During deliberations about the ways in which the United States should respond to Syria's ongoing civil war, General Martin Dempsey acknowledged an ineliminable gap between intentions and outcomes: “Simply the application of force rarely produces—and, in fact, maybe never produces—the outcome that we seek.” This sober assessment of military power, spoken during an August 2013 interview with ABC News, comes from the U.S. president's top military adviser, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The efficacy problem that Dempsey articulates touches upon two lines of inquiry integral to political science. The first line, pursued by normative theorists such as Michael Walzer and Jean Bethke-Elshtain, explores the obligations that politicians and soldiers incur when attempting to alter the sociopolitical landscape with military power. The second line, pursued by empirical political scientists such as Stathis Kalyvas and Séverine Autesserre, seeks to discern the causal spin that various factors—whether natural, institutional, or ideational—exert on a conflict's dynamics. Normative theorists routinely evaluate persons' intents and aims, but they tend to neglect integrating those perennial negators of intent and aims—fog, friction, probability, and chance—into their judgments. Empirical political scientists routinely take professional delight in unveiling the hidden and counterintuitive dynamics that negate actors' plans, but the scholar's depiction of tightly specified independent and dependent variables differs greatly from the messy circumstances confronted by real-world agents. The question arises: Is there a connection between these normative and empirical modes of inquiry? Or between these two modes of inquiry and the political and military agents whom political scientists feature in their work?
James Murphy's new book on just war theory takes a bold step toward forging these connections. War's Ends argues that causal literacy is a necessary component of ethical action. The politician must specify feasible political and military objectives and effectively wield the state's power. Since feasibility and effectiveness are causal measures, political and military leaders must evince an aptitude for the way the world works, particularly during crises, conflicts, and wars. This connection should come as no surprise. The nexus between causal literacy and ethics inheres in the venerable criterion that a war is just to the degree it has a reasonable probability of success. But neither ethicists nor political agents have sufficiently unpacked this obligation, especially as it relates to both the causal frustration Dempsey expresses and the new science of conflict and war that stands ready to inform the efficacy problem.
In this essay, I first describe Murphy’s contribution to the just war tradition. I then seek to extend his insight a bit further by suggesting that ethicists and military professionals ought to read political science with much more care than they are wont to do. Murphy subtly implicates ethicists, political scientists, and political agents in a network of relations whose activation is requisite for responsible political action. As Max Weber pointed out long ago, an “ethics of responsibility” requires political agents to carefully weigh the likely benefits and costs of alternative courses of action. Such mindfulness is supremely important when it comes to the actual deployment of the means of violence, for the use of force palpably and fatefully impacts people—combatants and noncombatants—and politically organized communities. The use of force is typically justified strategically, as a means of achieving certain ends in light of a military situation. It is thus imperative that those who make and enforce such decisions do their best to understand the situation at hand. Causal literacy is thus a fundamental constituent of ethics and political action, and political agents—and especially military professionals—have an obligation to study the causal claims that political scientists proffer.
After critically discussing Murphy’s argument and its important lessons, I turn to my own efforts to contribute to an “ethics of responsibility” in the U.S. Army. I write as a colonel in the U.S. Army and as a political theorist whose principal (and perhaps quixotic) personal and professional aim is to formally integrate cutting-edge political science on conflict and war into professional military education. Until my promotion to colonel in July 2014, I served as a professor at the U.S. Army Command & General Staff College, where mid-career officers take graduate-level instruction in military leadership, military history, and military planning. For two and a half years, I led five iterations of a six-month seminar designed to expose officers to various modes of political analysis and, especially, to the causal arguments posited by such scholars as Robert Bates, Stephen Biddle, Kristin Bakke, Erica Chenoweth, Page Fortna, Wendy Pearlman, and Idean Salehyan. I consider this combination of theoria and military praxis to be an ethical imperative for people in my particular institutional situation, just as I consider the combination of theory and praxis to be an ethical imperative for political scientists more generally in our roles as scholars and as educators.
War’s Ends: The Argument
Decisions to wage war, which authorize combatants to kill and destroy en masse, are subject to ethical evaluation. Yet the ethicist, whose task is to scrutinize intentions, circumstances, and outcomes, confronts a recurring challenge: how to account for war's persistent tendency to negate actors' intentions, muddle circumstances, and engender unimagined outcomes.
