thus expresses a tension often highlighted in discussions of military ethics: the desire and valorization of acting well versus the concern that doing so exposes troops to additional risks. The aspiration of ‘being ethical’ has been reflected in self-representations of armed forces across Western countries. The British Army used to inform those 3

Gregory, Colonial Present, p. 165; see also McInnes, Spectator-Sport War, p. 73. Note, however, that other military leaders justified such killing on the grounds of military realism. See Challans, Awakening Warrior, pp. 37 and 39–40. 5 Major General (Retd) Patrick Cordingley, ‘Foreword’, in: Paul Robinson, Nigel de Lee, and Don Carrick (eds.), Ethics Education in the Military (Aldershot: Ashgate 2008), p. xiii. 6 Army, Values and Standards of the British Army (2008), para. 10. 7 Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-To-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (London: Granta Books 1999), p. 1; see also Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (New York: Back Bay Books 1995), p. 93. 8 Cordingley, ‘Foreword’, p. xiii. 4

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interested in joining up that its values and standards ‘make sure that the Army is a strong and effective team and a force for good’.9 Until 2015, the US Navy presented itself under the strapline of ‘A Global Force for Good’,10 while the English language site of the Swedish military explained that there ‘is a lot worth fighting for’. The Swedish Armed Forces were said to be ‘always on standby to act on conflict, in defending human rights, democracy, peace and other mutual values’.11 This idea that militaries defend not just territory and sovereignty but values mirrored the rise of ethical war. It is also visible in the ‘war on terror’ rhetoric around the protection and promotion of freedom. Intriguingly, there has been something of a shift away from these clearly other-regarding self-presentations. The US Navy has abandoned its strapline, the British Army now instead promotes ‘belonging’ to those interested in joining, and the Swedish armed forces highlight the ‘right to live the way of our choice’.12 Even beyond this shift, however, militaries have continued to embrace values that are in keeping with the aspirations of ethical war. Armed forces clearly articulate—both to their soldiers and to the public— what it means to be a good soldier. Notwithstanding differences between countries and even services within countries, by and large this appears to take a similar form: militaries endorse values that their members are expected to live up to.13 On the British Army’s webpage, the gist was summarized informally: The Army’s values and standards are its strength. They encourage you to put your mates and the mission first. And by asking you to treat people with respect, they make sure you’re treated with respect too. Together they make sure that the Army is a strong and effective team and a force for good, wherever it operates.14

The recruitment pitch has changed, now emphasizing the personal and career benefits of serving in the armed forces, but the aspiration that all soldiers are expected to live by the Army’s values and standards remains.15

9 http://www.army.mod.uk/join/20217.aspx (accessed 13 September 2013). See also the 2003 Defence White Paper, which formulates a single mission for all UK armed forces: ‘To deliver security for the people of the United Kingdom and Overseas Territories by defending them, including against terrorism, and to act as a force for good by strengthening international peace and security.’ House of Commons Defence Committee, Defence White Paper 2003 (London: The Stationery Office 2004), para. 38. 10 http://www.navy.com/about/gffg.html (accessed 13 September 2013). 11 http://www.forsvarsmakten.se/en/ (accessed 13 September 2013). 12 See http://www.army.mod.uk/join/join.aspx and http://www.forsvarsmakten.se/en/ (both accessed 16 January 2017). 13 For an overview of the values endorsed by a range of militaries, see the table in Paul Robinson, ‘Introduction: Ethics Education in the Military’, in: Paul Robinson, Nigel de Lee, and Don Carrick (eds.), Ethics Education in the Military (Aldershot: Ashgate 2008), p. 7. 14 http://www.army.mod.uk/join/20217.aspx (italics added). 15 Army, The Leadership Code: An Introductory Guide (2015), p. 3.

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This turns out not to be straightforward, however. In The Values and Standards of the British Army a distinction is introduced. Values are construed as ‘the moral principles—the intangible character and spirit—that should guide us into the sort of people we should be’. Standards are ‘the authoritative yardsticks that define how we behave and on which we judge and measure that behaviour’.16 Both are necessary. The document asserts that it would be impossible to list all the standards British soldiers are expected to comply with, as this would involve envisaging every situation a soldier might face both on and off duty. In contrast, the values are clearly identified: selfless commitment, courage, discipline, integrity, loyalty, and respect for others.17 The Army leaves little doubt as to the significance of its values and standards; it claims they ‘directly contribute to the Army’s ethos and to fighting power. They are a moral requirement and have functional utility.’18 While some believe that there is a tension between being good and winning wars, the British Army declares its values and standards to be ‘vital to operational effectiveness’.19 Ethics as produced through these values is thus not represented as constraining the profession of arms but rather as enabling and enhancing its strength. Values and standards are seen to contribute to both ethos and fighting power. The Army refuses to distinguish between moral issues and morale issues; they are presented as inextricably connected or even coterminous: ‘Within the hierarchy of fighting power [British Military Doctrine] lays emphasis on the moral component: the ability to get people to fight.’20 Soldiering is also presented as other-regarding. It is ‘about duty: so soldiers should be ready to uphold the rights of others before claiming their own’. Respect for others is one of the key values and ‘also extends to the treatment of all human beings, especially the victims of conflict, the dead, the wounded, prisoners and civilians, particularly those we have deployed to help’.21 Soldiering is represented as a difficult profession, not just because it is physically demanding and might require risking one’s life, but because moral courage—‘the courage to do what is right even when it may be unpopular, or risk ridicule or danger, and to insist on maintaining the highest standards of decency and behaviour at all times’22—is equally necessary and

16

Army, Values and Standards, para. 3. Army, Values and Standards, para. 8–16. See also Army, Leadership Code, pp. 8–9. Army, Values and Standards, para. 7. 19 Richard Dannatt, ‘Foreword by the Chief of the General Staff ’, in: Army, Values and Standards of the British Army (2008). According to British military doctrine first established in the late 1980s, the three components of military effectiveness and fighting power are physical, intellectual, and moral. See Patrick Mileham, ‘Teaching Military Ethics in the British Armed Forces’, in: Paul Robinson, Nigel de Lee, and Don Carrick (eds.), Ethics Education in the Military (Aldershot: Ashgate 2008), p. 43. 20 21 Army, Values and Standards, para. 4. Army, Values and Standards, para. 16. 22 Army, Values and Standards, para. 10. 17 18

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difficult to achieve. The document reflects the effort required to ensure these values and standards become meaningful to soldiers. Inculcating and maintaining them is active work; it ‘must pervade all training activity, career development and be the focus of all leaders on what example their subordinates should concentrate’.23 The US Army displays an equally strong and open commitment to values. Since 1995 it has presented itself as ‘a “values-based” organization, with values that would be easy to remember’.24 This is designed to pervade everything the US Army does. Cook observes that no other US organization ‘talks so constantly, openly, and unabashedly about the importance of “ethics”, “professionalism”, “integrity” and “core values” ’.25 The US Army lists its values as Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage.26 These form the acronym LDRSHIP, designed to be memorable and to highlight the significance of leadership. The commitment to the US Army’s values is part of the ‘soldier’s creed’.27 Crucially, all ‘soldiers are indoctrinated in the Warrior Ethos, which the US Army defines as “the foundation for the American Soldier’s total commitment to victory through exemplification of the Army values”. ’28 Again, winning and conforming to values are presented as mutually reinforcing. The values and their significance are explained on the publicly accessible ‘Living the Army Values’ site.29 While courage and service seem to be values that have particular relevance to the soldier’s profession, respect is interesting in that using physical violence appears to run counter to this idea. The website explains: ‘In the Soldier’s Code, we pledge to “treat others with dignity and respect while expecting others to do the same.” Respect is what allows us to appreciate the best in other people.’ This sounds like a general definition of collegiality or team spirit; it does not appear different from anything civilians might aspire to. The website suggests, however, that while civilians may well have some familiarity with the Army’s seven values, they rarely ‘actually live up to them’. In contrast, ‘Soldiers learn these values in detail during Basic 23

Army, Values and Standards, para. 29. Challans, Awakening Warrior, p. 102. The codification of official Army values started in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. US Army, The Human Dimension, 1.5. 25 Martin L. Cook, ‘Ethics Education, Ethics Training, and Character Development: Who “Owns” Ethics in the US Air Force Academy?’, in: Paul Robinson, Nigel de Lee, and Don Carrick (eds.), Ethics Education in the Military (Aldershot: Ashgate 2008), p. 57; see also Jeffrey Wilson, ‘An Ethics Curriculum for an Evolving Army’, in: Paul Robinson, Nigel de Lee, and Don Carrick (eds.), Ethics Education in the Military (Aldershot: Ashgate 2008), p. 38. 26 https://www.army.mil/values/index.html (accessed 16 January 2017). 27 https://www.army.mil/values/soldiers.html (accessed 16 January 2017). 28 Wilson, ‘An Ethics Curriculum’, p. 36 quoting Warrior Ethos Briefing (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office 2003), p. 15. See also US Army, The Army Profession, ADRP1 (Headquarters, Department of the Army 2013), esp. 1.27. 29 https://www.goarmy.com/soldier-life/being-a-soldier/living-the-army-values.html (accessed 16 January 2017). 24

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Combat Training (BCT), from then on they live them every day in everything they do—whether they’re on the job or off. In short, the Seven Core Army Values [ . . . ] are what being a Soldier is all about.’30 Values are thus produced as central to the identity of a soldier. They serve to distinguish between soldiers and those who kill for illegitimate reasons, such as murderers or terrorists.31 They also mark the distance between soldiers and civilians, with soldiers aspiring to and achieving a higher standard.32 Both in the United Kingdom and the United States soldiering is presented as a distinct and demanding profession that takes a special kind of person. In other words, a distinction is produced between the ordinary civilian and the special soldier, secured by the soldier’s full observance of the values at all times. While the values produce this distinction, what is striking is that many of them would not seem out of place in a civilian environment. The Norwegian military provides an admirably short list of values that gives little clue as to the main business of the organization: respect, responsibility, and courage. While many militaries list courage and discipline, which might be seen as martial attributes, the Royal Marines also have humility and cheerfulness, the Israel Defence Force respect for human life, Australia innovation, the Royal Navy sense of humour, and the Royal Air Force the contemporary favourite of all professional aspirations: excellence.33 These sets of values are broadly in tune with the idea of forces for good providing help to those in need. They reflect the way their countries envisage themselves in the world. While the commitment to values generates the distinctness of the soldiering profession, the values themselves and indeed the idea of being committed to values reflect their societies. Hence, they do not just articulate soldiers’ uniqueness but also their inextricable situatedness within the society they serve. It is worth noting that not all Western states share the idea of soldiers as apart from and superior to civilian society in the same way. In Canada, for example, the ‘primary objective’ of the Canadian Defence Ethics Programme is ‘to promote the values shared by the majority of Canadians’.34 Similarly, the Federal Republic of Germany has promoted the ideal of the ‘citizen in uniform’ since rearmament in 1955.35 Of course, the citizen in uniform is to be an

30

https://www.goarmy.com/soldier-life/being-a-soldier/living-the-army-values.html. See Shannon E. French, The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield 2003), p. 1. 32 This is explicit in British Army, Values and Standards, para. 2. 33 Robinson, ‘Introduction’, p. 7, Table 1.1. 34 Yves Desjardin, ‘Canada’s Defence Ethics Programme and Ethics Training’, in: Paul Robinson, Nigel de Lee, and Don Carrick (eds.), Ethics Education in the Military (Aldershot: Ashgate 2008), p. 67. 35 Bundesminister der Verteidigung, Innere Führung: Selbstverständnis und Führungskultur der Bundeswehr, ZDv10/1 (Bonn 2008), para. 2. For an overview of the history of ‘Innere Führung’, see Eckhardt Opitz, ‘Geschichte der Inneren Führung: Vom “Inneren Gefüge” zur Führungsphilosophie der Bundeswehr’, in: Eckhardt Opitz (ed.), 50 Jahre Innere Führung: Von Himmerod (Eifel) nach Priština 31

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ideal citizen and hence this might be considered simply a different way of marking the difference from (ordinary) civilians. After all, the idea behind the specialness of soldiers is that they actually observe the values, not necessarily that the values themselves are distinct. In sum, contemporary Western militaries present themselves as forces for good and articulate values for their soldiers in order to support this vision. This is not just a matter of tuning into a Zeitgeist. Militaries have always regarded the profession of arms as a moral enterprise, even a higher calling.36 In the words of General Lord Dannatt, ‘the need for soldiers to understand and adopt high ethical and moral standards is more critical than ever in today’s complex operating environment.’37 Living up to such aspirations is not easy. Militaries therefore need strategies for enabling and indeed forcing soldiers to do so. A number of developments seem to have come together to make this task appear ever more important. First of all, other-regarding operations require a military that takes into account those they are meant to protect. As Paul Robinson observes, the British armed forces, for example, claim that their mission is to be ‘a force for good’. Clearly, if such claims are to be more than self-serving rhetoric, military personnel must uphold the highest ethical standards. This in turn means that military institutions must pay increasing attention to the ethical education of their members.38

As we saw in Chapter 4, when ‘hearts and minds’ are part of what is being fought for, restraint on the use of force may be central to the mission.39 In addition, peacekeeping and counterinsurgency operations put soldiers into close contact with the population; hence the need to make the right decisions under pressure and potentially without guidance from (senior) officers is significant. Secondly, there have been a number of incidents that showed Western soldiers falling short of expectations, for example using torture or committing atrocities. Abu Ghraib was the first, but the list of such incidents is now too long to be cited.40 Such scandals served to shine a spotlight on military ethics education. Finally, Western militaries cannot rely on a shared understanding of ethics among those joining them.41 There has been a wider trend in Western (Kosovo): Geschichte, Probleme und Perspektiven einer Führungsphilosophie (Bremen: Edition Temmen 2001), pp. 11–25. 36

See, for example, US Army, The Army Profession, Chapter 4. 38 Dannatt, Battle for Hearts and Minds, p. 12. Robinson, ‘Introduction’, p. 1. 39 This is also visible in US Army, Civilian Casualty Mitigation. 40 See 4.1 for the Haditha massacre and 5.3 for the killing of Abeer Qasim Hamza. 41 In respect of the United Kingdom, see Dannatt, Battle for Hearts and Minds, p. 14. In respect of Germany, see Gottfried Küenzlen, ‘Kämpfer in postheroischer Zeit? Leitbilder für deutsche Soldaten zwischen Visionen und Illusion’, in: Jochen Bohn, Thomas Bohrmann, and Gottfried Küenzlen (eds.), Die Bundeswehr heute: Berufsethische Perspektiven für eine Armee im Einsatz (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer 2011), pp. 27–9. 37

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societies towards considering the teaching and inculcation of professional ethics and values essential. The armed forces hence find themselves part of a trend towards, and perhaps even at the forefront of, explicit ethics education.42

5.2 Making Good Soldiers The military’s unique relation to violence creates a challenge in promoting ethical behaviour among its members. There is a tension between the ethical aspirations of contemporary operations and the destructiveness of the military instrument. While politicians, the public, and academics may debate the possibility of ever achieving the asserted aims by the chosen means, soldiers have to get on with their job. The question for them is what most effectively helps them to do so, taking into account the requirements of ethics. This problematization necessarily assumes that ethical warfare is possible, and just war thinking has traditionally provided the framework for working out what such warfare would look like. Although the increasing complexity of contemporary soldiering poses a range of challenges, the core issue in terms of ethics remains the appropriate use of violence. More specifically, the ethical dilemma at the heart of good soldiering revolves around killing. In Theodore Nadelson’s blunt words, ‘the soldier’s real work is in killing.’43 Military training therefore has to make soldiers overcome inhibitions against the taking of life: ‘to be a soldier requires learning to suppress one’s initial moral revulsion at killing other human beings.’44 Shouting ‘Kill!’ in training is part of this process.45 Evan Wright talks about ‘Get some!’ as the ‘unofficial Marine Corps cheer’. It expresses, in two simple words, the excitement, the fear, the feelings of power and the erotic-tinged thrill that come from confronting the extreme physical and emotional challenges posed by death, which is, of course, what war is all about. Nearly every Marine I’ve met is hoping this war with Iraq will be his chance to get some.46

As Wright’s account highlights, the challenge is to ensure that once the ‘moral revulsion’ has been overcome, soldiers do not kill whenever they feel like it. Having unleashed the capacity to exercise significant violence, it must be controlled, constrained, and channelled. 42

See also Dannatt, Battle for Hearts and Minds. Theodore Nadelson, Trained to Kill: Soldiers at War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 2005), p. 43. 44 Mark J. Osiel, Obeying Orders: Atrocity, Military Discipline and the Law of War (New Brunswick, NJ: Transition Publishers 1999), p. 113. See also Nadelson, Trained to Kill, p. 43 and Grossman, On Killing. 45 Nathaniel Fick, One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer (London: Phoenix 2007), p. 18; Wright, Generation Kill, p. 323; IVAW and Glantz, Winter Soldier, pp. 60–1. 46 Wright, Generation Kill, p. 15. 43

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Shannon E. French summarizes the ‘disturbing tension’ soldiers are exposed to: despite our abhorrence of murder ‘warriors are given a mandate by their society to take lives. But they must learn to take only certain lives in certain ways, at certain times, and for certain reasons.’ If they fail to observe these parameters, soldiers ‘will find themselves condemned by the very societies they were created to serve’.47 Thus, soldiers must learn to kill (or more generally use force) when authorized to do so and not to kill or harm in any other circumstances. Constructing and enforcing highly developed systems for governing soldiers’ conduct has been central to efforts to achieve this. Put differently, discipline is crucial.48 Yet while articulating and enforcing rules and regulations is an important element in ensuring that soldiers act appropriately, this approach is insufficient in itself. In order to understand why this is the case, it is useful to examine why excessive and irregular violence continues to be a part of warfare. Mark J. Osiel’s work on atrocities and their causes is instructive. Although atrocity is not a term recognized in international law, it is often used to describe events in war that offend against shared ethical standards. Following this practice, Osiel describes atrocity as ‘the deliberate harming of noncombatants (and their property), a category encompassing both civilians and soldiers who have surrendered (or sought to surrender), and the use of prohibited methods of warfare against enemy forces’.49 This understanding of atrocity delineates it against the expected standard—non-combatant immunity—and also appears to invoke a notion of proportionality, both central tenets of just war thinking, as set out in Chapter 2. According to Osiel, the dominant understanding sees atrocities as occurring when discipline and bureaucracy fail, that is because of ‘an inability of those at the top of the organization to exercise sufficient control over those at the bottom’.50 Put differently, such ‘traditional’ atrocities are conceptualized as an outbreak of the passions and desires of individual soldiers.51 As a result, the obvious solution is to increase and improve control. Soldiers must be forced to behave appropriately. Clear rules are therefore a good thing, ‘particularly rules requiring strict obedience to all superior orders’.52 In keeping with this view, it has long been standard practice to issue rules of engagement (ROE), often on cards that soldiers are required to carry.53 ROE spell out clearly what soldiers can and cannot do during a particular deployment, specifically, the conditions

47

French, Code of the Warrior, p. 3. US Army, The Army Profession, B-13; Grossman, On Killing, p. 260. 49 50 Osiel, Obeying Orders, pp. 47–8. Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 176. 51 52 Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 177. Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 178. 53 For examples, see ‘1991 Operation Desert Storm, US Rules of Engagement: Pocket Card’, in Adam Roberts and Richard Guelff (eds.), Documents on the Laws of War, 3rd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000), pp. 561–3 and, from the 2003 Iraq War, Buzzell, My War, pp. 76–8. 48

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under which force may be used. Yet, while the rules may be deceptively clear, their precise application raises complicated issues. This complexity is reflected in the increasingly close involvement of military lawyers in target clearance procedures, a process first widely highlighted and discussed in relation to NATO’s Kosovo operation.54 These procedures underline the significance of knowing and enforcing the rules but also of specifying their application to particular situations. Initiative from subordinates is not desirable because insufficient control over their passions and desires is seen to create the problem. As Osiel explains, commands have to be ‘as precise and specific as possible, leaving minimal latitude for interpretation’.55 If atrocities are the result of individual soldiers following their passions, full obedience to orders is the solution and must be the focus of military training. This diagnosis, however, assumes that orders given by officers apply the rules correctly and are in tune with the requirements of ethics. This assumption is deeply problematic, as crimes committed by the Wehrmacht in the Second World War ordered from above demonstrate.56 An alternative understanding of atrocities therefore sees them as deriving not from a lack of discipline and organizational control but from the opposite, namely ‘from the nature of social organization, especially military organization’. Osiel calls this ‘modern atrocity’.57 If the chain of command is ‘employed to induce soldiers to commit crimes’,58 then the crimes cannot be prevented by soldiers’ subordination to their superiors; instead subordination enables such atrocities. There is a broader problem with trying to resolve ethical matters through appeals to authority, namely ‘that once people submit to authority as the justification for acting “morally”, then it is no harder for the authority to impose something immoral than something moral’.59 Looked at this way, unquestioned obedience to orders is dangerous. Osiel therefore argues that ‘subordinates should be enlisted as part of a solution.’60 This suggests a very different task for training and ethics education: soldiers must be empowered to question and ultimately disobey orders that would lead to atrocities.61 The aspiration to enable and even require such behaviour finds expression in the legal requirement to disobey manifestly illegal orders,62 something that is not easily accommodated within the system of obedience to orders.

54 See section 3.1. For a critical assessment of such involvement by military lawyers as ‘giving a legal imprimatur’ to military actions, see Challans, Awakening Warrior, pp. 100 and 101. 55 56 Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 178. Osiel, Obeying Orders, pp. 179–80. 57 58 Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 180. Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 181. 59 60 Challans, Awakening Warrior, p. 31. Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 181. 61 One of Chamayou’s objections to drone warfare concerns the increasing removal of the human and thus of any possibility of critical intervention by the agent of violence; see section 3.6. 62 This requirement is not always understood well. See Challans, Awakening Warrior, p. 167. Osiel notes that some militaries, notably the German Bundeswehr, train soldiers in the limits to obedience. Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 25.

