The long wars of the early twenty-first century have re-inspired just war thinking in our era, just as the Vietnam War sparked Michael Walzer to pen Just and Unjust Wars (1977), leading to a reinvigoration of the academic debate about the ethics of war conducted more than 40 years ago. The challenges of this generation’s counterinsurgency wars in particular have raised practical questions about what tactics work best in such conflicts, as well as what the ethical implications of such tactics might be. Marcus Schulzke takes on these weighty issues from an essential, but relatively unexplored, angle by examining how the military ethics education of the American, British, and Israeli forces maps on to the real-life ethical challenges those forces have faced.
Drawing on an analysis of military publications and interviews with some 90 soldiers in three countries—the United States, Great Britain, and Israel—Schulzke develops a clear theoretical framework to compare the approaches to military ethics taken by each state, a device that enables a systematic comparison of the three. The US Army, he argues, uses a “rule-bounded virtue ethics” approach, emphasizing the importance of good character for good ethical decision making (p. 75). This approach frees soldiers to seize the initiative and to make independent decisions, but this very freedom sometimes leaves soldiers unsure as to what they should do in certain cases. American soldiers reported feeling a mismatch between the values taught in training, which were framed to address conventional warfare, and the counterinsurgency campaigns in which they found themselves. Furthermore, because virtue ethics are transmitted primarily through social interactions, the quality of leadership becomes an essential determinant of the ethical behavior of subordinates, meaning that ethical standards may vary between units. Lastly, a virtue ethics approach leads many soldiers to feel a sense of moral exceptionalism vis à vis civilians both at home and abroad, which can lead to a troubling lack of empathy.
Although aspects of virtue ethics can also be found in the British approach to military ethics, Schulzke finds that British soldiers are encouraged to “make decisions with an eye to what will be most effective in achieving political objectives” (p. 5). Drawing on experiences from past counterinsurgency efforts, British soldiers exercise restraint not necessarily because it is the right thing to do, but because they believe it works. This pragmatic approach has certain benefits in counterinsurgency warfare, encouraging restraint and respect for cultural differences. Indeed, British soldiers felt prepared, ethically and practically, for the sorts of missions they were asked to undertake during counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, when real-life conditions on the ground did not match those for which the principles were developed—when British forces were too few in number or the local civilian population was inclined to be hostile—British soldiers reported feeling simultaneously unsure about what action would be appropriate and trapped by overly restrictive rules. One might also question whether a restraint that emerges from a sense that it works tactically can truly be called an ethical approach at all, a point Schulzke could have perhaps explored in even greater depth.
Schulzke describes the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as using a deontological approach to military ethics, inculcating soldiers with a strict set of rules. Interestingly, Schulzke finds that Israeli soldiers more clearly remember their ethics classroom training than do their American and British counterparts and that they are practiced at conversations surrounding the ethical implications of their actions. However, the degree to which these rules minimize harm against civilians is somewhat offset by the pervasive sense within the IDF that every war Israel faces is an “existential crisis,” triggering an ethical analysis akin to Michael Walzer’s “supreme emergency” concept (p. 154).
Schulzke’s study moves beyond an analysis of the theoretical approaches to military ethics taken in each country to a discussion of how soldiers encounter these ethical structures. Drawing on interviews with soldiers, Schulzke attempts to tease out how much these theoretical approaches to ethics affect how soldiers think and behave. To this end, Schulzke is interested both in exploring how military ethics are taught (and what soldiers recall of that experience) and in piecing together how soldiers attempt to apply those ethical frameworks in practice. He finds that soldiers across the board face situational constraints on their ability to put ethics into practice, particularly because of “epistemic challenges associated with clearly identifying enemy combatants” (p. 45). Although all the militaries in the study experienced this problem to some extent, American soldiers in particular faced a troubling disjuncture between their training and the situations in which they found themselves in Afghanistan and Iraq. The virtues and rules they had learned were designed with conventional conflicts in mind and were not easily and straightforwardly adaptable to the challenges of counterinsurgency.
The implications of Shulzke’s book for those interested in the more theoretical side of just war thinking are evident. He writes, “An ethic that fails to account for [situational and cognitive] constraints would hold soldiers to unreasonable standards and fail to provide effective guidance” (p. 45). Effective rules must be clear and easily understandable, but must also be practicable. Rules that are overly constraining or that require access to information that soldiers simply cannot reliably acquire in combat are likely to be ignored.
Another implication of Schulzke’s study of particular interest to just war thinkers is his finding that the fear of feeling guilty in the future leads soldiers to exercise more restraint, whether by holding fire or by choosing to expose themselves to more danger, rather than risking civilian lives. Thus, moral emotions appear to play a significant role as motivators of ethical action in the real world and, hence, are worthy of further study.
Finally, Schulzke also finds cross-national agreement that self-defense is of primary importance. Civilian protection, in practice, is often ranked as more important than combating insurgents but not as important as self-defense. This suggests that, regardless of the ethical training soldiers receive, many rank these three disparate goods in the same way: self-preservation as primary, protection of civilians as secondary, and the killing of the enemy as tertiary. Future research into the origins and robustness of this moral hierarchy could be fruitful.
In an ideal world, Shulzke might have conducted even more interviews, particularly because drawing on a random sample is not possible. However, this small methodological shortcoming should not discourage those interested in the interplay between theory and practice in the world of military ethics from reading this fascinating book. As a work probing the adequacy of military ethics training in preparing soldiers to face the intense challenges of counterinsurgency warfare, Shulzke’s book provides rich food for thought for those interested in both ethical and practical questions.
