The Strategic Staff Sergeant

From the NYT:

PANJWAI, Afghanistan — Displaced by the war, Abdul Samad finally moved his large family back home to this volatile district of southern Afghanistan last year. He feared the Taliban, but his new house was nestled near an American military base, where he considered himself safe.

But when Mr. Samad, 60, walked into his mud-walled dwelling here on Sunday morning and found 11 of his relatives sprawled in all directions, shot in the head, stabbed and burned, he learned the culprit was not a Taliban insurgent. The suspected gunman was a 38-year-old United States staff sergeant who had slipped out of the base to kill.

Read the article here.
In contrast, read USMC Gen. Charles C. Krulak's original 1999 article on the Strategic Corporal here.

Stockdale to His Men: Know Thyself

BRIEFING TO AIRWING FLIGHT CREWS BY CDR JAMES BOND STOCKDALE, USN, APRIL 1965, AS EXCERPTED FROM STRATEGY FOR DEFEAT – USG SHARP PRESIDIO PRESS SAN RAFAEL 1978

Having reviewed for you the terrain of Vietnam, the enemy’s order of battle, the rules of engagement, and to some extent the modern history of the conflict and the evolution of America’s strategy, I think I owe you in addition a straight from the shoulder discussion of pilots’ mental attitudes and orientation in “limited war” circumstances. I saw the need for this last summer aboard TICONDEROGA – after the start of the war had caught us by surprise and we had gone through those first, exciting days pretty much on adrenaline. In the lull that followed, as we prepared for a next round, I could sense that those fine young men who had measured up so well in the sudden reality of flak and burning targets wanted to talk and get their resources and value systems lined up for the long haul. Like most of you, they were well read, sensitive, sometimes skeptical – those educated in the American liberal tradition to think for themselves – those who are often our most productive citizens – and just as often, our best soldiers. They realized that bombing heavily defended targets is serious business and no game – that it is logically impossible in the violence of a fight, to commit oneself as an individual, only in some proportion of his total drive and combative instinct. It has to be all or nothing; dog eat dog over the target. I think they were asking themselves, as you might – Where do I as a person, a person of awareness, refinement and education, fit into this “limited war”, “measured response” concept.

I want to level with you right now, so you can think it over here in mid-Pacific and not kid yourself into imagining “stark realizations” in the Gulf of Tonkin. Once you go “feet dry” over the beach, there can be nothing limited about your commitment. “Limited war” means to us that our target list has limits, our ordnance loadout has limits, our rules of engagement have limits, but that does not mean that there is anything “limited” about our personal obligations as fighting men to carry out assigned missions with all we’ve got. If you think it is possible for a man, in the heat of battle, to apply something less than total personal commitment – equated perhaps to your idea of the proportion of national potential being applied, you are wrong. It’s contrary to human nature. So also is the idea I was alarmed to find suggested to me by a military friend in a letter recently: that the prisoner of war’s Code of Conduct is some sort of a “total war” document. You can’t go half way on that, either. The Code of Conduct was not written for “total wars” or “limited wars,” it was written for all wars, and let it be understood that it applies with full force to this Air Wing – in this war.

What I am saying is that national commitment and personal commitment are two different things. All is not relative. You classical scholars know that even the celebrated “free thinker” Socrates was devoted to ridiculing the sophist idea that one can avoid black and white choices in arriving at personal commitments; one sooner or later comes to a fork in the road. As Harvard’s philosophy great, Alfred North Whitehead, said: “I can’t bring half an umbrella to work when the weatherman predicts a 50% chance of rain.” We are all at the fork in the road this week. Think it over. If you find yourself rationalizing about moving your bomb release altitude up a thousand feet from where your strike leader briefs it, or adding a few hundred pounds fuel to your over target bingo because “the Navy needs you for greater things,” or you must save the airplane for some “great war” of the future, you, you’re in the wrong outfit. You owe it to yourself to have a talk with your skipper or me. It’s better for both you and your shipmates that you face up to your fork in the road here at 140 degrees east rather than later, 2000 miles west of here, on the line.

Let us all face our prospects squarely. We’ve got to be prepared to obey the rules and contribute without reservation. If political or religious conviction helps you do this, so much the better, but you’re still going to be expected to press on with or without these comforting thoughts, simply because this uniform commits us to a military ethic – the ethic of personal pride and excellence that alone has supported some of the greatest fighting men in history. Don’t require Hollywood answers to “What are we fighting for?” We’re here to fight because it’s in the interest of the United States that we do so. This may not be the most dramatic way to explain it, but it is the advantage of being absolutely correct.