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The problem of how to generate and support the desired behaviour is compounded because modern atrocity has not replaced traditional atrocity; rather both are always possible. Individual soldiers and their lack of discipline may be the problem but so may be their superiors and the system of obedience to orders. What Osiel calls ‘atrocity by connivance’63 is a hybrid of the two types noted so far and has become more common over time, especially since the Nuremberg trials. It occurs in the context of permissiveness on the part of commanders, such as in the case of the My Lai massacre.64 The ‘intended result of such connivance is that the subordinate can claim to have acted pursuant to what he believed to be orders, while the superior can claim never to have issued them. To produce this result, orders must be willfully ambiguous.’65 The rule on command responsibility, which attributes criminal liability to commanders not just for acts based on their orders but for those enabled by their serious negligence, is intended to remedy this.66 Osiel’s typology of atrocities is a useful foil for a discussion of training and ethics education because it clarifies the challenges involved.67 How atrocities can be averted and what legal safeguards best protect against them—or what training might effectively support such protections—depends on what their causes are. Whether the issue is controlling individual soldiers tempted to go too far, or whether the system actually creates the problem it is ostensibly designed to prevent, is critical. While before the scandals of the war in Iraq Western militaries may have wanted to think that they had overcome the problem, it is clear that no such assumption can be made. Osiel’s analysis suggests that attempts at preventing excessive violence must call on soldiers’ understanding of and commitment to ethical behaviour, that is, on their mind, rather than on others’ attempts to control their actions.68 In sum, neither formulating clear rules nor the system of obedience to orders can ensure ethical (or legal) conduct. Instead soldiers must be active participants in making warfare ethical. Knowledge of the rules is insufficient, as a judgement about their application must be made.69 In addition, there is an issue of the will.70 That is, military ethics education needs to do more than identify the right thing to do in any given situation; it also needs to enable and

63

64 Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 187. Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 188. Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 189. 66 Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 192. See also Crawford, Accountability, Chapter 5. 67 Osiel discusses one final type of atrocity, which interestingly appears less connected to the issue of orders. This is atrocity caused by the brutalization of soldiers. Osiel proposes to address this through better protecting the troops themselves. Osiel, Obeying Orders, pp. 193–7. 68 This will be no surprise to Foucauldians. 69 Indeed, we saw in section 2.4 that ethical questions only ever arise where knowledge fails to provide the right way forward. 70 Challans argues that militaries reduce the problem to one of the will and underestimate the significance of the problem of understanding. Awakening Warrior, pp. 103 and 174. 65

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motivate soldiers to actually do it. In addition, the example of the slaughter of enemy troops becoming an issue in the 1991 Gulf War shows that what is considered to be excessive violence and hence an offence against the requirements of ethics may change with little notice, challenging any understanding that does not acknowledge that practice shapes ethics. In his reflections on these events, Cordingley acknowledges that soldiers had to do things they had not been trained for and at times their behaviour was ‘unacceptable, even criminal’. As a result he sees teaching ethics as addressing ‘arguably one of the most critical areas of modern soldiering’.71 Contemporary failures by Western military personnel to behave ethically while on deployment have not just shocked the general public but have galvanized thinking about the state of military ethics education, both within the military and in academia.72 In fact, many militaries have redesigned their ethics education. Although different methods, based on a range of philosophical principles,73 are used, most military ethics education programmes revolve around virtue ethics.74 In view of the dominance of just war thinking in academic and public discussion of the ethics of war, this is intriguing. Just war thinking plays a crucial role, of course. It is taught at officer training colleges75 and is also cited as forming part of the US Army’s Ethic.76 Arguably, it indeed permeates training, the configuration of rules of engagement, and targeting practices.77 Nevertheless, those tasked with implementing the vision of ethical war seem to agree that teaching rules is not enough; they resort, in the main, to virtue ethics to conceive training. Virtue ethics is not conceptualized around observing rules or duties. Rather, the idea of virtue is broad, relating to values, questions of character, emotions, and so on. Virtue ethics is interested in what types of persons we should strive to be.78 A central part of this kind of thinking is that ‘human beings must reflect upon who they are and who they ought to be.’79 Its application to military ethics education often focuses on character development80 as well as on ‘the formation of habits and bearing’.81 The idea is ‘to produce people who will act virtuously because they are virtuous’.82 As the US Army puts it, the

Cordingley, ‘Foreword’, p. xiii. For overviews, see, for example, Paul Robinson et al. (eds.), Ethics Education and Don Carrick, James Connelly, and Paul Robinson (eds.), Ethics Education for Irregular Warfare (Farnham: Ashgate 2009). 73 74 Robinson, ‘Introduction’, p. 1. Robinson, ‘Introduction’, p. 5. 75 76 See, for example, Cook, Moral Warrior. US Army, The Army Profession, 2.1. 77 Johnson, Ethics and the Use of Force, p. 1. 78 Rosalind Hursthouse, ‘Virtue Ethics’, in: Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2012), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/ (accessed 20 July 2014). 79 Berghaus and Cartagena, ‘Developing Good Soldiers’, p. 295. 80 81 Robinson, ‘Introduction’, p. 5. Cook, ‘Ethics Education’, p. 58. 82 Robinson, ‘Introduction’, p. 5 (italics in original). 71 72

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‘moral component of the human dimension is rooted in character, and from character comes behavior’.83 Put crudely, ethics education and training are based on the premise that good (or virtuous) soldiers will make good war, conceptualizing ethics as an integral part of what it means to be a soldier. The issue is not one of observing rules on top of or even in tension with achieving the mission; instead, everything a soldier does must be informed by the ethos of the good soldier. The attraction of this type of ethics is at least twofold. First, it is claimed that virtue ethics is effective because it allows for easier processing of complex dilemmas under pressure. Second, rather than merely ruling out what is prohibited—as rules do—virtue ethics can generate a commitment to a higher standard. A significant problem for ethics in warfare lies in the limited ‘capacity of the human mind to process complex information in situations of extreme adversity, such as those on the battlefield’.84 As one soldier points out, ‘in the middle of a firefight [ . . . ], you only can track about 1/10 of what is happening.’85 Under such pressure, soldiers are not likely to be able to carefully interpret the rules,86 especially if information that is not immediately obvious would be required to assess the situation. Yves Desjardins thus argues that in ‘crisis situations such as those found on modern battlefields, soldiers will rely more on their training, experience, education, good judgment, and values, than on unfamiliar or unknown rules’.87 What is needed is a ‘moral compass’ that continues to function under pressure.88 To illustrate this, Osiel tells the frequently recounted story of an officer stopping a recruit already pointing his rifle at the head of a Vietnamese woman simply by saying: ‘Marines don’t do that.’ He concludes that this ‘statement is surely a simple, more effective way of communicating the law of war than threatening prosecution for war crimes’.89 This is why virtue ethics is considered so promising. In Osiel’s words, the ‘highly chaotic nature of war [ . . . ] ensures that professional warriors will always best be governed by some form of “virtue ethics”’.90 In line with these ideas, the British Army’s vision presents values as guiding soldiers ‘into the sort of people [they] should be’.91 Through practising the values from the very beginning, they are to develop character or moral

83 US Army, The Human Dimension, 3.1. For the centrality of character to the Army professional, see also US Army, The Army Profession, 1.1. 84 85 Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 53. Buzzell, My War, p. 304. 86 Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 23. 87 Desjardins, ‘Canada’s Defence Ethics Programme’, p. 70. 88 The Counterinsurgency Manual tasks leaders with providing such a compass; see section 5.3. 89 Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 23. 90 Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 285. See also Johnson, Ethics and the Use of Force, pp. 89 and 98. 91 Army, Values and Standards, para. 3.

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strength,92 making them good soldiers. The idea of an ethos brings the range of values together for the individual soldier. This is important because knowing what living up to the values means in any concrete situation is not always straightforward, especially since soldiers have to satisfy a number of values simultaneously.93 The British Army ‘seized on the term “ethos” rather than on “ethics” as the basis of moral thinking’. This is significant, Stephen Deakin argues, because while ethics and ethos are related, they are not the same: ‘Ethics concerns the moral principles that should guide us. Ethos describes the characteristic spirit of a community; it is concerned with how the community actually lives.’94 Similarly, when the US Army declared itself a values-based organization in the mid-1990s, it also began to formalize ‘the relationship between adherence to a clearly defined set of professional virtues that become one’s personal values—a set of professional characteristics necessary for instrumental success on the battlefield—and the actions the soldier takes to interact with other people and the environment’.95 Soldiers are taught throughout their training that they must behave in accordance with Army values. They memorize and recite them every day in basic training.96 Challans highlights that the Army ‘even added one week to basic training so that new recruits could “inculcate” the Army values’ and that every soldier ‘carries a plastic card in his wallet and a tag (along with his dog tags) around his neck with the Army values on them’.97 To make them memorable, the values are designed to form an acronym: LDRSHP.98 The Army endorses honour as something of a super-value within its scheme of seven values: ‘Honor is a matter of carrying out, acting, and living the values of respect, duty, loyalty, selfless service, integrity and personal courage in everything you do.’99 Elsewhere, a succinct definition of honour is offered: ‘Live up to all the Army Values.’100 Honour thus ‘integrates all Army Values in the development of character for each Army professional’.101 Furthermore, honour is so important that the ‘[n]ation’s highest military award is The Medal 92 See Stephen Deakin, ‘Education in an Ethos at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst’, in: Paul Robinson, Nigel de Lee, and Don Carrick (eds.), Ethics Education in the Military (Aldershot: Ashgate 2008), pp. 15–29. 93 See also Joseph J. Miller, ‘Squaring the Circle: Teaching Philosophical Ethics in the Military’, Journal of Military Ethics 3:3 (2004), pp. 202–3. 94 Deakin, ‘Education in an Ethos’, p. 20. 95 Wilson, ‘An Ethics Curriculum’, p. 33. 96 Berghaus and Cartagena, ‘Developing Good Soldiers’, p. 299, fn. 13. 97 Challans, Awakening Warrior, p. 116. 98 https://www.army.mil/values/index.html. Challans explains how the desire to create a memorable acronym led to changing the set of values endorsed by the US Army. See Challans, Awakening Warrior, pp. 102–3. 99 https://www.goarmy.com/soldier-life/being-a-soldier/living-the-army-values.html. 100 US Army, The Human Dimension, 1.5. 101 US Army, The Army Profession, 4.3. For more on the Army Profession campaign, see section 5.4.

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of Honor. This award goes to Soldiers who make honor a matter of daily living—Soldiers who develop the habit of being honorable, and solidify that habit with every value choice they make.’102 The right ‘value choice’ should become intuitive. This can only happen within the broader context of what it means to successfully exercise the profession of the soldier. Military training must enable soldiers to effectively marshal the wide range of required skills, including technical and tactical, in the pursuit of mission accomplishment, while overcoming stress, fear, and exhaustion. Since S.L.A. Marshall’s claims about the low percentage of soldiers who actually fire their weapon in combat,103 a whole industry of realistic training scenarios and ‘gaming’ has developed, designed to enable soldiers to practise and improve their skills within settings that replicate, as much as possible, the challenges and stresses of combat.104 Such training is designed to expose soldiers to the pressures of the situation they will find themselves in on deployment, not just in combat but also in encounters with local populations more generally. The ability to function correctly within this demanding environment is explicitly also a matter of ethics education. The idea is to train for ethically challenging situations as they will actually occur. This approach takes into account a wider range of issues than identifying the right course of action and generating the motivation to implement it. Training seeks to recreate common emotional states, chiefly fear and confusion. To that extent, the use of live ammunition in training exercises and the use of Arabic speakers in simulations to create a background of noise, strangeness, and unintelligibility are not dissimilar.105 Exercises are also often designed to produce exhaustion and sleep deprivation106 so as to prepare soldiers for their effect on their ability to process complex information and to enable them to develop coping strategies. Inasmuch as these training regimes integrate questions of ethical conduct, they treat ethics as a skill or technique to be learnt. The expectation is that the good soldier who is proficient in the technique will come up with the right

102 https://www.goarmy.com/soldier-life/being-a-soldier/living-the-army-values.html. See also US Army, The Army Profession, 4.12. 103 The drive towards realistic training is thought to be a consequence of research that claimed to show that during the Second World War only a small percentage of soldiers had actually fired their weapons. S.L.A. Marshall, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1947). Although now widely questioned, these claims continue to be cited. See, for example, Grossman, On Killing, pp. xv and 3–4. 104 See Der Derian, Virtuous War. 105 See, for example, Barnes, ‘The Army is Rethinking’ and Scott et al., ‘Deployment Experiences’. For footage of such training see Udris, Der Derian, and Udris, Human Terrain. 106 Sleep deprivation is frequently noted as affecting soldiers’ ability to function in memoirs and journalists’ accounts of contemporary wars. See, for example, Wright, Generation Kill, p. 340 and Joshua Key, as told to Lawrence Hill, The Deserter’s Tale: The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in Iraq (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press 2007), p. 130.

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action at the right time, ensuring ethical conduct. The US Army points out that ‘there is often insufficient time to apply rules self-consciously, or calculate the consequences of wrongdoing. [ . . . ] Therefore, soldierly conduct must involve the practice of values and virtues until doing the right thing becomes habitual virtuous conduct that takes on the qualities of duty.’107 Moreover, ‘[d]eliberately integrating ambiguous moral situations into training to replicate those Soldiers are likely to face in the future will force Soldiers to reassess their understanding of moral issues.’108 Practising the technique will lead to the formation of good habits. This approach transposes the idea of ‘muscle memory’ to ethics training.109 The idea of habituation would make sense if an ethical reaction could be made intuitive. It is problematic, however, because acting ethically requires judgement of some sort. Where there is not a genuine dilemma, there is, after all, no question of ethics.110 The Army, accordingly, sees training not just as creating habitual responses but as generating a process of reflection. Difficult or ambiguous situations encountered in exercises might lead soldiers to think through possible reactions before they have to act on deployment. McMaster points out that ‘civilian role players help soldiers understand better the importance of restraint and respectful, professional conduct’ and that ‘after action reviews’ promote reflection on such issues.111 The question of whether training soldiers into intuitive or remembered behaviour is appropriate to dealing with ethical challenges recalls the issue of the extent to which soldiers should be trained to obey orders. The paradox of military culture and practice is that soldiers have to make very difficult decisions, often concerning life and death, but that they are trained to obey. In the US military, where there seems to be a tendency to control every aspect of behaviour, the problem is, according to Osiel, that officers ‘are expected routinely to display the most mature practical judgement in the most lifethreatening situations. But in many others they are treated like automatons or irresponsible adolescents, and in fact often behave accordingly.’112 Cook similarly observes newly graduated cadets’ low ‘ability to function practically in the world’ compared to civilians ‘precisely because they have been in a system that removes a great deal of decision making from their lives for four years’.113 That those entrusted with life and death decisions in combat may not have much experience in making decisions is alarming. Indeed, although

107

US Army, The Human Dimension, 3.3. US Army, The Human Dimension, 3.3. See also US Army, The Army Profession, 4.12. 109 George R. Mastroianni, ‘The Person-Situation Debate: Implications for Military Leadership and Civil-Military Relations’, Journal of Military Ethics 10:1 (2011), p. 10. 110 See section 2.4. 111 McMaster, ‘Preserving Soldiers’ Moral Character’, p. 21. 112 113 Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 5. Cook, ‘Ethics Education’, p. 61. 108

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promoters of counterinsurgency doctrine place enormous emphasis on the necessity for soldiers to use their mind,114 soldiers’ accounts of recent wars suggest that in practice the culture of obedience prevails and independent thinking is not always appreciated.115 The need to make sound decisions suggests that the ‘habituation’ that comes with virtue ethics is inimical to the aspirations of ethical war. Nevertheless, virtue ethics may be significant if it inspires good behaviour. The idea of martial honour is considered to be ‘quite demanding’116 and ‘generally more demanding than legal duty’.117 Instead of merely ensuring compliance with a minimum threshold of legal and ethical norms, martial honour or a warrior ethos promotes an ideal to aspire to. Additionally, an ethos can ‘be more effective in motivating compliance with ethical norms than threat of formal legal sanction’.118 The US Army indeed claims their values ‘form the moral identity that motivates Army professionals’.119 This is also why Coker endorses the warrior ethos as essential: ‘What keeps war an ethical activity is the warrior ethos.’120 He sees the modern instrumental understanding of warfare and the influence of liberalism in particular as having had a negative impact because good behaviour has come to be framed as a question of obeying the rules. As a result, the ‘duties we now owe to others have become more a matter of legal sanction than moral responsibility’.121 That is, duties are clearly defined but thereby also clearly delimited. In addition, the likelihood of their observance is tied to whether negative consequences are expected from breaking the rules. In contrast, duties deriving from the warrior’s honour are not confined to specific conditions, are intended for the long term, and are not subject to calculations of individual advantage.122 The point of a warrior code therefore is that soldiers ‘are trained to be moral’. It is, as Coker puts it, ‘a form of social conditioning’.123 This is, in his view, vital. Laws can only ‘reaffirm the warrior ethos; they cannot replace it’.124 The warrior ethos reflects that soldiers, both individually and collectively, regard themselves as being engaged in an ethical enterprise; ethical aspirations are central to their professional identity. Soldiers learn what the ethos demands not just through practice but also from example.125 The ideal of the good warrior is often transmitted through

114

See also US Army, The Human Dimension. See also Robinson, ‘Introduction’, pp. 8 and section 5.3 below. 117 French, Code of the Warrior, p. 3. Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 32. 118 Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 32. 119 US Army, The Army Profession, 4.4 (italics added). 120 Christopher Coker, The Warrior Ethos: Military Culture and the War on Terror (Abingdon: Routledge 2007), n.p. 121 122 Coker, Warrior Ethos, p. 136. Coker, Warrior Ethos, pp. 136–7. 123 124 Coker, Warrior Ethos, p. 137. Coker, Warrior Ethos, p. 138. 125 See, for example, US Army, The Human Dimension, 3.1; Army, Values and Standards, para. 3. 115 116

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stories of exemplary soldiers’ exploits. According to Cook, officers’ ‘entire sense of professional identity’ is ‘formed by stories of great combat leaders, heroic figures who sacrificed themselves in battle for the good of country and comrades’.126 Challans similarly highlights that soldiers and officers are encouraged to read military histories and stories and that these readings ‘not only can inform and educate, but also can socialize, acculturate, motivate, romanticize, and familiarize the military professional with the ethical norms of the profession’.127 Militaries thus seek to rely on ‘narrative identity’, which is ‘imparted not by instruction in international law but by stories about the deeds of honorable soldiers’.128 Honour, as we have already seen, is a key martial value. It is central to the US Army’s conceptualization of values and ethos. John Keegan strongly endorses the idea as vital: ‘There is no substitute for honor as a medium of enforcing decency on the battlefield, never has been and never will be. There are no judges, more to the point, no policemen at the place where death is done in combat.’129 Yet, much like obedience to orders, honour may support problematic behaviour because it lacks any substantive ethical content. Honour was endorsed by the military and paramilitary organizations of the Third Reich, for example. Hence, even though the US Army suggests that honour ‘requires a person to demonstrate an understanding of what is right’,130 it is doubtful that subscribing to the notion of honour can guard against unethical behaviour. Challans worries ‘that for all the emphasis put on values as being evidence that the military is ethical, these values as employed are only instrumental to the military’s explicitly stated purpose and final end—that of victory’.131 This observation is plausible, given the emphasis of the US Army’s official formulation of the Warrior’s Ethos or Soldier’s Creed: ‘I will always place the mission first, I will never accept defeat, I will never quit, I will never leave a fallen comrade.’132 More generally, Challans considers the warrior ethos to be ineffective in dealing with the moral problems it is supposed to address. He argues that virtue ethics ‘lacks any robust theory of right action’.133 Therefore, it is insufficient in guiding soldiers towards the right behaviour. In Challans’s view, the warrior ethos ‘is really about a special kind of work ethic, one that centres on

126

Cook, Moral Warrior, p. 69. Challans, Awakening Warrior, p. 69. Challans is critical of how narrative is used in ethics education: see Awakening Warrior, p. 33. 128 Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 21. 129 John Keegan cited in Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honor, p. 118. 130 US Army, The Army Profession, 4.3. 131 Challans, Awakening Warrior, p. 117. See also Crawford, Accountability, p. 79. 132 Cited in US Army, The Human Dimension, 1.5 and US Army, The Army Profession, B-8 and B-10 (italics in originals). 133 Challans, Awakening Warrior, p. 61. 127

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mission accomplishment and potential self-sacrifice, not on moral restraints and law-abidingness’.134 Again, there is a parallel concern in relation to the British military. The Values and Standards of the British Army contains the following question, known as the Service Test: ‘Have the actions or behaviours of an individual adversely impacted or are they likely to impact on the efficiency or operational effectiveness of the Army?’135 This formula highlights the primacy of effectiveness and, as Deakin highlights, ‘prohibits many acts of bravery by soldiers since these, being often particularly risky, are most likely to harm the operations effectiveness of the Army’.136 Deakin thus considers the British Army’s justification for the adoption of virtues to be utilitarian. The ‘implicit argument’ is that soldiers ‘will be better soldiers if they adopt these virtues’.137 Based on examining the lists of values and virtues that militaries claim to subscribe to, Robinson indeed highlights a ‘striking gap’: very few of them relate to restraint or respect for non-combatants.138 The exception is interestingly provided by the Israel Defense Forces, which include respect for human life as a value. Robinson thus argues that these values and virtues by and large ignore that the point of military ethics should be to limit the use of force and to protect those not involved from its effects. They produce not ethical but efficient soldiers.139 There is therefore a question mark over whether the values that are so loudly articulated and embraced have any ethical significance at all.

5.3 Good Soldiers, Good War? Despite the attempts by Western militaries to create good soldiers, they have not always behaved in a manner consistent with the idea of ethical war. In a 2010 lecture at the US Naval War College, one of the US Army’s leading officers reflected on military ethics and its challenges.140 Brigadier General McMaster suggested that Jim Frederick’s book Black Hearts141 provides an illuminating case study demonstrating what factors lead to ‘[b]reakdowns in discipline that result in immoral or unethical conduct’.142 In keeping with the notion that discipline ensures that soldiers use violence only when authorized to do so, McMaster portrays discipline as pivotal to the issue of ethical conduct. 134

Challans, Awakening Warrior, p. 11. Army, Values and Standards, para. 32. See also Mileham, ‘Teaching Military Ethics’, p. 50. 136 137 Deakin, ‘Education in an Ethos’, p. 24. Deakin, ‘Education in an Ethos’, p. 23. 138 See, however, US Army, The Army Profession, 2.20. 139 140 Robinson, ‘Introduction’, p. 6. McMaster, ‘Remaining True’. 141 Jim Frederick, Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death (London: Pan Books 2010). 142 McMaster, ‘Remaining True’, p. 187. 135

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Black Hearts is journalist Frederick’s account of the deployment to Iraq’s socalled Triangle of Death of 1st Platoon, Bravo Company of the 1st Battalion 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division in 2005–6. The soldiers whose deployment is recounted in Black Hearts should have been the kind of good soldiers values-based military training is meant to produce. Yet this particular platoon became notorious because on 12 March 2006 a group of its soldiers raped fourteen-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza and killed her, her parents, and her six-year-old sister.143 What is more, they almost got away with it. Frederick describes the book as ‘a story about how fragile the values that the U.S. military, and all Americans, consider bedrock really are, how easily morals can be defiled, integrity abandoned, character undone’.144 The rape and killing of civilians by US soldiers disrupted the vision that they are forces for good, engaged in ethical war. McMaster asserts that unethical conduct results from breakdowns in discipline and that Black Hearts illustrates how this happens. More specifically, he argues that these breakdowns ‘can often be traced to four factors’, namely ignorance, uncertainty, fear, and combat trauma.145 Ignorance of the mission or the environment will have a detrimental effect but also ‘a failure to understand or internalize the warrior ethos or professional ethic.’146 The problem with ignorance, McMaster argues, is that it breaks the contract or ‘covenant’ between soldiers and society. It also breeds uncertainty, the second of his factors. Uncertainty brings about mistakes, which may lead to unnecessary harm to civilians. Of course, as McMaster points out, ‘[w]arfare will always remain firmly in the realm of uncertainty.’ Yet leaders should strive to reduce uncertainty because combined with persistent danger it will lead to fear, the next of the factors. Confidence, in contrast, supports ‘morale, discipline, and combat effectiveness’. Combat trauma, finally, ‘often manifests itself in rage and actions that compromise the mission’.147 Although Black Hearts touches upon all these factors, they are not actually crucial. That is, the book does not represent the central event—the rape and murder of a young girl and her family—as having been brought about by ignorance, uncertainty, fear, and combat trauma. While McMaster stresses that ‘uncertainty can lead to mistakes, mistakes that can harm civilians unnecessarily’,148 this is precisely not what is at issue in the events recounted by Frederick. There is no accidental hurting of civilians involved, nor could it be said that the soldiers were ignorant in the sense that they were unaware of 143 Frederick, Black Hearts. See also Ellen Knickmeyer, ‘Details Emerge in Alleged Army Rape, Killings’, The Washington Post, 3 July 2006, p. A15. 144 Frederick, Black Hearts, p. xix. Interestingly, the soldier who reported the killings has become an exemplar of honourable service. US Army, The Army Profession, 4.12. 145 146 McMaster, ‘Remaining True’, pp. 187–8. McMaster, ‘Remaining True’, p. 187. 147 148 McMaster, ‘Remaining True’, p. 188. McMaster, ‘Remaining True’, p. 187.

