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COMMENTARY:
Battlefield Ethics
May 14, 2007 Episode no. 1037
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Paul Robinson is an associate professor in public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of MILITARY HONOUR AND THE CONDUCT OF WAR: FROM ANCIENT GREECE TO IRAQ (Routledge,
2006), and he has served as an officer in both the British and Canadian
armies:
One partial explanation for the willingness expressed by U.S. personnel to torture Iraqis in order to help their comrades lies in the emphasis military training places on "primary group cohesion." This rests on the theory, popularized after the Second World War by combat historian S.L.A. Marshall, that soldiers will not fight for abstract principles such as freedom, democracy, etc. or for larger communities, such as their country, but will fight for those who are close to them. If they can be bonded into very tight small groups, they will be more afraid of looking bad in front of their comrades than of the enemy, and so will stand and fight and not run away.
This thinking has led Western armed forces to put great efforts into creating small group cohesion and into fostering a sense of comradeship among troops. This has been extremely successful. The problem with it, however, is that some soldiers will come to identify so closely with their immediate comrades that they will put the interests of those comrades above all else: thus their willingness to torture others to help those closest to them.
Primary group cohesion as a means of combat motivation makes some sense in a traditional combat environment. In "operations other than war," it seems less appropriate. I would suggest, therefore, that consideration ought to be given to widening what anthropologists refer to as the "honour group" to give soldiers a more cosmopolitan sense of their identity.
The argument against this would be that it would weaken combat motivation. However, that may not actually be the case. Historians now widely believe that S.L.A. Marshall fabricated his research results. In other words, the whole theory of small group cohesion as a necessary basis for combat motivation is based upon fraudulent research. A cosmopolitan military ethic might well be perfectly compatible with combat motivation.
A.J. Coates is a lecturer in politics at the University of Reading and the author of THE ETHICS OF WAR (Manchester University Press, 1997):
The recent Pentagon survey findings of an Army mental health advisory team are revealing though not all that surprising, given the extreme and specific demands of the war in Iraq.
The report stresses the need for training based on "Soldiers' Rules" to improve the ethical behavior of troops. While not discounting the importance of rules, the role of the military (and wider) culture in the moral formation of soldiers also needs to be stressed. The problem with a rules-based approach is that it can lead to the neglect of those moral dispositions that determine whether war is fought ethically or not. The virtues that encourage the ethical conduct of war need to be cultivated and the vices that breed unethical conduct rooted out. Much ethical debate about war seems to take the belligerent's ability to apply rules for granted, but without the appropriate disposition, rules may remain inapplicable or unworkable.
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Differences of conduct in wars are discernible (e.g. the conduct of
US troops in the European sector in World War II appears to have been more ethical than their conduct in the Pacific), and they may be accounted for (partly) by prevailing cultural values and assumptions (the European enemy was not dehumanized). Perhaps a place ought to be found in military training (it may be there already) for comparative ethics and for the study of the impact of diverse military and moral cultures on the conduct of war. In the case of Iraq, for example, what effect (if any) does the difference between US and British military cultures have upon the conduct of troops?
The Pentagon survey notes a difference between the morale of soldiers and Marines. This suggests that the impact even of very particular (corps) cultures can be decisive. Similar claims have been made about the regimental system in the British army, some branches of the army being seen as better equipped than others for a policing role (e.g. in Northern Ireland).
From an ethical standpoint, the Army team's stress on the need for "theatre-specific" training seems very well founded. Different kinds of war make different moral demands. Upholding the immunity of noncombatants is much easier in some wars than it is in others; the greater the difficulty, the greater the need for relevant moral habits and dispositions among the soldiery.
Tolerance of torture and the mistreatment of prisoners are not surprising, given the semi-official sanctioning of "torture" as part of an effective counter-terrorist strategy. There is real danger of crossing a moral threshold here, the impact of which on the ethical conduct of war (in this and other respects) would be very damaging.
Who "owns" ethics in battle? Given the influence of the wider culture on the conduct of our troops (especially in a democracy), we could say that we all do. They represent us in more ways than one. More immediately, however, in a hierarchical and authoritarian organization like the Army, the role of the officer (and NCO) must be decisive. That role needs to be exercised in exemplary fashion if an ethical framework of war is to be preserved.
Sometimes the case for acting unethically is made on strategic grounds or on grounds of military necessity. Therefore, it seems worth stressing that, particularly in an operation like the one in Iraq, the ethical conduct of war is a strategic as well as a moral imperative.
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