1 00:00:02,060 --> 00:00:05,900 Today. However, it's my great pleasure to welcome to the group. 2 00:00:06,260 --> 00:00:18,080 Professor Martin Cook is the Stockdale Professor of Professional Military Ethics at the United States Naval War College in Rhode Island. 3 00:00:18,320 --> 00:00:25,640 He has published broadly and widely on pretty much every important issue within the ethics of war. 4 00:00:26,420 --> 00:00:32,810 He's also one of the founding editor of the Journal of Military Ethics, which is what many of you will know. 5 00:00:33,740 --> 00:00:35,780 And he's what I think you can say a little bit about his background, 6 00:00:35,780 --> 00:00:42,260 but he's also one of the significant things about him is that he is trained both as a philosopher and as a theologian. 7 00:00:43,430 --> 00:00:49,040 And that, I think will be informing some of the remarks is going to come yesterday, said Martin Wolf. 8 00:00:49,280 --> 00:00:53,270 Thanks for that. Well, I thought I would start. 9 00:00:54,390 --> 00:01:00,980 We usually do this by quote A little of my biography might be helpful because I think it will help situate some of my reflections. 10 00:01:03,260 --> 00:01:06,309 I on the Air Force Brat, as we say in the United States. 11 00:01:06,310 --> 00:01:09,680 So I grew up entirely on Air Force bases in Dublin, about 15. 12 00:01:10,100 --> 00:01:15,530 My father was a bomber pilot, the strategic architects of nuclear weapons in the fifties and sixties. 13 00:01:16,370 --> 00:01:19,820 So you might imagine that he was he made a considerable impression on me. 14 00:01:20,180 --> 00:01:24,290 I used to tell that to my daughter at the Air Force Academy that I really didn't expect I'd still be alive now. 15 00:01:24,590 --> 00:01:25,700 That's literally true. 16 00:01:26,660 --> 00:01:32,630 I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis quite vividly when old aeroplanes took off, and one minute it will take off, so it's going to get blocked. 17 00:01:33,140 --> 00:01:37,010 That's probably it. So that was a very formative experience for me. 18 00:01:38,990 --> 00:01:46,340 I did my education in philosophy as there was and also in religious studies as well as classics. 19 00:01:46,850 --> 00:01:50,690 And for the first half of my career, I had a purely civilian academic career. 20 00:01:50,690 --> 00:01:55,730 I taught at the College of William and Mary and then for nearly 20 years as secretary of state of California. 21 00:01:57,530 --> 00:02:03,290 But a funny thing happened to me right after I got tenure at Santa Clara, the phone rang out of the blue and it was an Air Force colonel saying What? 22 00:02:03,290 --> 00:02:07,250 I like to be a visiting professor at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. 23 00:02:07,880 --> 00:02:12,140 So having just gotten tenure, I thought, what the heck, why not do something else? 24 00:02:12,860 --> 00:02:17,930 My family's from Colorado anyway, so I went there for a year and that was the year 1991, 92. 25 00:02:18,510 --> 00:02:24,499 Now, those of you who remember your history, remember that was the first Gulf War. So while I was in philosophy department, 26 00:02:24,500 --> 00:02:31,220 a number of my colleagues were returning pilots from the Gulf War who were very troubled by some of what they had seen in particular. 27 00:02:31,580 --> 00:02:34,880 One pilot from was participant in the Highway of Death. 28 00:02:35,660 --> 00:02:37,190 You young people may not remember it, 29 00:02:37,190 --> 00:02:47,030 but it was a scene of a highway from Kuwait City into Basra with thousands of of one of vehicles, lots of dead corpses around. 30 00:02:47,720 --> 00:02:50,590 In fact, it is in many respects the political end of the war. 31 00:02:50,600 --> 00:02:54,650 Colin Powell saw those pictures and thought, you know, we are going to have to stop this real quick. 32 00:02:54,770 --> 00:02:59,719 So we wrote a paper on what actually happened then, and that was my first paper on military ethics. 33 00:02:59,720 --> 00:03:07,070 And I quickly discovered that this is a field that is not well occupied by people who could span these worlds. 34 00:03:07,190 --> 00:03:12,680 Right. That's the knowledge of the military, who have some knowledge of normative ethics, who are interested in both. 35 00:03:13,430 --> 00:03:18,630 And so increasingly, my career evolved in the direction of writing and thinking in that area. 36 00:03:19,070 --> 00:03:26,860 I went back to Santa Clara, and then in 98 there was an ad to be the Professor of ethics at the Army War College in Tasmania and so on. 37 00:03:27,050 --> 00:03:32,000 What the heck theory I applied to go there. I was a little bored and I took that position. 38 00:03:32,460 --> 00:03:37,220 No, you're not familiar with the system of professional military education that states the war. 39 00:03:37,220 --> 00:03:45,780 Colleges are the top tier of the professional system. Most officers will go through three major layers of training in the course of a career, 40 00:03:45,780 --> 00:03:50,570 and they'll go through an academy or a reserve officer training program as a pre commissioning level. 41 00:03:51,140 --> 00:03:56,570 Then they will go to Captain Low three grade, they'll go to a command staff school, 42 00:03:57,080 --> 00:04:02,980 and then at about 23 years of service at the rank of lieutenant colonel or so, they'll go to a war college. 43 00:04:03,260 --> 00:04:05,030 So this is sort of maybe general school. 44 00:04:06,350 --> 00:04:14,650 So going to Carlisle turned out to be a wonderful experience for me in the sense that I learned so much from my students. 45 00:04:14,660 --> 00:04:19,460 Most of my students have been naive managers. Almost all of them had combat experience. 46 00:04:20,270 --> 00:04:27,410 They had done a lot of things. So you're really not a teacher or they're you're a kind of impresario of an orchestra. 47 00:04:27,440 --> 00:04:29,960 People have a lot of experience that you've been drawing in the classroom. 48 00:04:30,680 --> 00:04:35,710 And it's going to be a wonderful learning experience for me that it should just go quickly. 49 00:04:35,720 --> 00:04:41,030 I went back to the Air Force Academy for a while and finally I went to the Naval War College to the stock culture, which is very nice. 50 00:04:41,040 --> 00:04:48,140 So in some ways the secret of success has been to find a really small pond and be a reasonably good sized fisherman, right? 51 00:04:48,170 --> 00:04:52,280 So the number of people who do military ethics in the way that I'm talking about, 52 00:04:52,280 --> 00:05:01,030 mainly in close proximity to people actually doing the professional stuff is very few military ethics conferences like the CIA in Castlebar, 53 00:05:01,070 --> 00:05:04,820 you know right up the. Usual suspects. So that's what I'm doing. 54 00:05:04,830 --> 00:05:09,209 So, yeah. Now, another thing about this is much earlier in my life, 55 00:05:09,210 --> 00:05:13,110 when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I ended up teaching at a medical school. 56 00:05:13,530 --> 00:05:17,040 I came by accident, a brand new medical ethics program. 57 00:05:17,040 --> 00:05:22,979 Medical ethics was just getting started, really, in the early seventies. And I quickly discovered something that stayed with me all my life, 58 00:05:22,980 --> 00:05:27,030 which is you can't walk from the philosophy department across the street to the med 59 00:05:27,030 --> 00:05:30,810 school and talk the way you were talking that was important and get any traction at all. 60 00:05:31,800 --> 00:05:35,430 You have no credibility with them. Their eyes glaze over quickly. 61 00:05:36,590 --> 00:05:41,340 There is interested in theory, but only if it scratches an itch they know they've got. 62 00:05:41,380 --> 00:05:46,890 Right. So you've got to persuade them if they've got the itch before, if there's any point in trying to bring theory to bear. 63 00:05:47,670 --> 00:05:50,760 So that basic thought has stayed with me throughout. 64 00:05:50,760 --> 00:05:55,660 And that's sort of the theme I want to develop in some of this talk, and I hope it'll be a dialogue. 65 00:05:55,680 --> 00:05:59,840 So if you have a question at any point, please program. In fact, let me just start now. 66 00:05:59,850 --> 00:06:04,540 Any question about what you already said? Okay. 67 00:06:05,530 --> 00:06:10,480 Now, as David indicated, he started the Journal of Military Ethics. It'll be ten years ago this fall. 68 00:06:11,620 --> 00:06:20,590 And the founding idea of the Journal of Military Ethics was to find a place where this intersection of theory and practice could be well developed. 