The Warrior, Military Ethics and Contemporary Warfare

Achilles Goes Asymmetrical

Pauline M. Kaurin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317011767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Military Science & Technology
• Index: Technology & Engineering

When it comes to thinking about war and warriors, first there was Achilles, and then the rest followed. The choice of the term warrior is an important one for this discussion. While there has been extensive discussion on what counts as military professionalism, that is what makes a soldier, sailor or other military personnel a professional, the warrior archetype (varied for the various roles and service branches) still holds sway in the military self-conception, rooted as it is in the more existential notions of war, honor and meaning. In this volume, Kaurin uses Achilles as a touch stone for discussing the warrior, military ethics and the aspects of contemporary warfare that go by the name of 'asymmetrical war.' The title of the book cuts two ways-Achilles as a warrior archetype to help us think through the moral implications and challenges posed by asymmetrical warfare, but also as an archetype of our adversaries to help us think about asymmetric opponents.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Hector, stop!

You unforgivable, you … don’t talk to me of pacts

There are no binding oaths between men and lions—

wolves and lambs can enjoy no meeting of the minds—

they are all bent on hating each other to the death.

So with you and me. No love between us.¹

Achilles and the Contemporary Warrior

What is a warrior? In Shannon French’s book Code of the Warrior, she relates her students’ (midshipmen and women at the US Naval Academy) perspective on this question; they responded that their idea of the perfect warrior is a Hector (from Homer’s The Iliad) who wins.¹ Despite this fact, and despite the fact that there are many heroes throughout world literature, art and film that capture our imagination, throughout the millennia since Homer wrote The Iliad, no figure has captured the imagination about the warrior and war like Achilles. Generations of warriors and soldiers have carried with them and read The Iliad, have invoked, admired and hated Achilles as no other figure. French’s students’ preference for a victorious Hector, reflects their reaction against Achilles and his (in their eyes) dishonorable behavior, even as they admire his military prowess and success. When it comes to thinking about war and warriors, first there was Achilles, and then the rest followed.

The choice of the term warrior is an important one for this discussion. There is a substantial literature on the idea of the warrior, as distinct from the soldier or members of the military more generally, and I am intentionally situating my discussion in terms of that debate.² While there has been extensive discussion on what counts as military professionalism, that is what makes a soldier, sailor or other military personnel a professional, the warrior archetype or ethos (varied for the various roles and service branches) still holds sway in the military self-conception, rooted as it is in the more existential notions of war, honor, identity and meaning. A cursory look at what the military says about itself on websites, their own training materials and in interviews with military personnel confirms that this is quite strongly the case, even as it seems that the mission of the military is no longer restricted to the conventional combat model.

In this volume, I appeal to Achilles as a touch stone for discussing the warrior, military ethics and the aspects of contemporary warfare that go by the name of “asymmetrical war” (AW). This is not because I think of Achilles as some kind of moral archetype or paragon of warrior virtue that one ought to follow; in fact, there are many aspects of Achilles’ approach to war and behavior that any military ethicist would and should shudder at the thought of contemporary warriors emulating. So then why appeal to Achilles? First, Achilles echoes more clearly than any other figure the existential aspects of war and the warrior; war is not a job for him, not a wise career choice, it informs and circumscribes his very being and personal identity. I will argue that any attempts to come to grips with the ethical aspects of asymmetric warfare that ignore this aspect of war and the warrior are bound to be incomplete. Where there is a gulf between the ethical demands placed upon warriors and their lived experience of war, we do and will find significant ethical breakdowns.

Second, for better or worse, Achilles does encapsulate many of the warrior virtues and dispositions that are important to war: loyalty, courage, honor, resistance to the misuse of political authority, independence of judgment and raw physical power as the currency of killing, suffering and honor. Achilles demonstrates the self-reliance and prowess that warriors across the ages have connected to and which frame how we think about the warrior.

Third, we also look to Achilles because from the very beginning Western society and philosophers reflecting on war have tried to come to terms with Achilles in thinking about the place of war and warrior as part of a society and its larger moral and political discourse. From Plato’s dialogue Laches, where he tries to come to terms with the idea that wisdom is central to courage; to Athenian critiques of their foes the Lacemodonians (Spartans) as excessively devoted to war and the view of courage that went with it; to Nietzsche’s resistance to philosophy and Western culture’s attempt to domesticate the warrior, thinkers have been trying to come to terms with the Achilles and the warrior archetype and where it belongs relative to the larger society. To what extent is the warrior a servant of the State and/or the military? To what extent (if at all) do we expect the warrior to exercise independent moral judgment and to execute his art and craft consistent with his own integrity and sense of honor? The debates over Selective Conscientious Objection and the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell highlight that contemporary society, military personnel and thinkers are still wrestling with these same questions.

