Abu Ghraib

Seeing through the fog of war: the need for Professional Military Ethics Education

September 24, 2015 by Strife Staff

By Gwilym Williams:

A US soldier burns a Vietnamese dwelling during the My Lai massacre, 1968, when between 350 and 500 unarmed civilians were killed by US soldiers. The massacre is a common case study in current military ethics teaching. (Photo: Ronald L. Haeberle, US DoD, Wikimedia)

Modern warfare is not a straightforward business. Amidst the fog of war, combatants are expected to make life and death decisions, weigh up the possible consequences of their actions, and consider whether their actions are right or wrong, just or unjust, in a matter of seconds. Ill-defined enemies, the presence of civilians, and intense media scrutiny all make these decisions, and therefore combat, particularly complex on land, at sea, and in the air. An ethical understanding is vital is this context, with an effective Professional Military Ethical Education needed to help guide military personnel when making such decisions.

In recent conflicts, professional service personnel of Western militaries have carried out acts in contravention of the Laws of Armed Conflict. In Iraq, there was the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and the shooting of civilians and journalists in the infamous Wikileaks exposé dubbed ‘Collateral Murder’. In Afghanistan, there was the case of ‘Marine A’, convicted for the murder of a wounded enemy combatant.

Similarly, militaries are not exempt from the ongoing efforts to achieve equality and diversity in society. Scandals, such as the Deepcut deaths and allegations of abuse in Britain, and the revelations of rape within the U.S. military, are not only abhorrent events within themselves, but reflect very badly on the services as institutions, both domestically and abroad.

Henrik Syse and Martin L. Cook argued in 2010 that service personnel need to better understand the ethical demands of them, and the dilemmas they may face, so that they can act appropriately when faced with such situations.^[i] The very fact that the aforementioned examples have occurred represent ethical failures on the part of some individuals, and thereby vindicates Cook and Syse’s argument.

Even if someone does not carry out an act but allows it to occur or does nothing to stop it once it is happening, there would be serious questions as to whether they acted appropriately, or whether they made the wrong decision when also faced with an ethical dilemma. This is not to say, however, that all military personnel will fail when posed with an ethical challenge. But the existence of such abuses and failings demonstrates that individuals are capable of making the wrong choices.

Both national and international laws such as the Laws of Armed Conflict and International Humanitarian Law tell military personnel whether something is legally permitted. However, ethics helps to answer the question of whether someone should do something. Although this is a different type of question, it is singularly important, particularly when a decision is made when lives are at stake.

Yet the existing methods of equipping the military to deal with ethical challenges are often lacking. At present, by learning certain values and standards expected of those in the military, and how they should apply these values to any ethical situation they may encounter, most service personnel are ‘taught’ how to tackle such issues. Instead, service personnel should be encouraged to consider the reasons and rationale behind these virtues, and how they should apply them. Although a somewhat subtle difference, this ‘education’ could prompt widespread change, and better equip service personnel to deal with ethical challenges.

Many militaries have neither the resources nor infrastructure to deliver ethical education to those within their ranks, instead relying on foreign academics to deliver ethics education.^[ii] For example, one British academic has helped to deliver this education to the militaries of Baltic States, Brunei Darussalam, and Nigeria, amongst others.[iii] Whilst many countries are enthusiastic about the delivery of ethics education, other militaries have demonstrated a lack of interest in the matter, with the subject poorly, if at all, integrated into the curriculum, and the teaching only existing so that the military could be seen to deliver something on the issue.^[iv] Clearly, in these cases, service personnel can receive an inadequate level of ethical training to cope with the demands of the jobs they will face in the future.

At the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, British Officer Cadets are expected to gain an ethical framework by studying practical applied ethics via dilemmas presented both in the field and in the classroom.^[v] This framework is ultimately derived from the virtues set out in Values and Standards, a document designed to shape and guide the character of those in the British Army.^[vi]

Likewise, the other three services in the British Military (including the Royal Marines) have their own sets of values and standards. In the Army, these Values and Standards, together with the Laws of Armed Conflict are tested via Military Annual Training Tests (MATTs). Yet, having spoken to serving Army officers, many feel that all too often ethics education is reduced to being ‘a tick in a box’ – something to achieve before the end of the year.