69 00:06:21,580 --> 00:06:29,770 And one of the things that we discovered as editors is we get many submissions to the Journal, which we reject, even though they're very high quality. 70 00:06:30,190 --> 00:06:34,030 But what they typically are intra philosopher arguments with each other. 71 00:06:35,200 --> 00:06:41,110 And one of our standards of what we want to put in the journal is, would this be of interest to a thoughtful journal? 72 00:06:42,040 --> 00:06:46,210 Would a thoughtful journal possibly pick this up and find it helpful? 73 00:06:47,260 --> 00:06:53,469 In fact, we published an editorial at the beginning of the Journal as as just this year saying, 74 00:06:53,470 --> 00:06:58,210 what do we think all of your efforts actually is and what do we think it uses, you know? 75 00:06:58,720 --> 00:07:05,800 So that's the thing we want to develop. Not none of this is meant to say that other disciplines are not free to do whatever they want to do. 76 00:07:05,890 --> 00:07:12,520 You know, if people in strictly philosophy journals want to talk about just war theory in the way philosophers talk about it, that's fine. 77 00:07:12,790 --> 00:07:17,680 You know, have fun with it, but it's not professional. 78 00:07:17,710 --> 00:07:22,350 So what I want to talk about first is really what do we mean by profession? 79 00:07:24,220 --> 00:07:27,670 Now, in the U.S. military, this has become a very hot topic. 80 00:07:28,420 --> 00:07:33,700 Admiral Mullen, who is our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, convened a meeting in Washington about six weeks ago. 81 00:07:34,210 --> 00:07:39,640 I don't think anything like this has ever happened in history of the U.S. military is about 50 people in a room. 82 00:07:39,910 --> 00:07:45,610 And he said, I'm very worried about this. We had two major things after ten years of war. 83 00:07:46,300 --> 00:07:51,190 Do we know who we are? We've seen that we're capable of doing some pretty bad things. 84 00:07:51,860 --> 00:07:55,210 We really need to reflect on this. And he said, I was a young officer in Vietnam. 85 00:07:55,720 --> 00:07:58,210 I know what a really broken military looks like. 86 00:07:59,170 --> 00:08:06,010 And if we're not self-consciously attending to the health of our profession, we're going to come out of this in really bad shape. 87 00:08:06,010 --> 00:08:12,100 We're already in pretty bad shape in practical terms, in terms of broken equipment and and stretched out soldiers. 88 00:08:12,100 --> 00:08:16,860 And, you know, most captains, the military has 30 year olds already been to Afghanistan or Iraq three times. 89 00:08:17,240 --> 00:08:22,120 So this is this is an incredible toll that we're taking on our people be a long time to recover from. 90 00:08:22,780 --> 00:08:28,630 The other thing he said was, we, the military, not all the American people and the American people don't know us. 91 00:08:30,070 --> 00:08:33,220 And I think that's increasingly true, as you probably know. 92 00:08:33,610 --> 00:08:39,340 The United States, which the United States switched to an all volunteer or all recruited force in 1973. 93 00:08:40,330 --> 00:08:46,210 So we have nothing but volunteers. So you can imagine that there's tracks in a couple of ways. 94 00:08:46,870 --> 00:08:54,099 You get people who needed who need a job in the enlisted ranks and in the officer corps. 95 00:08:54,100 --> 00:08:58,280 It's become largely a family business. Now that is it. 96 00:08:58,540 --> 00:09:03,100 Most officers are the sons and grandsons of previous officers that's out of work. 97 00:09:03,110 --> 00:09:07,920 So that's a very isolated little community and it quickly falls into group thing. 98 00:09:09,010 --> 00:09:15,520 So about 12 years ago, a very intelligent, retired Army colonel with a Ph.D. teaching at West Point, 99 00:09:15,520 --> 00:09:20,500 they've done Snyder started a project called The Future of the Army Professional Project. 100 00:09:20,650 --> 00:09:23,080 You're not even on the back of something right into this literature. 101 00:09:24,610 --> 00:09:33,880 Don was upset when he heard a young West Point graduate come back from the Balkans and say to a group of cadets at West Point, 102 00:09:34,390 --> 00:09:39,430 I told my unit when we went. Force protection is our major job over here. 103 00:09:39,820 --> 00:09:42,160 There's nothing in the Balkans worth anybody getting hurt. 104 00:09:44,050 --> 00:09:48,520 And Don, being an experienced combat officer sort of threw something to the ceiling and said, 105 00:09:48,790 --> 00:09:54,280 when did accomplishing the mission come to be subordinate to protecting our own forces? 106 00:09:55,270 --> 00:10:00,160 And by the way, where did you get the idea that just because you don't like this mission, you get to shirk about it? 107 00:10:00,200 --> 00:10:04,560 Right. And it through the army, really, just like those missions at the time. 108 00:10:05,020 --> 00:10:09,620 So he started this project saying, what are our officers? 109 00:10:09,640 --> 00:10:14,860 Are they professionals? Or as he'd like to put it, or are they merely obedient bureaucrats? 110 00:10:16,000 --> 00:10:23,290 And what difference would it make? And so the project had been about 50 scholars or so of about two years. 111 00:10:23,650 --> 00:10:27,310 It culminated in a very good book, I think maybe called The Future of the Army Profession. 112 00:10:28,780 --> 00:10:33,780 And he said, look, drawing in the sociology literature, he said, professions are characterised by a number of things. 113 00:10:33,790 --> 00:10:37,750 I won't get all of them, but first of all, they have a body of abstract knowledge, 114 00:10:39,880 --> 00:10:42,730 and it's that it's the part of the ethical obligation of the profession, 115 00:10:42,730 --> 00:10:49,390 both to know the existing body knowledge and to develop an adaptive for future applicability. 116 00:10:50,170 --> 00:10:53,270 And it's abstract knowledge because it's applied at discretion. 117 00:10:53,290 --> 00:10:59,710 It's not something you can simply train for. It's a kind of expert knowledge that you have to bring and make judgements about how you use it. 118 00:11:00,670 --> 00:11:04,920 Secondly, professions are. Characterised by corporate earnings. 119 00:11:04,960 --> 00:11:07,480 That is, they maintain their own standards. 120 00:11:08,740 --> 00:11:15,130 And in the U.S. military, it's certainly the case up to the very highest rate, although every officer is technically promoted by the Senate. 121 00:11:15,760 --> 00:11:20,350 It's very rare that the Senate actually looked by name, but it is a very, very high rank. 122 00:11:20,710 --> 00:11:26,020 So officers decide who gets in, who gets out and is promoted, who gets what job, who gets rewarded. 123 00:11:26,260 --> 00:11:33,490 So it's corporate in that way. It has its own ethic and is expected to both future and enforce that. 124 00:11:35,650 --> 00:11:38,799 And it has a strong sense of what its own expertise is. 125 00:11:38,800 --> 00:11:43,630 So and the unequal dialogue that goes on between military professionals and civilian leaders. 126 00:11:44,140 --> 00:11:49,060 Part of the job is to make sure that they clearly articulate something from their body of expertise, 127 00:11:49,420 --> 00:11:53,770 to guide the civilians, to make the right decision about what to do. 128 00:11:55,000 --> 00:11:59,800 So professional ethics in that sense is meant in that kind of narrow way. 129 00:11:59,860 --> 00:12:07,150 And how does it help address the practitioner to make them more self aware of their professional status? 130 00:12:08,390 --> 00:12:12,700 Now that's a pretty important point. So let me start see if there's any conversation we need to have about that. 131 00:12:17,160 --> 00:12:20,250 Pretty quickly. I'll do a little historically. Classically in the West. 132 00:12:20,430 --> 00:12:25,800 There were only three professions by the time in the late Middle Ages, early the early March period, 133 00:12:26,130 --> 00:12:32,220 only three things we use the word profession in the minor, in modern English, at least in the U.S., meaning people get paid for it. 134 00:12:32,790 --> 00:12:39,540 So how are you guys using it? So anybody want to take a guess what the three classical professions were? 135 00:12:40,530 --> 00:12:44,130 The church, church clergy law. 136 00:12:44,400 --> 00:12:49,110 And that's exactly right. What do those three have in common that makes them different from other kinds of jobs? 137 00:12:51,670 --> 00:12:58,450 Specific audit of their corporate in the section, which I thought was one of the important thing that I didn't mention already. 