Finally, though Achilles fought long ago and in a context (political, military, social) that might seem very removed from the kind of war that contemporary soldiers and militaries engage in with its focus on organization, technology, chain of command, I argue it is very much shared by those groups and individuals who are the typical adversary in asymmetrical war as we see it in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. If we want to see the future, we need to look at the past and Achilles is a brilliant and clear window into what to expect. The question then becomes, not: how to fight like Achilles but rather: how to fight Achilles? In this regard, the title of the book cuts two ways—Achilles as a warrior archetype to help us think through the moral implications and challenges posed by asymmetrical warfare, but also as an archetype of our adversaries to help us think through to fight these asymmetric opponents.

Integration of Theoretical Moral Concerns and Moral Education

This volume takes the approach, unusual in books about military ethics, of integrating the moral questions about the justification and conduct of warfare and questions about the moral education and training of soldiers. Military ethics typically deals with three areas: 1) the nature of the military and military professionalism (including discussions of moral education and training); 2) the nature and morality of war (jus ad bellum in the JWT); and 3) moral questions related to the just use of force (jus in bello in the JWT).³ Since the end of the Vietnam conflict and the publication and significant influence in military circles of Michael Walzer’s book Just and Unjust Wars, JWT has occupied important conceptual space in military ethics; the book and the issues in it are taught at the military academies and dealt with in officer education at the command level. In the last several decades, there have been important debates and discussions about the intersections of professionalism and the morality of war, and more recently about the intersections of jus ad bellum and jus in bello within the JWT.⁴ These more conceptual discussions, both in this book and in military ethics more generally, provide the foundation for the more practical, applied questions of action.

Many books in this field devote most of their time to the questions of the Just War Tradition (JWT)—to the ethical use of force and whether and under what circumstances the resort to force is ethical in the first place. There are many excellent volumes in this vein, some of which have and are taking up the question of how asymmetrical war changes or effects these ethical conversations.⁵ There are other volumes, much fewer in number, which take up the issue of the theoretical basis of military ethics and then address training and moral education issues within the context of that framework and related considerations.⁶ In the latter, there is much less attention paid to the question of asymmetrical war, taking the view that war is war from an ethical point of view, and that whatever version of military ethics and moral education being argued for applies to war. It follows on this line of thought that discussions about how to proceed in the case of asymmetrical war is a subset of these moral general discussions, or at most warranting a chapter or two or a couple of cases/illustrations. I take the position that the discussions of the ethical conduct and resort to war must be integrated with and are interconnected with discussions about the basis of military ethics and how such ethics are to be inculcated (moral education).

The Just War Tradition in the West has centered on the idea that war is an activity conducted, not by individuals acting on their behalf and out of their own interests, but by groups and individuals who are acting as agents of, and in the interests of a political community—normally the State or something like it. While this might seem an obvious point, it has not so obvious moral implications. If the agents of the State are to act, to restrict their application of violence in ways consistent with the requirements of this framework, then there must be an awareness of as well as explicit education in and training undergirded by the moral ideas and principles which ground the Just War Tradition. These ideas and principles need to be understood and committed to by those who are waging war, which means that they must be an integral and deep part of their training and moral education as well as their lived moral experience of war in order to be more than abstract principles or rules that are jettisoned as soon as things get messy. If it is not possible for these moral requirements to be organically and seriously integrated into our practices of war, then we would need to rethink how seriously we take the moral justification of war and whether it really carries any moral weight. Therefore, if it is to have moral weight, it must be integrated with questions about training and moral education, and concerns about training and moral education must also permeate our discussions of jus ad bellum (justice of the war), jus in bello (just conduct) and jus post bellum (justice after the war) requirements of the Just War Tradition.