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the wrongness of their actions. The soldiers’ actions instead displayed knowledge and confidence: they knew how things were handled in their area of operations and concluded that they could get away with murder. What emerges most clearly in reading Frederick’s account is the impact of poor planning and leadership. The book is full of stories about junior commanders and troops on the ground who believe that command fail to support them in vital ways. It is full of vivid descriptions of the impact of having insufficient troop numbers and equipment in a war zone. McMaster acknowledges the significance of leadership; he in fact prefaces his lecture by saying that he would focus his remarks on ‘military leaders’ connected responsibilities of ensuring moral and ethical conduct in war while also preparing our soldiers, psychologically, for the extraordinary demands of combat’.149 He proposes that ‘concerted effort’ is needed in four areas. The first is ‘applied ethics or values-based instruction’,150 which his service and the US armed forces generally have pursued for some time. The second concerns realistic training that ‘replicates as closely as possible situations that soldiers are likely to encounter’.151 Third, he argues for education about the history and cultures of the peoples living where wars are being fought.152 Finally, he supports ‘leadership that strives to set an example, keep soldiers informed, and manage combat stress’.153 The significance McMaster accords to leadership comes out even more strongly elsewhere when he claims that leadership ‘is perhaps even more important than education and training in developing and preserving the moral character of soldiers and units’.154 While the US Army has presented itself as a values-based organization since the mid-1990s, McMaster diagnoses the actual shift in ethical training as having occurred later. In fact, he claims that in contemporary counterinsurgency and state-building operations it was the ‘lack of intellectual and conceptual preparation’ that ‘limited military effectiveness and contributed to breakdowns in professional and ethical conduct’.155 His argument reflects the logic set out in favour of virtue ethics in section 5.2. Claiming it was the experience of Afghanistan and Iraq that ‘inspired the US military to emphasize values training as the principal means of ensuring moral and ethical conduct in combat’,156 he notes that inculcating values came to be seen as a more

150 McMaster, ‘Remaining True’, p. 185. McMaster, ‘Remaining True’, p. 188. McMaster, ‘Remaining True’, p. 188; McMaster, ‘Preserving Soldiers’ Moral Character’, p. 15. 152 Note that sociocultural awareness is part of the moral component of the human dimension, according to the US Army. US Army, The Human Dimension, 3.1. 153 McMaster, ‘Remaining True’, p. 188. 154 McMaster, ‘Preserving Soldiers’ Moral Character’, p. 24. In the UK context, Dannatt makes similar claims about the significance of leadership and ethics education. See Dannatt, Battle for Hearts and Minds. 155 McMaster, ‘Preserving Soldiers’ Moral Character’, p. 16. 156 McMaster, ‘Preserving Soldiers’ Moral Character’, p. 18. 149 151

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effective way of stopping soldiers from acting badly. Drawing on Coker’s Warrior Ethos, he suggests that ‘individual and institutional values are more important than legal constraints on immoral behaviour’.157 McMaster presents the Counterinsurgency Manual as having addressed the challenges he identifies. In particular, he points out that it requires leaders to ‘work proactively to establish and maintain the proper ethical climate of their organizations’ and to ‘ensure that the trying counterinsurgency environment does not undermine the values of their Soldiers and Marines’.158 The manual indeed has an entire chapter on ‘Leadership and Ethics for Counterinsurgency’,159 which is prefaced with a quotation from Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1, 1997: ‘Leaders must have a strong sense of the great responsibility of their office; the resources they will expend in war are human lives.’160 This is interesting not least because leaders’ responsibilities are limited to military personnel as presumably neither US civilians nor enemy combatants or civilians may be considered Marine Corps resources. The manual then observes that there are leadership and ethical imperatives that are ‘prominent and, in some cases, unique to counterinsurgency’. Adaptability plays a role, as do competence in a wide range of tasks and good professional judgement. Whatever else may be the case, leaders ‘must provide the moral compass for their subordinates as they navigate this complex environment’.161 The manual highlights the balance to be struck between mission accomplishment and ethics, again without representing the issue as a dilemma: leaders ‘continually reconcile mission effectiveness, ethical standards, and thoughtful stewartship of the Nation’s precious resources—human and material—in the pursuit of national aims’.162 Leaders must adequately prepare their subordinates: ‘Effective leaders ensure that Soldiers and Marines are properly trained and educated. Such training includes cultural preparation for the environment.’163 The manual also establishes that all ‘levels of training for all components should include values training’.164 The leadership role ‘includes the responsibility to serve as a moral compass that extends beyond the COIN force and into the community. It is that moral compass that distinguishes Soldiers and Marines from the insurgents.’165 Developing such an intuitive ‘moral compass’ often relies on encouraging soldiers to emulate exemplary soldiers. This is a role that leaders 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165

McMaster, ‘Preserving Soldiers’ Moral Character’, p. 18. See Coker, Warrior Ethos, p. 135. US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 7.2. US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, pp. 237–53. US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, p. 237. US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, p. 237. US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 7-1. US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 7-5. On such training see section 4.1. US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 6-61. US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 7-9.

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must take on: ‘Leaders serve as moral exemplars by their conduct.’166 As Major General Mattis puts it, ‘[b]y our every act and statement, Marine leaders must set a legal, moral and ethical model.’167 While McMaster’s suggestions all seem sensible, it is important to take a step back and consider how he sets up the problem and what that means in terms of possible resolutions. At the end of his analysis we find ourselves exactly in the place that the previous section identified: good soldiers will make good war. Hence the aim has to be to produce, develop, and support good soldiers. Indeed, McMaster ends by endorsing the warrior ethos as enabling the support of values and making units effective as well as war less inhumane.168 Somewhat incongruously, at one point he asserts that ‘forces have adapted and leaders have ensured ethical conduct.’169 Whatever the empirical merit of this observation, it is clear that the idea of leadership is extremely significant to McMaster’s conceptualization of ethics. He calls for better leadership and more applied ethics instruction. That he ends up with this position is not surprising, given his problematization of the issue. His starting point was that the problem is a failure within the system, a ‘breakdown’ in discipline. Discussion around the ethics of warfare often starts from instances when things have gone horribly wrong: Wehrmacht crimes, the My Lai massacre, Haditha, and so on, or in this case the rape and murder of Abeer Qasim Hamza. There are a number of problems with this way of thinking about the issue. Most obviously, it creates the impression that if these deviations from the expected conduct of good soldiers could be prevented, then all would be well. By implication, if the small group of soldiers who killed Abeer Qasim Hamza had not done so, then the war would have been ethical. This way of thinking about the issue has at least two immediate effects. First, the issue is presented as one of the failures of particular soldiers or units, making it possible to think of it along the lines of more or less sophisticated versions of the ‘bad apple’ argument.170 Second, by starting from the most egregious examples of poor and even criminal behaviour it trivializes the question of what constitutes ethical conduct in war. The deliberate rape and murder of a young girl and her family becomes the centre of attention. This makes it appear as though it is gross deviations from the expectation that are the problem, obscuring the question of whether a well-functioning system of

166 US Army, The Human Dimension, 3.3. This is again the same in the United Kingdom. See Army, Values and Standards, para. 3. 167 168 Ricks, Fiasco, p. 318. McMaster, ‘Remaining True’, p. 193. 169 McMaster, ‘Remaining True’, p. 186 (italics in original). 170 For a discussion of the ‘bad apple’ argument in relation to Abu Ghraib, see Zehfuss, Wounds of Memory, pp. 256–7. Crawford strongly argues against this conceptualization. See Crawford, Accountability.

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military ethics could ever ensure that war is ethical. The inevitable bad outcomes of ‘good’ uses of violence come to be invisible. What the soldiers who raped and killed Abeer Qasim Hamza did was clearly wrong; they also clearly knew this. Thinking military ethics from this place or more generally from the issue of soldiers committing atrocities obscures the serious question of the possibility of ethics in (and of) war. Starting from obvious ethical failures construes the problem as an issue of will or knowledge of individual soldiers, that is, as one that would be successfully handled by good soldiers, soldiers who are well-trained and therefore knowledgeable, committed to military values, and disciplined. It is assumed that if soldiers did not commit atrocities and instead behaved correctly, then war would (or at least could) be good. While McMaster’s approach to the issue goes some way to exploring how the possibility of the rape and murders arises in the first place, the larger ethico-political context within which the soldiers are operating—why they were at war and in a position to commit and nearly get away with these atrocities in the first place—is excluded from consideration. Following this line of thinking, ethics can be and is considered in separation from politics. Good war would be possible if all soldiers were good at all times. Construing the problem in this way not only squarely portrays any wrongdoing as necessarily due to soldiers’ deficiency, it also sidelines the ethical challenges of warfare and their aftermath that well-behaved soldiers deal with. McMaster’s argument is part of a wider tendency to portray ethics as an integral part of the practice of war, as something that is learnt and practised alongside other elements of soldiering. It should become part of the soldiers’ life-world, instead of being an add-on to be considered only in those moments when obvious ethical challenges occur. As we will see, this parallels a trend to think about soldiering comprehensively or holistically, involving physical, emotional, and even spiritual dimensions. It is not just that these challenges are faced on the battlefield and under pressure, they also form part of soldiers’ lives. It is therefore interesting to explore how ethical challenges are portrayed in the stories soldiers tell.171 Soldiers have always recounted their lives and their experiences of warfare. Within the genre of soldier memoirs, Nathaniel Fick’s One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer stands out because it starts with peace rather than war. ‘Peace’ is the title of Part I of the book which is prefaced by a quotation from Thucydides: ‘We should remember that one man is much the same as another, and that he is best who is trained in the severest school.’172 Fick thus considers training central to what he wants to say, making his recollections interesting in considering how soldiers are prepared and shaped for warfare. 171 172

See also Gutmann and Lutz, Breaking Ranks and IVAW and Glantz, Winter Soldier. Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 1.

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We encounter Fick for the first time on an old school bus used by the US Marine Corps to transport recruits to Officer Candidates School (OCS). While the recruits are still casually dressed, occupying themselves in ways they freely choose, a second lieutenant welcomes them by saying: ‘Honor, courage, and commitment are the Marines’ core values . . . If you can’t be honest at OCS, how can the Corps trust you to lead men in combat?’173 Fick highlights that, although he was joining a peacetime military, the first thing the lieutenant talked about was combat. This opening also presents values as central: everything starts with them. It is the summer of 1998 and Fick has just graduated from Dartmouth, majoring in Classics. While his peers go on to graduate school or command high salaries, Fick ‘wanted to go on a great adventure, to prove [him]self, to serve [his] country’. He says he ‘wanted something more transformative. Something that might kill [him]—or leave [him] better, stronger, more capable. [He] wanted to be a warrior.’174 Fick describes reading Ricks’s book on the Marine Corps175 and summarizes his interpretation of it: ‘The Marine Corps was a last bastion of honor in society, a place where young Americans learned to work as a team, to trust one another and themselves, and to sacrifice for a principle.’176 Before even having joined up, Fick already buys into the notion that the military is different from civilian society, marked by stronger adherence to values. The way Ricks uses terms like ‘honour’ and ‘duty’ without any sense of irony appealed to him. The allure of the warrior ideal is an important factor in Fick’s decision to join. He is a ‘closet idealist’,177 although his reasons for joining are not purely moral. While there is an element of wanting to serve others, Fick also talks a lot about testing and developing himself. Put differently, there is a macho undertone in Fick’s idealism. While there is little in Fick’s account to suggest that he received much explicit education in the ethics of warfare, he claims that ‘a strong dose of moral reflection on the nature of our job’ infused all the training at the Infantry Officer Course. They learnt that ‘moral courage is as important as physical courage.’ In fact, he says the ‘moral courage of their leaders is what separates combat units from armed mobs’.178 At the same time he was taught to behave like a predator.179 After all, the aim is to win and bring the Marines home safely. Like the writers of the Counterinsurgency Manual, Fick considers

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174 Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 3. Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 4. Thomas E. Ricks, Making the Corps (New York: Scribner 1997). 176 Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 5. 177 Wright, Generation Kill, p. 34. Such idealism is expressed time and again when soldiers reflect upon why they joined up. See Gutmann and Lutz, Breaking Ranks, p. 38 and IVAW and Glantz, Winter Soldier, pp. 29 and 69. 178 179 Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 48. Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 49. 175

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that a Marine’s ‘most deadly weapon’ is his mind.180 He talks about the ‘combat mindset’: ‘the tactical need to be a predator and the moral imperative to know where to draw the line.’181 While Marines like to show how tough they are, he found that ‘most Marines, behind the tough-talking façade, are idealists.’182 Fick gets a chance to put his training into practice when his 1st Reconnaissance Battalion deploys to Iraq in 2003. He recounts a visit at Camp Matilda in northern Kuwait by Lieutenant General James Conway, then the commanding general of the First Marine Expeditionary Force. Conway speaks to the officers about the rules of engagement. First, he stressed that commanders had ‘an inherent obligation—not merely a right, but a legal and ethical obligation—to defend their Marines’. Second, if the enemy used strategies such as human shields or placing legitimate targets next to religious sites or hospitals, they—not the Marines—would be endangering innocents. Third, commanders would be held responsible according to the facts as they appeared at the time, rather than the facts as established with hindsight. Finally, if the enemy started a firefight, the response should be proportional. If the Marines started it themselves, then collateral damage was the main concern. Reminded of his college classes on Augustine and just war thinking, Fick concludes that, while the question of justice of the declaration of the war was out of his hands, it was his responsibility to look after justice in the conduct of the war in his small sphere of influence.183 On 20 March, Fick reads Major General Mattis’s ‘Message to All Hands’ to his platoon. The message warns of the likelihood of ‘unethical tactics’, such as chemical attacks, use of human shields, and treachery, and recommends that the Marines ‘[t]ake it all in stride.’ It also suggests that they should use their brain before using their weapon.184 By 5 a.m. on 21 March Fick’s platoon finds itself in Iraq. He paints a scene of advancing through the desert, albeit past homes. ‘By noon’, Fick notes, they had ‘seen more people than I had seen in all my time in Afghanistan. It was our first clue that the civilian population would be a major factor in the war.’185 Fick’s platoon is at the front of the invasion in poorly protected Humvees as part of a plan that revolved around speed and mobility. Mattis was using the Reconnaissance battalion to ‘assault through the planned route and continue moving without establishing rear security’, thereby ‘throwing out a basic element of military doctrine’.186 The

180 Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 49. Petraeus uses the term ‘powerful’ rather than deadly. See David H. Petraeus, ‘Beyond the Cloister’, The American Interest Online (July-August 2007) https://www.theamerican-interest.com/2007/07/01/beyond-the-cloister/ (accessed 9 June 2011). 181 182 Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 49. Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 48. 183 Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 182. 184 Mattis’s message quoted in Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 191. 185 186 Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 195. Wright, Generation Kill, p. 26.

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other unexpected challenge is the behaviour of the Iraqi population. As another officer points out, one minute Iraqis were waving white flags and surrendering, the next ‘some fucker was shooting at us with a rifle in one hand and a little girl in the other.’ In this context, it was difficult to ‘do the right thing’ and not get killed in the process.187 Thus, the question of ethics is troubling from the start. Fick’s account does not bear out the claims made at the time that the US military was taking extreme care to protect civilians. Instead, he describes what Challans calls a culture of excess in practice.188 Fick recounts wondering ‘about the wisdom of dropping high-explosive artillery shells into a crowded town, regardless of the target’s legitimacy’.189 He also talks of another unit as ‘pogues blasting through at fifty miles per hour, shooting everything in sight’.190 Such tactics are presented even more starkly in Wright’s account, a journalist embedded with Fick’s battalion, the title of which sums up these issues: Generation Kill: Living Dangerously on the Road to Baghdad with the Ultraviolent Marines of Bravo Company. Nevertheless, even Wright’s account suggests that the Marines had set out wanting to do the right thing, rather than wanting to accidentally shoot old ladies sweeping their porches or women used as human shields.191 Fick’s and Wright’s accounts do not inspire confidence in the ROE serving as a constraint. This is not because they are being ignored by the troops but rather because they are ‘adjusted’ by commanders. When ordered to seize an Iraqi military airfield near Qalat Sukkar, Fick receives this instruction from company headquarters: ‘All personnel on the airfield are declared hostile.’192 Fick reflects that they ‘normally operated within certain constraints’, which in sum meant that targets had to be a ‘clear and present danger’ to be legitimately engaged. In contrast, ‘“[d]eclared hostile” . . . meant shoot first and ask questions later.’193 The original rules of engagement boiled down to ‘if the Marines come across a bunch of armed Iraqis, they generally can’t shoot them unless the Iraqis shoot them first’,194 but this had now been overturned. Qalat Sukkar had been ‘declared a free-fire zone’, even though he had learned at Quantico that in Vietnam these had been ‘immoral and counterproductive’.195 Despite his moral qualms, Fick lets the order stand. Based on the idea that restraint increases risks for the troops, he hopes that it might save some of his men’s lives. When they reach the airfield after firing some rounds at what they think are men with rifles, it becomes clear that it has been disused for years. A little 187 189 191 192 193 195

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188 Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 208. Challans, Awakening Warrior, p. 41. 190 Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 229. Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 232. Wright, Generation Kill, e.g. pp. 117 and 127. Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 237; see also Wright, Generation Kill, p. 218. 194 Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 237. Wright, Generation Kill, p. 53. Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 237.

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while later, a group of Iraqis approaches them, bringing two young boys, one with a leg wound and the other with several bullets to his abdomen. Fick’s medic examines the wounds, which he finds to be from 5.56mm rounds. Fick describes his realization of what had happened in words that are worth quoting at length: The only such rounds in Iraq were American and the only Americans there were us. In horror, I thought back to our assault on the airfield a few hours before. The pieces fell into place. Those weren’t rifles we’d seen but shepherds’ canes, not muzzle flashes but the sun reflecting on a windshield. [ . . . ] We’d shot two children.196

Once they have realized they were the ones who shot the two young boys, Fick and his platoon become desperate to save them. Fick wants to evacuate the children for medical care but is told to send the villagers home. He writes that he ‘wanted to tell [his superior] that we were Americans, that Americans don’t shoot kids and let them die, that the men in my platoon had to be able to look themselves in the mirror for the rest of their lives’. However, as he was ‘still conditioned to accept senior officers’ decisions, regardless of their stupidity, criminality, or inhumanity’, he tries to find another solution.197 Fick still needs his superior’s permission for the evacuation, however, and he refuses, smirking. This prompts the following analysis from Fick: Our values were being inverted, and it threatened to destroy us. Good Marines were sent on a stupid mission governed by harebrained rules of engagement, and now they were being abandoned to suffer the consequences of other people’s poor decisions. I thought of the untold innocent civilians who must have been killed by artillery and air strikes over the past week. The only difference was that we hadn’t stuck around to see the effects those wrought. Our actions were being thrust in our faces, and the chain of command was passing the buck to the youngest, and most vulnerable of the troops.198

Fick says that he had not ‘been seized by a sudden burst of conscience’, but that it was his job to get his men home ‘physically and psychologically intact’.199 Therefore, while he knew that the Iraqi boys could die, he had to ensure they did not ‘die in [his Marines’] hands’.200 That is, Fick professes not to be all that interested in achieving what he and his troops consider the ethical outcome, but merely in ensuring that his men do not witness the children’s death. In this argument, achieving what ethics demands is necessary only because 196 Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 239. For another account of the same incident, see Wright, Generation Kill, pp. 223–31. 197 198 Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 240. Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 240. 199 Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 241. Fick is in tune with McMaster’s line on leadership; see pp. 155–7 above. 200 Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 241; see also Wright, Generation Kill, p. 227.

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the Marines believe in it and therefore not doing so may damage their mental health. Eventually, Fick manages to get authorization for the evacuation. He suspects that his superior realizes that ‘posterity would frown on Marine officers who sat by while children died of Marine-inflicted gunshot wounds’.201 This incident distressed the Marines, even though the shooting had been within the rules of engagement they had been given. Clearly, in this particular situation, the rules were not helpful in reducing violence or protecting the soldiers’ mental health. In fact, the rules of engagement had been made so permissive that they were likely to generate this type of incident. What happened appeared wrong to Fick and his men. What is implied is that, had they known, they would have chosen not to kill the children. Significantly, they do not make sense of the wrongness of the shooting by drawing on rules, for example the Geneva Conventions or just war principles.202 Instead, they invoke their values—as seen in Fick’s reflections quoted above—and their identity. While Fick falls back on his self-conception as an American, in Wright’s account the platoon’s medic observes: ‘We’re Recon Marines. Our job is to observe. We don’t shoot unarmed children.’203 This latter way of putting it invokes their warrior identity in order to demarcate the boundaries of permissible uses of violence. This is what militaries aim to achieve through inculcating values captured within a larger warrior ethos: it is this valuebased identity that is to allow for an intuitive judgement of the rightness or wrongness of an action, without lengthy debates over which rules apply and to what extent. Thus, even though Fick’s superior does not approve of the concrete expression of their warrior ethos on this occasion, one could say that these Marines have been successfully socialized into an ethos that does not permit the killing of children. Clearly, they perceive soldiering as a profession that involves normative constraints. Fick himself makes much of the significance of their values. In recounting his men’s overwhelming desire to save the children and the chain of command’s indifference to their predicament, Fick observes that he and his men were being destroyed by an inversion of their values. He sees this as a problem of how the particular operation was being run and implemented, rather than a more fundamental impossibility of reconciling values and identities in war. Either way, seeing the values they have been taught to embrace as the core of their identity not just disregarded but overturned by their superiors has a profound effect on the Marines. 201

Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 241. It is of course possible to make a rules-based argument. Wright recounts that another platoon commander does not pass on the changed ROE to his troops, reasoning that the change is against the rules because it lacked adequate authorization. Wright, Generation Kill, p. 218. 203 Wright, Generation Kill, p. 225. Also see the discussion of this incident in Zehfuss, ‘Subjectivity and Vulnerability’, pp. 60–2. 202

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The Marines do not feel reassured by the fact that they did not mean to kill the children. As far as they were aware, they were engaging men with rifles in a hostile environment. Yet despite the significance of intent to thinking about the ethics of war,204 they focus on the outcome. It is the outcome—the potential death of the children at their hands—that they cannot reconcile with their identity, with being forces for good. Fick feels a strong need to protect his soldiers from the emotional fallout of seeing the children die. Unlike the soldiers who raped and killed Abeer Qasim Hamza, Fick’s Marines did not knowingly decide to do anything wrong. There was also no breakdown of discipline, no uncertainty over the rules of engagement, no poor grasp of the warrior ethos. In fact, the Marines obeyed the rules, and their reflections on the events show that they embraced high standards for themselves as Marines. McMaster argues that leaders must ‘understand that just as managing combat stress is one of the most effective means of ensuring ethical conduct, ensuring ethical conduct in combat is one of the most effective means of preventing post traumatic stress’.205 This advice, however, assumes that if soldiers act well all will be well. It fails to address the gap that may open up between conduct and outcome: even when soldiers (try to) behave ethically, bad things happen in war.