138 00:12:59,080 --> 00:13:03,370 They have a position of high social trust for something that's very important. 139 00:13:03,700 --> 00:13:03,900 Right. 140 00:13:04,690 --> 00:13:12,270 So there's a kind of contract between the society and the profession that says you are going to deal with something we consider vitally important. 141 00:13:12,280 --> 00:13:14,830 And we realise that you will have a unique body of expertise. 142 00:13:15,180 --> 00:13:19,809 And in exchange for that, we're going to give you these privileges that we don't give most other people. 143 00:13:19,810 --> 00:13:23,620 Right. And that relationship exists only so long as we trust you. 144 00:13:23,920 --> 00:13:27,130 Right. Only so long as the society needs to trust. 145 00:13:28,360 --> 00:13:31,930 Can societies lose trust in professions? Absolutely. 146 00:13:33,010 --> 00:13:39,700 When I was in college, my first freshman year with the Vietnam War, we invaded Cambodia. 147 00:13:40,720 --> 00:13:46,630 Students were killed at Kent State University. It became impossible to walk across my campus in an ROTC uniform. 148 00:13:48,490 --> 00:13:53,860 I got it in logic because it was impossible to go to class after midterms because of the burning of the buildings. 149 00:13:54,520 --> 00:14:02,079 So. So you want to see a complete loss of confidence, a professional you can never see in modern America. 150 00:14:02,080 --> 00:14:07,720 Accountancy just went through this surgery like you're plenty of years. Okay. 151 00:14:10,660 --> 00:14:16,660 Okay. So if we think about military officers in professional terms, 152 00:14:18,190 --> 00:14:23,229 one of the consequences of the Snyder project over the course of ten or 12 years is the 153 00:14:23,230 --> 00:14:29,889 U.S. Army has completely embraced this logic of professionalism to the point that there 154 00:14:29,890 --> 00:14:36,219 are now official Army doctrine statements on the profession this coming year coming directly 155 00:14:36,220 --> 00:14:39,520 from the chief of the staff for the Army is the Year of the Army professional ethic. 156 00:14:40,660 --> 00:14:45,160 All of the U.S. Army General Officer Corps is now speaking this vocabulary in a non-trivial way. 157 00:14:45,160 --> 00:14:52,270 And not just the buzzwords, but they've actually kind of absorbed pretty seriously what this language is and what it is meant to capture. 158 00:14:52,870 --> 00:14:56,290 One of the most heated debates is the question you just asked, right? 159 00:14:57,430 --> 00:15:07,820 Because, for example, Admiral Mullen conference, a very senior Marine master sergeant, gave an impassioned argument that at least senior NCO, 160 00:15:07,850 --> 00:15:15,760 that members of the profession of one of the colonels from West Point said, with all due respect, not really. 161 00:15:16,450 --> 00:15:21,790 You don't have the body of professional knowledge. You are implementers of the professional judgement of the officer. 162 00:15:22,210 --> 00:15:27,130 It turned out very quickly. If you're watching or listening to this, there's some equivocation on the term professional going on here. 163 00:15:27,550 --> 00:15:32,740 Right. On the one hand, there's this kind of technical sociological definition that I just gave it, 164 00:15:32,740 --> 00:15:35,780 which is a pretty good argument that only the officers really are that. 165 00:15:35,860 --> 00:15:41,920 Right. On the other hand, there's also a sort of just general term of phrase use of the term. 166 00:15:42,430 --> 00:15:44,829 Right, and which people are offended if you say, well, 167 00:15:44,830 --> 00:15:50,440 you're not really professional because in fact, military people have a very small world vocabulary. 168 00:15:50,770 --> 00:15:54,040 There are basically two words in it. Professional and integrity. 169 00:15:54,970 --> 00:16:00,910 Okay. So you use the word professional to phrase anything you like and you say unprofessional for anything you don't like. 170 00:16:00,940 --> 00:16:05,200 Everything from a messy desk to do, not clean your weapon properly. 171 00:16:06,070 --> 00:16:09,180 And you say integrity is if that explains everything. 172 00:16:09,190 --> 00:16:12,910 And of course, it's never spelled out what that means, but it's filled with water implicitly. 173 00:16:13,480 --> 00:16:18,190 Those are the two favourite world words. So that's where you very quickly get into this equivocation argument, right? 174 00:16:18,970 --> 00:16:20,650 And I don't know how the Army is going to settle that. 175 00:16:20,860 --> 00:16:26,050 I think right now there's a heated debate today in the Army because they're just rolling out this training program. 176 00:16:26,600 --> 00:16:27,010 Okay. 177 00:16:27,220 --> 00:16:36,470 But the sense of the Army is, you know, if we don't pay explicit attention to the moral health of of who we are, we're going to be in deep trouble. 178 00:16:36,490 --> 00:16:43,390 We've already seen some pretty deep trouble. So that's why it's working on a plea bargain around the edges. 179 00:16:45,010 --> 00:16:49,030 Now, if you start thinking about military authorship as a profession, 180 00:16:49,030 --> 00:16:55,269 it quickly becomes clear there's not necessarily just one of these to do professional ethics. 181 00:16:55,270 --> 00:17:00,130 Well, you have to start by understanding the profession that are formed in a fairly finely nuanced way. 182 00:17:00,820 --> 00:17:03,100 So let me give you something a couple of things to think about. 183 00:17:04,240 --> 00:17:13,600 All military services are defined by what in the U.S. we call the pointy end of the spear, the part of it that does the serious combat work. 184 00:17:13,810 --> 00:17:22,060 Right. So in the Army, there's a distinction between the combat branches, infantry, 185 00:17:22,510 --> 00:17:28,570 artillery and the combat service support branches like logistics and things like that. 186 00:17:29,200 --> 00:17:33,430 And the prestige end of it are the pointy end of the spear parts of the right. 187 00:17:33,850 --> 00:17:37,870 So that sort of sets the tone for the whole service. 188 00:17:38,110 --> 00:17:42,340 And you have to get close to the service to begin to begin to understand that. 189 00:17:42,820 --> 00:17:45,640 And sometimes these identities are in flux, right? 190 00:17:46,360 --> 00:17:54,220 So, for example, artillery has played a pretty small role in Afghanistan and Iraq for obvious reasons. 191 00:17:54,470 --> 00:17:58,180 And so artillery officers are feeling kind of like we're not getting much respect. 192 00:17:58,630 --> 00:18:03,820 Right. So when you start to try to understand the internal dynamics of the army, 193 00:18:03,820 --> 00:18:07,750 you have to get down to that level of detail to figure out what's going on with them. 194 00:18:10,780 --> 00:18:15,790 Another problem for all military services is trying to get the right balance between their 195 00:18:15,790 --> 00:18:21,820 inherently conservative nature and the fact that they need to adapt to a new environment. 196 00:18:21,850 --> 00:18:28,000 So I think it's now common knowledge. The U.S. Army failed miserably in Iraq for the first sort of 3 to 4 years. 197 00:18:28,780 --> 00:18:33,130 It did so because it tried to do Iraq the way it had been trained to do other things. 198 00:18:33,910 --> 00:18:39,760 And it really didn't like counterinsurgency. In fact, the Army's not even talking about counterinsurgency after Vietnam. 199 00:18:40,150 --> 00:18:44,440 I mean, in fact, the general idea there was never do that again or anything like that ever again. 200 00:18:45,040 --> 00:18:51,640 And it was only when it was visibly failing that basically you had a change out of the senior officer corps in your, 201 00:18:52,180 --> 00:18:54,280 you know, get rid of a whole cadre of people. 202 00:18:54,520 --> 00:19:01,390 And guys like the Prius and McMaster, who were not getting promoted, suddenly get in because they're willing to adapt. 203 00:19:02,470 --> 00:19:06,880 Now, the buzz in the Army is, are we all becoming the majority? 204 00:19:06,950 --> 00:19:07,820 Jordan is squeezed. 