As Colin Powell emerged from his service in Vietnam, he and his fellow officers made a vow: “Many of my generation, the career captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels seasoned in that war, vowed that when our turn came to call the shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in half-hearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand or support. If we could make good on that promise to ourselves, to the civilian leadership, and to the country, then the sacrifices of Vietnam would not have been in vain” (quoted in Felice, p. 82). The substance of Powell's vow presumes that an agent of the state has a moral duty to evaluate policy and to grant or not one's acquiescence based on the findings.

Jeff McMahan's Killing in War and William Felice's How Do I Save My Honor? counsel that an agent of the state has a moral obligation to disobey the state's order to facilitate or prosecute an unjust war. Apart from their conclusions, the books' approaches differ greatly. Killing in War is an abstract examination of the moral choices a soldier faces when asked to fight in an unjust war. How Do I Save My Honor? looks closely at the actual reasons that particular American and British officials—both diplomatic and military—gave to protest their governments' post-9/11 Iraq policies. Killing in War, while politically aware, is mostly an exercise in philosophical ethics. The author's interlocutors are other academics. How Do I Save My Honor?, while philosophically aware, is mostly an exercise in politics, if we mean by “politics” the giving and taking of reasons for our actions. Despite their differences, the substance of each text is weighty and informative.

McMahan produces a retooled just war theory (JWT) in the hope that it will seep into citizens' imaginations and yield better war policy. Were McMahan's fundamental revisions to gain popular traction, active-duty soldiers “would be more reluctant to fight in wars they believed to be unjust.” It follows that the subsequent “prospects of [military] resistance” might well “deter at least some [political leaders'] attempts to initiate unjust wars” (p. 7).

The fundamental flaw of orthodox JWT is the doctrine of the moral equality of combatants. This doctrine posits that soldiers do no wrong in war so long as they fight justly: i.e., they wear uniforms, they treat prisoners well, they discriminate between combatants and noncombatants, and they adhere to considerations of proportionality. It makes no difference whether a combatant fights in a just or unjust war. McMahan's principal claim, contra the just war tradition from Augustine to Michael Walzer, is that only combatants whose government wages a just war act rightly. If soldiers fight in an unjust war, they act wrongly even if they adhere fastidiously to the traditional rules of conduct in war.

Killing in War argues that orthodox JWT “has no plausibility outside the context of war. In contexts other than war, the morality of conflict is almost invariably asymmetric: those who are in the right may be permitted to use force and violence but those who are in the wrong are not” (p. 35). If a homeowner fires a pistol in self-defense against an armed burglar, the armed burglar has no right to fire back. Mutatis mutandis, an unjust combatant has no right to fire back at an attacking just combatant.

This conclusion is not entirely new. McMahan acknowledges drawing partial sustenance from such venerable thinkers as Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suarez. The novelty arises in Killing in War's employment of innocence and liability in ways contrary to orthodox JWT. First, an innocent person is not someone who is an unarmed civilian, but someone who is not personally liable to attack for wrongdoing. It follows that a just combatant, having done no wrong, is an innocent. Second, someone who takes up arms against a person who is innocent (i.e., a just combatant) becomes personally liable for wrongdoing. These two premises inform his theoretical ripostes against those arguments in favor of the moral equality of combatants: e.g., that soldiers “consent” to be attacked, that a soldier is at an epistemic disadvantage in discerning whether a war is just, that soldiers ought to defer to their government's authority, and that war is a collective endeavor.

Killing in War is theoretically elegant, nuanced, and comprehensive. McMahan's proposed framing of just war, while not definitive, certainly deserves attention, and scholarly counterarguments to his position will surely be forthcoming. Indeed, McMahan's argument is philosophical, and his main targets are other philosophers. Yet Killing in War contains also a not so subtle and strange polemic against the soldier. McMahan asserts that there is too little sober, theoretical attention paid to discerning the morality of war in the military. He is right. There is virtually no discussion of JWT at (e.g.) the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, which provides most midcareer officers with the intellectual capital they will need to serve as military staffers and battalion commanders in future assignments.