5.4 Virtue Ethics and the Impossibly Good Soldier Military virtue ethics operates on the assumption that good character will lead to good behaviour. Practising the right behaviour will develop character and thus make good soldiers who will act in the right way, even under pressure. Adherence to values is meant to help soldiers ‘make the right decision in any situation’.206 This appears to be a compelling scheme, which also has the merit of aligning with military culture. Soldiers always train in order to improve. If being ethical can be practised, this should address the sorts of problems explored by Osiel and McMaster. Embracing a warrior ethos might even protect not just those on the receiving end of soldiers’ violence, but the soldiers themselves. Citing Jonathan Shay’s work, which proposed a relationship between unethical behaviour and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),207 French forcefully argues that a warrior code helps soldiers negotiate the tension created by the contradiction between the general rule against killing and the demand that, under specific 205 See Chapter 2. McMaster, ‘Preserving Soldiers’ Moral Character’, p. 24. US Army, The Army Profession, 2.33. 207 Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Simon & Schuster 1994). See, for example, Challans, Awakening Warrior, p. 93. 204 206

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circumstances, soldiers must kill. She suggests that such a code serves ‘to protect the warrior himself (or herself) from serious psychological damage’.208 Her argument is that Accepting certain constraints as a moral duty, even when it is inconvenient or inefficient to do so, allows warriors to hold on to their humanity while experiencing the horror of war—and, when the war is over, to return home and reintegrate into the society they so ably defended.209

Thus she claims that the ‘code is a kind of moral and psychological armor that protects the warrior from becoming a monster in his or her own eyes’.210 Cook similarly points out that Morally conscientious military personnel need to understand and frame their actions in moral terms so as to maintain moral integrity in the midst of the actions and stress of combat. They do so in order to explain to themselves and others how the killing of human beings they do is distinguishable from the criminal act of murder.211

That is, a warrior code or ethos is not just about protecting others; it is about protecting the soldiers themselves. While this appears compelling, the problem is complex. Above all, the right thing to do in any given war situation might not be obvious.212 Hence, it is doubtful whether soldiers can be conditioned into the right response. For a range of reasons, decisions in war can be extremely difficult: they are urgent, the stakes are high, information which should inform the decisions may be unavailable, and they have to be made while tired, stressed, and frightened. Fick talks about the burden of making the difficult assessment of when to engage a target and the responsibility that his men carry. ‘No one’, he says, ‘knows the costs of war better than the grunts.’ He wishes ‘people could see how much we agonised over our decisions and prayed they were the right ones’.213 This problem is compounded because often there is no right way forward, however difficult to determine, no magic solution that would lead to everything being all right. Fick observes that he ‘was learning that choices in war are rarely between good and bad, but rather between bad and worse’.214 Just as all the rules cannot necessarily be followed at the same time, it simply might not be possible to observe all values within any decision. What is more, sometimes the situation does not present itself as a decision in response to a 208

209 French, Code of the Warrior, p. 4. French, Code of the Warrior, p. 10. 211 French, Code of the Warrior, p. 10. Cook, Moral Warrior, p. 21 (italics added). 212 Litz et al. cite a field survey that found that 27 per cent of soldiers faced ‘ethical situations during deployment in which they did not know how to respond’. Brett T. Litz et al., ‘Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy’, Clinical Psychology Review 29:8 (2009), p. 696. 213 214 Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 261. Fick, One Bullet Away, p. 339. 210

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dilemma at all. In the incident discussed in section 5.3, Fick’s Marines did not make any assessment about the ethics of shooting children; they did not know that that was what they were doing. The example illustrated how even where no faulty decision is knowingly made, soldiers may retrospectively be distressed by outcomes that cannot be reconciled with their values. Despite these difficulties, soldiers often clearly expect themselves to get it right. Lieutenant Colonel Pryer observes: My most significant combat experiences are sewn together with a thread other than extreme, life-threatening violence. This thread is moral dissonance. It is clear to me today that I and others sometimes failed to make wise choices. To our shame, we should have known better.215

Brett T. Litz et al. call this ‘moral injury’, a term that has gained some currency. They argue for recognizing and treating moral injury as a distinct phenomenon and define potentially morally injurious experiences as: ‘Perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.’216 The question of the merit, for the purposes of clinical psychology, of creating a new category of moral injury versus accommodating the phenomenon within PTSD is beyond the scope of my argument. What is interesting is what the phenomenon captured in this way might tell us about how military virtue ethics functions to enable and indeed enhance war. Since 2008 Comprehensive Soldier Fitness—by 2012 reshaped into Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness (CSF2)—has been central to US Army training. It promotes resilience and requires fitness in five domains: physical, emotional, social, spiritual, and family fitness.217 Despite this wide-ranging scope, ethics training has remained separate. Paul T. Berghaus and Nathan L. Cartagena question this set-up. They suggest that distinguishing between moral development, based on professionalism, on the one hand, and resilience or personal fitness, relating to emotional, social, spiritual, and familial issues, on the other hand, is unhelpful. Instead they propose drawing on the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Program for moral development, which they argue would allow the Army to make fuller use of the strengths of the virtue tradition.218 Berghaus and Cartagena’s proposal would treat ethics as part of resilience, underlining that successfully living up to ethical standards is part of soldiers’

215 Douglas A. Pryer, ‘Moral Injury: What Leaders Don’t Mention When They Talk of War’, Army: The Magazine of the Association of the United States Army (14 August 2014). 216 Litz et al., ‘Moral Injury’, p. 700. 217 See Alison Howell, ‘Resilience, War, and Austerity: The Ethics of Human Enhancement and the Politics of Data’, Security Dialogue 46:1 (2015), pp. 15–31. 218 Berghaus and Cartagena, ‘Developing Good Soldiers’, p. 288.

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personal responsibility. What this way of thinking and an ethics of warfare based on a warrior ethos have in common is that ethical problems are construed as tricky but essentially resolvable by correct behaviour on the part of soldiers. According to Coker, ‘the warrior has the primary responsibility for ensuring that war remains a moral activity.’219 Put crudely, good soldiers are responsible for behaving in the right way, right behaviour will ensure the demands of ethics are satisfied, and this in turn will support soldiers’ wellbeing. The fundamental assumption is, again, that it is soldiers’ bad behaviour that causes ethical problems in war. Bad behaviour is, however, by no means necessary for the wrong outcomes to arise. Berghaus and Cartagena discuss the case of Corporal Sanchez who ‘grew up with a strong sense of the importance of doing what is right. He entered the Army because he believed that his nation needed soldiers who would do the right thing in tough situations.’220 During his deployment to Iraq, Sanchez was ordered to fire his machine gun at a car that failed to stop at a checkpoint despite being given several signals to do so. The driver’s teenage son, who was in the passenger seat, died from his wounds. No weapons or explosives were found in the car.221 An investigation into the incident concluded that both Corporal Sanchez and his superior had ‘acted appropriately within the line of duty and the rules of engagement’.222 Sanchez is nevertheless troubled: ‘The Army says I did the right thing, so why do I feel so guilty? How can I say I am a good soldier and a good man when I hit an innocent boy?’223 These questions highlight that having acted in ways that Sanchez cannot reconcile with his understanding of ethics creates an issue of identity for him. This is in keeping with how the US Army envisages soldiering, namely as a question of identity, and not just of doing a job or following some rules. As Berghaus and Cartagena note, these days ‘the Army offers a new identity for all who join its ranks—the Army Professional.’224 This does not mean that soldiers’ prior identity is replaced, they say; rather their moral self is

219 Coker, Warrior Ethos, p. 144; see also Crawford, Accountability. Coker argues that the professional soldier has displaced the warrior. For an exploration of the relationship between the ideas of warrior and professional soldier that sees more resonance between the two concepts, see Hanne A. Kraugerud, ‘Shields of Humanity: The Ethical Constraints of Professional Combatants’, Journal of Military Ethics 10:4 (2011), pp. 263–73. 220 Berghaus and Cartagena, ‘Developing Good Soldiers’, p. 290. 221 The stress of this experience of roadblocks where soldiers had to decide whether to shoot and potentially kill the drivers of vehicles failing to stop without knowing whether they posed an actual threat or else risk that they and others would be killed is often described in memoirs of the Iraq war. See, for example, Fick, One Bullet Away, pp. 255–61; Wright, Generation Kill, pp. 326–7 and 440; Key quoted in Laufer, Soldiers, p. 11. O’Callaghan discusses the issue of roadblocks in terms of the Derridean concept of undecidability. O’Callaghan, Walzer, Just War and Iraq, pp. 116–19. 222 Berghaus and Cartagena, ‘Developing Good Soldiers’, p. 291. 223 Sanchez quoted in Berghaus and Cartagena, ‘Developing Good Soldiers’, p. 291. 224 Berghaus and Cartagena, ‘Developing Good Soldiers’, p. 288. See US Army, The Army Profession, 3.25.

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constituted by their professional and personal identities.225 Yet, even if the professional aspect were to be intended to merely supplement a wider identity, this would at the same time replace a prior identity.226 Nancy Sherman observes that for many soldiers ‘[f]inding a moral self capacious enough for both civilian and warrior sensibilities becomes the pressing challenge.’227 In his account of the invasion of Iraq, Wright describes the issue as one of Marines’ ‘inner warrior’ constantly ‘bumping into’ their nice civilian self.228 Berghaus and Cartagena refer to this as the possibility of fragmentation. In their analysis, Sanchez’s moral self is fragmented because, while he can identify as a good soldier with a positive service record, he struggles to reconcile this with his vision of what it means to be a good person.229 An alternative interpretation of Sanchez’s struggle with himself is that he is not even convinced that he is a good soldier. After all, he asks how he can say that he is a good soldier just as much as he asks how he can say that he is a good man. Contrary to Berghaus and Cartagena’s analysis, therefore, the problem seems not to be a tension between different identities—personal and professional—but the recognition of the impossibility of the aspirations expressed in each, that is, a tension within the identities. Despite being told that he is a good soldier, Sanchez cannot reconcile this with what he has been trained to think a good soldier is. Good soldiers do not kill children. Having acted in ways that cannot be reconciled with their understanding of their own self, soldiers like Sanchez discover that they are not who they thought they were,230 that, despite what they thought, they are not good soldiers or even good men. For Berghaus and Cartagena the issue could be resolved by more fully aligning personal and professional identities. Therefore, soldiers’ moral development should involve both personal and professional identities. In some ways, the US Army already aims to do this, for example in respect of the way in which it emphasizes good character as the basis of good behaviour.231 Being a good person, having integrity, and so on are considered to provide a solid basis for appropriate conduct in war. Being of ‘high moral character’ is to ensure that soldiers ‘make the proper discretionary judgements’.232 This is one of the Berghaus and Cartagena, ‘Developing Good Soldiers’, p. 289. On the logic of the supplement, see section 2.4. 227 Nancy Sherman, The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of Our Soldiers (New York: W.W. Norton & Company 2010), p. 4 cited in Berghaus and Cartagena, ‘Developing Good Soldiers’, p. 289. 228 Wright, Generation Kill, p. 373. 229 Berghaus and Cartagena, ‘Developing Good Soldiers’, p. 291. 230 This can be seen in Wright’s account of the Marines he was embedded with. Wright, Generation Kill, pp. 373 and 228. See also Zehfuss, ‘Subjectivity and Vulnerability’, pp. 61–2. 231 Berghaus and Cartagena, ‘Developing Good Soldiers’, p. 292. See US Army, The Human Dimension, 3.1. 232 US Army, The Army Profession, 3.11. 225 226

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reasons why militaries are concerned that soldiers live or practise their values both on and off duty.233 Ethical behaviour is an issue of being a good person and not just of being a good soldier. At the same time, the US Army seeks to prevent illegal and unethical behaviour by developing soldiers’ professionalism. The Army Profession campaign was launched in 2010 in response to scandals, including Abu Ghraib, and killings of civilians.234 The Center for the Army Profession and Ethic (CAPE) was set up to develop two concepts for the institution: the Army Profession and the Army Ethic.235 The Army Ethic White Paper seeks to articulate why soldiers must ‘conduct [themselves] morally and ethically’, instead of just describing what this entails.236 Yet, while it may appear that the Army is interested in morally developing the person as well as the soldier, according to Berghaus and Cartagena, the Army Profession campaign has at least one serious weakness: it conceptually and practically limits the scope of moral development to the professional domain of the soldier’s moral self. Indeed, the entire campaign is based on the presupposition that a soldier’s character consists in ‘an Army professional’s dedication and adherence to Army Values and the Profession’s Ethic as consistently and faithfully demonstrated in decisions and actions’.237

This emphasis on character in respect of soldiers’ professional identity, rather than more widely, heightens fragmentation instead of reducing it; ‘it fails to help develop soldiers in the holistic manner.’238 Berghaus and Cartagena are concerned that this division has practical consequences. A soldier like Sanchez, overcome by guilt, would, if he were to seek help, likely be referred to a doctor, psychologist, or chaplain. As a result, he would experience tackling this issue not as professional development but as time away from real soldiering in which he was receiving ‘some kind of emotional or psychological first aid’. This system is hence likely to support the view that ‘emotional concerns fall outside of the domain and expertise of professional soldiering.’239 Yet integrating emotional and moral concerns, as is arguably done through the frame of resilience, creates its own problems. When the US Army says that ‘[m]anaging emotion skills must be part of the training and education 233 Good character is significant to the military tradition more broadly. Deakin highlights its importance to the British Army today. Deakin, ‘Education in an Ethos’, p. 19. 234 Berghaus and Cartagena, ‘Developing Good Soldiers’, p. 293. 235 Berghaus and Cartagena, ‘Developing Good Soldiers’, p. 293. See also US Army, The Army Profession. 236 US Army, The Army Ethic White Paper (Centre for the Army Profession and Ethic 2014), p. 1. 237 Berghaus and Cartagena, ‘Developing Good Soldiers’, p. 293 quoting US Army, The Army Profession, 2.3. 238 Berghaus and Cartagena, ‘Developing Good Soldiers’, p. 293. The Army does speak of ‘holistic fitness’, however. US Army, The Human Dimension, 1.1. 239 Berghaus and Cartagena, ‘Developing Good Soldiers’, p. 294.

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system’,240 this is part of a wider trend of making emotional well-being individual soldiers’ responsibility. Following this line of thinking, soldiers ‘must be able to call on psychological “resources” under complex and difficult moral dilemmas to maintain their moral compass’.241 This expectation that soldiers must do whatever it takes to maintain their well-being and continue to function as good soldiers, in all senses of the term, is reflected on the other side of the same coin, namely the possibility of portraying soldiers suffering from mental health problems as fakers or malingerers, who compare unfavourably to those who simply get on with the job.242 Increasingly, the demand is that soldiers look effectively after their own emotional, psychological, and moral fitness. As Alison Howell observes, ‘[f]itness discourses call upon subjects to work upon themselves: to govern their bodies, behaviours, and minds.’243 Soldiers have an all-encompassing responsibility to be fit, not to be damaged by combat. What is more, CSF2 builds on positive psychology, creating a ‘fantasy of indomitability’.244 Howell highlights that at the heart of military resilience lies a tension about the future: at once entirely pessimistic about preventing wars but also aspirational, even hopeful, in its attempts to optimize how soldiers and Army civilians respond and relate to war. This irony reveals itself pointedly in the positive psychology and CSF2 technique of ‘avoiding catastrophizing’, in which soldiers are required to govern their thoughts and emotions, so as to avoid assuming ‘worst case’ scenarios in order to stay positive and functional. All the while, CSF2 is oriented towards a dark future, envisioned as one marked by persistent conflict.245

In this way, ‘responses to war experiences [ . . . ] are pitched as maladaptive and unrealistic when they fail to be positive or show resilience.’246 Put differently, soldiers are required not just to carry on but to be ‘happy’.247 This requirement has to be seen in the context of soldiers’ ‘invisible wounds’248 increasingly having become a daunting problem. Of two million

240

US Army, The Human Dimension, 5.2. US Army, The Profession of Arms: An Army White Paper (US Army Training and Doctrine Command 2010), p. 14. Note that this is a draft White Paper and not official policy or doctrine. 242 See Alison Howell, Madness in International Relations: Psychology, Security, and the Global Governance of Mental Health (Abingdon: Routledge 2011), Chapter 6. For a powerful account of individual experiences with the failure to manage emotions and remain ‘fit’, see David Finkel, Thank You for Your Service (New York: Picador 2013). 243 Howell, Madness in International Relations, p. 123. 244 Howell, ‘Resilience, War, and Austerity’, p. 21. 245 Howell, ‘Resilience, War, and Austerity’, p. 22. 246 Howell, ‘Resilience, War, and Austerity’, p. 22. 247 Howell, ‘Resilience, War, and Austerity’, p. 29. 248 Terri Tanielian and Lisa H. Jaycox (eds.), Invisible Wounds of War: Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Center for Military Health Policy Research 2008). 241

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US soldiers deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq an estimated 20–30 per cent returned with PTSD or Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), which also ‘causes psychological damage’.249 The profile of this issue was heightened when it was recognized as the cause of deaths. The suicide rate among military personnel came to be seen as ‘alarming’250 and indeed ‘tragic’ within the military itself.251 According to the US Army’s own report, in 2009 there were 160 suicides by active duty soldiers and a total of 239 across the Army (including the reserves). Another 146 deaths were attributed to high-risk behaviour, including seventy-four drug overdoses. In addition, there were 1,713 known attempted suicides.252 Suicides became such a concern that while General Chiarelli served as Vice Chief of Staff of the US Army he became personally involved in addressing the issue, convening monthly meetings to discuss each and every suicide with a view to learning lessons.253 The difficulty was that mental health issues may be triggered by any number of so-called ‘stressors’, that is, challenging aspects of warfare and more broadly of serving in the military,254 generated, for example, by multiple deployments255 and ‘exposure to difficult threats, such as improvised explosive devices (IEDs)’.256 Why some veterans are more susceptible than others is not sufficiently understood. In response to the complexity of the problem, Chiarelli declared that the ‘overarching goal’ of the Army’s ‘concerted effort is to increase resiliency in our Soldiers and Families who continue to serve under a high operational tempo’.257 CSF2 encapsulates this effort. As already noted, it placed responsibility for maintaining and enhancing their own functionality with the soldiers themselves, requiring them to work on developing positive feelings. Yet feeling bad can be an appropriate reaction. In contrast to the US Army, Sherman considers that ‘even when guilt is irrational, it can be an important sign of a soldier’s humanity, and something admirable.’258 More broadly, she is interested in understanding the ‘emotional fallout from decisions made in

249 Finkel, Thank You, p. 11. A RAND report puts the incidence of mental health conditions among returning troops at ‘[u]pward of 26 percent’. Terri Tanielian et al., ‘Introduction’, in: Terri Tanielian and Lisa H. Jaycox (eds.), Invisible Wounds of War: Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Center for Military Health Policy Research 2008), p. 3. 250 US Army, Health Promotion, Risk Reduction, Suicide Prevention Report (2010), p. 1. 251 252 Army, Health Promotion, p. i. Army, Health Promotion, p. i. 253 254 Finkel, Thank You. Army, Health Promotion. 255 It should be noted that a 2011 RAND study asserts that ‘[n]o research has yet been performed to estimate the proportion of suicides attributable to deployment, or the impact of multiple deployments on suicide.’ Rajeev Ramchand et al., The War Within: Preventing Suicide in the U.S. Military (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Center for Military Health Policy Research 2011), p. 27. 256 Tanielian and Jaycox, Invisible Wounds, p. xix; see also Finkel, Thank You, pp. 77–8. 257 258 Army, Health Promotion, p. iii. Sherman, Untold War, p. 91.

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the fog of war, under stress and urgency, and often with nonoptimal information’.259 That is, she raises and discusses the possibility that soldiers do the right thing, in the sense of following the rules, but nevertheless experience moral anguish. We have already seen this possibility with Fick’s Marines acting within the admittedly problematic ROE. As one of the team leaders puts it, what happened ‘is killing [him] inside’.260 Sherman discusses the example of Major John Prior who struggles with feelings of guilt over the accidental death of Private First Class Joseph Mayek, killed in Baghdad in 2003 when a Bradley misfired. As Prior explains, the ‘aftermath of that was the guilt because I’m the one who placed the vehicles; I’m the one who set the security’.261 Sherman recounts in detail how the malfunction occurred and in what sense Prior’s actions led to the accident. After a formal investigation, Prior was exonerated. What Sherman points out, however, is that he nevertheless ‘carries guilt and holds himself responsible’.262 Emotional distress is clearly not dependent on being seen by others as having violated the standards of being a good soldier. Importantly, recognizing the serious consequences even of decisions made under pressure, in good faith and in line with articulated ethical requirements, soldiers struggle not just with having caused death263 but with what that means about who they are. The idea that living up to the ideal of a good soldier or observing the warrior ethos will somehow deal with the ethical challenges arising in warfare therefore appears deeply problematic. While it seems plausible that emotional distress and feelings of guilt will be heightened where death and destruction have resulted from bad behaviour, it does not follow, conversely, that reassurance that soldiers’ actions were permissible—ethically and legally— necessarily assuages guilt. After all, in this line of thinking, good character is to lead to good behaviour; however, we only know someone has good character tautologically, by observing that they behave in line with the articulated values. What follows for soldiers is that behaviour retrospectively recognized as flawed demonstrates their poor character, that they are not a good person, despite the common experience that even permissible behaviour in war can lead to consequences that are hard to bear. While ethics as it is portrayed and promoted by military ethics education presumes that it is possible to do the right thing in warfare—and therefore to be ethical—this sits uneasily with soldiers’ accounts. Thus, either being a good soldier does not ensure war is good or, alternatively, it is simply impossible to be a good soldier. The expectation, reinforced by training and rhetoric, that 259

260 Sherman, Untold War, p. 97. Cited in Wright, Generation Kill, p. 228. Major John Prior cited in Sherman, Untold War, p. 95. 262 Sherman, Untold War, p. 96. 263 Not all soldiers do, of course. See Dan Mills, Sniper One: The Blistering True Story of a British Battle Group under Siege (London: Penguin Books 2008), p. 73. 261

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being a good soldier is an issue of fitness, that soldiers have to strive to and can be good warriors if only they work on it hard enough, might then actually serve to amplify the sense of inadequacy experienced by individuals. Through ethics education, building on virtue ethics, soldiers are to be inspired to be all they can be in the context of ethical war—to be impossibly good soldiers—because good soldiers are thought to make good war. Ultimately, this logic fails, however. War always gives rise to events that are experienced as distressing, something reflected in the frequent references to tragedy in discussions of war.264 Put differently, embracing virtue is a double-edged sword. Soldiers may be inspired to act well. Some undoubtedly succeed in persuading themselves that the violence they have committed is acceptable because doing so was part of being a good soldier. To that extent, codes, values, and other forms of military ethics may well, as French argues, allow soldiers ‘to hold on to their humanity’.265 At the same time, however, some soldiers are overwhelmed precisely because they experience the impossibility of the demand; the scheme thus undermines itself. Colonel Ted Westhusing’s suicide might serve to illustrate this. Westhusing was a professor of English at West Point and published on military ethics.266 While serving in Iraq he became increasingly distressed at evidence of contractors’ involvement in corruption and human rights abuses. A note was found in which he says that he felt ‘dishonored’.267 Sherman argues that Westhusing was undone by his virtue.268 The failure to attain the high standards that virtue demands undermined his will to live altogether.