Similarly, at West Point, the United States Military Academy, cadets are issued with cards detailing the seven virtues expected of American soldiers.^[vii] However, as J. Joseph Miller argues, this removes the virtues from any context, which limits the ultimate value of knowing these virtues.^[viii] In both the British and American systems, the risk of merely teaching service personnel ideal virtues in isolation is that whilst soldiers have an understanding of the virtues and characteristics that they should possess, they do not perhaps have a deep enough understanding of the reasoning behind these.

Whilst existing methods provide a good framework of virtues and standards, there is a danger that it instils a binary perspective on a dilemma – that is to say, there is a good or bad, right or wrong solution to an ethical challenge. As Patrick Mileham argues, ‘While principles can be taught, developing the ability to form moral judgements can only be achieved up to a point. That requires acute imagination and intelligence’.^[ix]

Thus, the current military ethics teaching needs to be developed into military ethics education. By helping service personnel to form their own moral judgments, rather than just regurgitating codes of conduct, those in the military will be better placed to understand the ethical aspects of decisions facing them both on operations and in day-to-day life.

Critics might argue that this suggestion is merely idealistic. Yet tools have been, and continue to be developed to achieve this aim. For example, the Norwegian military use playing cards to promote and normalise the discussion of ethical issues, and a similar project also utilising playing cards as learning aids to supplement existing ethics discussion and education, and to prompt more informal interest in the subject, is being undertaken at the Defence Studies Department of King’s College London. The Defence Studies Department is also exploring the possibility of delivering Professional Military Ethics Education via a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). This, however, requires both investment from militaries and academics, and uptake and implementation by military authorities so that the positive effects of this education can be as widespread as possible.

One caveat to note is that this is not an argument to suggest that service personnel should become high-level moral philosophers able to weigh up the pros and cons of Kantian ethics against utilitarianism. Nor is it trying to convince combatants to become pacifists and to lay down their arms. It is simply trying to improve the conduct with which wars are fought, and to ensure equality is achieved in everyday military life.

Ethical decisions are often difficult to make. But if Professional Military Ethics Education becomes widespread, service personnel should be better equipped to deal with the dilemmas and challenges which face them. And it is hoped that by having a greater understanding of these problems, military personnel will be able to make better decisions.

Gwilym Williams is an Undergraduate Research Fellow in the Centre of Military Ethics of the Defence Studies Department, King’s College London. He graduated from King’s in July 2015 with a BA in History, and is currently studying for an MA in War Studies at King’s College London.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Dr. David Whetham and the editors of Strife for their helpful and constructive comments on earlier drafts of this piece.

NOTES

^[i] Martin L. Cook and Henrik Syse, ‘What Should We Mean by ‘Military Ethics’, Journal of Military Ethics, vol. 9, no. 2, 2010, p119-120.

^[ii] David Whetham, ‘Expeditionary Ethics Education’, in George Lucas (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Military Ethics, (Routledge, Abingdon, 2015), p124.

[iii] Ibid. p124-125.

^[iv] Ibid. p127.

^[v] Stephen Deakin, ‘Education in an Ethos at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst’, in Nigel de Lee, Don Carrick, Paul Robinson (eds.), Ethics Education in the Military, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p16.

^[vi] Ibid. p23.

^[vii] J. Joseph Miller, ‘Squaring the circle: Teaching philosophical ethics in the military’, Journal of Military Ethics, vol. 3, no. 3, 2004, p202-203.

^[viii] Ibid. p204.

^[ix] Patrick Mileham, ‘Teaching Military Ethics in the British Armed Forces’, in Nigel de Lee, Don Carrick, Paul Robinson (eds.), Ethics Education in the Military, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p50.

Gender and the War on Terror

March 11, 2015 by Strife Staff

By Caroline Cottet:

Specialist Lynndie England holds an Iraqi detainee on a lead at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, 2003. Photo: Wikipedia.