205 00:19:09,410 --> 00:19:17,210 Is everybody so obsessed with counterinsurgency that you need to get back to the skills that you drop to be able to adapt in this way? 206 00:19:17,870 --> 00:19:24,080 So for many years, when I first went work for the Army, they sent me out to the National Training Centre, 207 00:19:24,890 --> 00:19:32,240 which is an enormous piece of desert out in California, and they practised for combined arms battle. 208 00:19:32,240 --> 00:19:39,500 So I'm freezing my butt off on a mountaintop when at 4:00 in the morning and these tanks are rolling across and the F-15 are strafing them. 209 00:19:39,500 --> 00:19:46,280 And also it becomes like $1,000,000 a day who is trained. It's very impressive to look at one of these. 210 00:19:46,280 --> 00:19:51,540 What were we training for? This is this is this is training to fight the Russians in the photograph. 211 00:19:51,590 --> 00:19:58,280 That's what it took them quite a long time to realise that they need to start putting civilians 212 00:19:58,280 --> 00:20:04,040 out there on the battlefield and Afghan villagers and make them side with the locals and, 213 00:20:04,040 --> 00:20:09,419 you know, completely rework the training because if you're going to fight the way you trained. 214 00:20:09,420 --> 00:20:11,410 Right. And we were training internally for the role. 215 00:20:12,890 --> 00:20:21,890 So back to my professionalism question is an ethical obligation of a profession to adapt this body of knowledge and expertise so as to be relevant. 216 00:20:23,060 --> 00:20:31,459 But it's always a tension. You get them to do it. One of the examples I use in my own chapter of Snyder's book is Suppose you had a 217 00:20:31,460 --> 00:20:37,250 highly trained thoracic surgeon and suddenly you have a large public health emergency. 218 00:20:37,580 --> 00:20:41,180 What you objectively need are low tech public health workers. 219 00:20:42,350 --> 00:20:47,479 So you go to the surgeon and you say, Look, you're a physician, you're committed to treating patients objectively. 220 00:20:47,480 --> 00:20:52,310 What what patients need right now is this low tech public health. 221 00:20:53,510 --> 00:20:58,760 You can imagine, at least emotionally, a thoracic surgeon would push back yourself a little bit and say, 222 00:20:59,030 --> 00:21:03,050 well, no, I have this very highly involved set of skills. I'm very reluctant to get rid of them. 223 00:21:04,100 --> 00:21:08,239 And you might even say it might be legitimate for a small congressman to say we're 224 00:21:08,240 --> 00:21:11,750 going to preserve these skills for the future when they're going to be needed again. Right. 225 00:21:13,010 --> 00:21:21,130 Or you might say no, objectively, you've got to look at every service as this little failure with that thing in the back of his mind. 226 00:21:21,140 --> 00:21:26,510 Right. Take, for example, you ever been to a cavalry base or to a formal event for the army? 227 00:21:26,780 --> 00:21:30,170 The cavalry often show up with cowboy hats and spurs. 228 00:21:31,620 --> 00:21:39,140 That really that's the direction of, you know, every cavalry unit has horses on the base and they ride them around the ceremonial occasion. 229 00:21:39,680 --> 00:21:44,990 Oh, no. And that's just there because that's the legacy of that branch. 230 00:21:45,440 --> 00:21:49,880 And this part of understanding the profession is knowing when that's not so right. 231 00:21:50,840 --> 00:21:58,940 It's not entirely so. It's a little bit farther to go to the other services. 232 00:22:00,260 --> 00:22:08,150 The Air Force is can't to a service. Of course it's just an army since 1948 and it's had two phases so far. 233 00:22:08,180 --> 00:22:10,730 It's a it's going into its third as we speak. 234 00:22:11,720 --> 00:22:18,830 Phase one was built on a theory of strategic bombing that was developed between World War One and World War Two, 235 00:22:19,460 --> 00:22:27,500 that assumed that by bombing strategic nodes, either transport in manufacturing or aerial bombing of civilian populations, 236 00:22:27,500 --> 00:22:35,299 there were arguments of between those two possibilities that you would either in war quickly or with the existence of nuclear weapons, 237 00:22:35,300 --> 00:22:43,310 you would need to maintain mutually assured destruction. So the Air Force, my dad flew in was a mad for straight, mutually assured destruction. 238 00:22:44,030 --> 00:22:51,920 And the Commander LeMay was so committed to that mission that he tried his very best to refuse to provide airpower to be enough, 239 00:22:52,730 --> 00:22:57,290 because the other air airpower in Vietnam was a sideshow. We exist to deter the Russians. 240 00:22:57,950 --> 00:23:05,270 And it was only when he continued to refuse to cooperate that that the civilian leadership finally said, 241 00:23:05,420 --> 00:23:12,440 we're going to take the pilots who get no respect in the Air Force, maybe the tactical fire guys, they'll do what we want to do. 242 00:23:12,860 --> 00:23:19,760 So there's a very funny book from area where he called The Rise of the Fighter Generals, the documents around 73, 74. 243 00:23:19,910 --> 00:23:24,230 Suddenly chiefs of a set of staff of the Air Force are fighter pilots instead of bomber pilots. 244 00:23:25,040 --> 00:23:31,490 That was a major cultural shift. And since then, every chief of staff in the Air Force has been a fighter pilot until the current one, 245 00:23:32,530 --> 00:23:38,440 and you wouldn't want to guess what the current one is. We just close air transport. 246 00:23:39,460 --> 00:23:45,820 These are transport, right? But the reason is that does anybody see why I say the Air Force is about to 247 00:23:45,820 --> 00:23:49,270 get a new kind of leadership and a new kind of a different kind of service? 248 00:23:49,320 --> 00:23:50,980 What is the big thing that's going to change? 249 00:23:53,160 --> 00:24:01,080 You you have if you really want to annoy at the dead or an Air Force, I would say, why would you ever put a human being in defended airspace? 250 00:24:01,090 --> 00:24:04,380 People have. Just asking that question. 251 00:24:04,560 --> 00:24:08,280 Why would he ever put you in the fetid airspace if you don't know? 252 00:24:08,520 --> 00:24:13,850 As you probably know, the Air Force was was a poster child for unwillingness to adapt, right. 253 00:24:15,120 --> 00:24:22,410 When the first weaponized predators were used who killed young children? 254 00:24:23,190 --> 00:24:28,380 Here's the thing. CIA, the Air Force hated them. 255 00:24:28,800 --> 00:24:31,680 Air Force didn't want them. Didn't want to fire them. 256 00:24:32,850 --> 00:24:40,200 When the number of cadets graduate of the Air Force Academy going for UAV training exceeded the number going to manned aircraft for anything. 257 00:24:40,440 --> 00:24:44,760 You couldn't believe the cultural stress that those guys. 258 00:24:45,000 --> 00:24:51,210 This is not real flying. Right now, the Air Force has decided, by the way, I'm not sure that they even need to know how to fly an actual air. 259 00:24:52,140 --> 00:24:55,660 In fact, it turns out they do better on your knees if they don't have one. 260 00:24:57,150 --> 00:24:58,800 And in fact, the Army says, what? 261 00:24:58,950 --> 00:25:04,650 Why don't they don't have to be officers either, because the Army plays all of their duties with the enlisted people. 262 00:25:05,550 --> 00:25:14,640 So the Air Force had only begun to start exercising any professional ethical judgement to get with this program and figure it out. 263 00:25:14,910 --> 00:25:20,520 Right. One small example. When I just before I left the Air Force Academy few years ago, 264 00:25:20,520 --> 00:25:26,069 we I was part of a small group that got a tasking from the air staff to tell us what the AFC, 265 00:25:26,070 --> 00:25:30,450 which is the job designator code, ought to be for UAV pilots. 266 00:25:31,530 --> 00:25:35,759 So we met for about six months talking about this question about a law report. 267 00:25:35,760 --> 00:25:40,870 Was it entirely the wrong question? The question is not who operates that, 268 00:25:40,920 --> 00:25:46,770 because probably very quickly that will largely be automated for the purposes of getting the aircraft from point A to point B. 269 00:25:47,100 --> 00:25:50,669 That's not something you get a human being able to do. Right. The real question is, 270 00:25:50,670 --> 00:25:53,459 how is the Air Force going to develop a cadre of officers who understand the 271 00:25:53,460 --> 00:25:58,230 whole system of systems that unmanned vehicles are going to represent because, 272 00:25:58,660 --> 00:26:02,850 hey, you're from now chief there for the chiefs of Air Force is a UAV guy. 273 00:26:03,600 --> 00:26:06,670 Just do the math. I mean, it's got to happen right now. 274 00:26:06,690 --> 00:26:11,340 Can you imagine the cultural stress as the service tries to adjust to all this? 275 00:26:12,270 --> 00:26:18,840 And in fact, the whole rationale for an independent Air Force in the first place was to pin it on the strategic bombing theory. 