5.5 Conclusion Western militaries are presented by their governments and present themselves as forces for good. Making ethics work in and for war has, however, always been a challenge not least because soldiers have to kill. In response to recent failures in this respect, militaries have considered the issue and attempted to improve ethics training. They have gone to great lengths to reflect on, redesign, and integrate matters of ethics into military training. These attempts are based on an application of virtue ethics that reinterprets the warrior ethos

See section 2.4. For a critique of this use of the term, see Zehfuss, ‘Tragedy of Violent Justice’. French, Code of the Warrior, p. 10. 266 See, for example, Ted Westhusing, ‘A Beguiling Military Virtue: Honor’, Journal of Military Ethics 2:3 (2003), pp. 195–212 and Westhusing, ‘Targeting Terror’. 267 Cited in Sherman, The Untold War, p. 240; see also Dahr Jamail, The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books 2009), p. 144. 268 Sherman, Untold War, p. 240. While questions have been raised over whether Westhusing’s death really was suicide, this controversy has no bearing on my argument. 264 265

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for the twenty-first century to produce professional soldiers. The idea is that professional soldiers are good soldiers, and good soldiers make good war. Rules are essential because they define what is legal and ethical in the first place. What counts as ethical is therefore shaped not least by just war thinking, which is not just taught to soldiers but impacts rules and procedures. There has been concern that soldiers have been unaware of the legal codes governing behaviour on the battlefield. To address this issue the US Army distils the basics of the Hague and Geneva Conventions into what it calls the Soldier’s Rules.269 In addition, rules of engagement are designed to clarify and specify these further for particular operations. However, awareness of the rules is insufficient not only because they might be inconclusive but also because it does not stop deliberate wrongdoing. Creating an entire identity for soldiers—a now ‘professional’ warrior ethos—is meant to generate the motivation to do the right thing, even in the face of difficulties. Ethics thus comes to be construed less as a constraint than a necessary part of being a soldier and even an efficient part of war-fighting. While questions are raised over the ‘relation between fighting effectively and fighting ethically’,270 militaries present this not as a tension but a synergy. The British Army claims that its values and standards ‘directly contribute to the Army’s ethos and to fighting power’.271 This is a sleight of hand that serves to reaffirm the question. As we saw earlier, critics suspect that victory or ‘mission accomplishment’ takes priority when it comes to the crunch.272 Challans indeed regards the current system of ethics education in the US military as being geared simply towards the primacy of victory,273 something that seems to be confirmed by the centrality of the commitment to winning within the Warrior Ethos. Thus, promoting ethics by making it accessible and palatable to soldiers in this way appears at the same time to undermine it altogether. Writing about ethics training in the Norwegian Defence Forces, Tor Arne Berntsen and Raag Rolfsen ask When does ethics go from being ethics proper, i.e. from constituting something that comes from without the military system to direct and critically address it, to the point of having become just another tool in the military toolbox, repairing a dysfunctional machine and enabling it to work as smoothly as possible?274

Thus, they point out that the function of ethics training or education is not to make war ethical, but rather to enable and indeed enhance war. Socialization 269

270 US Army, The Army Profession, B-15. Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 223. Army, Values and Standards, para. 7. 272 See section 5.2 and Crawford, Accountability, Chapter 3. 273 Challans, Awakening Warrior, p. 117. 274 Tor Arne Berntsen and Raag Rolfsen, ‘Ethics Training in the Norwegian Defence Forces’, in: Paul Robinson, Nigel de Lee, and Don Carrick (eds.), Ethics Education in the Military (Aldershot: Ashgate 2008), pp. 95–6 (italics in original). 271

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into the Warrior Ethos—now, at least in the US Army, complete with the requirement to be happy—may support some restraint. Its objective appears to be to serve as an inspiration and related responsibility to be not just a good soldier, but the best. The dilemma of whether the ambition to be the best supports, at the moment of decision, the primacy of victory or a consideration of ethics has been noted. Soldiers have to make choices where none of the options are particularly appealing in ethical terms. The US Army acknowledge that soldiers will face ‘ambiguous moral situations’ which are therefore to be integrated into training.275 In other words, the right behaviour does not necessarily impose itself, even if soldiers know the rules and embrace the right ethos. Even more disconcertingly, sometimes soldiers find themselves having made a decision without knowing it. This was the case with the Marines who engaged what they thought were men with rifles, only to find they had decided to shoot two shepherd boys. As a result, the attempt to make war ethical by socializing soldiers into observing a code is bound to fail. There is a line of argument within the literature on ethics education that promotes the need for more philosophical engagement. In Challans’s scathing critique of pragmatic approaches he argues that the military relies on an ‘inadequate system of moral education’ based on ‘inadequate moral understanding’ and this has led to ‘large-scale systemic moral error’.276 For him, military ethics ‘is a problem of education, not training’.277 It is—or rather should be—not a question of practising the correct behaviour but of thinking through the philosophical issues so as to gain a more robust understanding. In the same vein, Joseph J. Miller suggests that ethics training leads to unhelpful ‘moral certainty’.278 This critique takes the ethical dilemmas of warfare more seriously than do current practices for military ethics training. Yet it appears to share the assumption that ethical war is possible based on correct individual behaviour: if only soldiers were educated in the right way, unethical behaviour and outcomes would be prevented. In other words, if only the system of ethical war functioned smoothly, things would be all right. This problematization places the responsibility for ethical war squarely on the shoulders of individual soldiers, obscuring the fundamental problem. Things that are considered wrong happen in war, even when soldiers try hard to do everything right. This may be why so much of the discourse on war uses the imagery of tragedy. The tragedy of Oedipus, for example, is not just that he kills his father, but that he does so in spite of—or possibly even because of—the measures taken to prevent him from fulfilling the prophecy.

275 276 278

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US Army, The Human Dimension, 3.3. See also US Army, The Army Profession, 4.12. 277 Challans, Awakening Warrior, p. ix. Challans, Awakening Warrior, p. 53. Miller, ‘Squaring the Circle’, p. 200.

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Many soldiers do their best to obey the rules and do what is right. Corporal Sanchez, for example, acted within the rules of engagement and did what he was asked to do to protect his fellow soldiers at and through the roadblock. To all intents and purposes, he did the right thing. Yet he recognizes the bad outcome, the unwanted and unnecessary death of a boy, and so do we. One way of thinking highlights that, in combat, soldiers find themselves in some way beyond the rules. As Wright puts it, ‘[h]owever admirable the military’s attempts are to create ROE, they basically create an illusion of moral order where there is none.’279 He pins the problem down further: ‘The Marines operate in chaos. It doesn’t matter if a Marine is following orders and ROE, or disregarding them. The fact is, as soon as he pulls the trigger on his rifle, he’s on his own.’280 In a similar vein, Osiel suggests that warfare ‘is a social practice the very nature of which places its practitioners momentarily beyond good and evil, making them partially exempt from normative regulation that exists in all other contexts’.281 That is, soldiers have to act at the limit of ethics. What these commentators highlight as a peculiarity of warfare is a structural feature of the social world. While the context of rules serves to establish an ethics, decisions, as we saw in Chapter 2, must go beyond that order. Put differently, ethics cannot throw ‘a net of safety under the judgements we are forced to make’. John D. Caputo points out, therefore, that ‘one is rather more on one’s own than one likes to think, than ethics would have us think.’282 To think of ethics as providing answers misconstrues the issue. Decisions are necessary to move forward, but they cannot satisfy the demands of ethics. They do not resolve the ethical dilemma, which is why Derrida argues that Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac illustrates the most common experience of responsibility. The predicament of human life is precisely to find one’s way in the absence of a simple, good option.283 Thus, that military ethics does not acknowledge the precariousness of ethical claims and assessments is itself a problem; there seems little prospect of it being anything other than ‘just oil lubricating the machine’,284 that is, an enhancement of war. As Howell points out, CSF2 promotes more than responsibilizing soldiers; rather it pursues ‘the more ambitious aim of enhancing them’.285 The problem is that the predominant way of thinking about military ethics is necessarily

279

Wright, Generation Kill, p. 230. Wright, Generation Kill, pp. 230–1. This predicament of being on one’s own with a decision that cannot be explained, transgressing the moral order, is elucidated in Derrida, Gift of Death, pp. 58–9. 281 Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 114. 282 John D. Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press 1993), p. 4. 283 284 See Chapter 2. Berntsen and Rolfsen, ‘Ethics Training’, p. 96. 285 Howell, ‘Resilience, War, and Austerity’, p. 24. 280

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unable to resolve the ethico-political challenges of warfare, yet unhelpfully made to appear capable of doing so, if only it fully worked. The idea of a possible, though not yet attained, military ethics relies on conceptualizing ethics as outside of politics, as something pure to be aspired to, unaffected by the messy questions of why violence is being employed in the first place, of how ill effects on non-combatants could ever be avoided, or of why combatants should be liable to be killed. Yet the ‘tragic’ outcomes of even the best behaviour attest to the problem that where we face questions of ethics, there is no right way forward. Indeed, ethics cannot ensure that we do the right thing; it cannot, as Caputo has pointed out, make safe.286 Hence, the idea of an ethics of warfare ensuring that war is good is an illusion. Ethical war turns out to be impossible. The problem is not that there is a tension between what is good in war and what is good in life—or between the professional and personal identities of soldiers—but that the ideal of ethics is always already affected, and therefore its supposed purity tarnished, by the politics that produce it. As a result, soldiers bear not just the costs of war but the costs of the seduction of an impossible ethics. The demand that soldiers must be good is scandalous inasmuch as it demands the impossible. It is a demand that works through construing ethics as pure and outside of politics. Killing the right people—the people soldiers have been told to kill—is projected as ethical; it does not require any investigation of the political context that has made them the ‘right’ targets. At the same time, the seductive values that constitute being a good soldier may, as Fick points out, threaten to destroy precisely those they are meant to produce and protect when the values necessarily and obviously undermine themselves in warfare. When the picture is disturbed—by the realization that the shepherd boys were killed within the rules, for example—the whole imaginary threatens to come apart. The ideal of the professional warrior intensifies the expectations on soldiers. While the ‘warrior ethos lies squarely within the Romantic tradition, the tradition that views war as ennobling’,287 its reappropriation in the context of post-Cold War Western war brings the overblown romantic rhetoric together with a liberal notion of personal and professional responsibility, creating an all-encompassing sense of moral pressure. Professional warriors must not just function but continuously self-enhance, in spite of—or perhaps in the face of—the impossibility of being good. Military ethics education, no matter how it is defined and conducted, is part of the liberal conceit that allows us to think that our ever-enhancing violence is in some way better than ‘theirs’.

286

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Caputo, Against Ethics, p. 4.

287

Challans, Awakening Warrior, p. 23.

6 The Politics of War at the Limits of Ethics

Since the end of the Cold War, the West has branded its own wars as ethical wars, casting its troops as ‘forces for good’ with the ability to make the world a better place not just for Westerners, but crucially also for people in the regions where its wars are conducted. In this imaginary, going to war is a way of doing good. When Barack Obama declared the end of combat operations in Iraq, he claimed the military forces involved in Operation Iraqi Freedom had helped ‘Iraq seize the chance for a better future’ and paid tribute to those who fought and lost their lives in Iraq: ‘They stared into the darkest of human creations— war—and helped the Iraqi people seek the light of peace.’1 It almost sounded as though it had all gone according to plan, as though the West had been able to ‘leave Iraq a better place for us having been there’.2 Obama’s assessment was odd even at the time. With the war in Syria, the rise of ISIS, and streams of refugees risking their lives to leave the region, it seems even more obviously wrong. Although certain victories against oppressive regimes may have been achieved along the way, ethical war has clearly failed to promote sustainable improvements to the conditions of life for ordinary people in the war zones, that is, for those on whose behalf ethical war is ostensibly fought. In Afghanistan the oppression and marginalization of women continues. Millions have fled Iraq. Security, housing, healthcare, and food continue to pose significant challenges for many people. At the same time, ethical war itself has wreaked significant destruction.3 Nor has such war succeeded in making those in the West feel more secure; instead fear of an apparently ever-increasing threat of terrorism appears widespread, contributing to a rise in anti-immigrant sentiments. In short, the enactment of the idea that the West’s ‘forces for good’ would make the world a better place for the oppressed and the abused, even while securing the West, has not been able to overcome the obvious problem 1 3

2 Obama, Remarks by the President. Collins, ‘Colonel Tim Collins’ Speech’. For details see http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/ (accessed 15 January 2017).

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of the paradox at its heart: ethical war kills and destroys like any other war,4 including those it ostensibly seeks to protect. That is, ethical war—or ‘war for humanity’, as I have put it elsewhere—undermines itself.5 Crucially, this is not because Western states or militaries are not serious about the ambition to pursue ethical concerns through war. Rather, this book has explored how the commitment to ethics has shaped the practice of war and shown that, counter intuitively, it has not constrained the violence, but rather enhanced it. The idea that ethics can tame war, therefore, is a dangerous illusion. This concluding chapter draws together key themes that have been explored across the individual chapters and reflects on implications for the wider argument about war and the politics of ethics. First, it briefly sums up the seductiveness of ethical war and how it gives rise to practices that counterintuitively enable and even enhance violence. That is, it brings into focus the problem of the practice of ethics in contemporary Western war. Second, it asks whether we might be able resolve the problem by making ethics better and shows that this would not work. Put differently, the chapter challenges the proposition that the problem identified could be resolved within ethics, that is, that a different ethics might avoid the pitfalls of the practices examined in this book. As ethics itself is produced and impossible to demarcate against politics, the third part of the chapter goes on to flesh out the need to conceptualize a response at the limit of ethics. The chapter concludes by returning to the problem of the politics of ethics.

6.1 The Seduction of Ethics From the perspective of the West, the post-Cold War world has fallen short of the promise of peace and the ‘end of history’ that seemed to be heralded by the end of the confrontation between the superpowers. Instead it finds itself engaged in ‘unending war’. This appears to be a problem inflicted from the outside, obscuring how the West is implicated in its creation in the first place.6 Whether it is in response to terrorist attacks or in response to serious human rights abuses, Western war is only ever a response. War is not what we, as liberals, want. Violence embarrasses and even disgusts us. War can therefore only ever be what is called a last resort: the response to a significant dilemma that cannot otherwise be addressed, such as a violent threat to our own communities or a large-scale threat to ‘innocent’ others. It must be absolutely 4 As Smith points out, military force ‘has only two immediate effects: it kills people and destroys things’. Smith, Utility of Force, p. 6. 5 Zehfuss, ‘Contemporary Western War’. 6 Orford, Reading Humanitarian Intervention demonstrates and critiques the way in which the West imagines itself as unconnected to these problems.

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necessary in order to be permissible. At the same time, the West has also found itself increasingly in possession of capacities that apparently make protecting lives during warfare easier. This seems, to some at least, a happy coincidence. War has come to be seen not just as justified but as positively required; it is produced as good. Put differently, war has come to be envisaged and legitimized in reference to ethics. To put it crudely, that the West was dropping bombs on Belgrade or Baghdad could be made intelligible through the claim to a higher ethical purpose.7 In turn, doing so then becomes recognized as ethical. The invocation of ethics perhaps made it not just possible but inevitable that liberals who see themselves as abhorring violence would embrace war: the promise of a world in which ordinary people may live to their full potential without fearing for their lives is seductive. War, which had been largely discredited in Western liberal societies, became something that could be aspired to again. Whether we should fight and, if so, how has presumably always been thought about in ethical terms, certainly since the inception of just war thinking. This book has not attempted to provide new answers to these questions but has rather examined how the practice of ethical war has shaped, and been shaped by, existing answers. The West’s branding of its own wars as ethical has generated particular practices, building on dominant conceptions of what is ethical in war. What has emerged is that these practices enhance rather than constrain the violence against the very people such ethical war most seeks to protect, namely non-combatants. In the ethical wars enacted by the West since the end of the Cold War we see a merging—what some see as a fortuitous coming together8—of commitment and capacity. ‘Virtuous war’ became popular precisely because it was considered possible in practice. In particular, the superior capacity for precisely targeting aerial bombs created the impression that war could be waged without risking the lives of either civilians living in the area of operations or indeed of Western troops. The use of high-tech weapons would protect those who were to fight these ethical wars on behalf of the West by reducing or even negating the need for soldiers to ever enter the warzone; moreover, they would also allow the West to control its own violence. Thus, the West was able to project an image—and arguably self-belief—of being able to limit the destruction, thereby protecting civilians in particular. ‘Smart’ bombs would destroy their targets only and civilians would not be targeted, of course, as the intention not to harm them is central to the dominant conceptions of ethics in war. Capacity supported by commitment thus nicely corresponded with what was identified as an ethical requirement. 7 8

On this see also Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press 2007), p. 4. See section 3.1.

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This is a seductive imaginary. If Western war is increasingly bloodless, then making the world a better place through war is increasingly possible and attractive. Politicians and the public are susceptible to this seduction, despite the laments about the fierce individualism of the twenty-first century. Soldiers sign up because they want to help,9 and even social scientists have been tempted to provide their particular skills to support the enterprise.10 If we believe that our wars can help those who cannot help themselves and indeed create a world in which the oppressed will be freed, then we may well feel compelled to fight. Indeed, there is such commitment to this imaginary that enormous effort has been put into bringing ethical war to life. The necessary capacity for such warfare did not simply materialize out of the blue; rather, Western militaries have gone to great lengths to use and improve their capacity to fight in keeping with the ethical vision, especially to limit non-combatant deaths. Of course, this might also be seen to be the most effective way to fight. At any rate, technological developments enabling ever more precise targeting were understood as a means to protect civilians, that is, to have ethical significance. With ability comes expectation, leading to what should be a virtuous circle of increasing ethicality. Destruction is to be limited to what absolutely has to be destroyed. Targeting procedures have consequently been enhanced to minimize collateral damage, making use of legal advice and technical possibilities. This is about much more than just using ‘smart’ bombs; it is about establishing practices that minimize the risk of collateral damage. Detailed information about proposed targets is to be considered, angles of attack optimized, and timings evaluated, all with a view to ensuring that civilian deaths are avoided as much as possible. With the rise of satellite imaging and drone technology there are apparently ever more ways of acquiring information so as to ensure that the right objectives are identified as targets. In short, considerable efforts have been made to adjust practices to ensure that only legitimate targets are hit. It is important to highlight this commitment, even if—as Chapter 3 showed in particular—it does not translate into civilian protection. Western war is pursued through a whole set of complex practices that are to support discriminate destruction, resonating with the idea of non-combatant immunity. This in turn reinforces the notion that Western war can be—and indeed is—ethical. Ethical war is (re)produced through such practices. The asserted capacity to control the violence—what I called the ‘fantasy of control’—is a key part of making sense of ethical war in the first place: the claim that our wars are in

9 Of course, soldiers sign up for a range of different reasons, including in order ‘to kill people’ or, more precisely, to be able to ‘legally kill people’. Kristofer Goldsmith in IVAW and Glantz, Winter Soldier, p. 185 and Mills, Sniper One, p. 43. See also section 5.2. 10 See section 4.3.

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some way for the freedom of the people whose countries we attack only really makes sense if we think we can keep the people out of harm’s way. Thus, cause and conduct are inextricably related. In this sense the permissibility of the cause depends on the possibility of certain standards of conduct. At its best, ethical war would reinforce itself. Yet the ‘fiasco’11 of the war in Iraq disrupted this virtuous circle. Increasing numbers of civilians were dying, as were Western soldiers. The feasibility and cost of ethical war came to be questioned. In response to this situation, the Counterinsurgency Manual made the case that the people, not superior hardware, were the key to resolving the problem. As a consequence, a new kind of effort had to be made to improve the capacity for winning the war, while remaining in tune with the vision of Western war as ethical. Commanders would have to understand how people in Iraq were thinking, what they needed, and how they might be persuaded to lay down arms. In other words, Western militaries needed to understand Iraqi culture. The local population and their protection were made a central consideration; the people were recognized as ‘the prize’.12 This was not comfortable for a profession more used to deploying force but had become necessary in response to the death toll associated with the West’s inability to secure victory. Studying the population and their culture was to identify who was an ‘irreconcilable’ enemy, deserving of the old-fashioned use of actual violence, and who could instead be persuaded to accept the new order. In this sense, cultural expertise was to enable another kind of precision warfare, reliant on reinterpreting the distinction between combatants and civilians as a more sophisticated categorization into those permanently posing a threat versus those who could be assimilated into the liberal order. The need to use actual physical force was to be reduced. Cultural knowledge was to enable the military to go beyond limiting violence to particular geospatial coordinates, as precision weapons do. Chapter 4 demonstrated that violence was effectively made to appear incidental to war, no more than a last resort within a bigger project on behalf of the people. War was therefore beginning to look gentler. ‘Armed social work’ was to deliver solutions to concrete problems, improving the lives of the population in the war zone.13 Again, militaries went to great lengths to put this solution to the problem of counterinsurgency war into practice. Social scientists were brought into the effort of understanding the people and their needs through the Human Terrain System. Soldiers themselves were also trained in cultural awareness to support the mission. The point was, or so we were told, to help and to protect the people. By reducing the need to use ‘kinetic force’, HTS was 11 13

12 Ricks, Fiasco. See section 4.1. Col. Clarke Lethin quoted in Ricks, Fiasco, p. 318. US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, A-45.