Scholars can, in varying degrees, either diminish or foreground the inefficacy that frustrates General Dempsey and the policymakers whom he advises. The sources of inefficacy do not trouble the apolitical ethicist, who is free to focus on definitional slicing and dicing and the crafting of illustrative “trolley car” examples. Such foundational work is important, but it is neither immediately useful to leaders empowered to wage war nor terribly interesting to contemporary theorists hoping to work on the leading edge. A more politically attuned, pathbreaking approach integrates the sources of political inefficacy into ethical analysis. Murphy's book is philosophically informed and politically serious. The text squarely confronts how politics—its ambiguities, its entanglements, its messiness—complicates decisions to wage war.
The focus of War's Ends is on the tradition's jus ad bellum branch, which evaluates political leaders' decisions to wage war, rather than the jus in bello branch, which evaluates combatants' conduct during war. Its driving point is that ethicists, if they are to be instructive, must wrestle with the circumstantial uncertainties that suffuse politics and war.
Murphy aims to provide useful counsel, not moral finger wagging or legal hairsplitting: “The central point of this book on jus ad bellum is: politics first. With respect to the decision to go to war, the political must be neither excluded by the moral nor swamped by the legal” (p. 205). His style of infusing politics into jus ad bellum obliges ethicists to evaluate how well leaders cope with the fuzzy probabilities associated with competing courses of action: “Governmental failure to evaluate the probability of success properly is a failure in prudence. Certain kinds of failure or carelessness shade into negligence, and negligence can be morally culpable” (p. 145). Ethicists must also evaluate a leader's overall strategic competence since the “inability to or reluctance to be practical and prudent is a character failing” (p. 132).
There is more, however. Jus ad bellum applies not only during discrete decisions about whether to wage war. Just war thinking applies continuously “within a developed framework of long-term policy” (p. 28). The book's foci—probability, strategic competence, and comprehensive foreign policy—will surprise unsuspecting theorists and policymakers. Foreign policy decisions, whether routine or exigent, must evince competence. Leaders must skillfully conduct negotiations, infer and signal intentions, deter threats, impose sanctions, and wage war as an ethical requirement. And ethical leaders must become adept at discerning the probabilities and potential outcomes that these practices might engender.
Murphy's concern extends to deliberations between policymakers and military leaders, particularly with respect to his provocative interpretation of two of the six criteria for jus ad bellum. The right-intention criterion requires that the “political leadership must have worked out with its military advisers whether its political goal can be made concrete enough to make it possible to outline plausible strategies for its realization” (p. 132). The probability of success, or “succeeding,” criterion requires political and military leaders to develop military strategies and specify military objectives that help achieve broader political objectives. Apart from strategy and military planning, political and military leaders must in all cases take concrete actions to increase the likelihood of a war's success.
In addition to its abiding practicality, War's Ends contains two sweeping theoretical innovations. First, Murphy is alone among contemporary just war thinkers to argue that the “competent authority” criterion takes precedence, both theoretically and practically, over the rest. Second, he argues that the jus ad bellum criteria, properly understood, compose a rightly ordered sequence. Political and military leaders must satisfactorily address each criterion in order and in context. The idea is to make each criterion “fit well with earlier criteria, and thereby with the overall orientation to the good that drives jus ad bellum” (p. 163). The result is not so much a “decision procedure” as a structured way to “assist practical judgment” (p. 209). Insofar as the author succeeds, War's Ends is an actual just war theory and not simply a serial exposition of loosely connected imperatives.
Murphy’s rightly ordered sequence unfolds as follows. One may not consider waging war without first possessing competent authority, which—pending circumstances—may accrue to a sovereign state, or the United Nations, or the leaders of a rebellion so long as the authority seeks to defend or promote national or international public goods. Leaders with competent authority must next satisfy the second criterion, just cause. Discerning whether a leader has just cause to wage war requires straddling between the primacy of state sovereignty and the primacy of international law. The former dampens consideration of human rights and a global common good. The latter relies on an immature institutional regime shot through with suspicion and commitment problems. It follows that just cause can range from defense against an imminent interstate attack to intervention in another state's affairs to stop a genocide. As described earlier, the third criterion, right intention, requires the specification of sufficiently detailed and feasible political aims, whereas the fourth criterion, succeeding, obliges the formulation of feasible military strategies.
The fifth criterion, which addresses last resort or “necessity,” places emphasis “not on whether there are other options but on what is the option most likely to be effective in achieving the objective” (p. 166). If political leaders assess that a military option is superior to nonmilitary options for achieving a specified political aim, Murphy's ethical advice is to get on with it and not waste time. The sixth criterion, proportionality, is “a kind of ‘catchall' for any moral concerns not addressed by the other more specific criteria” (p. 180). If the other five criteria are met, proportionality entails the application of judgment to weigh residual factors that may not yet have come up for consideration, including moral or public goods, values, evils, harms, the price of peace, and the price of war.