276 00:26:20,070 --> 00:26:22,890 But if you don't think you're going to do that, maybe you ought to put it back in the Army. 277 00:26:24,360 --> 00:26:27,510 If it's doing close air support of the Marines, for example, 278 00:26:27,870 --> 00:26:31,290 it's just like having their own army because they don't trust the Air Force to close air support. 279 00:26:31,830 --> 00:26:35,550 So as General Scales used to say, Tell me why our Navy's army needs its own air force. 280 00:26:37,320 --> 00:26:40,950 And the reason is because the Navy's army doesn't trust the air. 281 00:26:42,300 --> 00:26:46,170 These are they're going to say, well, these are all professional ethics questions in a kind of complicated way. 282 00:26:47,220 --> 00:26:54,060 So what you want to feel a fear for the officer is it's part of your ethical obligation to be thinking about this adaptability question. 283 00:26:54,060 --> 00:27:00,810 Right. As recently as two years ago, if you poke an Air Force general at 3:00 in the morning for another month of an F-22, 284 00:27:01,810 --> 00:27:10,230 but from that point of view, we lost the chief of staff of the Air Force, and you had a secondary Air Force over this issue. 285 00:27:10,530 --> 00:27:14,790 Well, they lost a few nukes, too, but that was the real issue, was this action, 286 00:27:14,940 --> 00:27:21,030 their insistence on lobbying for the F-22, even though the second said, we're not going to build more than about 130. 287 00:27:21,780 --> 00:27:27,060 They wouldn't do 360. And I thought, you know, what, are you going to fight with it? 288 00:27:27,930 --> 00:27:33,300 It's a magnificent aeroplane. But, you know, if it gets to exactly where it used to be, better for them. 289 00:27:33,540 --> 00:27:37,260 When's the last time that American pilots have an air to air engagement with anyone? 290 00:27:40,500 --> 00:27:46,200 Vietnam. Americans have been floated, defended seriously, vigorously. 291 00:27:46,650 --> 00:27:53,940 So it's a little bit becomes okay for the Navy. 292 00:27:54,750 --> 00:27:59,580 I'm still learning Navy. Just waiting to speak to the Navy is not one service. 293 00:28:00,270 --> 00:28:09,839 The Navy is a bunch of tribes. Surface warfare people, aviators and submariners are the three main tribes of. 294 00:28:09,840 --> 00:28:14,159 They're very different cultures. They treat it. 295 00:28:14,160 --> 00:28:20,060 They are trained, different kinds of officer, and they have trouble playing well together. 296 00:28:22,520 --> 00:28:26,370 The baby has a big problem along the line, parallel to the Air Force from aircraft, 297 00:28:26,370 --> 00:28:29,730 because that's been the primary weapon system since since World War Two. 298 00:28:30,150 --> 00:28:34,070 How many of them have we got within the 11? 299 00:28:34,920 --> 00:28:38,670 That means that at any given moment there are two or three of them. Right? 300 00:28:40,120 --> 00:28:47,020 So what's the problem with an aircraft carrier? It's a very large target. 301 00:28:48,490 --> 00:28:52,990 And if anybody has been reading their news lately, you know, the Chinese are developing excellent carriers, 302 00:28:52,990 --> 00:29:01,090 thinking about how are you going to defend the network after it is determined, attacked by designers. 303 00:29:01,750 --> 00:29:06,100 You can shoot down. A few of those missiles are cheap compared to aircraft carriers. 304 00:29:06,100 --> 00:29:13,150 You can saturate any air strike. So an aircraft carrier is very obviously not a sustainable platform. 305 00:29:14,030 --> 00:29:22,319 For the future. So what is. They seem to see denial. 306 00:29:22,320 --> 00:29:29,700 Maybe it's hard to do. Some people have written that anything is on the surface of the water isn't safe. 307 00:29:29,700 --> 00:29:35,330 So you better think about under the water with pretty much everything or lots of much smaller things. 308 00:29:35,390 --> 00:29:44,700 Like the one ship building is called the Littoral Combat Electoral, but it is shallow water of positive things. 309 00:29:44,700 --> 00:29:48,570 Instead of being a blue water navy, think about, you know, how you did in post Charlotte. 310 00:29:48,930 --> 00:29:52,440 And by the way here an aircraft here is a crappy way to aeroplanes and no land 311 00:29:52,470 --> 00:29:56,160 target anywhere because they don't have a very good range radio to refuel. 312 00:29:56,160 --> 00:30:01,739 What? And by the way, I wait for humidity to defend airspace. 313 00:30:01,740 --> 00:30:08,610 Anyway, when I just watch a bunch of you it is much smaller thing to accomplish much of the same thing. 314 00:30:08,880 --> 00:30:16,650 So all all of this is meant to illustrate what I mean by the adaptability question and professional military ethics. 315 00:30:18,300 --> 00:30:20,370 When you objectively can see a challenge, 316 00:30:21,480 --> 00:30:27,390 it's part of your professional ethical obligation to be thinking about how are you going to adapt to address it? 317 00:30:29,510 --> 00:30:43,440 The Marines are in even worse shape. Why do the Marines exist to wear the best uniform to do assault across beaches from from the sea? 318 00:30:45,210 --> 00:30:50,400 How much of that to think you do? Not much, right? 319 00:30:50,820 --> 00:30:54,600 Even Marines don't want to do what they want to do. So we fly over the beach. 320 00:30:54,610 --> 00:30:58,200 Right. So. So what are the Marines now? 321 00:30:58,200 --> 00:31:02,400 The reason always exists because politically it's impossible to kill them. So don't worry, obviously. 322 00:31:02,730 --> 00:31:09,120 But really what they're for as opposed to what are we doing using the Marines as for the last ten year? 323 00:31:09,370 --> 00:31:13,679 Oh, okay. That's the end of that that little block of stuff that I wanted to talk about. 324 00:31:13,680 --> 00:31:17,400 So let me just take a little pause. Anybody have anything you want to offer about that? 325 00:31:18,810 --> 00:31:23,790 Usually, I guess you learned already about the UK system, but you guys are going through this massive drawdown too, right? 326 00:31:23,790 --> 00:31:29,820 So figuring out what are the mission, essential things you need to have in this much written budget. 327 00:31:30,060 --> 00:31:33,450 If I we're about to have a massive budget cut there, so it's hard to know what to do. 328 00:31:34,470 --> 00:31:38,220 In the US budget. There are only few places to get serious money. Defence. 329 00:31:38,220 --> 00:31:42,410 Social Security. Medicare. Let me give you an example from another profession. 330 00:31:43,150 --> 00:31:46,750 Suppose you had a surgeon who said I wouldn't do the surgery. 331 00:31:47,080 --> 00:31:54,280 The way they told me to do it in their school in 1980. I haven't read in journal science, but it was good enough then and it's good enough now. 332 00:31:55,750 --> 00:31:59,680 Now, about that surgeon, you would want to say they are unethical, would you not? 333 00:32:00,670 --> 00:32:08,409 They're unprofessional. Is part of the obligation of the profession is to be keeping up with the best 334 00:32:08,410 --> 00:32:14,110 available knowledge because you have a social trust relationship with the client. 335 00:32:14,770 --> 00:32:22,000 So when I go to you, I'm assuming that if you are a professional that you will do it right. 336 00:32:23,020 --> 00:32:28,750 Because ultimately the metric of your success is not do you defend your bureaucracy or even your preferred way of doing it, 337 00:32:29,290 --> 00:32:35,550 but are you able to meet the need of the client, which is the basis of the trust relationship between you and the society? 338 00:32:35,590 --> 00:32:39,130 Right. So here's another example. 339 00:32:39,190 --> 00:32:43,720 There's a guy, a surgeon in the United States who published a book called The Checklist Manifesto. 340 00:32:43,960 --> 00:32:54,700 Anybody heard the story? This guy did a study to show that if surgeons used a simple checklist, they would reduce surgical error and left instruments. 341 00:32:54,760 --> 00:32:58,030 Fine. Just all kinds of stuff by a very, very high rate. 342 00:32:58,900 --> 00:33:02,350 Surgeons are very resistant to using historical history. 