Shannon E. French

Partly Cloudy: Ethics in War, Espionage, Covert Action, and Interrogation

Perry, David L., Partly Cloudy: Ethics in War, Espionage, Covert Action, and Interrogation, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, Scarecrow Press, 2009, 247 pages,

Sergeant Davis's Stern Charge: The Obligation of Officers to Preserve the Humanity of Their Troops

40.00. ISBN 978-0-8108-6758-1 Davi...

Steven Pressfield, The Afghan Campaign

Abstract This article examines what it might mean for officers to be held responsible for safeguarding not just the lives of their troops, but also the humanity of their troops. How should such a charge be understood, and can it be justified? Arguably, any experience of combat is an assault on the participants’ humanity. The idea that officers should try to shield their troops from combat altogether, however, is untenable, for reasons that are discussed (including the danger of selective conscientious objection). Nor, it is argued, can officers guarantee or ensure that they will never lead troops in conflicts that violate jus ad bellum criteria. If officers are to be held responsible for protecting their troops in any way beyond the physical, it must be against specific, severe threats to their humanity that occur in the course of waging war. Candidates for threats of this kind are considered, leading to the conclusion that the greatest threats arise from jus in bello violations that dehumanize the victim and degrade the perpetrator. The question is then raised whether officers in fact can protect their troops from committing such violations, and the argument is advanced that the command climate officers create in their units plays a significant role in encouraging or deterring serious transgressions of the warriors code.

The future of the army profession. Lloyd J. Matthews, ed.

The White House recently claimed that President George W. Bush has read sixty books this year. If I could go back in time to 2002 and set just one volume on the President’s nightstand, a top candidate would be Steven Pressfield’s gut-wrenching historical novel, The Afghan Campaign . Pressfield’s book reminds us that the Soviet and British incursions into Afghanistan were only two of the more recent attempts to subdue that unforgiving land and its people. In 330 BCE, over 2,300 years before the United States launched its ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, Alexander the Great, commander-in-chief of his own superpower, led the heretofore undefeated Macedonian army against the Afghan tribes. If President Bush had understood what happened next, he might have hesitated to follow Alexander’s footsteps into Afghanistan or pursue the similarly perilous 2003 invasion of Iraq. There is no question that Steven Pressfield wrote The Afghan Campaign with the current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq in mind. Employing the same gripping first-person narration that was so effective in Gates of Fire, Pressfield forces the reader to confront the ugly realities of a war that involves the clash of widely disparate cultures, asymmetry in weapons, technology, and tactics, and a native insurgency resisting foreign occupation. The result is a much darker book than Gates of Fire. Although Gates of Fire described the battle of Thermopylae where over 300 Spartans and their allies died almost to a man defending a crucial pass against the invading Persian army, it had an uplifting, optimistic quality. It celebrated the nobility of warriors who were willing to sacrifice their lives to defend their city-state and its values and whose courage derived ultimately from love. Gates of Fire reminded the reader how that courage and sacrifice succeeded in helping to secure the legacies of the Western world. Reading Gates of Fire could revive a warrior’s sense of pride in his or her calling and even reconcile a warrior’s loved ones to the challenges of that commitment. Not so The Afghan Campaign . In the final chapter, we learn that the protagonist, Matthias, has chosen to remain with Alexander’s army. Rather

The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present

field of military ethics and highlight how their authors are contributing (knowingly or not) to on-going discourse or debates on issues that may be of interest to our readers. Some discussions will direct the reader’s attention to a single book or article, presented in a context in which it may not have been previously considered, while others will attempt to reveal connections among a cluster of works that are worthy of further exploration.