Book Review - New Wars and New Soldiers: Military Ethics in the Contemporary World by Paolo Tripodi and Jessica Wolfendale (eds)
Written by: Paolo Tripodi and Jessica Wolfendale
Ashgate, Farnham Surrey, UK and Burlington, VT, 2011
ISBN 9781409401056, 296 pp,
Reviewed by: Dr Lacy Pejcinovic
There is a tendency in current academic literature dealing with war, conflict and violence to assume that there have been fundamental shifts in the political, military, economic and social fabric of the international system since the turn of the millennium. Books and articles that seek to tell us what exactly has changed and how are increasing exponentially. However, what is lacking is scholarship that questions the impact of these changes on the moral and ethical foundations of the modern world. That is, how do modern conflicts pose challenges to our understandings about the ethics of war, to the traditional legal and theoretical foundations that have governed the recourse to war for centuries? Moreover, while a few well-renowned authors tackle such questions, very few have in mind a military audience and hence do not consider the role and needs of modern military personnel. New Wars and New Soldiers goes a long way to redressing this balance and presenting important insights into military ethics in the contemporary era.
This is a far-reaching book, a product of a workshop held in Australia and funded by the Australian Research Council and GovNet. The academics, military officers and members of the general public who participated in this workshop sought to ask questions about the ethical issues in modern combat. This is clear from the way in which the individual chapters are connected by an overarching interest in how military forces should employ force. According to the editors, ‘in environments that were significantly different from traditional battlefields—environments no longer characterized by a simple friend–enemy dichotomy but complicated by large numbers of civilians whose status as friend or foe, innocent or non-innocent, could be very unclear’. Within this framework, military ethics now embraces not only the ethics of traditional war, but the ethics of the ‘nature, conduct and moral dilemmas’ faced by individual soldiers in negotiating the new terrain of global conflict, the threat of international terrorism, autonomous weapons systems, and the reinvigorated use of private military or security agents. New Wars and New Soldiers embraces the multi-disciplinary approach necessary to address the ethical concerns found in issues as broad as these themes, which means we see, throughout the chapters, a combination of philosophical, historical, theoretical, scientific, and legal reasoning used to interrogate the ethical questions at hand.
The book has five sections. Section I deals with the relevance of Just War Theory to modern combat. Is the normative framework of Just War suitable for assessing modern conflict including the threat of international terrorism? Or, do modern wars render the moral constraints of the Just War obsolete or even dangerous? Following from these questions, each of the chapters, consciously or subconsciously, addresses the question of whether new or different aspects of war constitute a reason to revise or loosen the constraints of Just War Theory.
Section II deals with the ethical questions of humanitarian intervention. Since the 1990s military forces have increasingly been used in ‘operations that did not resemble conventional battlefields’. Given the acknowledged shifting role of military forces in many Western countries, including Australia, to combine both traditional warfighting functions with humanitarian, development, and reconstruction roles, the questions and issues raised in this section are of particular interest to an Australian audience and should be carefully read and debated at all levels. These include an evaluation of the appropriate level of risk an intervener should carry out to save a civilian, and the moral obligation or duty of a state to intervene in crisis situations. This last point engages the relationship between ‘assistance’ and ‘duty’ in the common parlance of states and individuals in a morally ambiguous situation.
Section III interrogates the ethical implications of modern weapons systems. From long-distance weaponry, to robotics and unmanned weapons systems, this section asks some of the toughest ethical questions in the book. The ethics of killing-at-distance is not a new issue for the study of war. Medieval warriors fought an ethical battle over the use of the bow and arrow within the framework of the Chivalric Code that governed conflict between principalities and kingdoms up until the early seventeenth century. They sought to ban the use of the bow and arrow in warfare because it removed not only the skill involved in killing a man in combat, but it allowed anonymity in killing which was antithetical to the honour, glory and courage associated with medieval knights. Are we facing a similar ethical issue with modern unmanned or autonomous technology? Robert Sparrow comments in chapter seven when he writes about robotic weapons in war, particularly unmanned weapons systems (UMS), that ‘it is hard not to think that by distancing warfighters from the consequences of their actions, both geographically and emotionally, UMS will make it more likely that the operators of Robotic Weapons will make the decision to kill too lightly.’
Section IV is concerned with new actors in the battlefield—mercenaries, corporate private military companies, state military forces, anthropologists, researchers, and journalists. In a particularly interesting chapter Uwe Steinhoff asks whether being or acting as a mercenary per se is immoral. His conclusion is that mercenaries are no worse than regular soldiers in modern warfare. They are all employed to fight wars and understand the risks involved with such a profession. Their sources of income might differ as may their inherent motivations, but as individual actors mercenaries are no different from regular soldiers. However, the widespread use and deployment of mercenaries and the private military companies which employ them may have more negative consequences. Similarly, George R Lucas has studied the programs of embedding non-military personnel in combat situations, with a specific focus on civilian ‘social scientists’ employed through the US Army’s ‘Human Terrain System’. Envisaged as a project to assist ground forces with navigating the cultural, linguistic, and human dimensions of a battlefield, ethical questions arise when you combine the complex problem of professional ethics interwoven with a ‘wider moral debate over the justification of America’s “irregular” wars in Iraq and Afghanistan’. How should the legitimacy of a given conflict influence the behaviour of professionals involved in the conflict?
Finally Section V analyses the ethical challenges of individual soldiers on the battlefield, in particular those involved in counterinsurgency operations. The chapters engage with moral reasoning, behaviour and decision-making at the individual level, and in particular how the ‘military culture’ and ‘mindset’ can impact on this. Because of the association of ethical and moral reasoning with individuals, it is these chapters where the more nuanced philosophical and theoretical questions are raised. For example, under what circumstances may an individual who is not predisposed to evil commit an act of evil? According to Paolo Tripodi in chapter eleven, ‘atrocities by situation’ can not only be explained by the inherent predisposition of an individual, but must take into account the nature of the ‘evil zone’ in which they are placed. This is a zone where multiple forces are in play—sights, smells, noises, fear, living conditions, and the more abstract sociological, psychological and emotional. The combination of these factors may lead an individual to choose a course of action they know is wrong.
An obvious omission in what is otherwise a very interesting and thought provoking collection of papers is a conclusion which finishes the project as a book rather than a slightly longer special edition of an academic journal. As mentioned, Paolo Tripodi and Jessica Wolfendale set out to show how military ethics was challenged by a range of developments in modern warfare and some final concluding remarks would have been useful to summarise the critical advancements made by the chapters in the book. Nonetheless, this is an essential book for those in the military profession or for research and teaching academics interested in the vast array of ethical questions being asked about modern conflict.