When making sense of the people and things around us, it is often tempting to rely on binaries. There’s “us” and there’s “them”, there are “men” and “women”, “masculinities” and “femininities”, some are “white” others are not. These lists apply to our our daily routines as much as to extraordinary events. For example, the last few days have seen various forms of celebration for International Women’s Day. The ways in which such an occasion is observed highlight the common dichotomy between “men” and “women”. This constructed binary, like many others, may seem harmless. But those who consider themselves to be outside of that binary construction would disagree, arguing that if you do not conform to the binary labels then you might suffer intolerance, insecurity and perhaps even violence. The extent to which such binaries are problematic is most visible in the War on Terror, as this article sets out to demonstrate.

When the War on Terror was first announced by President George Bush in 2001, it was set up as a simple war of good against evil. The media, caught up in the post-9/11 hysteria, largely followed this narrative. But what has been missing from our general understanding of the War on Terror has been the importance of gender power relations in defining its narrative. While there is a wealth of scholarship on the subject, researchers in gender studies have a tendency to use technical language and to remain within strict academic circles. This is an attempt to step outside of that circle.

Gender can be understood on several levels and so should the War on Terror. On the individual level, certain policies target people because of their gender (such as liberating Afghan women and condemning Taliban men). On a collective level, Western culture is deemed vulnerable and feminised against the dangerous and masculinised “Other”, represented for a long time by al-Qaeda. [1] Gender is socially and politically constructed, it is immaterial yet at times instrumental. Ultimately, gendered narratives and power relations are mutually reinforcing, and make violence possible.

Looking at gender does not mean analysing the positions of men and women as subjects of masculinities and femininities respectively; gender should be considered beyond bodies, and in parallel with other binaries, such as that of skin colour. This is called “intersectionality”.

On an individual level, there is commonly understood to be a static correspondence between gender and sex. In other words, visual instincts draw people to assume that ‘men’ and ‘women’ will behave in certain ways, according to their gender. Traditionally, the gender binary also follows that of gendered roles in war: men and women; the Just Warrior and the Beautiful Soul; the protector and the protected, the soldier and the civilian. [2] While this construction has been increasingly debated and undermined on a theoretical level since the 1950s, [3] it nonetheless presents the major challenge in trying to make sense of several distressing episodes during the War on Terror.

One of these episodes was the torture at Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison, in 2003. Photographs of the abuse were widely circulated, and people struggled to make sense of what they were seeing, principally because it did not jive with their understandings of the supposed man / woman binary.

During the scandal Lynndie England received most attention. A female-identified soldier, her acts called for extraordinary justifications: a Sjobergian Monster, a victim of feminine submissiveness by blindly obeying her – male – superior; or a subject deprived of feminine characteristics with an androgynous body. [4] Worst of all for Barbara Ehrenreich was that the photographs represented “imperial arrogance, sexual depravity … and gender equality”. [5] Gender equality?! Ehrenreich’s last, and preposterous, suggestion points to an important mistake: gender cannot be understood solely on an individual level. Trying to do so fails to unveil the gendered power relations that underlay the War on Terror.

Instead, we should consider gender beyond bodies. The femininities were not the female-identified US-soldiers, and the masculinities were not the male-identified prisoners. Instead, Abu Ghraib prisoners were feminised and members of the American armed forces were hyper-masculinised. Torture aside, the emasculation of the “Other” also proceeded domestically in visual representations. For example, an increase in male media anchors to cover the War on Terror, the figure of the heroic male firefighter of 9/11, and posters with sexual humour depicting Ben Laden as “gay”. [6]

In Abu Ghraib, the process of emasculation was much less subtle:

And he called…me “faggot” because I was wearing the women’s underwear, and my answer was “no”. Then he told me “why are you wearing this underwear”, then I told them, “Because you make me wear it”. (Abu Ghraib Detainee #151108) [7]

When instructing naked male prisoners to wear women’s underwear, when they were held on a leash, or were covered in red ink that was supposedly menstrual blood, the gendered dynamic was one of inequality, inequality between the American hegemony and its inferior enemy. [8] This is not an attempt to point fingers. Rather, I am trying to make sense of the power relations present in gendered torture.