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saving lives, or so it was claimed. This is a seductive idea and a number of social scientists joined the programme precisely because they wanted to use their skills to improve—and indeed even save—people’s lives. Thus, by enabling militaries to treat the population with consideration and limit the use of violence, the idea of drawing on cultural expertise seems very much in tune with the vision of ethical war. Militaries are thus working at a range of levels to make war less violent and less dangerous to those not directly involved in the fighting. For these strategies to work, soldiers have to buy into these goals or at least work correctly to achieve them. As shown in Chapter 5, the vision of the professional soldier as a twenty-first-century version of the good warrior was to guide and inspire soldiers to act in the right way; it was to shape them into good soldiers capable of and committed to waging good war. The abuse at Abu Ghraib and other deviations from the expected standards of behaviour disrupted this selfreinforcing cycle of ethical war. Again, the military worked hard to develop solutions. Efforts to train soldiers in ethics, to inculcate values in them appropriate to their self-image of being ‘forces for good’, were renewed and enhanced. New training regimes, doctrines, and programmes were put in place to develop soldiers as ethical professionals. The ideal of ethical war remained in place; it was again the strategies for achieving it that were considered in need of improvement. All of this does not mean that the negative effects of war have not been recognized. On the contrary, Western publics receive ever more information— both official and informal—about deaths and destruction, and they react to it, through elections, demonstrations, pressure groups, and so on. It could also be argued that Western militaries have never been more aware of their own destructive impact. Indeed, they appear to have vigorously sought to deal with this problem. They have worked to improve the precision of their violence through using high-tech weapons within carefully regulated targeting protocols. In the context of the prolonged conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, they have even striven to drive back the use of physical force altogether by engaging with how populations might be persuaded to lay down their arms. In addition, they have overhauled the ways in which ethics is conceptualized for and made attractive to soldiers, making it an integral part of their professional training and identity. Militaries have thus made considerable efforts and expended significant resource in pursuing an ideal of good warfare, which at a minimum is envisaged to reduce, and ideally eliminate, violence against non-combatants. Yet I have demonstrated that the strategies that Western militaries employ to implement ethical war and reduce the violence end up legitimizing and enabling violence. As Chapter 3 showed, the focus on precision obscures the highly destructive character of aerial bombing, which often involves large 184

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warheads. It draws attention away from the fact that not all bombs hit the target and construes civilian deaths as merely regrettable mistakes. PGMs and, increasingly, drones have made it possible to bomb objectives that would not previously have been considered as potential targets, for example, leaders hiding in residential neighbourhoods. In other words, (the belief in) the possibility of discriminate destruction has in fact enhanced the violence. Highly destructive weapons are developed and acquired because they effectively support mission accomplishment with what appears to be minimal damage. Something similar can be said about the acquisition of cultural knowledge. As we saw in Chapter 4, the focus is on understanding the needs of the population and how they might react to certain behaviours or actions, on obtaining in-depth knowledge about all aspects that are said to be part of the culture in the area of operations. Doing so ostensibly helps reduce violence and therefore to increase civilians’ protection. However, this attempt at reduction also means that violence—where it is still used—is brutal and intrusive. Everyday life becomes a target for military intervention. In addition, studying what is called the ‘culture’ allowed the identification of so-called ‘irreconcilables’, who then became targets that could be legitimately killed. What is more, this identification relied on searching for and arresting numerous people, often in raids on their homes, bringing violent force into their private space and to their entire families. Thus, while violence appears to be reduced, it is enhanced: highly focused, destructive, and invasive. Talk about the people as the prize thus obscures how exploiting cultural knowledge enhances the violence of warfare against them. While ethics education and training aim to guide and restrain soldiers’ behaviour, they follow the same logic. In tune with the vision of ethical war, militaries present themselves as ‘forces for good’. They explicitly articulate the values soldiers must live up to, including, for example, courage, respect, and discipline. As Chapter 5 showed, the aim is to make the warrior ethos part of soldiers’ identity so that its requirements will be recalled in difficult situations on the battlefield, constraining behaviour. Soldiers are to be inspired to act as well as at all possible, rather than merely to follow rules: they are trained to want to behave ethically because doing so makes them who they are. While such training aims to prevent wanton violence and abuse and thereby again to constrain violence, it operates through getting soldiers to enhance themselves so as to wield violence as effectively as possible in pursuit of their mission. Soldiers are made responsible for maintaining their all-round fitness, to function at all times, and to aspire to be good. Put differently, they must not succumb to exhaustion, stress, or emotions, but instead always find the best way to wield force effectively and ethically, and indeed to do so happily. They must enhance themselves as agents of violence. 185

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In sum, conduct in war has been shaped through a range of strategies and tactics designed to ensure not only that Western forces prevail militarily but also that they do so while achieving the aims for which ethical wars are pursued. This revolves not least around apparently limiting the violence: targeting correctly, reducing the need for violence, and indeed avoiding any unnecessary violence. This set of thoughts and practices is appealing. They seem to translate the intention to protect non-combatants from the effects of war. More broadly, they make the violence intelligible and give us the impression that it can be correctly calculated and controlled. Helping others, especially where they are being oppressed, abused, or killed for who they happen to be, seems to be a good idea, and these practices present ethical war as doing this. The practices enabling such warfare at the same time come to be seen as ethical, shaping our understanding of what constitutes ethical war and the ethics of war. The seductiveness of helping others in need obscures the ways in which the practices of ethical war also work to enhance the violence. New targets can be effectively destroyed, acquiring cultural knowledge makes people’s everyday lives subject to assessment and control, and soldiers are to be inspired to be the best through the warrior ethos, making them ever more motivated and effective agents of violence. In this way, ethics as embodied and produced in the practice of warfare examined here enhances the violence. It therefore fails in its ostensible purpose, namely, to reduce and constrain violence. This is not because the military has made a poor job of trying to live up to the demands of ethics. On the contrary, notwithstanding the concern that victory is primary in military strategy, a strong argument can be made that Western militaries are committed to fighting well and constantly looking for ways to do so: indeed, they invest considerable energy and resources in achieving this aim. However, what comes to be construed as ethical is the ever more effective application of force: hitting the right targets, finding the right insurgents, and doing so while enacting the right military values. What comes to be permissible in this scheme is instrumental violence, that is, violence that can be justified through its aims and made intelligible through the outcomes it is envisaged to produce—a sort of variation on Clausewitzian war ostensibly inspired by doing good.

6.2 Responding within Ethics If there ever was a naïve enthusiasm for bloodless war—or rather intervention—among the public, the casualties of the Iraq War, both civilian and military, brought home its impossibility. While the idea of ethical war is seductive, its implications are nevertheless recognized as deeply problematic. 186

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As we have seen, militaries have vigorously sought to mitigate the negative consequences, even if also motivated by the desire to prevail, generating a whole apparatus of ethical war. In respect of each of my sites of exploration— targeting, cultural knowledge, and ethics education—there have been determined attempts to devise strategies for calculating the right kind of behaviour: targeting only combatants, seeking strategies of resolution short of using force, or living up to the values embodied in the warrior ethos. That is, ethical principles were translated into policy, training, and guidance. All this activity appears driven by the expectation that the right kind of effort, the right kind of technology, and the right kind of knowledge can resolve the problem. Disruptions to ethical war—evidence that war produces outcomes that we are unable to square with our understanding of ethics— merely reinforce the motivation to work harder on getting it right. In this vein, civilian deaths in incidences of what the military describes as collateral damage led to reviewing weapons design and use as well as targeting protocols. Increased tensions and violent actions from within the population generated even more determined efforts to really understand their culture and perceived needs. Atrocities committed by Western military personnel produced new protocols for ethics training and leadership. At the same time, using highly destructive bombs, violently invading people’s lives, and perfecting soldiers as agents of violence come to be part of what is envisaged as ethical. Indeed, ethical war kills, just like any other war. Even though Western war is presented as protecting civilians in the warzones, it paradoxically risks killing them. All the efforts to ameliorate the dilemma of war have not just failed, they have aggravated it. That is, despite designing and promoting ever better strategies for constraining the violence of war, the commitment to ethics has produced ever more overwhelming, intrusive, and deadly violence. Therefore, ethical war undermines itself. This is not a result of a failure to try to implement the demands of ethics; military forces have made impressive efforts to create practices of ethical war. Indeed, these efforts appear to draw on dominant understandings of the ethics of war. Protecting civilians, for example, is regarded as central and this is very much in keeping with the dominant just war thinking. Ostensible efforts to comply with this principle and its formulation in the laws of warfare clearly permeate military strategies, policies, and practices. Indeed, at times, militaries seem to go further in the protection of life than required, for example by not killing defenceless combatants or those believed to be ‘reconcilable’. Perhaps, however, the demands of ethics have been misunderstood in a fundamental way. Put differently, perhaps it is not the implementation, but rather the understanding of ethics itself, that is mistaken. This would mean that in creating this whole apparatus of ethical warfare the West has started from the wrong place. As set out in Chapter 2, our conceptions of ethics in 187

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relation to war are dominated by just war thinking. This seems to be the case even when virtue ethics is invoked for the purposes of making military ethics practical. If ethics as understood in and translated through military practice is fundamentally flawed, then we need to start from a different account. The practice of ethical war draws on what is available conceptually. How ethics is thought shapes how ethical war is enacted. Perhaps, then, we simply need to construct a better ethics of war. This book is not a direct response to the scholarly work that seeks to do just that, but is rather concerned with how the commitment to ethics has shaped the practice of war. In Chapter 2 I therefore focused on key claims from the just war tradition that underpin, shape, and reinforce understandings and practices of ethics of, and in, war beyond academia. Nevertheless, I noted that over the past decade or so, a socalled revisionist account of just war has emerged, challenging core aspects of just war thinking. It is helpful to briefly engage with these claims, not so as to discover whether the revisionists are right and the so-called traditionalists wrong—a question that makes no sense within the approach of this book— but so as to explore whether conceptualizing the ethics of war in the way the revisionists do would help us avoid the paradox of ethical war. The centrality of non-combatant immunity has been one of the defining features of just war thinking. Yet what has come to be called the revisionist account questions this pivotal principle.14 Crudely speaking, the revisionist account takes an analytical philosophy approach to the question of what is permissible war and permissible in war. What is of interest is whether the rethinking of the ethics of war offered by the revisionists allows us to escape the dilemma of ethical war. That is, what is at issue is whether the enhancement of violence through the practice of ethical war has been generated by a misinterpretation of what ethics demands. The revisionist account has developed into a whole literature.15 It is not possible to do justice to this entire body of work here, nor is it necessary, however, in order to explore the question of whether the impossibility of ethical war could be avoided by substantively rethinking what ethics means in this context. McMahan’s Killing in War has been highly influential within this approach and focuses precisely on what has been construed as central: the protection of non-combatants as an expression of ethics. It can therefore serve as a useful illustration.

14 Of course, (some) pacifists have argued all along that war is impermissible because killing anyone, or at least killing non-combatants, cannot be justified. Pacifism, however, does not help us think through the practicalities of warfare and is therefore easily ignored by the discourse on war outside of philosophy. For an overview, see Jenny Teichman, Pacifism and the Just War: A Study in Applied Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1986). 15 For a useful overview, see Lazar, ‘War’.

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Unsurprisingly, Killing in War starts with the problem of killing. McMahan proposes to show ‘that common sense beliefs about the morality of killing in war are deeply mistaken’. He observes that while ‘the thought of deliberately killing another person is almost unthinkable’ to most of us, things change radically when the killing in question occurs as part of something we call ‘war’. In that case, McMahan says, ‘our scruples vanish and killing no longer seems a horrifying crime but instead becomes a glorious achievement.’16 This is overstating the case. No doubt the right kind of killing in war is not considered a crime, but whether it is celebrated as McMahan suggests is at least debatable. Indeed, we have seen that such killing is often considered disturbing by the public, scholars, and soldiers, who resort to the idea of tragedy to make sense of the deaths. While soldiers in particular may celebrate the ‘kills’ they have made and may indeed be keen to ‘get some’, as we saw in Chapter 5, they also often struggle with having taken others’ lives. Whether or not McMahan correctly captures common-sense views, he argues we are generally wrong in our attitude to the moral permissibility of killing in war. McMahan rejects the prevailing view that amounts to arguing that killing in war is ‘governed by different moral principles’ from killing in other contexts.17 This point resonates with my claim that what is generally overlooked is that enemy combatants are only legitimate targets on the basis of being at war in the first place.18 That is, I highlighted that the goodness of Western wars depends on killing only the people made into targets by the rules of these wars in the first place. In that sense, the war produces the very ethics that legitimize it. McMahan is, of course, not interested in the practice of ethics; his argument is strictly within the realm of theory, arguing against accepted reasoning in moral philosophy, especially just war thinking. Based on his argument that moral principles do not change just because we call an activity war, McMahan arrives at substantive claims that differ from the traditional view. He summarizes the ‘requirement of discrimination’ as promoted by the ‘reigning theory of the just war’ as follows: ‘in war all combatants are legitimate targets of attack, while no noncombatants, or civilians, are.’19 That is, McMahan highlights that discrimination involves two aspects, not just the impermissibility of killing non-combatants but the permissibility of killing combatants. The latter appears less prominent in broader discussions about the ethics of war. McMahan crucially considers both to be mistaken. The root of the problem, McMahan argues, is the idea of the moral equality of combatants, which ‘traditional’ just war thinkers, such as Walzer, endorse. That is, in Walzer’s thinking, what combatants may legitimately do in war is separate from 16 18

17 McMahan, Killing in War, p. vii. McMahan, Killing in War, p. vii. 19 See Chapter 3. McMahan, Killing in War, p. 204.

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whether they are legitimately at war in the first place. This is the basis for the permissibility of attacking all enemy combatants. In contrast, for McMahan, the justifiability of killing turns on whether or not combatants are engaged in a just war. Just combatants, for example, are not legitimate targets, unless they use unjust means.20 He argues that it ‘makes an enormous difference whether soldiers exercise their skills as warriors for just purposes or for unjust purposes’.21 He objects to the classification of people as killable based on membership of a group rather than based on their actions.22 Instead, as he puts it elsewhere, ‘a person is morally liable to attack in war by virtue of being morally responsible for a wrong that is sufficiently serious to constitute a just cause for war, or by being morally responsible for an unjust threat in the context of war.’23 This argument leads McMahan to introduce new terms. As it is no longer sufficient to distinguish between combatants and civilians, McMahan calls civilians in a country fighting a war that lacks just cause ‘unjust civilians’.24 As he puts it elsewhere, ‘the distinction between combatants and noncombatants in itself has no moral significance.’25 Indeed, in McMahan’s view, the ‘idea that people can be liable to attack, or immune from attack, merely by virtue of membership in a group, particularly when membership is involuntary, or largely involuntary, is both false and morally repugnant’.26 He follows this sentence with a quote from Primo Levi, suggesting at least implicitly that the idea of non-combatant immunity is structurally similar to conceptualizations that underpinned the Holocaust. If this is the case, then it is perhaps not surprising that an ethics which revolves around this idea enhances violence. While McMahan therefore rejects the blanket permission to attack enemy combatants as well as the blanket prohibition against targeting noncombatants, he does defend just combatants’ rights to kill. Indeed, McMahan claims that ‘there are likely to be some occasions on which some civilians may be liable to intentional military attack, and on which it is permissible to attack them.’27 Consequently, he develops detailed arguments about the conditions under which people may become liable to attack or under which an attack on them may be excused. The upshot seems to be that attacking civilians could be morally permissible for just combatants if these civilians are ‘unjust’, an attack on whom would prevent deaths of ‘an equal or greater number of wholly

20

21 McMahan, Killing in War, pp. 16 and 204. McMahan, Killing in War, p. 97. McMahan, Killing in War, p. 208. 23 Jeff McMahan, ‘The Morality of War and the Law of War’, in: David Rodin and Henry Shue (eds.), Just and Unjust Warriors: The Legal and Moral Status of Soldiers (Oxford: Clarendon Press 2008), p. 22. 24 25 McMahan, Killing in War, p. 212. McMahan, ‘Morality of War’, p. 27. 26 27 McMahan, Killing in War, p. 209. McMahan, Killing in War, p. 231. 22

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innocent people on the other side’ with very few ‘genuinely innocent civilians’ being in harm’s way.28 Clearly, McMahan strikes at the heart of traditional just war thinking and, he thinks, common sense, slaughtering the sacred cow of non-combatant immunity. In his words, ‘absolute civilian immunity is false as a moral doctrine.’29 What matters for the argument here is whether the ethics that McMahan formulates to replace what he identifies as false has the capacity to provide us with a more promising reference point for a practice of ethical war. Although philosophers highlight the radical departure of McMahan’s position, this way of thinking is not dissimilar to traditional just war thinking in a number of respects. McMahan not only adopts the terminology of ‘just’ but also embraces the idea of proportionality that structures traditional just war thinking on both the right to go to war and the right way to fight a war. That his arguments are identified as revisionist just war thinking, rather than a wholly new approach, illustrates that this overlap is significant. Crucially, in McMahan’s understanding of the morality of war, some people are still liable to attack. To be sure, their liability is not based on their membership in a group but rather on what they are doing, on their responsibility for the threat the just forces are in the business of fighting. Despite being seen as a radical departure in theoretical terms, this conceptualization actually resonates with how just war principles have been translated into practice. Some of the ways in which militaries have gone beyond legal requirements in protecting lives align with the thrust of McMahan’s thinking. When commanders worried in the 1991 Gulf War that killing people merely because they were Iraqi combatants given they were unable to cause any harm to coalition forces would not be right,30 they were considering these individuals’ actions (and capacity to act), rather than their mere membership in a group. In a similar vein, the question of ‘reconcilability’ in the so-called counterinsurgency war in Iraq considered the permissibility of inflicting harm on individuals according to specific threat, rather than category.31 Crucially, despite the apparent differences, the revisionist account generates an ethics that seeks to establish who can be killed under what circumstances in the abstract, just as traditional just war thinking does, making it possible to devise strategies and practices for killing them efficiently on this basis. McMahan and other revisionists operate on the idea of developing rules and principles which can then be applied to the world. Indeed, Coates, whose thinking is more

28

McMahan, Killing in War, p. 231. McMahan, Killing in War, p. 235. For a defence against this position see Lazar, Sparing Civilians. 30 31 See section 5.1. See Chapter 4. 29

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traditional, complains about this being out of sync with the spirit of just war thinking which, in his view, is much more historically minded.32 McMahan clearly seeks to establish ethical principles in separation from the historical reality of the world. Although he occasionally refers to real life events, he does not engage with what war and warfare actually involve. His references are never more than vignettes and he proudly embraces the use of ‘contrived hypothetical examples’.33 For McMahan, the job of the moral philosopher is to work out and explain ‘true’ moral principles. History does not matter, other than as providing occasional illustrations or constituting a hurdle for the implementation of what has been found to be true. The latter is visible in McMahan’s claim that while non-combatant immunity is false as a moral principle, it remains legally necessary. His hope would, however, be to move us in the right direction such that eventually the law can be changed to correctly reflect morality. In this line of thinking, ethics is clearly separate from the world. McMahan highlights that political and moral permissions are not the same.34 Significantly, for him, political reasons are morally irrelevant.35 Ethics can and must be determined in separation from real existing war. There is no recognition that even the very starting point, the liberal position which privileges individual life, is based on an ethico-political decision and that the ‘morally irrelevant’ politics may be shaping what we perceive to be ethical. A commitment to the sanctity of life structures the entirety of McMahan’s reasoning without this core being particularly articulated or defended. The assumption is that individuals have a right not to be killed, unless they have somehow become liable to attack or their killing can at least be excused. Cécile Fabre, another revisionist, makes this starting point more explicit in asserting a cosmopolitan attitude which she does not itself defend.36 Beginning from individual claims or rights is part of a liberal imaginary which is not understood as historically developed, politically significant, or worthy of justification.37 That is, the scholarly debate about what constitutes the ‘true’ principles of ethics is already shaped by politics without this being visible. If we find ourselves pursuing a just war, McMahan’s argument leads to the same—or at least a very similar—impasse to the one currently generated by non-combatant immunity. His principles allow for a technology of ethics that 32 Coates, Ethics of War, p. 10. For my own argument that just war thinking does not effectively engage with history, see section 2.2. 33 McMahan, Killing in War, p. 228. Abstraction is seen to forestall ‘unhelpful disputes over historical details’ and to reduce ‘bias’. Lazar, ‘War’, p. 3. 34 35 McMahan, Killing in War, p. 81. McMahan, Killing in War, p. 83. 36 Cécile Fabre, Cosmopolitan War (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012), pp. 2–4. 37 For a powerful account of the political history of liberalism, see Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 1999).

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translates them into guidelines for ethical warfare, entirely in keeping with what has been shown in the preceding chapters. In the discourse of war examined in this book, ethics is meant to guide and constrain: to make war better, if you will. In Chapter 2, I set out how the dominant way of thinking the ethics of war provides a framework for doing so; it sets out criteria for when to wage wars and how to fight them. This thinking permeates practices of warfare. The logic of such an approach is to start from a consideration of the question of what is just(ified) or ethical. Once this question is resolved, guidance can be given. In other words, ethics is imagined as separate from and prior to the world. Put differently, it is possible for us to identify what would make war ethical (or at least more so) and to work towards making it so. This then enables the creation of a set of expectations and even policies and doctrines that generate, inform, and shape the practice of war. In McMahan’s thinking, the relationship between ethics and practice is also just such a one-way street: establishing the right kinds of moral beliefs and principles will shape good practice. The beliefs and principles themselves are determined in the abstract, outside of and unaffected by practice. In this imaginary, there is no sense in which moral beliefs are impacted by prevailing practices, which in turn may be shaped by capacities, needs, and interests, as well as by the factors McMahan is interested in.38 In keeping with this view, McMahan asserts that moral philosophers are uniquely qualified to establish the defensibility of our moral beliefs and principles.39 While put in this way his claim sounds intuitively persuasive, this kind of thinking relies on cordoning off ethics from politics, moral reasoning from the real world. There is no need to understand the latter to determine the former. This separation creates and supports the notion of ethical purity, which problematically sustains the enhancement of violence in ethical war. Unlike the broader debate on the ethics of war, McMahan’s reasoning cannot be shaken by the disruptions I have highlighted in the book: incidents of collateral damage, increasing death tolls, or atrocities committed by the ‘forces for good’. These empirical occurrences are not issues for moral philosophy. Following McMahan, the ethical aspirations inspiring the conduct of Western war are wrong. That is, what is being presented and implemented as ethical military practice does not reflect the correct moral principles. From such a perspective, this is where any attempt at improving ethical war would have to start. McMahan’s intervention contests what appeared incontestable, namely the absolute requirement to protect non-combatants. His critique uses 38 That the ‘direction of thought’ tends to be ‘one way’ even where ethics is related to practice is also noted—from quite a different intellectual perspective—by Glover, who seeks to give ethics ‘an empirical dimension’. Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London: Pimlico 2001), pp. 6 and xii. 39 McMahan, Killing in War, p. 7.

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the language of just war to open up the space for debate. Yet this intervention leaves in place the problematic politics of ethics that this book takes issue with. McMahan seeks to defend a supposedly true moral doctrine that can then be applied to the world. What he significantly does not acknowledge is the way in which such a doctrine is always already shaped by the world, that is, it is political. His argument may be logically coherent within its own terms, but the grounds upon which it authorizes itself—the independence of moral philosophy from real existing practice—are problematically taken as given, placing this core aspect of the argument beyond contestation. Thus, there are at least two key reasons why McMahan’s rethinking, and indeed embracing an alternative ethics of this sort more generally, does not allow us to escape the dilemma of ethical war. First, the problem arises not because of the particular substance of the ethical claims that shape ethical war but rather more fundamentally because of the structure of ethical thinking. The structural problem is the impossible separation of ethics and politics in our thinking, which apparently allows us to determine the right ethics which is then to be translated into the right actions. Whether we assign liability to be killed in war according to the same or different moral principles, or whether permissibility of killing should be conceived of in terms of group membership or in terms of actions that might be seen to establish responsibility for the threat that is to be eliminated through the war, matters to an extent, but it does not affect the underlying structural separation. This problem is, if anything, more pronounced in McMahan’s argument. His and other analytical philosophers’ enthusiasm for hypothetical examples thought to sharpen conceptual thinking enables a philosophically authorized obliviousness to the politics that goes into the creation of the categories in the first place. This only aggravates the politics of ethics this book is concerned with. Second, McMahan is even less able than traditional just war thinkers to engage with the impossibility of logically identifying the right way forward and therefore with the need for a decision. Deaths, even if permissible according to McMahan, remain liable to disturb us. That is, killing in war is and remains an ethical problem precisely because there are contradictory rules or obligations in play. If we are committed to the inviolability of life, then it does not cease to exercise a demand on us because a rationale can be offered as to why a particular life might be taken under particular circumstances. The ethical question arises precisely because the particular argument permitting the killing and the general prohibition against doing such a thing cannot be fulfilled at the same time; we have to respond at the limit of the rules of ethics. Thus, ultimately, McMahan’s argument cannot help us with our predicament. Ethical war relies upon a problematic politics of ethics, that is, there is a fundamental problem in how we conceive of ethics in the first place. In other words, ethics creates and aggravates the problem it purports to address. 194

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Although it may be tempting to think that this problem could be overcome through developing and embracing a different ethics, the problem is not the substantive content of ethical thinking but its structural position within our wider imaginary. The problem is that ethics is cordoned off against the real world, against politics, that it is produced as desirable and true precisely on the basis of its exclusion from anything that might endanger its purity. This predicament cannot be resolved by reconceptualizing ethics, by providing an alternative account of what ethics is or requires. Therefore, any attempt to respond to the dilemma of ethical war within ethics is insufficient. We need instead to respond at the limits of ethics.