In opposition to this line of argument, some argue that jus ad bellum/jus post bellum and jus in bello considerations are conceptually different—the former the domain of political leadership, the latter the domain of the military.⁷ Discussions about the Just War Tradition commonly seem to operate on this assumption, but there is plenty of criticism of this view; criticisms that suggest that the different components of the theory are interrelated. Most of the focus of this book, however, will be the interrelation between jus in bello and moral education and training—a more straightforward connection. There are clear implications for jus ad bellum/jus post bellum coming out of these discussions, which even one who argues they are conceptually distinct would concede. Further, even if the argument that they are conceptually distinct with regard to the conventional picture holds, this seems to break down when we get to asymmetrical war—where the political and military are intertwined, and not distinct in any meaningful way, as we will see in what follows in this chapter, but also in Chapter 10.

In addition, this book takes up the lack of a systematic approach to moral questions in asymmetric war or in conflicts with significant asymmetric aspects. In recent years, we have begun to see some ethical treatments of specific issues and questions that arise more in AW: collateral damage and the application of the Principle of Discrimination, torture and other interrogational practices, whether non state actors could have legitimate authority, the moral justification of terrorism and humanitarian interventions, to name only a few. However, these discussions have typically occurred in the context of the Just War Tradition as conceived relative to conventional war. These issues may seen as pushing the boundaries of that context, raising questions about whether and how changes need to be made to the Just War Tradition in order to deal with these issues within the already existing framework; a framework based centrally on a picture of warfare as conventional, between state actors and involving conventional militaries operating in largely conventional ways and contexts, perhaps with certain “exceptions” for the issues noted above.

At the end of the day, I think this approach is showing itself to be flawed and incomplete because it fails to take seriously the depth and centrality of the ethical challenges in asymmetrical war. I argue that we need to think through, in a cohesive, consistent and systematic way the ethical challenges posed by AW, which center on the issue of moral asymmetry. Moral asymmetry relates to the differences in moral practices and the moral norms that undergird those strategies and tactics the parties of the conflict are willing to utilize in war. For example, one party is willing to torture captured combatants or disregard the claim that one ought to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants, while the other side (because of public opinion, political will and their roots in the moral principles and commitments held by that society) cannot or will not reciprocate. Michael Gross makes much of this inability to reciprocate because he thinks that it is this threat and danger of reciprocity or retaliation in kind that keeps the war conventions and rules largely in force in conventional conflicts and allows the rules to work.⁸

I take a deeper slice on Gross’s insight about moral asymmetry to make the case that in asymmetrical war there is an intentional subverting of the accepted moral and normative paradigm of war, as another weapon of war along with the physical weaponry and other tactics. In this case, the greater the moral shock, the greater the subversion of the accepted moral paradigm, the greater the impact on the other side, the more effective it is as a weapon. As we shall see below, one of the hallmarks of AW is the use of tactics that have impact of effects disproportionate to their expected effects. In a standard conventional context the crashing of one helicopter and the capture, killing and making a public spectacle (on CNN) of the bodies of a handful of soldiers would seem minor in the context of an overall war where thousands may be killed, but in the asymmetric context of the war in Somalia in 1992, it was a decisive event that had the profound effect of reversing US policy and arguably changing the course of the conflict, as well as other events in the area. Part of the reason for the impact of this seemingly small action was the moral asymmetry involved; the reaction in the US press was immediate, horrified and intense: Get out of Somalia. Now.

Part of why moral asymmetry is so important to address and so difficult to deal with lies in the fact that, especially for the West, identity is tied up in perceived strengths, as military powers which observe certain moral requirements and restraints in the use of their considerable power.⁹ Not surprisingly, then, there is an unwillingness or inability to question these strengths because they are not simply tactics to be jettisoned for practical reasons, but deeply rooted existentially. Asking whether military prowess is the best solution to the problems we encounter; how we maintain our moral commitments; whether they can be maintained in the face of opposition that is not simply physical and material is not simply to ask practical questions, but is to question the very basis (at least for the Western developed democratic states) and purpose of war.

I am not suggest...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Courage
• 3 Loyalty
• 4 When Less is Not More: Expanding the Combatant/Non-Combatant Distinction
• 5 War and Risk: Non-Lethal Weapons and Unmanned Warfare
• 6 Rules of Rescue: Jus in Bello and Humanitarian Intervention
• 7 Reshaping Achilles: Warrior Ethos and Identity
• 8 The Education of Achilles: Moral Education for Asymmetric Contexts
• 9 War Stories: Narrative and Teaching Case Studies
• 10 Navigating the Great Divide
• Bibliography
• Index