Some might charge that Murphy's theoretical reshaping of jus ad bellum tilts too much toward idiosyncrasy; however, close inspection reveals a well-grounded contribution certain to invite new research and lines of argument, including his friendly critique of Brian Orend's work on jus post bellum (the ethics concerning justice after war) and his claim, contra the strategist Colin Gray, that strategy and ethics are inseparable.
Most provocative will be Murphy's sustained attentiveness to “practical factors” (p. 112). He insists that political and military leaders exemplify “foresightedness or prudence or practical good sense” as ethical imperatives (p. 95). Leaders must “avoid policies that raise the probability of other countries going to war” (p. 81). Leaders must track “change[s] in the balance of military power” (p. 83). They must attend also to the possibility “that circumstances may change dramatically during war since war upends many of the previous arrangements and landmarks” (p. 107).
Causal Literacy and Ethical Analysis
One unexplored implication proceeding from Murphy’s approach is that ethicists must cultivate the skills necessary to evaluate political and military leaders' practical competence. If, as Murphy instructs, jus ad bellum ought to inform a comprehensive foreign policy and the continuous prosecution of a war, is not the ethicist now obliged to learn something about the body of scientific work that routinely explores diplomatic signaling, economic sanctions, applications of force, negotiations, conflict-termination measures, and the historical probabilities of success associated with these maneuvers?
I wonder if War's Ends points toward a new, transdisciplinary approach to ethical inquiry into war, an approach wherein empirical political science has an indispensable role? For instance, Patricia Sullivan links the probability of strategic success or failure to the specification of certain kinds of politico-military objectives. If a powerful state embarks upon a political objective that can be accomplished by military force alone—that is, extrinsic of the wishes of the weaker party—the historical track record suggests a favorable outcome. However, if a powerful state pursues an objective that requires some degree of compliance on the part of the vanquished, the historical record suggests a much lower probability of success. My point is that Sullivan's theory should inform the application of Murphy’s “succeeding” criterion, which requires the specification of feasible military strategies. There is no doubt that Sullivan's theory is contestable, as are most social-scientific theories. But her theory is also compelling, plausible, and—unfortunately—relatively unknown to ethicists and practitioners alike. I offer five more brief examples.
Séverine Autesserre warns that the peace-building community suffers from a top-down, macro-level bias that ignores local-level instigators and mitigators of war. Were an ethicist to read Autesserre, would he or she not be obliged to seek out and criticize political and military leaders who—falling victim to an empirically recognized and remediable bias—limit their understanding of conflict to its regional and national dynamics while ignoring “the local”?
Paul Staniland describes how various degrees of overt and tacit modi vivendi between governments and rebel groups, known as “wartime political orders,” might illumine new possibilities for conflict termination and the reduction of violence. Given that political and military leaders tend to conceive of war as a clash of wills wherein “decisive victory” against an “evil” enemy is the sole acceptable outcome, is the ethicist not obliged to criticize political and military leaders who refuse to at least consider lifesaving, stability-inducing accommodations with their adversaries?
Barbara Walter finds that a state's weak political and legal institutions—more so than poverty, the level of economic development, or the absence of a peacekeeping force—conduce to civil-war recurrence. Is the ethicist not obliged to ask whether political leaders have sufficiently accounted for the need to strengthen a state’s institutions as part of an anticipated or ongoing conflict-termination policy?
If the ethicist applauds a leader for pursuing peace via negotiations, should she or he not also consider Monica Duffy Toft's argument that negotiated settlements, under certain conditions, might unintentionally pave the way for increased bloodletting and the instantiation of illiberal regimes several years down the road?
Finally, Peter Krause argues that the power distribution among rebel groups (i.e., whether the groups composing a rebellion are fragmented, unified, or corralled by a hegemonic group) presents a state’s policymakers with a necessary trade-off: Either decrease the level of violence by striving for a hegemonic opposition, or decrease the rebellion’s chances of success by striving for a fragmented opposition. Should not the ethicist account for Krause's typology of a rebel movement's power distribution in assessing the prowess of political and military leaders?
The ethicist's vocation, if Murphy is right, is to assess a political and military leader’s moral and practical judgment on matters of foreign policy and politico-military objectives. Hence, ethicists must cultivate causal literacy to best fulfill their scholarly mandate, and this literacy is something many pathbreaking political scientists are advancing in both scholarly publications and outreach efforts like the blogs Duck of Minerva and Political Science @ a Glance and the special studies assembled by Marc Lynch's Project on Middle East Political Science. Almost every substantive article, book, special study, and blog entry by a political scientist includes two elements useful to the just war theorist and, as I will explain, the political agent, including an empirically grounded causal story and a statement about the scholarship's policy implications or significance. Ethicists seeking to cultivate causal literacy should attend to both.