343 00:33:03,040 --> 00:33:09,850 He's been trying for about two years to persuade them to do it. But, you know, their culture is, hey, I'm a surgeon, you know, and I know it all. 344 00:33:10,130 --> 00:33:17,810 I don't need this same checklist, even when objectively it's been shown that you would do your professional activity better if you adapted. 345 00:33:17,910 --> 00:33:23,470 Right. So that's to your point. Or are more people, I think not just bureaucracy but culture, right. 346 00:33:24,100 --> 00:33:27,580 The cultures have been formed around certain ways of thinking behaving. 347 00:33:27,790 --> 00:33:35,540 So here's another example. For many years in the Air Force, the culture was that the head pilot was gone. 348 00:33:35,800 --> 00:33:42,860 Right. And then they did a whole series of studies showing if the co-pilot felt empowered to simply raise questions. 349 00:33:42,860 --> 00:33:46,960 But they didn't look right to the pilot. The accident rate would drop dramatically. 350 00:33:47,470 --> 00:33:52,750 So the Air Force had to go through a whole retraining of the pilot culture to say it's a team effort up there. 351 00:33:52,870 --> 00:33:58,630 Right. If you see something that doesn't look right, you say, you know, did you remember we saw the flaps down or something like that. 352 00:34:01,090 --> 00:34:05,140 And you think that's kind of obvious, but it was culturally not acceptable. 353 00:34:05,530 --> 00:34:11,319 Right. So my point is, I mean, and we all struggle with it as individuals only. 354 00:34:11,320 --> 00:34:16,120 I mean, if we've gotten highly developed skills, we can are proud of that accomplishment and love it. 355 00:34:16,120 --> 00:34:23,200 But if it's no longer doing the job, you know, then that's where the professional ethics piece has to be, is obligatory of me to adapt. 356 00:34:23,230 --> 00:34:28,180 Right. So now that's what you see in the Army is kind of as I mentioned already, 357 00:34:28,480 --> 00:34:33,310 we arguably swung too far the other way in terms of trying to adapt to counterinsurgency. 358 00:34:33,920 --> 00:34:36,590 Yeah. Well, I mean, that's a practical challenge, right? 359 00:34:36,680 --> 00:34:42,560 So the professional argument has to be, what is your evidence that this is the objective future need? 360 00:34:44,430 --> 00:34:50,250 Right. So here's another example used to say that if what you want is close air support in Afghanistan, 361 00:34:51,390 --> 00:35:01,620 why not build a solar powered one lawyer aircraft that you could park at 60,000 feet with a whole bunch of GPS guided weapons on them? 362 00:35:01,890 --> 00:35:07,800 So the joint tactical air controller on the ground can send coordinates up to that thing and have that to refuel it, 363 00:35:08,400 --> 00:35:11,340 and it can cruise over the battlespace for days on end. 364 00:35:11,730 --> 00:35:20,850 It would be objectively a better way to deliver air power to do a tour of battlespace right through some of the tactical possible. 365 00:35:22,570 --> 00:35:27,600 What what reason would you have not to do it if you really pressed Air Force people? 366 00:35:27,600 --> 00:35:32,460 And I think their JDAM is beginning to sort of it would answer that is not true. 367 00:35:33,960 --> 00:35:41,250 It's just not who we are. The culture of of the white flight staff and kick the tires first and then that's just kind of that's the culture. 368 00:35:42,690 --> 00:35:45,760 And so it takes someone to step out of that. So. Right. 369 00:35:46,140 --> 00:35:48,240 Or, you know, you know, the Air Force gives out in first place. 370 00:35:48,240 --> 00:35:52,950 And an Army colonel and Mitchell was convinced that you go to their power to do all kinds of things. 371 00:35:52,950 --> 00:36:00,330 So he violated a whole bunch orders, went out and bombed captured French vessels between the wars and things, and he got caught. 372 00:36:02,280 --> 00:36:05,640 But he said he's the patron saint of the Air Force. You go. 373 00:36:07,350 --> 00:36:11,950 Okay. It takes a mid-grade officer, a major or a lieutenant colonel. 374 00:36:12,480 --> 00:36:17,280 They're given a mission or they have a lot of choices about how they execute this mission. 375 00:36:17,910 --> 00:36:18,140 Right. 376 00:36:18,990 --> 00:36:25,380 People will do it better at worse, depending on their willingness to try to do their best to understand objectively the needs of where they're going. 377 00:36:25,950 --> 00:36:29,790 And a good example, one of my favourite Army officers is now Brigadier General McMaster. 378 00:36:30,570 --> 00:36:36,300 But when Matthew McMaster was a colonel, he was going he was at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, which is just down the road from me. 379 00:36:36,870 --> 00:36:42,630 And he knew he was going to a tall offer, and he knew that he was going to have to try to pacify this town. 380 00:36:43,770 --> 00:36:50,280 So he got all of the Arab linguists and specialists he could get from the Air Force Academy to train up his unit, 381 00:36:50,370 --> 00:36:56,310 even give them some Arabic, and then issue general order one, which was every time you offend an Iraqi, we're losing. 382 00:36:58,290 --> 00:37:01,949 And that was one colonel on his own making a decision. 383 00:37:01,950 --> 00:37:09,900 If I'm going to be successful and will offer, I can't use the normal, overwhelming force approach that the U.S. Army had trained for. 384 00:37:10,260 --> 00:37:19,799 And he'd been trained for it right on the fly. You realise the objective requirement of where I'm going is to not do what was the what was 385 00:37:19,800 --> 00:37:24,330 the American doctrine and always was overwhelming firepower that would not work at all. 386 00:37:24,510 --> 00:37:31,140 Right. So at every level, I think professionals within their sphere of organisation, I mean you can get the difference. 387 00:37:31,470 --> 00:37:36,690 Here's another example. Just last week, an artillery officer who had been in in Iraq. 388 00:37:37,650 --> 00:37:40,830 He's a colonel. So, you know, I was there with artillery. 389 00:37:40,830 --> 00:37:45,510 I realised I cannot use artillery in advance because it's too indiscriminate. 390 00:37:46,500 --> 00:37:54,600 So he he drove back to the artillery range in Washington, said, I need quick GPS guided artillery munitions. 391 00:37:55,650 --> 00:38:02,040 And within six weeks, you know, he said in the first couple of battles, I only had two, you know. 392 00:38:02,280 --> 00:38:06,100 So I had told the commander I can hit two targets with precision artillery. 393 00:38:06,120 --> 00:38:11,129 So you got to be pretty picky about what you want me to hit with artillery, but I can't use the weapons. 394 00:38:11,130 --> 00:38:16,680 I can't be effective. Now, those are both examples of mid-level adaptation. 395 00:38:17,310 --> 00:38:19,830 You obviously can't run your own procurement system. 396 00:38:20,190 --> 00:38:24,810 You know, as Rumsfeld famously said, you come with the army, you have another weapon, not your you wish. 397 00:38:25,500 --> 00:38:28,559 I think if you look I mean, the Army talks about flexible, 398 00:38:28,560 --> 00:38:37,379 adaptive leaders is what it wants and it talks about soldier resiliency that a massive growth because the ability of people 399 00:38:37,380 --> 00:38:44,400 to be more prepared for and to recover from the kinds of experiences that they're now having is become a major focus. 400 00:38:44,400 --> 00:38:49,540 I mean, the suicide rates in the Army are like three times the number of the general population. 401 00:38:49,560 --> 00:38:56,580 So, you know, the army is well over. All of those mental characteristics are as are more important than physical. 402 00:38:57,660 --> 00:39:01,590 But is that. Okay. Let me move on to another point that I wanted to make. 403 00:39:02,190 --> 00:39:06,419 Another thing one has to do with points to really work on is understand the 404 00:39:06,420 --> 00:39:12,260 relevance of legal frameworks as to say one doesn't start with a blank slate here. 405 00:39:12,270 --> 00:39:17,700 One has to start with with things that every officer, that every soldier needs to know. 406 00:39:17,700 --> 00:39:20,790 Something in the U.S. kitchen. This is one of my personal obsessions. 407 00:39:21,210 --> 00:39:27,060 You've probably noticed that every military member, and for that matter, every federal employee like me and takes an oath. 408 00:39:27,270 --> 00:39:31,800 And the oath is in the Constitution of the United States, not to any particular leader. 