But it is true also that elected and unelected policymakers receive no formal training—as a matter of course—in JWT. Since policymakers have direct responsibility for formulating policy, which group—policymakers or soldiers—provides McMahan's heartfelt concerns about killing with the most direct, efficient target? If McMahan wants to stop wrongful killing in war, should his logical, most direct target be the policymaker, who is professionally responsible for war, or the soldier, who is professionally responsible for fighting a war justly?

Given Killing in War's contention that the campaign in Iraq is unjust (p. 76), it follows that American soldiers serving in Iraq today are unjust combatants. There is not a little condescension in his pages, despite McMahan's personal relationships with military professionals (p. viii). To wit: soldiers “have few scruples about setting off unquestioningly at the behest of their government to kill members of other nations” (p. 7). Soldiers as unjust combatants “have been worse than derelict in their duty to protect their people” and they “bear significant responsibility for the threat their civilians face” (p. 49). “We must stop reassuring soldiers that they act permissibly when they fight in an unjust war” (p. 95). The aim of most military organizations is to “convert them into largely unreflective instruments of the wills of their superiors” (p. 119). “[I]t is highly doubtful that many [soldiers] do take seriously their moral duty to examine the reasons for and against their participation in the war” (p. 150). “[S]oldiers very seldom even try to fulfill their rather exacting epistemic duties. So it is hardly surprising that they so often get it wrong” (p. 185).

Notwithstanding the fact that moral enquiry need not be a syllogistic endeavor, two possibilities present themselves. First, if the most direct, concrete problem McMahan faces has to do with policymakers' ratiocinations and not the military, McMahan's condescension toward soldiers is oddly misplaced. Second, if it turns out that McMahan loses his theoretical campaign against JWT and, say, Walzer's orthodox position prevails—a possibility that, as an intellectual, McMahan ought to at least consider—McMahan's barbs lose their theoretical support, thereby rendering his patent condescension toward soldiers wrongful and unjustified.

McMahan's barbs seem all the more strange given his vacillating determination to make the world a better place. He wants to improve war policy by inculcating a new morality among soldiers, but he recognizes the utopian flavor of his campaign, which effectively outlaws war (p. 6). He claims that soldiers are unreflective instruments, but he asserts that most unjust combatants (e.g., American soldiers) are to a significant degree excused. He thinks, “at least at present, there are decisive reasons, mostly of a pragmatic nature, not to hold unjust combatants liable to punishment” (pp. 189–90). Yet, he also favors a future world in which it would be a good idea “to try to deter soldiers from participating in unjust wars by threatening them with punishment if they do” (p. 190). McMahan sees soldiers as ethical slackers, but he concedes that soldiers' commonsense thinking about war is fully supported by centuries of JWT since Augustine.

Felice's How Do I Save My Honor? begins not with theory but with the actual narratives of policy dissenters. How Do I Save My Honor? examines the justifications that civilian and military officials gave for either resigning from or remaining in office upon determining that the Iraq War was unjust. Although Felice focuses on civil servants, he proceeds with an awareness that responsibility for war extends beyond the foreign service and the military: “All of these persons have lessons to teach all of us about individual moral responsibility in a time of war. No matter what we are in society—teachers, community leaders, janitors, nurses, and so on—we all have a responsibility to the truth and our personal integrity and moral autonomy” (p. 5).

Much of the substance of How Do I Save My Honor? arises from a series of interviews Felice conducted with government officials who had moral qualms with British and American policy in Iraq. His method has the merit of concretizing and amplifying the problem that McMahan theorizes. For instance, the financial, professional, and legal risks officials and soldiers assume in resigning arise as tangible concerns. Moreover, Felice complicates the problem of discerning whether a war is just or not with enough time to take action. If How Do I Save My Honor?'s accounts of the mixed motives and intelligence shaping that took place within the U.S. and British governments are plausible, the epistemic problem associated with just war discernment is more difficult than Killing in War leads us to believe.