Causal Literacy and the Military Professional
If War's Ends sets the stage for ethicists to read political science, perhaps it obliges military professionals to do so as well? Military officers—who must attempt to imagine a range of potential outcomes, windows of opportunity, and associated probabilities—should find the contemporary science of conflict and war to be an indispensable aid to competent, and thereby ethical, performance.
While serving as a professor at the U.S. Army Command & General Staff College, I created and taught a new program of study for a select group of officers called the “Local Dynamics of War.” My prompt to design the program was a two-year period of self-study and reflection following my return from a 15–month deployment to Iraq during the “surge” of 2007 and 2008. I had deployed with two intellectual influences, one scholarly and the other military. My studies in political theory—on the themes of faith, reason, democracy, and modernity—would infuse my daily decisions as a task-force commander in Baghdad with an ethical sensibility that placed the dignity of the Iraqi citizen foremost in mind. Meanwhile, the chief intellectual current in the military was the perspective contained in the Army and Marine Corps' new field manual on counterinsurgency.
Upon returning from Iraq in the summer of 2008, I read a just-published Perspectives on Politics symposium on the counterinsurgency manual. The discussion, and especially the contribution of Stathis Kalyvas, spurred a reconsideration of the official frames I had carried into Baghdad. The symposium also pushed me to expand my reading beyond normative political theory to include empirical works by such scholars as Kalyvas, Elinor Ostrom, and Fotini Christia as well. Jeff Isaac and Ian Shapiro served as my examples of political theorists who engaged with empirical political science in their work, the former through his work with this journal (disclosure: he was also my teacher and the supervisor of my dissertation, a comparison of the ethical and political theories of Jürgen Habermas and Pope John Paul II) and the latter through his advocacy of a “problem-oriented” approach to political inquiry.
Prior to deployment, I had accepted the stylized story that the “insurgents” and the Iraqi government were competing for the support of the Iraqi “population.” Our role as soldiers was to support the government, and our main difficulty would be distinguishing the “anti-Iraq forces” from the rest of the population. This counterinsurgency narrative failed to encompass much of the politics that my soldiers encountered.
Once in Iraq, we soon detected the possibility of becoming pawns in a series of private disputes and personal agendas. For instance, a local Iraqi citizen would approach our patrol to—conveniently—denounce another fellow citizen as either a member of “JAM” (the Shia militia Jaish al-Mahdi) or as a member of Al Qaeda. Kalyvas, as early as 2003, had amply described how these private conflicts playing out at the local level were an integral part of civil wars, but we as army leaders had not read him. The U.S. military had limited its predeployment training to a rather simplified view of the master cleavage (i.e., the Iraqi government versus the insurgents) and considered these local, private conflicts to be epiphenomenal. Sorting through these local cleavages and attendant denunciations and counterdenunciations was a daily preoccupation. On a larger scale, the American military would learn that the war between “the government” and “the insurgents” was only one of many conflicts playing out in Iraq—whether within or among various citizen factions, tribes, local governments, or national ministries. Exposure to and meditation on Kalyvas's work would have been helpful preparation.
My soldiers also routinely distributed money, whether to local entrepreneurs or businessmen bidding for contracts, to stimulate economic growth and garner support for the Iraqi government. Apart from wondering whether these disbursals would achieve their intended aims, we detected that the program was susceptible to exploitation despite adherence to established oversight and contracting procedures. I later came to understand that the unintended and deleterious effects we worried about were precisely those catalogued in 2005 by Clark Gibson and Elinor Ostrom, among others, as collective-action problems. Information and motivational asymmetries predictably generate stock pathologies, such as free-riding, moral hazard, and adverse selection. But we as military professionals had not been exposed to the clarifying logic of institutional analysis. On a larger scale, these same pathologies would pervade other military endeavors, including the raising and training of a host nation's security forces, as well as the conduct of partnered combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Given the tremendous waste amply documented in reports issued by the Special Inspectors General for Iraq and Afghanistan Reconstruction, institutional analysis is a fit topic for military professionals.