409 00:39:33,180 --> 00:39:38,850 So it's rather important that they understand what the Constitution says, and frankly, they usually don't. 410 00:39:39,570 --> 00:39:49,140 So one of my pet peeves is, as anybody, even an American Defence Department building, what do you see as you walk in the door? 411 00:39:49,710 --> 00:39:51,860 There are some pictures on the wall. Yeah. 412 00:39:51,870 --> 00:39:58,890 You see the president, vice president, the secretary of defence, the service secretary, all the way down to the local commander. 413 00:39:59,730 --> 00:40:03,030 Constitutionally speaking, there's something seriously wrong with this picture. 414 00:40:04,620 --> 00:40:08,760 Maybe the only Americans in the room know what should be at the top. 415 00:40:09,330 --> 00:40:15,780 The President, the Congress and the Supreme Court, all three is a very important point, 416 00:40:16,440 --> 00:40:21,630 because the Constitution says some things that are easily misunderstood, especially given my reports. 417 00:40:22,320 --> 00:40:25,530 It says the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces, the United States. 418 00:40:25,980 --> 00:40:30,230 True enough. And the reason that it said that was the founders were worried about unity. 419 00:40:31,680 --> 00:40:36,630 But if you read Article one of the Constitution, which is not about the president, it's about the Congress. 420 00:40:37,110 --> 00:40:40,499 It says it empowers the Congress to create Army at all. 421 00:40:40,500 --> 00:40:46,100 And if you do it, you can only have it for two years. So the expectation was there would be no standing army. 422 00:40:46,770 --> 00:40:51,339 So I like to say that to students, you know, in terms of the founders, 423 00:40:51,340 --> 00:41:02,420 that in peacetime the commander in chief is the commander of what exactly the Navy and the state militias, if they are pulled into federal service. 424 00:41:02,460 --> 00:41:06,740 But normally they work for the government. Period. That's it. 425 00:41:08,010 --> 00:41:12,210 Now that's. Important because it goes to the very deep question of civil military relations. 426 00:41:13,710 --> 00:41:22,510 When all the North violate a whole bunch of federal laws to ship money to the Contras in Nicaragua, he said, We have this problem before the Senate. 427 00:41:22,530 --> 00:41:26,490 If I Commander-In-Chief stand on my head in a corner, I'd do it. 428 00:41:28,350 --> 00:41:35,520 And all thoughtful officer said. Where did somebody get to be an army lieutenant colonel with such a serious misunderstanding of the Constitution? 429 00:41:36,600 --> 00:41:46,860 I don't. My officer has no right to violate a federal law, even if the president tells you it's an illegal order and you're supposed to disobey it. 430 00:41:47,970 --> 00:41:51,520 So the starting point for at least in the American context, 431 00:41:51,520 --> 00:41:54,690 and I'll leave you to figure out what the equivalents are in your various national structure. 432 00:41:54,690 --> 00:42:00,329 But for us, getting a clear understanding, just that point is vitally important. 433 00:42:00,330 --> 00:42:04,440 Why? It's vitally important because if I get an order, for example, to torture a prisoner, 434 00:42:05,100 --> 00:42:11,550 even if it comes from the president of the United States, the right answer is that's a violation of a ratified treaty. 435 00:42:12,180 --> 00:42:17,580 And according to the Constitution of the United States, a ratified treaty is U.S. law, and that is an illegal war. 436 00:42:19,920 --> 00:42:27,569 Only so far. So they need to know that if any American system there's a code of military justice, 437 00:42:27,570 --> 00:42:32,010 the Uniform Code of military justice, the whole legal system, they need to know that. 438 00:42:33,750 --> 00:42:40,590 They need to know international law and treaties. In recent years, it's become fashionable in America to pooh pooh the international system. 439 00:42:41,670 --> 00:42:47,820 I like to ignore them a lot by saying whose bright idea was the U.N. part bright idea? 440 00:42:48,240 --> 00:42:53,610 But also to point out this clause of the Constitution says said ratify treaties are law or U.S. law. 441 00:42:54,450 --> 00:43:01,320 So you don't have an option when you start doing something else, you will have to understand to work with as well, 442 00:43:01,470 --> 00:43:04,740 because I understand the interconnections of some parts of the profession. 443 00:43:05,250 --> 00:43:10,950 So for example, in the U.S. military, one of our great strengths is the quality of our non-commissioned officer for the service. 444 00:43:11,940 --> 00:43:15,659 If you don't understand the role of the sergeant plays reasonably the young lieutenant, 445 00:43:15,660 --> 00:43:19,800 platoon commander, for example, who's way younger and less experienced with the sergeant. 446 00:43:20,190 --> 00:43:24,690 That's a very complicated relationship from the young offenders to officers of the new generation. 447 00:43:27,330 --> 00:43:36,750 Okay. Let me go on to my general point about the limits of the philosophical approach. 448 00:43:37,800 --> 00:43:42,090 As David mentioned, in college, I didn't major in philosophy, but I was also frustrated with philosophy in one way. 449 00:43:43,020 --> 00:43:47,549 One thing that frustrated me about it was its general data source tendency to 450 00:43:47,550 --> 00:43:51,810 approach the world as if ideas operated in some kind of historical vacuum. 451 00:43:53,430 --> 00:44:00,270 That's important when you're dealing with the military, because obviously they're playing out in a real world, historical and evolving environment. 452 00:44:00,330 --> 00:44:05,910 So let's just start with the basic question. The Peace of Westphalia that sets up the international system. 453 00:44:08,790 --> 00:44:14,790 We've we've had it so long, we sort of take it for granted. But it's important to remember this is an investment in a particular point in time, 454 00:44:14,790 --> 00:44:18,960 and for particular reasons it solved some problems and it created some of it. 455 00:44:19,920 --> 00:44:24,510 So remind yourself what it was before Westphalia in Europe, at least notionally. 456 00:44:24,510 --> 00:44:25,530 What was the idea? 457 00:44:26,490 --> 00:44:35,760 The idea was Christendom, a unified Christian civilisation with the Pope, as the supreme authority in the system after the Reformation. 458 00:44:36,870 --> 00:44:43,740 That's no longer possible. And what follows is a series of wars, like all wars, there are many sources of it. 459 00:44:44,190 --> 00:44:52,620 But one of the sources of the wars was the belief by all of the major players that they should put Christendom back together again in somewhere early, 460 00:44:53,220 --> 00:45:02,280 because the idea goes all the way that Constantine, who thought that the unity of government rested on, as he put it, one god, one church, whatever. 461 00:45:04,050 --> 00:45:10,650 And it became apparent as those wars dragged on that Europe was not going to be put back to religious unity. 462 00:45:11,880 --> 00:45:16,990 Lutherans were unhappy with the Lutheran Christendom, the colonies, with the Calvinists, with the Catholics, with Catholics. 463 00:45:17,010 --> 00:45:22,230 But it wasn't going to happen. So Peace of Westphalia was not a triumph with anybody's ideals. 464 00:45:23,160 --> 00:45:25,000 It was a settlement of the exhaustion. 465 00:45:25,440 --> 00:45:31,560 And who said, if we're going to put an end to this perpetual war, we're going to have to give up on the Christian idea. 466 00:45:32,400 --> 00:45:40,559 And the compromise is going to be a system of sovereign states, and those sovereign states will have to issue proper territorial integrity. 467 00:45:40,560 --> 00:45:46,260 You're supposed to share the borders and political sovereignty, which means within the borders they can do whatever they want. 468 00:45:48,000 --> 00:45:55,830 And nobody, no other state has liberty to criticise them. Now, given the religious issues nobody has talked about, 469 00:45:56,250 --> 00:46:01,770 what are the practical implications of settling for the Westphalian state with respect to the religious convictions of individual? 470 00:46:03,000 --> 00:46:06,120 But the problem out there was only worth Germany over Fallujah as a capital. 471 00:46:06,210 --> 00:46:13,440 Right. But are you surprised because regulators really, really view for each of their religion. 