6.3 Responding at the Limits of Ethics War remains possible and indeed positively required because it is thought to achieve some good, typically articulated around the protection of human beings. While the enthusiasm for fixing the world’s problems through Western war appears to have waned, the dilemma persists: can others’ humanity be protected by using force that might also kill them? Whether or not particular states chose to intervene militarily in Syria, for example, the plight of the Syrian population is a key part of what is seen to impose itself on us as a problem. Pictures of the devastation of its civil war and the impact on the civilian population, in particular children, are less seen as an effect of Western involvement but rather as raising the very question of whether the West should intervene now. There is at the same time the fear that such conflicts fuel terrorism in Western societies themselves, most recently by allowing terrorists to enter European countries by pretending to be refugees. How should the West respond? My argument does not provide an answer to this question, nor even an alternative account of ethics that would allow us to navigate this ethicopolitical challenge in a better way. Indeed, I have argued that the dilemma, although produced by our thinking, is inescapable, that it is an aporia. This book might thus be seen as a dispiriting or even pointless exercise. It identifies current responses as unsatisfactory or downright counterproductive without providing a way of resolving the problem. It matters, however, that embracing ethics in the discourse of war fuels an apparatus that perfects the administration of lethal force to resolve problems it has a part in producing and framing, not least because this ethics is at the same time conceptualized around the protection of life. More fundamentally, that existing approaches to thinking this issue do not work matters precisely because they claim to provide us with answers. If ethics is made, then it is political. It is not just a framework designed to guide actions but at the same time an element and outcome of 195

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the struggle over who gets what and why. The separation in our thinking between ethics and politics therefore is a problem, rather than the solution. Instead of trying to respond by following ethical guidance—that is, within ethics—we need to respond at the limit of ethics.40 The production of ethics and hence the precariousness of ethical claims becomes visible through examining ethics as practice. In this way, it becomes possible (and necessary) to engage with the question of what it means for our actions to not be secured by ethics but rather to be at the limits of ethics. Ethics has come to authorize and shape practices that enact and enhance violence against those who are to be protected. We might therefore conclude that rather than improving our thinking and practice of ethics, we should instead move beyond ethics. This would only be possible if ethics was a separate, identifiable area of thought and activity that we could successfully cordon off and leave behind. What we have seen throughout this book is that we navigate life, or rather war, in reference to ethics. Put differently, the ‘context within which we find ourselves’41 is invariably ethical. Ethics matters: it is a productive part of the discourse on war. War is made within and shaped by the context of ethics; ethics provides a framework within which actions become intelligible and justifiable but also subject to debate. While ethics is incredibly significant, the need to act arises at the point where abstractions meet the particularity of the world. Politicians have to decide whether to risk killing by using force, often while people are already being killed or at least when such killing appears to be imminent. Soldiers, increasingly at all levels, have to decide when to use force and when to exercise restraint. This cannot be resolved in the abstract. In such situations ethical rules and principles, such as the prohibition against killing noncombatants, provide a reference point; they matter to how the challenge imposes itself on us. We would not experience a dilemma if we did not recognize the imperatives created by the context of the rules of ethics. Yet ethics cannot resolve the matter for us. This is why it is an aporia. Derrida elucidates this through his analysis of the temptation of Abraham, discussed in Chapter 2. Abraham’s predicament arises precisely from recognizing the validity of the rules of ethics which, however, are impossible to satisfy. That slaughtering your son is not recommended by the framework of ethics is a constitutive aspect of the aporia. There is no right way forward which could be derived from the rules of ethics.

40 I am, of course, drawing on Fagan’s argument. She talks about responses at the limits of foundations and theory, which I understand to be what I conceptualize as the limits of ethics. See Fagan, Ethics and Politics. 41 Fagan, Ethics and Politics, p. 8.

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The generality of the context and the particularity of the situation have to be brought into relation to each other through a decision that cuts through the imperatives pulling in different directions. Derrida insists that this is the very predicament of ethics: that precisely at the moment when we confront a question of ethics, ethics and its rules cease to be useful in the sense of delivering clear instructions. There seems to be a conceptual ambiguity in Derrida’s discussions. He appears to use ‘ethics’ both to refer to the context of rules and principles—to what he also calls the ‘generality of ethics’42—and to the intersection between generality and particularity—to what he also calls ‘ethico-political’.43 This is visible when he says that ethics only ever exists where we face an aporia,44 that is, when the generality of ethics ceases to be useful. Following Fagan’s discussion of the limits of theory and foundations in the context of ethics, I frame this predicament as being at the limit of ethics. This must not be misread as de-emphasizing the issue, making it less central. What matters always happens at the limit. When soldiers have to decide whether to open fire at a roadblock or elsewhere so as to protect themselves or others this is not an issue merely of thinking through the likelihood of attack or of correctly weighing the lives of individuals perceived as a threat, potentially mistakenly, against the lives of those they might harm. It is an issue of making a decision at the limit of ethics.45 Soldiers have to decide and act at this limit, often while having available only incomplete information. While it may be better to have more information, to have ‘the best possible’ knowledge, the dilemma of having to make a decision that will affect—and in wars that may mean kill—others cannot be overcome through acquiring the right kind of information; an ‘abyss’ necessarily remains between knowledge and the responsible decision.46 There must be what Derrida calls undecidability, which ‘is the condition for the opening of a space for an ethical or political decision’.47 That a decision is not and cannot be determined by knowledge is a structural feature of the situation: ‘If we knew what to do, if I knew in terms of knowledge what I have to do before the decision, then the decision would not be a decision.’48 Acting ethically has nothing to do with clarity, with a certain path to good behaviour, but with a response where we have reached the limits of such clarity. 42

Derrida, Gift of Death, p. 61. Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf, revised edition (New York: Columbia University Press 1986), p. 259, fn. 44. 44 45 Derrida, Other Heading, p. 41. See also sections 5.4 and 5.6. 46 Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge 2001), p. 54. 47 Derrida, Negotiations, p. 298. 48 Jacques Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in: Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (eds.), Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy (London: Routledge 1999), p. 66. 43

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When soldiers hurt or kill civilians they often struggle with this outcome of their decision to use force, even if they did not intend the harm, achieved another good as a result, or were under orders when committing the act.49 If they have correctly followed the rules of engagement, the reaction is often to reassure them that they have done the right thing or at least that the responsibility is not theirs. However, even if they have acted pursuant to rules that are thought to capture the relevant principles of ethics as much as possible, this does not deliver absolution to these soldiers. We might recall Corporal Sanchez, briefly discussed in Chapter 5, who was unconvinced that killing an innocent boy could be reconciled with being either a good soldier or a good man. Although others drove the action and Sanchez ‘merely’ followed orders, he ultimately owns the decision to have done so. Whatever the situation, no one can make a decision in our place,50 making us responsible for what we do, often giving rise to guilt. Guilt, as Derrida points out, ‘is inherent in responsibility because responsibility is always unequal to itself: one is never responsible enough’.51 It is not possible to be fully responsible to all others and indeed to ourselves, all at the same time. What we do in situations where we come to the limit of the rules and have to reach beyond them to make a decision is deeply important because of its effects. Disconcertingly, such a decision rests on nothing but itself. It cannot be justified. O’Callaghan points out that we derive satisfaction from justifications, something his ‘ethics as response’ seeks to do without.52 This is uncomfortable or even daunting. Derrida observes that a ‘decision is something terrible’,53 meaning not the scale of the outcome, but rather the terror of moving forward based on nothing but the decision itself. Nevertheless, the terror is likely to be significant when the decision ends someone’s life. As we saw in Chapter 5, there is a suggestion that the experience of guilt—or the sense to have acted unethically—can lead to psychological damage among war veterans. There is debate about this alleged relationship between morality and mental health. While some argue that a category of ‘moral injury’ needs to be recognized, others point out that what generates PTSD among soldiers is still insufficiently understood. Whatever the reasons, soldiers’ mental health problems and in particular increasing suicide rates have come to be seen as a serious problem in the United States. While the idea of making the world a better place through war allows for the possibility of some negative side effects, deaths still have the power to disturb. That some of those who are purportedly fighting for freedom and democracy—that is, for the lives of both 49 See Chapter 5 and Finkel, Thank You; Jane Collins, For Love of a Soldier: Interviews with Military Families Taking Action Against the Iraq War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield 2008); and Tanielian and Jaycox, Invisible Wounds. 50 51 Derrida, Gift of Death, pp. 59–60. Derrida, Gift of Death, p. 51. 52 53 O’Callaghan, Walzer, p. 93. Derrida, ‘Hospitality’, p. 67.

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their fellow citizens and of ordinary people in the war zones—take their own lives is, once acknowledged, a problematic conundrum. For those who weigh the permissibility of killing as part of an ethical calculation, it raises questions about where these deaths are to be counted on the balance sheet. More substantively, it may lead us to ask why the forces for good find themselves unable to carry on living.54 This question has no easy answer. The armed forces nevertheless have to tackle the problem. As was set out in Chapter 5, the package of measures revolved around giving soldiers better tools to help themselves. Those exhibiting symptoms of PTSD needed to be fixed, especially if there was a danger that they might kill themselves. The practice of ethical war was, again, improved so as to ensure the proper functioning of the military wielding force in the name of the good. Noting, and reacting to, negative side effects of ethical war, even those perhaps not considered in traditional discussions of the ethics of war, does not in itself help us to rethink the issues involved. This is a general problem with the type of critique of war that is based on accounting for its cost. While such a critique may be intent on showing the profound problems with war, its futility even, it may instead be absorbed as a driver for optimization, in this case for reducing psychological injury or improving its treatment. Indeed, one of the central arguments of the Counterinsurgency Manual is that ‘the side that learns faster and adapts more rapidly—the better learning organization—usually wins’;55 it also praises the US military’s ‘firstclass lessons-learnt systems’.56 Yet the idea of ethical war conducted by the forces for good made up by good soldiers who are constantly improving their practices obscures not just the ever-present possibility of doing harm to those who are ostensibly being protected. It also obscures the precariousness of the claim that such wars are enactments of ethics in the first place. One of the recurring themes of this book has been the way in which deaths—those of civilians in particular— disrupt the vision of ethical war. Apparently, whatever good might be delivered through war, these deaths cannot be reconciled with having done the right thing. They are routinely represented as beyond control and intelligibility: as tragic. This disruption has time and again been met with renewed efforts to optimize the system. Highlighting the death count has therefore not been particularly effective as a strategy for critiquing war. In focusing on deaths, we appear to acknowledge the challenge of always already being related to others only at the very moment when these others become inanimate, objects rather than subjects.

54 55 56

See Finkel, Thank You. US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, p. lii. US Army/Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, p. liv.

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Butler’s assertion that, within the Western discourse of the ‘war on terror’, only Western lives have been grieved and that this has impacted on the economy of violence57 brings a new dimension to this type of argument in highlighting that while Western dead remain subjects to an extent, nonWestern dead are decisively objectified. However, what we do not appear to have done in the context of thinking the ethics of war is to think from our relation with others more generally. If we recognize that we always find ourselves within the ethico-political, that is, that we are always already related to, and implicated in, others, then, as Fagan points out, ‘interruption happens, and there may be potential for engagement in a focus on such moments of interruption.’58 Such moments might create a space for critique. Put differently, they can pose a challenge to our thinking and we should engage with them in this spirit. Although unwanted deaths pose such a challenge, the problem with leveraging them for a critique is that the dead cannot speak for themselves. One could instead explore relationality and the interruptions it generates by examining reactions from those who supposedly benefit from these ethical wars, the people to be liberated and protected in the warzones, and others have done so. Staying with the general approach of this book and looking at the issue from the perspective of those tasked with implementing the vision, it is intriguing that war has also been challenged by the soldiers meant to wage it. Pacifists might fantasize about the possibility that at some point no one might be willing to fight, making it impossible to pursue war.59 Such full noncompliance has of course not happened, but a number of soldiers did refuse (re)deployment to the Iraq War or removed themselves from the military in some other way. That is, they disrupted the expectation of how soldiers should behave when called upon to serve in a war. At the time, some of these refusers—such as Camilo Mejía, Jeremy Hinzman, Kevin Benderman, and Ehren Watada—attracted considerable media attention. Each of their stories is different, but each involves a refusal or avoidance of deployment on moral grounds that was not—and in some cases could not legally be— recognized by the military authorities. Amnesty International and a number of anti-war charities vocally supported these and other soldiers, in some cases clearly heroicizing them.60 Some of these soldiers went underground or fled to Canada. Many were court-martialled, thereby establishing which rules had priority in practice. By and large, therefore, the problem of soldiers ceasing to 57

58 See section 2.1. Fagan, Ethics and Politics, p. 151. This hope has been given memorable expression in Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. 1936), p. 43. 60 See, for example, Amnesty International, ‘USA: Iraq “Refusenik” Should not be Put on Trial’, 2 February 2007, https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/usa-iraq-'refusenik'-should-not-beput-trial (accessed 15 January 2017). 59

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function as expected was ‘solved’ by enforcing the Uniform Code of Justice. Little attention appears to have been focused on engaging with why these soldiers decided to withdraw their cooperation61 and with what this means for our understanding of (the ethics of) war, even among those critical of Western warfare. Some of the refusers have written books making sense of their decision to break the rules that they had previously lived by.62 Joshua Key’s memoir, The Deserter’s Tale, written by journalist Lawrence Hill,63 provides a useful context for engaging with what happens when we think of individuals’ decisions as responding at the limits of ethics. Although in another book Key is presented as ‘remembering himself as an idealistic young man who brushed aside warnings from his friends and family about the Army’,64 in the memoir, Key is depicted as joining the US Army out of desperation, in order to support his growing family. He is not, then, a likely poster boy for a critique of ethical war. While Key had ‘no objection’ to war when he grew up,65 he became increasingly uncomfortable with what his war involved. He realized that he was ‘raiding, arresting, and intimidating people who were like [him] in the most surprising ways: poor, with almost no way to escape their miserable situations’.66 When some of his colleagues play football with decapitated heads, he concludes that far from ‘acting as a force for good in the world’, the US armed forces ‘had become monsters in a residential neighborhood’.67 In other words, he started to doubt the idea that the war was ethical and started to see the politics of harassing people who already have limited options. As a result, Key’s conscience begins to assert itself. He says he likes ‘to think it was [his] grandfather’s voice—the voice of right and wrong—that woke [him] from the long sleep [he] fell into during military training and the first months of war’.68 While the US military presents itself as preserving and even promoting values, Key alleges the opposite. He says that ‘during the time [he] served in the war in Iraq, soldiers and officers of the American forces violated the very values that we claim to uphold in our own nation.’69 This creates a conflict of conscience. Key’s reawakening of conscience is rooted in who he is, in what he learnt in his childhood. It is uncomfortable because he cannot find a way to excuse his behaviour: ‘If you have beaten or killed an innocent person, and if there remains a shred of conscience in your heart, you will likely not avoid 61

Note, however, Gutmann and Lutz, Breaking Ranks. Another powerful example of this genre is Camilo Mejía, Road from ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejía, An Iraq War Memoir (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books 2008). 63 Key appears to speak quite differently in Deserter’s Tale from how he is quoted at length in Laufer, Soldiers, Chapter 1. The journalist has clearly changed the voice, making the use of English more sophisticated. 64 65 Laufer, Soldiers, pp. 11–12. Key, Deserter’s Tale, p. 4. 66 67 Key, Deserter’s Tale, p. 7. Key, Deserter’s Tale, p. 108. 68 69 Key, Deserter’s Tale, p. 212. Key, Deserter’s Tale, p. 228; see also p. 110. 62

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anguish by saying you were only following orders. We each have to find what we believe to be the right way to live.’70 While he does consider the Army responsible, this is no excuse for his own failure. He says he holds the Army ‘in judgment for the repeated abuses of Iraqi civilians’, but he holds himself ‘in judgment too’.71 In sum, he acknowledges that he is ‘responsible for the things [he] did’.72 While on leave in the United States, Key comes to the conclusion that he cannot return to the war. He says his ‘conscience told [him] that it was wrong to return to Iraq and to keep doing things [he] knew to be wrong’.73 Seeing no other way to avoid returning to his deployment, he ends up deserting. This is not something he has planned. In fact, he reports to Dallas airport as his orders require. It is only when he is told that his flight had been delayed by a few days, that, he says, ‘in [his] mind the switch had finally clicked. [He] was not going back to Iraq.’74 Although continuing to fight in the war was against his conscience, his decision not to return to his deployment is not protected by the right to conscientious objection, primarily because his problem is with fighting in this particular war, rather than with fighting in any war.75 Key is caught. Whether he deserts or not, he will break rules that he recognizes as important. Nor will deserting mean that he moves beyond the dilemma: he confronts an aporia. He is already implicated, complicit in the very acts he objects to.76 Morally, the problem is that he has to break his commitment to the military and his comrades to escape having to commit more acts that he considers immoral; it is also what he has already done, the acts of brutality for which he remains responsible and, more broadly, his contribution to the whole process: he ‘was part of the machine’.77 However, crucially, this decision is not just a difficult decision because the right way forward has to be decided at the limit of the ethics of the right conduct in war. The only way to not continue acting against his conscience leads to a wide range of negative consequences. Legally, he will break the law and would be prosecuted if he stayed in the United States. Socially, he finds himself in a sociocultural context where his conclusion to follow his conscience and therefore to desert is not acceptable to the vast majority of his family and friends. Economically, he faces an uncertain future with no income and no assets but the need to support a large and growing family.

70

71 Key, Deserter’s Tale, p. 212. Key, Deserter’s Tale, p. 216. 73 Key, Deserter’s Tale, p. 216. Key, Deserter’s Tale, pp. 87–8. 74 Key, Deserter’s Tale, p. 190. 75 Department of Defense Instruction 1300.06 (31 May 2007), http://www.dtic.mil/whs/ directives/corres/pdf/130006p.pdf (accessed 15 January 2017), section 3.1. 76 Mejía argues similarly in his memoirs, Road from ar Ramadi. 77 Key, Deserter’s Tale, p. 110. 72

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There is therefore much to stop Key from going Absent Without Leave (AWOL) rather than go back to Iraq. When he does, he says that three things ‘teemed in [his] brain: I wanted to hold my wife and children; I had the blood of men, women, and children on my hands; and I couldn’t live with myself if I had to fight again in Iraq’.78 The desire to be with one’s family and indeed the idea that continuing to fight a cruel war would make it impossible to continue to be a good father or husband appears in the accounts of a number of deserters, that is, the entanglement in life beyond the military matters to decisions made at and about war. While a traditional understanding of ethics might recommend that these other aspects need to be conceptually removed to determine the right way forward, when looking at ethics as practice, as this book does, the competing claims on individuals’ responsibility matter. By embracing his conscience, Key cannot undo what he has done. He remains, inevitably, responsible for these actions. He cannot achieve good conscience. This is not just because he has participated in unethical acts but because he is entangled in life such that it becomes impossible to claim an ethically pure motivation for refusing to fight on. If his desertion is assessed against the ideal of a pure ethics that is found beyond the messy relations that make up life, then his actions will necessarily fail to measure up. Key does not even take a heroic stand against the Army’s failure to uphold its values. Rather, he packs up his car with his family and possessions and escapes to Canada. What is more, the decision is precipitated by circumstances beyond his control—not least a trivial delay in his redeployment—and considerations beyond his role in the war. This is what Derrida calls ‘the Other’s decision in me, or through me’.79 Clearly, the point is not to argue that he is right, that he has acted ethically, courageously disrupting a problematic war. It is rather to recognize that he had to take a decision at the limit of ethics, for which he is responsible without being entirely in control of it. There is no right way forward for Key that could be plotted out by theory. This precludes the formulation of an alternative ethics as the solution to his predicament. Nor can the way forward he nevertheless has to find be assessed to be good. There is no counter-heroic story that can occupy the space of military heroes bringing freedom to the oppressed. As Fagan points out more generally, we ‘can only take responsible decisions (if we ever can) at the limits of the theory or criteria which might determine the “more ethical” way forward’.80 There is no ethical way forward for the soldiers already implicated in the killing. However, listening to the accounts they give of why they have done what they have done and understanding them as part of a practice of

78 80

79 Key, Deserter’s Tale, p. 191. Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged, p. 103. Fagan, Ethics and Politics, pp. 146–7.

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ethics at least allows us to recognize the limitations and implications of claims in the name of ethics. Recognizing and indeed enacting a response at the limits of ethics is not easy, not least because our language does not provide us with a vocabulary for engaging with the limits of our own thinking. In respect of the problematic discussed here, the challenge is always already both ethical and political. It is useful to briefly return to Fagan’s analysis of the relationship between ethics and politics. She explains that ‘both the ethical and political are descriptions of the context in which we find ourselves; compelling and irreconcilable obligations can and do happen in a forceful way.’81 While the obligations may be irreconcilable, there is at the same time never a point at which ethics and politics are separate. One always already involves the other. They define each other’s categories, making it impossible to prise them apart. The two terms therefore ‘cannot be understood without one another; they are always conjoined in the ethico-political’.82 This does not mean that ethics turns out, ultimately, to be politics.83 Rather, the two contexts pose different but inextricably intertwined challenges. Thus, it is simply not possible to derive answers from an ethics outside of politics. Neither is the reverse—prioritizing the politics of Western warfare and disregarding the particular configurations of ethical claims—sufficient. Instead, we need to be attentive to ethics and politics as different but inextricably related modes of making our being-with others in the world intelligible. Whatever may be formulated as the rules and principles of ethics—what in my terminology sets the terms for acting within ethics—is already shaped and penetrated by what appears to lie beyond it. There is no straightforward way to demarcate the ethical from the political84 because ‘[e]thical problems are already taken up in the so-called space of the political, of calculation, of negotiation, of deliberation.’85 Our practices shape what we consider to be ethical without this being easily visible. Recognizing something as an ethical problem is inevitably political. Those who consider ethics or moral philosophy to consist in the development or even discovery of the right moral principles miss that we cannot look at an ethical demand in terms of ethics only; any situation—indeed any conceptualization—is already shaped by our practices and by what we call politics. When Key recognizes the problem of raiding the homes of people much like himself, this challenge arises as the result of a politics that has put him in the houses of ordinary Iraqis as a highly armed ‘liberator’ and is simultaneously configured by an understanding of 81

82 Fagan, Ethics and Politics, p. 8. Fagan, Ethics and Politics, p. 129. Fagan, Ethics and Politics, p. 129. 84 Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1999), p. 99. 85 Derrida, Negotiations, p. 302. 83

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ethics that normally precludes harassing or harming human beings. These two aspects of the situation that present themselves to him as a tension are not independent, however, inasmuch as they both support each other as constitutive parts of the ethico-political imaginary of liberalism. This makes it impossible for ethics to function as extra-political guidance; it cannot provide us with secure answers in response to our questions about how we ought to live. In this spirit, we might abandon the attempt to be right, ethically speaking, and instead ask ourselves whether we would be prepared to accept the inevitable negative consequences of our actions, even if we were wrong. Would we take the risk of engaging in the highly destructive practice of war on the basis of ethico-political judgements that are inevitably precarious? How would we respond if we started by acknowledging uncertainty or ambiguity? How would we respond if we recognized that both positive and negative consequences cannot be attributed to having correctly followed the rules but to having stepped beyond the rules and made a decision, a decision that also happens to us? Throughout this book I have highlighted moments where the vision of ethical war has been disrupted, most often because of unwanted deaths. What we have seen are well-meaning attempts to fix the interruption: to target better, to understand people better, to train soldiers better. If instead we accepted the interruption and asked ourselves how to think with it, we will not find a better way to wage ethical war, but we may grasp and respond to the issue that the assumption that we should is already an outcome of a problematic politics of ethics.