The dragons Felice slays include excessive loyalty, groupthink, the separation of “policy” and “ethics,” and the hubris and self-delusional motives inherent in regime change justified on humanitarian grounds. Felice champions an ethic of principled resignation, which “is based on the idea that the primary duty of all government employees and all citizens is to individual conscience. From the very beginning of his or her government career, the individual government employee would understand that he or she was expected to always voice his or her objections to immoral policies. The employee is never to ‘go along to get along’” (p. 190).

Among How Do I Save My Honor?'s most compelling arguments is the author's juxtaposition of Powell's post-Vietnam vow to resist half-baked, poorly understood, and insufficiently supported reasons for war with his role in facilitating the 2003 invasion of Iraq as secretary of state. The “Powell Doctrine,” which contained the substance of Powell's post-Vietnam vow, demanded (in Felice's words) “war as a last resort, overwhelming force to bring about a quick end to the suffering, and clear political and military objectives.” How Do I Save My Honor?, after a step-by-step analysis, concludes that “[e]very component of the Powell Doctrine was violated in the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq” (p. 84). Political scientists, military professionals, and citizens would do well to discuss, debate, and reflect on the validity of Felice's blistering critique of Powell's distinction between “ethical” and “policy” reservations.

Killing in War and How Do I Save My Honor? are serious books, and each deserves the attention of political scientists and, especially, military professionals. Yet, I see two omissions. The authors seem reluctant to consider Walzer's concept of jus post bellum, which explores the moral duties inherent in the intuition that “once we have acted in ways that have significant negative consequences for other people (even if there are also positive consequences), we cannot just walk away” (Arguing about War, 2004). It is inevitable that political leaders will make errors in judgment and—at times—willingly order the commission of wrongful acts. If so, we must discern when to stop the moral finger wagging and attempt to correct our wrongs. Those soldiers who deployed to Iraq after the regime's fall routinely ventured into the populace to stop the killing, improve governance, develop essential services and public infrastructure, grow the economy, train security forces, and improve the health and welfare of ordinary Iraqis. Indeed, it is plausible that significantly more soldiers were killed or wounded in the execution of these capacity-building, cooperative endeavors than in the execution of lethal raids or enemy-clearing missions. Determining the justness of a war may not be a discrete, one-time event, but a continuous discernment. The mission after Hussein's fall from power was not to topple a regime but to carry out a military-generated mission to protect the population (these issues are discussed in Noah Feldman's What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation-Building [2004]).

A second line of investigation might fruitfully inform McMahan's argument and supplement Felice's interviews. Among the ranks of military professionals are persons trained in ethics, philosophy, and political theory. Many of these soldiers have taught cadets in the service academies or officers in military schools. How might the justifications of these scholarly warriors round out the analysis in Killing in War and How Do I Save My Honor?

One possibility is that soldiers have recourse to a frame not unlike that contained in Powell's vow. That is, the soldier discharges his or her duties not with bovine trust, but with the sacred trust akin to one's hope that his or her other will be faithful and true. Given the stakes of war, to proceed with such trust is not foolish. Of course, McMahan's and Felice's intuition is correct: soldiers “are not simply lumps of coal or dumb animals” (Felice, p. 181). If asked to conquer Mexico in a power-seeking grab or to commit genocide, a soldier must resign and face the expected consequences. But the policymaker, ex officio, has the capacity to place his or her soldiers and his or her citizens in moral and physical risk. The soldier, by vocation, has the capacity to place his or her subordinates in moral and physical risk. The policymaker's chief duty is to ensure that war policy is sound and just. The soldier's chief duty is to ensure the war's execution is efficacious and just. If both are faithful, no moral problem arises. If either betrays the other's trust, the souls and bodies of flesh-and-blood persons will suffer—often for a lifetime.