472 00:46:14,100 --> 00:46:18,879 But so of what? So the practical application of your Catholic and Protestant country or vice versa, 473 00:46:18,880 --> 00:46:23,430 that your government can't treat whoever they want up to and including Hillary 474 00:46:25,140 --> 00:46:29,970 and all the states swallowed that because they said it's the best of a bad deal. 475 00:46:30,300 --> 00:46:35,790 Right. So that's the word, so to speak, totally anachronistically. 476 00:46:35,970 --> 00:46:39,570 It was the hope for political stability bought at the price of human rights. 477 00:46:40,770 --> 00:46:46,140 Of course, the concept of human rights hasn't been invented yet, but in effect, that's what it was saying. 478 00:46:46,170 --> 00:46:54,210 Good luck with that human rights thing, right? You know, you're left to the tender mercies of your state, but they're going to say why. 479 00:46:54,220 --> 00:46:58,110 At the time, arguably, it was a pretty reasonable compromise. The alternatives are all worse. 480 00:47:00,000 --> 00:47:03,360 They could go on fighting over forever or we could accept this deal. 481 00:47:04,560 --> 00:47:08,400 Now, the fact that human rights were sold out over everybody was family. 482 00:47:08,400 --> 00:47:10,110 It was fairly obvious to everybody. Right. 483 00:47:11,170 --> 00:47:19,709 If you ever read John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, there's a long preface to the king of France, even though he was there, 484 00:47:19,710 --> 00:47:24,300 a long preface to the king of France, because he's trying to persuade the King of France to stop persecuting Huguenots. 485 00:47:25,470 --> 00:47:29,530 This is what we believe to see we're really okay. That did work out so well. 486 00:47:29,750 --> 00:47:34,500 But that was what Calvin was wrong. So this failed. 487 00:47:34,500 --> 00:47:39,790 This weakness of Westphalia with respect to human rights that has been palpable to everybody for a long time. 488 00:47:39,790 --> 00:47:45,720 But he got it, obviously very clearly articulated after the Holocaust with the slogan Never Again 489 00:47:46,560 --> 00:47:51,350 and with a brand new U.N. that's one of whose first acts was the 1949 genocide, 490 00:47:52,410 --> 00:47:58,910 which said, in broad terms, if genocide is going on, the states of the world agree that they will do something. 491 00:48:02,070 --> 00:48:05,040 The result of that for a long time is we don't want to use the G word. 492 00:48:07,230 --> 00:48:15,150 When Rwanda was occurring, the woman who was the State Department spokesperson later was in my seminar at Carlisle, 493 00:48:15,600 --> 00:48:20,220 and she explained in some detail that every morning before she went out to the press, she was coached very carefully. 494 00:48:21,090 --> 00:48:26,309 First of all, not use a G word to describe what was happening. You have to the level of body language and so forth. 495 00:48:26,310 --> 00:48:31,940 The policy of the United States is this is not just because the belief is that if we called it genocide, 496 00:48:32,250 --> 00:48:34,709 this kicked in some obligation to go do something about it. 497 00:48:34,710 --> 00:48:39,900 And and President Clinton was determined we were not going because he'd just been so badly burned earlier. 498 00:48:40,860 --> 00:48:46,650 Of course, now we've passed that threshold. President Bush called Darfur a genocide on Congo. 499 00:48:46,830 --> 00:48:52,170 And so now we're in the world where we can use that word. All we want is no longer effective. 500 00:48:52,170 --> 00:49:00,430 Right. And this all culminated a few years ago, as you know, when with the new responsibility to protect go, which goes even further. 501 00:49:01,020 --> 00:49:08,580 And the difference between says. So I was listening to a podcast one day across the pond and listening to a very 502 00:49:09,090 --> 00:49:14,100 articulate liberal guy saying This clearly triggers our competing in Libya. 503 00:49:15,540 --> 00:49:23,459 We absolutely have an obligation to go. And his interlocutor, Ted Koppel, the ambassador, John, said, well, not so fast. 504 00:49:23,460 --> 00:49:27,540 Think about the law of unintended consequences. Where are you going to send how I'm going to be there. 505 00:49:28,500 --> 00:49:30,900 What are you to do to get there? Thought on through. 506 00:49:31,230 --> 00:49:38,160 So what we've got is the British scholar Geoffrey Bennett has a wonderful book called War and Law since 1945, which I highly recommend. 507 00:49:38,820 --> 00:49:43,380 But the best argues that look where we stand right now is we've got two bodies of international law, 508 00:49:44,070 --> 00:49:52,440 was Dalian Law, which talks about state sovereignty. And we have huge international humanitarian law, which suggests interventionism. 509 00:49:52,950 --> 00:49:56,190 They're both completely legally valid and they are totally powerful. 510 00:49:59,010 --> 00:50:02,450 And that's exactly where we are, exactly what they are. 511 00:50:04,260 --> 00:50:10,050 So it's interesting when you watch the behaviour of states and you and you listen 512 00:50:10,070 --> 00:50:14,690 individuals that depending on the issue they might one side or the other of the law. 513 00:50:15,630 --> 00:50:18,360 So you know, if you don't like what's going on in somebody else's country, 514 00:50:18,360 --> 00:50:22,620 you really like the international humanitarian law, if you will, like what's going on in your country. 515 00:50:22,620 --> 00:50:27,179 You really want to state sovereignty, sovereignty. And you get and you can play the one because they're both valid. 516 00:50:27,180 --> 00:50:35,759 So play the part which you are. And there is no harder solution to that because a notionally the Security Council was here. 517 00:50:35,760 --> 00:50:39,270 The council, as we all know, is very rarely going to do much of anything. 518 00:50:39,720 --> 00:50:43,140 So soldiers are put in the middle of all of that, right. 519 00:50:43,860 --> 00:50:51,060 I just saw a letter. The main point of it and this is where I think philosophy really does fall short. 520 00:50:51,480 --> 00:50:59,490 I mean, put this strongly, none of this what I just said is fully rational or even intellectually reconcilable. 521 00:51:00,810 --> 00:51:04,320 It's a mess. It means, therefore, 522 00:51:04,320 --> 00:51:10,680 that any attempt to insist on imposing clarity on the system will ironically end 523 00:51:10,680 --> 00:51:15,240 up with irrelevance because the world is not going to conform to that part. 524 00:51:17,460 --> 00:51:21,540 So if you're going to help actual practitioners understand the system, 525 00:51:22,320 --> 00:51:30,000 you need to help them understand the mess and not the clutter, because that's the real world in which they will be offering. 526 00:51:31,920 --> 00:51:34,770 They need to kind of make their peace with this unclarity. 527 00:51:35,880 --> 00:51:40,510 There's always going to be if we find a better political solution, there is a tension between, I think, 528 00:51:40,590 --> 00:51:45,960 our best moral impulses, which are always kind of coherent or broadly universalist and cosmopolitan, 529 00:51:46,500 --> 00:51:50,850 stressing the equal value and dignity of every human person and the importance of 530 00:51:50,850 --> 00:51:55,110 the rights and the reality that the world is still organised in sovereign states. 531 00:51:56,550 --> 00:52:01,470 And rarely are states going to agree. Intervening against a sovereign state. 532 00:52:01,770 --> 00:52:07,560 Occasionally individual states will do it. I was using the example of David working on self-publishing. 533 00:52:08,190 --> 00:52:12,720 Maybe remember Vietnam and Cambodia unilaterally for a whole bunch of reasons. 534 00:52:13,440 --> 00:52:20,100 And I think most people thought after deep rows of the international players normally crossing and other countries were in that war. 535 00:52:20,640 --> 00:52:29,430 But given what was going on in Cambodia, I think most people probably think that way, though that makes no sense. 536 00:52:29,430 --> 00:52:33,630 Legally, hard to justify, doesn't create a case precedent for anything. 537 00:52:34,200 --> 00:52:41,130 If if, if, in fact, anyone is going to intervene in Libya, I leave the large that the Security Council will not authorise it. 538 00:52:42,780 --> 00:52:49,080 So if anything happens, there is probably going to be. No. But let me just start with that. 539 00:52:49,710 --> 00:52:53,580 The irreconcilable ness argument. What do you think? 540 00:52:56,040 --> 00:53:01,440 Well, thank you very much, Matt. And we have about 25 minutes.