6.4 Conclusion Ethical war is, in its own terms, impossible. This does not mean that the practice is about to wither away. After all, the First World War was meant to have taught us the futility of war altogether. Yet a century later war is alive and well; indeed it is said to be unending and everywhere. As scholars we may find this unsatisfactory: if a practice has been shown to be pointless, dysfunctional, and even deadly on a large scale, surely that should be reason to abandon it. Yet this is not how the world works. We all have experience of this phenomenon in everyday life: many of us drive cars, eat too much sugar, or even smoke. Similarly, ethical war may be ultimately destructive, but it clearly appeals to many of us regardless. Thus, it is not sufficient to treat ethical war as a problem to be overcome or reject the frame of ethical war as incoherent, hypocritical, or simply objectionable. Instead, this book has explored what it does. The framing in terms of the good—the foregrounding of ethics—matters. 205

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For Western war to be aligned with the demands of ethics is politically powerful. Western wars have been presented as good because they liberate the oppressed. The objection that these wars are rather about fighting terrorism, securing access to oil, or other strategic interests fails to account for the seductiveness of the ethical branding. It also misses the inextricable but obscured relation between ethics and politics. From the position of an ethics that is separate from politics, the world always looks in need of improvement because life necessarily falls short of what is imagined to be the good. Ethics therefore works to enable violence rather than to limit and constrain it. The commitment to ethics protects neither combatants nor non-combatants: it neither prevents the former from being killed, nor the latter from experiencing devastating guilt. In fact, what I have shown is that such a commitment, counter intuitively, has led to enhancing the violence. The idea of ethical war creates pressure to continuously improve its techniques, driving what I have been calling a technology of ethics in which implementing the right protocols or guidelines is impossibly considered to promote the good. The fiction that the harm-inflicting aspect of war can increasingly be overcome is part of the problem in that it seduces us into an impossible expectation of our own harmlessness and indeed heroic ability to help others. Violence comes to be acceptable, even positively required. Yet there is always an excess, something that cannot be justified. I have illustrated this around deaths which cannot entirely be rationalized within the rules. They cannot be made fully intelligible. Life turns out to be more uncertain and more dangerous than ethics can bear. Derrida draws our attention to ‘the perhaps’, the structural possibility of unwanted consequences.86 O’Callaghan thinks this through as the question of how to think war in the face of our increasing awareness of its awful impact, our awareness that our intervention could make things worse.87 Perhaps the question is even more difficult, namely, of how we respond, given our awareness that enacting what we believe to be responsibility may not just aggravate the situation but undermine precisely what it is intended to achieve. Following the experiences of Afghanistan and Iraq, the West has appeared more wary of military intervention. Yet the situation in Syria has again led to arguments about the moral imperative to bomb forces harming civilians. The plight of the Syrian population, captured in iconic images of a boy pulled from the rubble in Aleppo and of another drowned and washed up on a beach in Turkey, poses an ethico-political challenge, perceived as imposed from the

86 87

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See section 2.5. This is what O’Callaghan engages with in his Walzer, Just War and Iraq.

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outside, unrelated to the provision of arms by the West or Western war in the region, for example. There has been no large-scale Western military intervention, but nor were there other solutions that were seen to be acceptable from a Western vantage point. The oppression and killing of civilians especially tugs at our conscience. We continue to face the same impasse. Acknowledging the impossibility of drawing a line between ethics and politics does not resolve the impasse, but it matters nevertheless. From such a perspective, it is impossible to argue that any war is ethical per se, without taking account of how this view is itself politically produced. War is not good (or, for that matter, bad).88 From such a perspective, the claim that something can be good is itself recognized as problematic in the sense of political. Put differently, ethics—like knowledge—is dangerous. Ethics is made, rather than out there, to be discovered: we invent the claims to the good that we apparently merely invoke. War becomes ethical through the practices that allow it to be produced as such. By acknowledging this, the righteousness and moral enthusiasm that has been seen in the defence of Western war by some, that has indeed driven Western war, becomes impossible. There can be no warm glow of satisfaction for bringing freedom to the oppressed because what freedom is is an ethico-political question that cannot be answered on someone else’s behalf. Good conscience is impossible if claims to ethics are political, of this world. The politics of ethics—that is, the pretence that ethics can provide guidance to actions that is not already politically produced—is therefore a problem because it apparently gets rid of politics. It enables the claim that we ought to and therefore can—or, alternatively, that we can and therefore ought to— change the world. Indeed, it excludes this claim from contestation. The violence of Western war thus becomes the solution rather than the problem, making it impossible to apprehend it as violent. The point is not that any particular Western wars have been wrong but that we have not deployed the right intellectual tools to even engage with the issue. Ethics is an ineffective resource for any critique of war, as long as it is perceived to be outside of politics. On the contrary, it provides resources for the legitimation, refinement, and amplification of war. My argument is not a call to bring the politics back in; the point is that politics has always been there already. Neither is it a call to move beyond ethics. If anything, it is an argument to be more attentive to the ways in which life is never quite as we wish, never quite adds up, and will always expose us to difficult questions, given that our actions are always dangerous: they have the

88 The Good War, as it was often called in this debate, was not of course good either. See Dexter, ‘New War’ and Zehfuss, Wounds of Memory.

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capacity to hurt as well as support others. There is no heroic resolution; instead we can only resist firm answers, look beyond the obvious context, and try to allow interruptions to challenge our thinking. Any proposal to support or indeed to hurt others must be seen as invariably ethico-political: in need of careful examination that does not reify uncontested grounds and, ultimately, in need of a decision that we do not quite control and that cannot be authorized by anything other than itself.

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Index

Abraham’s sacrifice 42–3, 46–7, 177, 196 accidents 76–7, 81 Afghanistan 6, 184 casualties 70–1 civilian deaths 19 drones 85 Khost 111 warlords 65 altruism 50–1 Amazonian Indian tribe 103 American Anthropological Association (AAA) 124 Anderson, Kenneth 82, 84 Annan, Kofi 7 Ansorge, Josef Teboho 125–6 anthropology 108–9, 121, 133 aporia 36–45, 195–7 and decision-making 41–4 definition 41 see also ethical dilemma; responsibility Aquinas, Thomas 32–3 atrocities 159, 187 by connivance 146 definition 144 modern 145–6 Augustine, Saint 30–2, 35, 37, 161 Austria 141 Bacevich, Andrew J. 8, 61, 78 Bailey, Major General 96 Bargewell, Eldon 94 Barkawi, Tarak 125–6 Beier, J. Marshall 65, 77–9 Bellamy, Alex J. 24, 26, 32–3, 36, 75 Benderman, Kevin 200 Berghaus, Paul T. 167–70 Berntsen, Tor Arne 175 Bhatia, Michael 111 Bismarck 5 Blair, Tony 5–6 ‘bomb now, die later’ 72–3

bombing non-combatant immunity 59 norm 59 bombs cluster 80 large 67 smart 56, 67 Bourke, Joanna 137 Brennan, John 83 British Army, values and standards 137–40, 148–9, 154, 159–68 Brown, Keith 98 Bulley, Dan 48 Burke, Anthony 24 Burke, Carol 116 Bush, George H.W. 2 Bush, George W. 8, 62, 82 Butler, Judith 19–21, 35, 94, 200 Callahan, Ted 124 Campbell, David 35 Canada 7, 141 Caputo, John D. 177–8 Cardinalli, AnnaMaria 112, 116 Cartagena, Nathan L. 167–70 Casey Jr, George W. 99 casualty figures problematical 71–2 see also death count Center for the Army Profession and Ethic (CAPE) 170 Challans, Timothy L. 34, 149, 153, 162, 176 Chamayou, Grégoire 83–6, 90 Chiarelli, Peter 112, 129, 172 Chinese embassy in Belgrade 65 Christianity 22, 31 Christopher, Paul 34 Circular Error Probable (CEP) 63–4 civilians unjust 190 see also non-combatants

Index Clarke, Victoria 62 cluster bombs 80 Coates, A.J. 23, 34, 37, 191 Cohen, William S. 60 Coker, Christopher 6, 57, 87, 152, 157, 168 collateral damage 56, 60, 64, 68–9 Collins, Tim 6 Colonomos, Ariel 70 combat abolition of 89 stress 165, 168–9 trauma 155 combatants moral equality 189 see also soldiers Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) 7 communication 49, 96–7, 104, 114, 131 communitarianism 45 Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness (CSF2) 167, 171–2 Conetta, Carl 63–4, 68, 70–1, 80–1, 87 conflict resolution 92 Connable, Ben 99 Conway, James 161 Cook, Martin L. 61, 151 Cordingley, Patrick 137, 147 counterinsurgency 113, 127 as cultural encounter 114 academy 99 people-centred 120 warfare 95 Counterinsurgency Manual 93, 100–7, 115, 118, 120, 123, 126–7, 131, 157, 199 Crawford, Neta C. 52, 71–2, 82, 85, 90 critical thinking 126 cultural intelligence 125 cultural knowledge 110, 120, 185 and ethical war 92, 131 and political control 92 and politics of ethics 100 Cultural Preparation of the Environment 108 culture awareness training 97–8 expertise in 108, 183 Iraq 183 political context 105–6 recognition of 105 rise of 93–100 understanding 98–9 US 103–4 web of meaning 102–3 Dannatt, Richard 9, 129, 142 Davis, Mike 58

226

Deakin, Stephen 149, 154 death count 18–19, 79, 199–200 deaths avoided 115–16, 119 civilian 71 tragedy of 20, 36–45, 199 decisions 43, 177, 194, 196–8 beyond ethics 41 politicians’ 131, 196 responsible 45 soldiers’ 196 see also Abraham’s sacrifice; aporia; ethical dilemma deconstruction 39–40 Der Derian, James 35, 74 Derrida, Jacques 12, 36, 38–43, 45–7, 49, 53, 88, 90, 177, 196, 198, 203, 206 Desjardins, Yves 148 destruction, limited 182 Deutsches Youth For Understanding Komitee e.V. 104 discipline 144, 154–5, 158 double effect 32–3 Downes, Alexander B. 72 drones 69, 81–7, 89, 182 Elshtain, Jean Bethke 21, 32, 36 emotional distress 168–9, 173 empathy 132 errors 64–5 Estrada, Oscar 94, 106 ethical, use of word 10–11 ethical dilemma 16, 29, 117, 133, 143, 176–7 ethical thinking, structure of 194 ethical war 2–3 and cultural knowledge 92, 131 as HTTs 112 failure of 179 impossible 205–6 paradox 11–12, 16–21, 47, 53 possibility of 143 rise of 3–9, 54 ethico-political challenge 48–9 context 159 imagination 16 the concept 197 ethics and practice 28, 192–3 and precision 73–81 and violence 186–7 aspects shared with politics 39 dangerous 207 emergency 44–5 importance in politics 51–2 inseparable from politics 46–53, 194, 196, 204–7

Index limits of 195–205 politics of 9, 46–53 possibility questioned 159 professional 125 rules 50 technology of 133, 192–3 training 136, 175 understanding 187–8 ethnic cleansing 5 ethnography 123–4, 125, 128 ethos good soldier 148–9 warrior 152–3, 158, 165–6, 185 excess 36 expectations, behavioural 135, 142 Exum, Andrew McDonald 85 Fabre, Cécile 192 Fagan, Madeleine 10–11, 51–3, 197, 200, 203–4 Farrell, Theo 57, 62, 66, 71–2, 76, 81 fear 155 Fick, Nathaniel 159–68, 173, 178 fighting from a distance 74 flexibility 54 force protection imperative 74 forces for good 16, 136–43, 179, 184–5 Frederick, Jim 154–6 French, Shannon E. 165–6 Fukuyama, Francis 2 Geneva Conventions 26, 73 Gentile, Gian P. 118 Germany Federal Republic of 141–2 sites of destruction 58 unification 4, 10 Gezari, Vanessa M. 128, 130, 133 Glover, Jonathan 193 González, Roberto J. 130 good soldier ethos of 148–9 impossibility of 165–74 meaning of 138 the making of 143–54 see also soldiers Gorbachev, Michail 1–2 GPS (Global Positioning System) 63, 65 Graham, Stephen 72 Gray, J.D. 33 Gregory, Derek 51, 82, 84, 89, 106, 118, 130 Griffin, Marcus 118 ground troops 70 Gulf War 54, 58–60, 65, 79, 80, 137, 191 Gusterson, Hugh 119, 126 habituation 151–2 Hedges, Chris 8

Hill, Lawrence 201 Hinzman, Jeremy 200 Hitler, Adolf 4 Holmes, Robert L. 30–2 honour 149–50, 152–3 Howell, Alison 171, 177 human rights 5–7 human terrain 92, 113 Human Terrain System (HTS) 107–11, 183–4 Human Terrain Team Handbook 112–13, 122 Human Terrain Teams (HTTs) 110–20, 123 humanitarian ideals 9 intervention 5, 21, 35 war 5–7, 16 HUMINT reports 123 Hutchings, Kimberley 10, 51 identity 164, 169 Ignatieff, Michael 8, 58, 73–4 ignorance 155 Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) 86, 108 information gap 96 infrastructure damage 19 investment 98 training 99 Institutional Review Board (IRB) 124–5 insurgents 119–20 intelligence 116–18 cultural 125 failure 65–6 intentionality 15, 25–6, 49–50 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) 7, 24 international law 61–2 intervention strategy 7–8, 16, 21 intuition, and judgement 151–2 invisible wounds 171–2 Iraq Body Count 72–3, 79 Iraq war 6, 17, 34, 62–3, 65–6, 75, 161–5 Abeer Qasim Hamza rape and murder 158–9 Abu Ghraib 132, 135, 142, 170, 184 casualties 70–1 civilian deaths 19 culture 183 fiasco 93–100, 183 Haditha massacre 94 population behaviour 162 Shock and Awe 75, 93 surge 95 Triangle of Death 155 ISIS 3

227

Index Israel Defence Force 141 iterability 49

Loyd, Paula 111, 124 Lucas, George R. 109

Jabri, Vivienne 35 Jesus 31 Johnson, James Turner 29, 34, 36, 44 Joint Improvised Explosives Device Defeat Task Force 108 Jones, Charles 30 judgement, and intuition 151–2 just cause 25 just conduct 30 just war 143, 147, 181 and discrimination 73 limiting 33 revisionist account 188–91 just war thinking 21–30 confidence from 53–4 criteria and rules 25 history of 30–6 justice 161 justification 33, 54

McChrystal, Stanley A. 129 McFate, Montgomery 108–9, 115 McInnes, Colin 66, 68 McMahan, Jeff 28, 188–95 McMaster, H.R. 92, 98, 107, 114, 127, 133, 135, 151, 154–9, 165 Marine Corps 160–5 Marshall, S.L.A. 150 Mattis, James 97, 105–7, 158, 161 Mayek, Joseph 173 Mejía, Camilo 200 military ethics education 142–3, 147–8 lawyers 145 leadership responsibility 156–7 overstretch 136 training 136 military force, when to use 21–2 Miller, Joseph J. 176 missiles 84 moral anguish 173 moral certainty 176 moral compass 148 moral courage 160 moral equality 189 moral expansion 17 moral injury 167, 198 motivation 32, 146–7, 152 My Lai massacre 146 Myers, Richard B. 27

Kaempf, Sebastian 70, 75 Kahl, Colin H. 76, 81 Kant, Immanuel 50 Keegan, John 153 Key, Joshua 96, 201–4 Kierkegaard, Søren 42–3 Kilcullen, David 85, 106, 108, 113 kill zone 83 killing intentionality 15 justifiable 189–90 soldier’s work 143–4 King, Christopher 114, 117–18, 125 knowledge cultural 110 dangerous 125–6, 133 gap 110, 128 Korean War 59 Kosovo 60, 73–4, 76, 81, 145 ethnic cleansing 5, 17 Krishna, Sankaran 78 Lamb, Christopher J. 119, 126 laser-guided systems 63–4, 68 last resort 25 leaders and leadership 87, 156–8 legitimacy 26–7, 29 legitimate authority 25 legitimation of war 30–6, 39 lethal radius 68, 83–4 Levi, Primo 190 liberal war 10 Litz, Brett T. 167 lives, worth of 19

228

Nadelson, Theodore 143 NATO forces 137 Kosovo operation 60, 73–6, 81, 145 Operation Allied Force 5–6 Operation Maiwand 118 Nobel, Alfred 1 Nobel Peace Prize 130 non-combatants casualties 64, 68–9 classification 85 deaths increased 87 immunity 26, 28–9, 188, 190–1 protection 18, 60–1 Norman, Richard 15, 23, 25, 36 Norway 141 nuclear war 30 nuclear weapons 69 O’Callaghan, Ronan 198, 206 Obama, Barack 1, 22, 54, 82–3, 85, 179 obeying orders 151 obligations, contradictory 48

Index Oedipus 37, 177 Operation Enduring Freedom 6 Operation Infinite Justice 6 Operation Iraqi Freedom 179 orders, illegal 145 Orford, Anne 4 Osama bin Laden 3 Osiel, Mark J. 144–6, 148, 151, 165, 177 Owens, Patricia 76, 81, 88 pacifism 23, 31, 188, 200–3 Pakistan 82, 85 Pearl, Danny 20 people, as battlefield 112–20 permissiveness 146 Petraeus, David H. 95, 100, 111, 127, 130, 132 Pinker, Steven 18 planning failure 156 political and moral permissions 192 political control 92 political decisions 131, 196 political system 131–3 politicians 196 politics aspects shared with ethics 39 and collateral damage 68–9 importance of ethics 51–2 inseparable from ethics 194, 196, 204–7 of ethics 9, 15–55, 100 of the war 106 Porter, Patrick 101 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) 165, 167, 172, 198–9 power 105, 115 precision 13 accuracy, impact and target identification 83 and ethical war 62 and imprecision 63 and production of ethics 73–81 and protection 66–73 gap 68 impossible 88 in drone warfare 81–7 in practice 62–6 meaning of 67 political imperative 61–2 praise of 57–62 precision-guided munitions (PGMs) 56 guidance systems 63–4 inherent indeterminacy 77–8 numbers increased 80 see also smart bombs Prior, John 173 professional soldier 184 professional warrior 178 proportionality 25–6, 33, 191

protection and precision 66–73 responsibility 21 Pryer, Douglas A. 167 punishment 32 Qasim Hamza, Abeer 158–9 Ramsey, Paul 44 realism 23 realists 37 reconnaissance 82 religious fanaticism 3 remainder 36, 41 Rengger, Nicholas 22 resilience 167–8, 170–1 responsibility Abraham’s 46–7 analysis of 43–4 and decision making 43, 45 aporia of 36–45 for threat 191, 194 moral or political 50 of military leaders 156–7 of ordinary soldiers 166, 168, 171, 176–8, 198, 203 Responsibility to Protect (R2P) 7, 17, 21, 26, 35, 47–8 responsible action 44 Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) 4, 93, 135 Ricks, Thomas E. 93–4, 96, 105, 160 Robinson, Paul 142, 154 Rodin, David 28 Rolfsen, Raag 175 Roman Empire 31 Royal Air Force 141 Royal Marines 141 Royal Navy 141 rules 175 and contradictory obligations 48 and principles 191 ethics 50 of engagement (ROE) 144–5, 162, 198 Rumsfeld, Donald 27 Rwanda 7 Saddam Hussein 4, 6 safe distance 67–8 Sanchez 168–9, 177, 198 satellite-guided systems 63–4, 68, 182 Scales, Robert H. 121, 132 Schweitzer, Martin P. 115–17, 120 self-defence 28, 33 September 11 3, 6 Sewall, Sarah 48 Sharratt, Justin 94 Shaw, Ian G.R. 84, 86

229

Index Shaw, Martin 19, 66–7, 71, 74–6, 79, 88 Shay, Jonathan 165 Shelton, Henry H. 60 Sherman, Nancy 169, 172–4 Slim, Hugo 19 smart bombs 56, 67 see also precision-guided munitions (PGMs) smart cards 98, 126 Smith, Thomas W. 57, 71–2 social network theory 128 social science 120–9 methodology 129 research 121–2, 124–6 sociocultural analysis 116–18 soldiers challenge war 200–3 decisions 196 professional 168–70 responsibility 166, 168, 171, 176–8, 198, 203 stories 159–65 see also good soldier Somalia 4–5 Srebrenica 7 standards 137–40, 148–9, 154, 159–68 see also values state sovereignty 7 Stone, John 81 suicides 172, 174, 199 supplement 38, 45, 103, 169 surveillance 84 Suveges, Nicole 111 Swedish Armed Forces 138 Syria 195, 206–7 Taliban 3, 6, 65, 111 targeting an ethico-political issue 88–9 countereconomy and countercity 58 data 116–18 procedures 182 weapons out of control 88 targets identification 83–5 influenced by technology 69–70 leaders 70, 87 technology and changing targets 69–70 pervasive imagery of 58–9 terror, war on 3, 6 terrorism 16, 26 terrorists 18 The Lancet 72 Thomas, Ward 56, 58–60 Thucydides 159 tragedy 178 of death 20, 36–45, 199 sense of 37–8

230

training regimes, realistic 150 turkey-shoot 137 uncertainty 155 undecidability 197 Uniform Code of Justice 201 United Kingdom Defence Vision 8 and Kosovo 5 Third Reich threat 44–5 United Nations Security Council 4–5, 17 We the Peoples 7 United States Army 153, 168–9 Army Ethic 147 Boston Tea Party 103 CAOCL 99 CIA 82 culture 103–4 foreign policy 106 Navy 8, 138, 140–1 Operation Enduring Freedom 62–4, 75, 80 Somalia 4–5 Targeting and Collateral Damage 62–3 TRADOC 99 unjust civilians 190 Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) 82 see also drones urban areas 64 utile form 126–7, 133 values 149, 153, 185 centrality of 160, 164 US Navy 140–1 see also standards values training 156–7 Vietnam War 59 violence acceptable 206 appropriate use of 143 and ethics 186–7 control of 181 fantasy of control 182 frames 19–20, 35 reduction 114–16 virtue ethics 147–8, 152, 156, 165–74, 188 virtues 154 Walzer, Michael 15, 21, 24–5, 29, 33, 34, 44–5, 55 war about the people 129 among the people 91 as an instrument of ethics 8 defensive 16

Index good 154–65, 181 humanitarian 5–7, 16 last resort 180 legitimation of 30–6 on terror 3, 6, 132 operationalized 12–13 risk-transfer 75, 86 unending 2–3, 180 virtuous 35, 82, 181 see also ethical war; just war warfare, history of 22 warrior ethos 152–3, 158, 165–6, 185 Watada, Ehren 200

Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs 18 Weber, Samuel 88 Westhusing, Ted 174 Wheeler, Nicholas J. 4–5, 17, 56, 60–1, 68, 75–6 will and motivation 146–7 World War I 58, 205 World War II 18, 58–9, 69 Third Reich threat 44–5 Wehrmacht 33, 145 Wright, Evan 143, 162, 169, 177 Yugoslavia 5

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