Finally, we had deployed with the dictum that “cultural awareness” and “cultural sensitivity” were central to winning the allegiance of the Iraqi people. But we would learn, individually and as a U.S. military force, that raw power calculations—extrinsic of culture and identity—oftentimes matter more, just as Fotini Christia found to be the historical case in Bosnia (1940s and 1990s) and Afghanistan (1980s and 1990s). Side-switching among armed groups, as occurred during the Sunni “Awakening,” is a common occurrence in civil wars and, as Jesse Driscoll argues, a principal mechanism for civil war termination. But those scholars who study rebel-group dynamics receive no attention in Fort Leavenworth's classrooms despite the prevalence of armed groups and militias in contemporary conflicts. Military professionals should learn how to analyze a conflict in terms of i) identities and narratives to be interpreted and ii) a structural and institutional obstacle course comprising a set of incentives, constraints, costs, benefits, and anticipated payoffs. Although scholars are free to choose between interpretive and positivist modes of inquiry, the military officer cannot. He or she must ask both “What does this story or practice mean?” and “Who benefits?”
My approach to integrating political science into military education at Fort Leavenworth centered on a fundamental question: how to intervene responsibly in a world wherein military action so often engenders surprising or ambiguous political outcomes? This question became the theme around which a group of adventurous, trusting, and hardworking military officers organized their inquiry into causal literacy and ethics. Apart from reading the political scientists of conflict and war, my students studied the merits and demerits of political science with Ian Shapiro, causal logics with Craig Parsons, ethical and political complexity with William Connolly, stories of peoplehood with Rogers Smith, politics and language with Murray Edelman, political judgment with Linda Zerilli, semiotic practices with Lisa Wedeen, and logics of critical explanation with David Howarth and Jason Glynos.
My students assiduously worked through unfamiliar empirical and theoretical prose, diagrammed complementary and competing causal claims on whiteboards, and argued with each other about the extent to which these claims apply to historical and contemporary conflicts. These students used political science to expand and fill out their “furniture of the world” view of how lethal power, politics, economics, identity, and ethics combine to form tough problems for military and political leaders. It was not uncommon for seasoned combat veterans—upon reading someone like Peter Krause, Roland Paris, or Fotini Christia—to remark, “I wish I had read this before going to Iraq [or Afghanistan].” To hear these responses was simultaneously satisfying … and troubling.
U.S. Army doctrine instructs that land forces exist to help set conditions for conflict termination. The problem is that mid-career military education focuses on military doctrine, military organization, and military history, and—consequently—military conditions. Yet the conditions for ending violence are not merely—or even principally—military. They are political, economic, and cultural as well. The experience of Iraq 2003 makes this point clear.
During an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations on February 11, 2014, the U.S. Army's chief of staff, General Raymond Odierno, observed: “The thing I learned most—and I always use Iraq as an example. When we went into Iraq in 2003, we did everything that we wanted to do. We very quickly removed the regime. We gained control of the population. We had no idea or clue of the societal devastation that had gone on inside of Iraq and what would push back on us. We didn't even think about it until we got in there. So we can't allow that to happen again.”
For a two-and-a-half-year span, I trained 45 security professionals to cultivate a fine-tuned appreciation for how the application of military power affects sociopolitical dynamics and vice versa. The idea was to develop in military officers the ability to advise higher-level military and political leaders about whether the conditions for conflict termination are aborning, or whether they are in danger of slipping away.
The sustained application of political science in one military classroom has yielded tangible results. Front-line troopers, logisticians, and staff officers who have returned from their operational deployments eagerly credit the Local Dynamics of War (LDW) experience for improving their work overseas (as do their supervisors). Students who have gone on to other army schools report on LDW’s ample comparative advantage in teaching students how to understand the interplay between lethal and sociopolitical dynamics. Several students have published versions of their LDW papers in military-professional outlets. Most importantly, all 45 students believe that the LDW program should not only continue but also grow. There is much written about how difficult it is to traverse the theory–practice bridge; however, political scientists should know that a handful of very talented military professionals are waving books by Erica Chenoweth and Fotini Christia around with professional endorsement … and these officers want more.
Marc Lynch argues that the political scientist's contribution to the ethical enterprise is to get the causal story right. Given the contestability of most social-scientific claims, Lynch's vision of the “right” causal story is ambitious. But he is right insofar as political scientists very much do contribute to the world a large and growing bank of compelling causal stories. Just war theorists and military practitioners can use this bank of causal theories—whether they be complementary or competing—to usefully complicate their thinking. War's Ends suggests that Murphy may be open to reading Lynch and his fellow social scientists. It is necessary, too, that military professionals be similarly postured. A 2012 study, called for by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sought to discern the principal lessons learned from this century’s first decade of war. The number-one shortcoming was a “failure to recognize, acknowledge, and accurately define the operational environment.” A similar study by the RAND Corporation in 2014 found that military professionals failed to appreciate the “inability of technology to substitute for the sociocultural and historical knowledge needed to inform understanding of the conflict, formulation of strategy, and timely assessment.”
If Lynch is right, political scientists have done their part. How will military professionals respond?