Are There (Real) Online Friendships?

Barbro Froding and Martin Peterson don't think so:

Based on a modern reading of Aristotle’s theory of friendship, we argue that virtual friendship does not qualify as genuine friendship. By ‘virtual friendship’ we mean the type of friendship that exists on the internet, and seldom or never is combined with real life interaction. A ‘traditional friendship’ is, in contrast, the type of friendship that involves substantial real life interaction, and we claim that only this type can merit the label ‘genuine friendship’ and thus qualify as morally valuable. The upshot of our discussion is that virtual friendship is what Aristotle might have described as a lower and less valuable form of social exchange.

Read the paper here.

The Ethics of Data

Ethical concerns over the explosion of data in cyberspace have primarily focused on privacy, identity and the potential for misuse. The World Economic Forum has outlined a broad program that refocuses the mining of data in ways that help people:

Utilising the data created by mobile phone use can improve our understanding of vulnerable populations, and can quicken governments‟ response to the emergence of new trends. Actors in the public, private, and development sectors are beginning to recognise the mutual benefits of creating and maintaining a "data commons" in which this information benefits society as a whole while protecting individual security and privacy. But a more concerted effort is required to make this vision a reality.

Read the briefing here.

Hearts and Minds

A report prepared for ISAF's RC-East claims the rising number of coalition forces being killed by Afghanistan National Army and Police partners is indicative of a deeper animosity growing between the allies' lower ranks.

“Lethal altercations are clearly not rare or isolated; they reflect a rapidly growing systemic homicide threat (a magnitude of which may be unprecedented between ‘allies’ in modern military history),” said the report. Official NATO pronouncements to the contrary “seem disingenuous, if not profoundly intellectually dishonest.”

Read the article here.

The Shifting Application of Airpower

From carpet bombing and cluster munitions to overwatches and shows of presence, the (re)development of COIN Ops in Afghanistan has brought combat aviation to heel:

The use of air power has changed markedly during the long Afghan conflict, reflecting the political costs and sensitivities of civilian casualties caused by errant or indiscriminate strikes and the increasing use of aerial drones, which can watch over potential targets for extended periods with no risk to pilots or more expensive aircraft.

Read the article here.

Ethical Rules for Robots

In September of 2011, the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council hosted a conference of experts drawn from the fields of technology, industry, the arts, law and social sciences, to develop rules for robots in society. The result, five ethical rules for robots:

1. Robots are multi-use tools. Robots should not be designed solely or primarily to kill or harm humans, except in the interests of national security.

2. Humans, not robots, are responsible agents. Robots should be designed & operated as far as is practicable to comply with existing laws & fundamental rights & freedoms, including privacy.

3. Robots are products. They should be designed using processes which assure their safety and security.

4. Robots are manufactured artefacts. They should not be designed in a deceptive way to exploit vulnerable users; instead their machine nature should be transparent.

5. The person with legal responsibility for a robot should be attributed.

Read an expanded version of the principles here.

Can Plato's Cave Help to Explain Addiction?

Of course it can. Peg O'Connor explains how:

[Addicts] engage in faulty yet persuasive alcoholic reasoning, willing to take anything as evidence that they do not have a problem; no amount of reasoning will persuade them otherwise.

Read the article here.

How far Should Science Take Us...?

NYT's Armchair Ethicist posed the following:

Recently, scientists at two laboratories tweaked a dangerous bird-flu virus in order to make it more contagious. Was it ethical to even undertake such an experiment? Does the importance of preparing for a pandemic justify publishing the experiment’s results? Should the importance of preventing bioterrorism justify governments’ suppressing the information? Is some information simply too dangerous to share — or even to ascertain?

Read the responses here.

"Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned / Nor hell a fury like a woman..."

... who's had her salon appointment interrupted by a bunch of young zealots. To wit:

Vigilante gangs of ultra-conservative Salafi men have been harassing shop owners and female customers in rural towns around Egypt for “indecent behavior,” according to reports in the Egyptian news media. But when they burst into a beauty salon in the Nile delta town of Benha this week and ordered the women inside to stop what they were doing or face physical punishment, the women struck back, whipping them with their own canes before kicking them out to the street in front of an astonished crowd of onlookers.

Read the story here.