The particular relationship between the torturer and the tortured is not just gendered, but also racialized. There are the populations that can be tortured and those that cannot. [9] And yet another binary: that of the Occident (i.e. the Western or European political entities between the Enlightenment and the early 20^th century) and its construction of the Orient (the broad stereotypes characterising the Arab culture as exotic, backward, uncivilized, dangerous and so on). [10] Such a dichotomy might sound like a caricature, yet what happened in Abu Ghraib was made possible by anthropological research on “Muslim culture” published in a manual called The Arab Mind. [11] Torture during the War on Terror, of which the abuses in Abu Ghraib are merely the most prominent example, were designed based on a certain archetype of the Arab/Muslim man, who would be most vulnerable to sexual humiliation, in particular when produced by a woman. [12] This shows that it is difficult to dissociate the gendered binary from the racialized one.

What I want to highlight is that binaries are not disconnected. They are all historically constructed and follow a hierarchical logic. The celebrated side of the binary builds and secures its very definition through subordination of the Other – the sexually deviant Orient.

What was made visible during the Abu Ghraib scandal may not be as blatant today, yet it is no less relevant. Making sense of people and things by using binaries places a certain values on lives. Such categorising is not harmless: it is interwoven with a certain judgement of whose lives are deemed to be acceptable subjects of violence. The Obama Administration has now ceased to capture “enemy combatants”. According to Michael Hayden, former Director of the NSA and later the CIA the strategy is now to kill, not capture: “We take another option, we kill them. Now. I don’t morally oppose that.” [13] Clearly the power relations at work have not really changed.

Why does this matter? Because the construction of binaries makes such violence possible. The animation of such binaries in the military sphere is not disconnected from the way gender is understood domestically. (Notice that the “military” and the “domestic” spheres represent another binary.) In the light of the celebrations of International Women’s Day, we should ask ourselves how the construction of “men” and “women” and its fluidity interplays with the notion of race, and how it creates and maintains artificial hierarchies that underlie and perpetuate the War on Terror.

Caroline Cottet is an MA student in Science and Security at King’s College London.

NOTES

[1] Anne J. Tickner (2002) “Feminist Perspectives on 9/11”, International Studies Perspectives, Vol. 3, p.333–350

[2] Jean Bethke Elshtain (1987) Women and War, Chicago: University of Chicago Press

[3] Judith Butler (2008) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Oxon: Routledge

[4] Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry (2007) Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics, London: Zed Books, Timothy Kaufman-Osborn (2005) “Gender Trouble at Abu Ghraib?”, Politics and Gender, Vol 1 (4), p.615, and Marita Gronnvoll (2007) “Gender (In)Visibility at Abu Ghraib”, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Vol. 10 (3), p.375

[5] Barbara Ehrenreich (2004) “What Abu Ghraib Taught Me”, Alter Net, 19 May 2004

[6] Patricia Owens (2010) “Torture, Sex and Military Orientalism”, Third World Quarterly, Volume 31 (7), p.1042 and Meghana Nayak (2006) “Orientalism and ‘Saving’ US State Identity After 9/11”, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 8 (1), p.46

[7] In Owens 2010, p.1041

[8] Incidents described in Kaufman-Osborn 2005, Owens 2010 and Laleh Khalili (2010) “Gendered Practices of Counterinsurgency”, Review of International Studies, Volume 37 (4), p.1471-1491

[9] Melanie Richter-Montpetit (2014) “Beyond the erotics of Orientalism: Lawfare, torture and the racial–sexual grammars of legitimate suffering”, Security Dialogue, Volume 45, p.43-62

[10] Edward W. Said (1977) Orientalism, London: Penguin

[11] Owens 2010

[12] Ibid.

[13] Michael Hayden, former Director of the NSA (1999-2005) and later of the CIA (2006-2009), quoted in David Kravets (2012) “Former CIA Chief: Obama’s War on Terror Same as Bush’s, But With More Killing”, 9 October 2012 (available at: http://www.wired.com/2012/09/bush-obama-war-on-terror/, last accessed on 12/11/14)

The tortured narrative of a nation at war: USA & the CIA Torture Report

December 10, 2014 by Strife Staff

By Tyrell Mayfield:

What is more important: truth or trust? Are they mutually exclusive? Does one require the other? These are the questions that America is struggling with as it finds itself once again standing at the crossroads of legal, moral, and social justice.

