Ground Truth

The Moral Component in Contemporary British Warfare

Frank Ledwidge, Helen Parr, Aaron Edwards, Frank Ledwidge, Helen Parr, Aaron Edwards

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781350335516
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350335530
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Shortlisted for The Society for Army Historical Research's 2024 Templer Medal for best first book.

After twenty years of almost unbroken wars of choice, the ethical deficiencies in the operational conduct of war by Western armed forces have largely been ignored by scholarly critique. This volume addresses these deficiencies, featuring analysis by some of the UK's leading academics and military veterans working in the fields of military ethics and contemporary conflict.

Compiled in honour of Colonel David Benest OBE, a soldier-scholar who believed that ethics should be central to an effective military education, the book focuses on problems ranging from the practicalities of how to conduct a counterinsurgency campaign in one of the most challenging combat zones in the world to the failure to account properly for defeat during military conflicts. This important volume explores critical questions perennially raised about the role of the military in a democratic society and the extent to which its ideals are compromised in fighting wars of choice.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One David Benest’s legacy
• 1 ‘Not the British way of doing business’: Atrocities in military operations and how to avoid them
• 2 The military virtues: David Benest and David Fisher on when soldiers turn bad
• 3 Legal accountability at the tactical level and the Overseas Operations Act
• Part Two Legal and moral accountability
• 4 The Iraq war crimes allegations and the investigative conundrum
• 5 From forgetting to institutional failure: The army as a non-learning organization
• 6 Accountability, responsibility and culpability: Are British senior officers truly ‘professional’?
• Part Three Combat realities
• 7 The operational design for Nad-e-Ali South, Afghanistan, 2011
• 8 Killing over winning: How fluid ethics turned success into failure for Britain’s special forces
• 9 Must liberal democracies compromise their values in order to defeat insurgencies?
• Part Four Myths, stories and memory
• 10 The lonely death of Highlander Scott McLaren
• 11 Military myths
• 12 Remembering the British soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan
• Bibliography
• Authors’ biographies
• Index
• Copyright