Maple Leafs GM Warns Against Decline in Hockey Fighting

Brian Burke told ESPN he's wary of the decline in on-ice fighting because of what he sees happening on game nights: "If you want a game where guys can cheap-shot people and not face retribution, I'm not sure that's a healthy evolution," he said. "The speed of the game, I love how the game's evolved in terms of how it's played. But you're seeing where there is no accountability." Burke argues that players, some more than others, are seeing that there's no longer a price to pay for throwing a cheap shot at the opposition, and they're taking advantage of that change. "I wonder about the accountability in our game and the notion that players would stick up for themselves and for each other," Burke said. "I wonder where we're going with it, that's the only lament I have on this. The fear that if we don't have guys looking after each other that the rats will take this game over.

Read the article here.

"I fear they do not know us"

"National leaders and advocacy groups say they see a widening rift between a military at war and a public at peace, distracted by a sputtering economy and weary of hearing about Iraq and Afghanistan." USA Today published a piece on the alienating effect that has on families who've lost loved ones in combat.

Read the article here.

Stress and RPAs

A new study on RPA crews indicates their greatest challenge isn't PTSD, it's burn-out from long hours and inadequate staffing. But there's still the dissonance of remotely killing someone half the world away, then, two hours later, taking your kid to a soccer match. 

"We try to select people who are well-adjusted. We select family people. People of good moral standing, background, integrity," said Lieutenant Colonel Kent McDonald, who was also involved with the study.

"And when they have to kill someone, and when they're involved with missions when they're observing people over long periods of time, and then they either kill them or see them killed, it does cause them to re-think aspects of their life and it can be bothersome."

Read the article here.

The Trolley Problem

Researchers have attempted to learn more about the ethical choices we make, updating the classic "Trolley Problem" by adding a virtual element to make it more "real." The findings? Pretty much what you'd expect: "Evolution has hardened us into brutal and selfish creatures. We make split-second calculations that result in murder — unless a family member is at stake."

Read the article here.

Thanks to C2C Michael Sortino for forwarding.

The Ethos of Fighting in Hockey

Recent reports on brain injury and a lengthy NYT feature on NHL enforcer Derek Boogard are focusing attention on fighting in Hockey. As a supplement, the NYT published an article tracing the origin of fighting in hockey to late 19th century Montreal, where the sport was first played. One theory has it that the first hockey clubs formed around ethnic and religious identities, lending a clannish or gang-like quality to the earliest teams. Thus you had the Victorias (Scottish Protestant), the Montreal Athletic Accociation (English Protestant), the Shamrocks (Irish Catholic), and the National and Montagnards (French Catholic). Researchers found little evidence of fighting between teams that involved punches, but the use of sticks for slashing and clubbing was prevalent. Once fighting was "allowed" in the early twentieth century, incidents of more serious injuries involving sticks declined. In recent years, the last serious case of stick-related violence occurred in 2002, and the NHL averages about one fight for every two games.

Read the article here.

Cyber Attack as Just Cause

In a recent Pentagon report, the United States declares it reserves the right to retaliate with military force against a cyber attack and is working to sharpen its ability to track down the source of any breach.

Read the report here.

Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics Essay Contest 2012

Here's an opportunity for you, as a military ethicist, to display your mad skills, contribute to the field of ethical study, and possibly win a cash prize.

The Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics Essay Contest is an annual competition designed to challenge college students to analyze the urgent ethical issues confronting them in today's complex world. Students are encouraged to write thought-provoking personal essays that raise questions, single out issues and are rational arguments for ethical action. This year's topic: articulate with clarity an ethical issue that you have encountered and analyze what it has taught you about ethics and yourself.

Guidelines are posted below; more information can be found here.

Hobbes on Comedy Central

Andrew Napolitano channels The Leviathan to explain the Libertarian view of government. Watch The Daily Show interview here.

What's Wrong with Torture?

If you missed the Reich Lecture last evening, here's a link to Dr. David Sussman's article, "What's Wrong with Torture?" Dr. Sussman's talk was based on this article.

Pew Research Center: Gap Grows Between Military, Civilians

Citing the convergence of two records - the length of OEF and the relatively small percentage of the population serving in the military - Paul Taylor, editor of the Pew Research Center's study, "War and Sacrifice in the Post-9/11 Era," said he wanted to investigate this unique period in US history. "We've never had sustained combat for a full decade, and we've never fought a war in which such a small share of the population has carried the fight."

Citing results of the study, Taylor observed, "there is a gap. Whether or not this is a good or bad thing is in effect, frankly, above my pay grade. It's an interesting question."

Read the article here.

Review the Pew study here.