The recent release of the summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program describes—in over 500 pages—what America has long referred to as ‘enhanced interrogation’. Most of the world called it what it was: torture. America has shown the world a redacted report – the original is 6700 pages – that describes what it has done in its quest to protect itself and its way of life from those that would do it harm. It turns out that America has clearly harmed itself and its own credibility more in the process than it gained in any meaningful way.

America rode an unprecedented wave of international support into Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks, which targeted the economic, military, and political arms of the nation’s power. The attacks, notable for their simplicity and profound impact on the American psyche, galvanized the country in a way that was perhaps last seen with the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbour on 7 December, 1941. In other words, on 12 September 2001 anything was possible in America. The narrative that emerged was one universally understood: America was a nation that would respond in a measured and purposeful way to ensure its security and exact retribution for an unprecedented attack on its homeland.

To say that it has been a long road would be a drastic understatement. It has most certainly been a complicated one, full of technicalities, abstract ideas, and an undeclared war against a non-state actor. It is likely that this last complication—the non-state actor—served as the point of departure for a series of policy decisions that have brought America through the invasion of a sovereign nation without any real justification, the debacle of Abu Ghraib, and now the disclosure of a prolonged policy of behavior which in hindsight is nothing short of appalling.

Had America gone to war against a nation with a uniformed army, obligations to treaties and conventions would have proscribed the behavior now in question. In an undeclared war against an ideology, America applied executive policy where moral courage was required. One is now compelled to ask what positives, if any, can come of this behavior and its now very public disclosure? Does America believe that if it tells the truth, even when it harms its own image, that it will become a more trustworthy entity in the eyes of the international community? Can America change the way other states, cultures, and people view it by disclosing its own wrongdoing?

Truth-telling is only the first step in building trust. What comes next is more difficult: it requires that people and institutions be held accountable and that real and meaningful change be enacted. This suggests that the release of the ‘torture report’ may in fact serve two purposes. First, the report clearly demonstrates that America acted in a manner which was inconsistent with its own ethical values and boundaries. That these boundaries were, for a time, obscured by anger and injury, and further complicated by a prolonged campaign against a non-state actor is in part a reasonable explanation, but it is no excuse for the behaviour that followed. America seems to be coming to terms with its own actions; whether or not it can reconcile its conduct with its identity by holding individuals and institutions accountable remains to be seen.

Second, the report demonstrates that while America’s actions were inconsistent with its own identity, it is still a country that is capable of admitting when it is wrong. Make no mistake, America’s humility will not be appreciated by its detractors. They will simply argue that America is finally providing the world a glimpse of what it is capable of or, worse yet, what it considered to be acceptable and legal behaviour. But that is not why this report is important – its true value resides in its ability to regain some of the confidence of its allies and supporters. America has, after all, pressured many other states to reconcile the grievances of its own citizens with truth and justice commissions. Should it not ask the same of itself?

These two paths can be traveled at the same time. As with the release of the photographs from Abu Ghraib, America has once again torn off its bandage and revealed a self-inflicted wound to the world. What happens next will determine if the American narrative can help the nation recover its credibility or if the narrative of its detractors will remain dominant. Regardless of the kinetic power of the American military, so long as the opponent’s narrative remains compelling and dominant, the persuasive capabilities of American instruments of national power will continue to wane.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the USAF, the DoD, or the U.S. Government.

Ty Mayfield is a Political Affairs Strategist in the U.S. Air Force. He holds an MA in International Relations from the University of Oklahoma and an MA in National Security Studies from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. Ty is participating in the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff directed AFPAK Hands program and splits his time between Washington D.C. and Kabul, Afghanistan. @tyrellmayfield

Editors’ note: Strife and the US Foreign Policy Research group will be hosting our first annual conference 4 March 2015 at King’s College London entitled: “A world in flux? Analysis and prospects for the U.S. in global security”. Leading up to this, we will be featuring a number of articles and responses to current events related to US and global security from a variety of students, researchers, practitioners and academics. This article is part of that series.

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